The Relay Hub
My backpack was getting heavier. That was a good sign.
They say generosity comes from a full granary, and people aren't much different — you need a fat wallet before you can afford to be generous. So I yanked the arrow out of my poor friend's chest, threw in a singsong "Pain, pain, go away~," and even blew on the wound with a hearty "Whoosh!"
Our friend — the biological sample storage container — having received Han Seungho's premium brother-in-arms treatment, had grown into an even more magnificent specimen. Dark green fluid now dribbled from the wound, and it had begun faintly puffing out spore-smoke like a soda gone flat.
Faced with this shocking visual, Lucy was keeping a solid three meters between us. The enemies unlucky enough to cross our path along the way threw every kind of fit imaginable, so I handed down an equalization verdict on every last one of them.
"Whew. Looks-based discrimination hasn't changed a bit, even in the 2040s."
"I don't think that's a lookism problem..."
"No, it absolutely is. You can see their faces change the second they lay eyes on us."
"Ahaha..."
And this from a guy born in the 2020s, when respecting every sexual identity, every orientation, and every flavor of diversity under the banner of political correctness had been basically mandatory. If you disagree, you're wrong.
Current Remaining Capacity: 95%
While I was at it, I swapped the oxygen filter again. Three spare canisters left. Lucy had one extra since she'd been less exposed to the contamination, but that hardly mattered. If we proceeded according to plan, those spares would run equally short either way.
Every last element of this themed Darkzone carried the potential for poisoning and infection, after all. And the plan I was cooking up was the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a house already on fire.
Snip!
I started cutting the jungle brush more sparingly — snipping instead of slashing, to keep the noise down — and the things hiding in the undergrowth seized the opening and revealed themselves. I'd originally been cutting them down along with the brush as I went, but the moment I reduced the frequency, they'd prepared this little surprise party.
"Kieeet!"
The most common were the worm-type Native Species, whose very sounds were nauseating. Everything from dog-sized larvae that could crack a prisoner's skull and swallow it whole in one bite, to Head Spiders that ripped a human head clean off and tried to plug their own in its place. And then there were the Spit Bugs, ambush predators that sprayed acidic venom meant to inflict lethal damage on our gear and bodies.
Honestly, I'd take a Spitter any day — at least those humanoid Native Species have the decency to loudly vomit their venom where you can see it. Spit Bugs are so hard to spot they piss me off twice as much.
Of course, none of this was a problem for a ten-year veteran like me. Lucy's sharp eyes and faster reflexes covering me from nearby certainly helped, but I was already moving with a pre-mapped sense of where the ones I could reasonably handle were waiting.
It still felt a little strange to say out loud, but I was a universal all-rounder — a Pathfinder who could read the route, a point man who punched into the enemy first, and a supporter who covered the whole team. I hadn't spent my career cherry-picking easy roles just to start whining over something like this.
EFD had always been that kind of game anyway — genuine fun and intrigue thoroughly mixed with unbearable griefing, like a mint-chocolate raw-beef bibimbap. Looks like a meal. Should never have been in the same bowl.
Didn't memorize it? You die. Memorized it but can't tell them apart? You die. Memorized everything, can tell them apart, but your mechanics are trash? Then you die again.
After ten straight years of die, die, die — a nonstop parade of the game screwing you over — an opponent's "ambush" or "surprise attack" was as natural to me as breathing. The way a person born Korean just happens to speak Korean, I just happened to know how to do this after rotting in EFD for a decade.
"Lucy. Ten o'clock — the one camouflaged as a tree branch. Don't touch it. It won't react unless you hit it first."
"It looks like some kind of tree fruit. Is it dangerous?"
"You'd be in trouble if you assumed every Native Species in the Darkzone takes the first swing. Plenty of them deliberately bait you into attacking so they can turn it around and put you in a worse spot."
"That's genuinely vicious. In an environment where you already have to watch every hazard around you, they refuse to strike first and instead lure you into doing it? That's a trap you'd never recognize unless you'd walked into it yourself at least once."
"Which is why when you're sorting real talent from the rest, you don't look at profit per Darkzone drop. You look at survival rate per drop."
Compare a guy who dropped in ten times and walked out with a hundred million to a guy who dropped in a hundred times and walked out with the same hundred million, and the picture gets simple. The first one looks impressive on paper because the return rate is high, but odds are he just got lucky with the loot tables. The second one may have had terrible farming luck — but he dropped in a hundred times and came back alive a hundred times. That's the part you pay attention to. Darkzone profits ride heavily on RNG. Walking out in one piece is pure skill.
Back when EFD was just a game, I could shrug that off. Now that the Darkzone is reality, the gap is even uglier.
If EFD had felt like a well-written program, the real Darkzone felt like a single living thing stuffed full of malice. That kind of viciousness was a flavor of spite only something alive could carry, and even I got the creeps from it now and then. Even an AI only learns emotions well enough to imitate them. The Darkzone flaunted a brand of malice that even death-row inmates — people who already showed you the ugliest floor of the human condition — couldn't casually put on display.
Come to think of it, there was another unfinished task I never completed in EFD.
One, as everyone knew, was that the prisoner never escaped — no matter how infinitely he died and respawned across the Darkzone and the prison. The other was that nobody ever figured out what the Darkzone actually was, or where it came from.
If I've decided to see EFD through to the end, I should find that out too.
The Darkzone's identity. Its origin. Its truth.
I felt the weight of an intangible burden settle across my shoulders — one nobody had ever forced onto me. Even the biological sample storage container keeping left-right pace beside me had a physical body. The Darkzone was like being told to catch a ghost with my bare hands. Then again, if I failed, what was the worst that could happen? Something worse than dying?
"...We're here."
While I'd been entertaining those useless thoughts, we'd been weaving between broken roads and forest, and at last we reached our destination.
"Is that... a communications base?"
"More precisely, it's the intermediate hub connecting this backwater to the 'outside.'"
What stretched out ahead of us was a colossal installation planted square in the middle of a truly enormous forest. "Colossal installation" made it sound impressive. In truth it was a scrap of humanity, shoved into this civilization-less wilderness by force, for no reason other than to keep a line open to the outside world.
The proof was everywhere you looked. The first thing that caught the eye was, of course, the Communication Tower spearing into the sky. In a jungle this dense you could never have spotted it from the brush — we'd had to grind all the way to the installation's doorstep just to confirm the existence of that misshapen structure.
And that wasn't all. The railroad stretching from the heart of the installation toward the outer edge of the map was impressive in its own right. The lore said trains had run those tracks, hauling supplies and people, bringing in equipment and technology to carve this wilderness open. Which meant every small base camp we and the other inmates had passed through from the outskirts inward had been nothing more than a twig branching off from this place.
On top of that, in the original EFD story, this had been the center stage of the entire theme.
The surrounding base camps were all core farming spots and the sites of major quests. This place wasn't a farming spot at all. It existed to be cleared.
In a competitive PvP game, this would have been the hottest contested ground on the map. EFD, though, had always been a cooperative PvE game. If all you wanted was farming and regular quests, you hit the core loot zones and extracted. Done. But if you wanted to clear the high-difficulty quests and see the underside of the main story, you had to take a place like this. The way I once had, slamming my head against it like a maniac.
How much money and time did I sink into clearing this place with my regulars back then?
I hadn't been a veteran yet, so it had been rough in every way that counted. Still, after slamming my head into the wall hundreds of times, we'd become the first clear party — and for a while I got to be the guy lighting the community on fire.
The problem is, this theme's main story hasn't even started yet. Which means there are no high-difficulty quests. There's nothing.
The clear itself might start next time. It might never start at all. There was also a real chance the strategies I already knew simply wouldn't work. I was already aware the tenth-anniversary update had changed a lot. Which was exactly why I had to use this opportunity now.
"Lucy."
I waved over Lucy, who was still standing there overwhelmed by the view. We were never going to clear this place with just the two of us — but we'd come this far, so we might as well grab everything we could. And, while we were at it, move my plan forward.
"You called, Leader?"
"Yeah. I'm going to walk you through the plan. We're going to prep our extraction and raise hell at the same time."
"Raise hell...?"
"Originally this mega-base is a special location you're supposed to clear with a single squad, but luckily it looks inactive right now, so we don't actually have to take it. The gimmick you need for the clear, though — that we can still use. And if I remember right, that gimmick hits the entire theme."
Sharp as she was, Lucy didn't bother asking how I knew any of that. Everything I'd told her so far had already been more than enough to make someone tilt their head, so at this point, what was one more thing? She'd joined the party on two conditions — follow my lead, and don't waste time on unnecessary questions — and she was a model student about both.
"If this were a normal recon job, there'd be no reason to raise hell at all. We'd just eat our fill and extract first. But the inmates who came into this Darkzone with us today are getting in the way of that."
"Everyone except us belonged to the new clans. Not all the same clan, but they clearly marked us as a common enemy."
"Exactly that. I wouldn't even bother overreacting if they left us alone. But those bastards are itching to screw us over any way they can, and it pisses me off too much to let it go."
If stress kept me from farming in peace, if my profits dropped and every plan and schedule I'd already mapped out went off the rails — who was going to compensate me for that? Hire a lawyer and sue those awful people for inflicting mental and physical harm? Please. The only way to educate a beast that keeps snapping at people is a club steeped in the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
"If we dodge a fight and extract first like cowards, what do you think they'll decide we are? We need to issue a warning, at least once."
"That's not wrong. In prison, the ones who look easy get eaten first. We'd need a warning that if they try to touch us, they won't like what happens."
"No. If we're going to raise hell, this is a warning about how you raise hell."
"..."
"It's closer to advice than a warning, honestly. But since we're going to kill them all anyway, warning works too."
I've said this more than once: I am not some psychopathic serial killer addicted to murder. I am a model citizen with a heart so kind I don't just dislike unnecessary killing and violence — I despise them. And yet every last one of these people seemed to have eaten their common sense for breakfast, because they kept poking the guy who just wanted to farm in peace. And then, on top of that, they had the nerve to needle you with an attitude like, What, so you're actually going to kill us?
Yep. I'll just kill all of you~
I consider my patience already well proven. I spent years at a nowhere company without ever throwing my resignation in the boss's face. If they insisted on testing it anyway, I'd just have to explain things in my own way. More than anything, I was a man who could forgive an honest mistake even in real life — but a true gamer who would never, under any circumstances, tolerate a deliberate troll.
"Recheck your oxygen filter and how many spare canisters you've got. And get ready to use the nerve agent at any time."
"I packed a nerve agent each in case of unexpected poisoning or infection, but... you're not planning to use it here, are you?"
"It's insurance. That's all. We don't need it right this second. But in the worst case, whether we have it or not is going to decide if we walk out of here alive."
I watched Lucy swallow hard. Sharp as she was, she already had a rough idea of what I was talking about. With the briefing over, I started toward the mega-base, where not even an ant was stirring.