No Way Out
The power structure inside Seoul Southern Prison reversed completely from that day forward. Until then, the men who sat above every other inmate had been the ones with powerful backers, the ones with money, and the ones who commanded strong organizations. No matter how formidable any single prisoner's personal combat power, a human being was still an animal — and an animal would always be crushed beneath the shackles of money that capitalism had forged, the weight of authority, and the sheer pressure of numbers.
But the day everyone was converted, equally, to death-row status, they no longer needed to read the room like civilized human beings. Someone rubs you the wrong way? Kill them. That's it. Someone's sitting on a pile of loot? Kill them and take it. That's it. No more weighing the angles. Just pick the option labeled kill, and the problem simply vanished. A bizarre new phenomenon had taken hold.
The reversal of the old power structure was therefore an unstoppable current — as irreversible as a law of nature. And of course those who had climbed into the new ruling class would establish a new order. That much was only natural. Right now, the clan-affiliated prisoners deployed into this Darkzone were the living witnesses to that new order.
If only they hadn't suddenly become former living witnesses, the new order probably would have settled in without a hitch.
"We have to figure at least five are down. Ten or more, if we're being realistic."
"..."
The man belonging to one of the clans that had so boldly announced themselves scowled the instant the report hit him. That was probably why the pleasantly heavy backpack that had been kneading his shoulder just a moment ago suddenly felt like a slab of stone.
"Have the dead been identified?"
"Most of the bodies are too badly damaged to ID on the spot, but some of them belong to clans we're currently in a temporary alliance with."
Everyone deployed into this Darkzone besides the Super Rookie's team was clan-affiliated to begin with, so that much was obvious. Still, there was a reason they needed to pin down who the dead actually were.
"We've got roughly twenty people with us right now. If that many went down, it shouldn't be hard to figure out which deployment they came from. Run a cross-check."
"Yes, sir."
"Fine. Drop that. What about their trail?"
"The tracker team is working the traces as hard as they can, but terrain like this doesn't make it easy. And they say the monsters hitting them every other minute during the pursuit are a real headache."
The man — or rather, Choi Yeonjong, the temporary leader of this prisoner pack — clicked his tongue.
That's the weak point. Once you drop into the Darkzone, you get carved into tiny team-sized pieces. Doesn't matter if you move as an organization. If you don't link up fast once you're inside, you get picked off one by one.
And once the picking-off started, their own combat power bled away while the enemy's didn't shrink at all. That part especially pissed him off. The Super Rookie who had slyly hit some of their people and then vanished was no different from the monsters lurking somewhere in this jungle, waiting for their chance.
No. He's more dangerous than the monsters.
He had to choose. Commit every remaining asset, force the chase, and put the Super Rookie in the ground — or take the items twenty men had scraped together and walk out for a fat payday. The first option had the advantage of eliminating a future threat, but the risk scaled with it. High risk, high return, no sugarcoating.
And the second? They'd fail to prove they could kill the Super Rookie or even control his movements as a group — but the payout was guaranteed. A stable war chest to fund their new start, plus extra life for every prisoner who'd stacked Darkzone deployments. Walking away from a sure thing like that was just too damn wasteful.
No choice.
Choi Yeonjong scratched irritably at his scalp and issued new orders to the men waiting in silence.
"We're dropping the Super Rookie hunt. Call the tracker team back in immediately. I want everyone ready to extract in ten minutes."
"Are you sure, sir? The clans that lost people are going to blow up over this."
"Even if we failed to put the Super Rookie down, this many people walking out alive is still a serious profit. And don't forget — we contracted with Vladimir. We're wearing bodycams. We can prove we did everything we could."
And if someone still wanted to complain, still wanted to spit on his methods? If they wanted to walk away from a clean, mutually profitable arrangement first, Choi Yeonjong had no intention of stopping them. Besides, anyone who couldn't grasp basic business before they started talking about a "new order" wasn't someone he needed at his side.
By the time they'd recalled the scout team and started prepping the extract, Choi Yeonjong's pack had reached a bunker entrance cunningly hidden in the undergrowth.
"This the communal exit?"
"Yes, sir. We swept the Darkzone. This is the only communal exit that lets a large group extract at once with no special conditions."
Fortunately, the bunker door was fully automatic — just lay a hand on the touch pad and it opened. No special key, no keycard, no passcode. Conditions so light they barely counted as conditions at all. What he liked most, though, was that a lot of people could leave at once. Once you'd linked up inside the Darkzone, extracting together was the safest play.
No reason to stall. Choi Yeonjong set his hand on the touch pad, and a low vibration ran through the bunker as the internal locks disengaged. The door that had opened easier than shouting open sesame was about to lead them to the safety of the outside.
And then, at some point, the bunker entrance simply stopped.
"...The hell?"
"It looks like it just... stopped working."
Why, though? The questions were still lining up, one after another, when the anomaly hit.
A noise so alien it froze the blood in their veins, so wrong it sent cold sweat crawling down every spine, slammed into every ear at once. It was coming from quite a distance, and still the prisoners locked up like statues — because that was not a sound that had any business ringing out in a wilderness like this.
And as luck would have it, none of them had surveyed the Darkzone's dead center. Every last one of them had been circling the outskirts of that core — linking up with other clan prisoners, farming, chasing the Super Rookie's trail. A siren going off out of nowhere in the middle of all that was more than enough to plant a nameless dread in their guts.
"Fuck."
Choi Yeonjong put his hand back on the touch pad just in case, anxiety clawing at him — and all he could do was swear. The bunker entrance no longer responded.
"Leader. Looks like the external signal's been cut."
"What?"
"This biometric touch panel. It seems to be linked to the electronic lock on the inside of the entrance. It was probably maintaining the connection by receiving an external signal in real time."
Well, of course a fully automatic door that wasn't analog would stop working if something went wrong. But who the hell would have predicted that an "external signal cutoff" would seal the entrance in a situation like this? Did it even make sense that one of the countless exits inside the Darkzone would just stop working because an outside signal got blocked? If the power had been cut, that at least he could have understood.
Choi Yeonjong said nothing. He pulled a crowbar from his pack and jammed it into the seam of the bunker door.
The steel bit, then shrieked.
Whatever the reason, they needed this door open. Now. If it didn't open, every plan they had would come apart — and they couldn't even guarantee their own lives. A few of his men caught his intent and jumped in to help force the bunker open, but a bunker door locked down this tight was not something human muscle was going to crack.
They strained at it for more than ten minutes. In the end Choi Yeonjong hurled the crowbar away and stood there dragging in ragged breaths. The tool hit the ground with a hard, ringing clang.
It wasn't as if the Darkzone were some living creature that had suddenly decided to block their escape. Which meant there was only one party who would pull a stunt like this with this kind of timing.
"That son of a bitch...!"
The Super Rookie. He was running a two-man team now, but he'd made his name as a new face putting up overwhelming numbers even when he moved alone. Choi Yeonjong remembered how everyone had snickered at first — said the kid was just lucky, said they ought to call him Super Lucky instead of Super Rookie. He knew better now. That assessment had been one-dimensional. Superficial. The man was not some lunatic who threw his life at the mercy of luck.
"...If this exit is sealed, there's a high chance the others are sealed too. And the only bastard who would pull this is the Super Rookie. He'll have left himself at least one last insurance policy — an exit of his own."
If he didn't want to get wiped out here with the rest of them, he would have set up at least a minimum fail-safe. Choi Yeonjong decided to trust the Super Rookie's patterns — not Super Lucky's.
"But that area's crawling with an insane number of monsters. That's why the scout teams deliberately stayed away from it..."
"Then what's your plan? We all sit here in front of an exit that may or may not ever open and wait to die?"
"N-no, sir!"
"Then shut up and get ready to move. We have to walk out of here alive before we can do a damn thing."
Choi Yeonjong looked over his temporary team — Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, a multinational patchwork. Communication itself wasn't that hard, but they were from different countries and different clans. A fracture at any moment wouldn't have been surprising. Which was exactly why he, the man who'd taken the temporary leader's weight, had to make fast, precise calls and lead them with a spine.
A superior's authority didn't come from power. It came from ability. He had already seen far too many examples of what happened to a leader who failed to prove his.
"We move! Scout team and tracker team on point. Fire team covers their six. Support and transport follow the path the vanguard opens and keep the supplies and items secure."
Exactly twenty men. Five four-man squads, each slotted where they belonged. Choi Yeonjong felt his will to fight catch fire again. Originally, if they ran into the Super Rookie, he'd planned to strip him of every item he had and leave him half-crippled. That plan had changed.
He's dangerous. We cut his throat here, for certain. If we don't...
Today — or maybe next time — the ones getting wiped out would be them.
It didn't take long for the twenty-man prisoner column advancing on the map's dead center to notice that something was wrong.
"Kiiiiiieeee!"
"Aaaah! Aaaaaaaaah!"
"Grrrrrk? Grk! Grk!"
The same instant a colorless, odorless, tasteless death spread across the entire map, the hunters who had been hiding in the green shadows, waiting in silence for prey to wander close, began to wake.
And under a sky of piercing blue, beneath a sun that burned away even a single speck of darkness, a true vision of hell unfolded.