An Ideal Partnership
Elena Blavatsky. To her, the world was a clamor of chaos, a dizzying otherworld unto itself.
That was why she had never forgotten the shock of first opening her eyes in the culture fluid. Of first becoming aware that she existed. Of first reaching out and communicating with someone who was not herself.
If she hadn't known what would come after — if her instincts had been even a little duller — she would never have needed to sit here drowning in sentiment.
No. Maybe it would have been better never to have been born at all.
The reason she had been having so many uncharacteristically idle thoughts lately was obvious. It was because of that peculiar man down below, dual pistols in hand, bounding around with glee as he toyed with his enemies.
"Is there anyone who can stand against my Dual Pistol Fist!!"
Bang-bang! Bang!
"......"
The more she watched him, the stranger he seemed.
In an age like this, the fact that he — like her — hadn't so much as a single decent implant installed gave her a sense of kinship. At the same time, the attitude he wore filled her with a powerful sense of alienation. A being in whom kinship and alienation coexisted. Was that not a contradiction in itself?
If that had been the extent of it, she would have shrugged it off as the world simply having all kinds of people. But the real thing was something else entirely.
She had first approached him out of simple curiosity, but after luckily joining his team she had naturally come to learn one particular fact. Namely, that he knew far too much about the Darkzone.
Even the battle-hardened veteran convicts who have been surviving trips in and out of the Darkzone for years — even the legendary inmates numbered in the ten thousands — don't know the Darkzone this thoroughly.
And yet that man, Prisoner Number 77777, carried himself as if he knew everything, as if the Darkzone were his own living room. What was here. What was dangerous. What was expensive. He was like a cheat-code gamer walking around with a strategy guide in one hand.
But to cut to the conclusion: Elena Blavatsky had decided not to particularly care. No matter what he knew or how much of it, he never pried into Lucy more than necessary. Not about Lucy's origins or identity. Not about Lucy's bizarre physical abilities. Not about the status and position she held in the prison. Nothing at all.
That was how she knew his purpose was extremely simple. To enter the Darkzone. Unlike the other convicts who never bothered to hide their ugly desires, his reason was transparent and crystal-clear.
The proof is that I don't sense even the slightest hint of him trying to overwork me or rip me off.
If he wanted, he could have openly exploited her ignorance of the Darkzone, stacked the profit split in his favor, and skimmed off all the private gain he liked. Unlike the convicts who had gone down into the Darkzone with her that first time and thrown her out as bait without a moment's hesitation, that man was a rare breed of loyalist in an age like this.
No — calling him a loyalist wasn't quite right either. He simply looked after her because one fewer person meant that much less item farming, that much less ground they could explore. And it was precisely that which inspired such strong trust.
It wasn't a tainted romantic relationship. It wasn't a vertical hierarchy. It wasn't a cold connection bound by money alone. They looked after each other properly while drawing a clean line. A truly ideal partnership. It was also a human connection she had rarely felt from the white-coated scientists who had looked at her with cold eyes.
"Oops. I should focus."
That was the end of her woolgathering. Even without an ocular implant, her vision laid the entire world bare, and she stared down at the wooded terrain.
Soon the undergrowth shook violently, and what emerged were a dozen-odd convicts who had come running at the sight of the flare — and a horde of hundreds of native species that had come chasing moving prey.
Let the convicts approach as far as possible, but keep them from crossing the line we set. Harass them just enough to buy time.
Thwum!
The arrow she loosed so casually flew with the terrifying force of a gunshot and punched through a native species' skull. The power was so tremendous that the head of the creature charging toward the humans simply separated from its body.
The sharper-eyed among the convicts noticed the arrow that had come flying out of thin air, but they had no luxury of searching for her, hidden somewhere in the Communication Tower. The horde of native species, already closing to point-blank range, had gone beyond covering the ground — they were moving the wooded terrain itself.
In particular, a bundle of tentacles camouflaged as enormous vines shifted along with the earth in which the trees were rooted, looking for all the world like a colossal tortoise on the move. What came raining down from there along with clods of earth were worm-type proto-species, each one carrying a vicious poison or an annoying debuff effect — or so the leader had said.
The unlucky convicts whose ankles were snared by the worm-type proto-species, a half-step too slow to dodge, were seized by the vines and dragged down into the earth.
But perhaps it was the poison gas spreading through the air. The native species couldn't quite bring their full strength to bear.
"Throw them! Burn them all!"
"Eat this, you sons of bitches!"
The Molotov cocktails a few convicts hurled in a fit of rage did a splendid job of incinerating the native species and checking the relentless pursuit. The humans, so long as they had spare filter canisters for their gas masks, had no need to worry about their condition deteriorating. The native species, exposed directly to the atmosphere, had no choice but to show signs of weakening.
The leader had told her that managing this gap until the very end was the key.
Thwum!
"Gyaaaaaah!"
Fortunately, for someone of her physical gifts, regulating that gap was no great difficulty. Every sensation her body registered became information, and her highly efficient brain distilled it into the optimal conclusion.
"An arrow just came down from above!"
"Up there! Someone's up there!!"
"Shit! Just run! If we can just get inside the facility somehow!"
Could they, though?
Fweeeeng!
"Aagh! My foot!!"
The booby traps the leader had set in advance triggered, and dangerous odds and ends you could find anywhere — nails, shards of glass — erupted across the ground. For people like them, who had worn steel-plated combat boots from the start for safety, it would have been fine. But those men were not the type to prepare for the Darkzone's dangers with the leader's pathological thoroughness.
One man crumpled as a nail punched through the sole of an ordinary combat boot. Another lost his footing, went down, and ended up with glass shards embedded all over his body. Most of those who fell behind became a tasty meal for the native species.
Of course, they hadn't built booby traps for humans alone. The proof was that traps placed where a human would rarely ever trigger them had begun going off one after another.
"Kieek!"
"Pssshhhhhh!"
Native species that had wormed into the gaps of buildings, native species that had scaled walls and roofs and pursued the humans by any means necessary, became the victims of those traps. A ground stained with erupting slime and scraps of flesh, with screams and gunfire flying in every direction, and with fragments whose owners no one could name.
It was a sight that grew more nauseating the longer you looked, and yet Lucy felt not the slightest stir of emotion. The things she had seen escaping a secret laboratory in Russia, and again entering Korea as an illegal immigrant and choosing Seoul Southern Prison as her "refuge," had been worse than this — never less. Human malice, after all, sometimes surpassed the imagination.
Thwum!
Just as the arrow she had just loosed would feel, to someone out there, more vicious than anything else in the world.
"Uwaaaaaaah!"
"...Leader! At the top of the Communication Tower!"
"Support team, lay down suppressive fire on the Communication Tower! Everyone else, we punch through as we are!"
Bang! Baaang!
Crude lead slugs bursting from homemade pipe guns hammered the steel plates and railings near her hiding spot. They had a decent amount of fighting spirit, flailing as if they had no intention of just taking it — but Lucy had no intention of disappointing the man who had shown her trust first. Not even a speck.
Thwum!
"Fuck! Eokmani's down!"
"Just run! I said run!!"
"Throw more Molotovs! Don't let those monster bastards get in! We'll take out the Super Rookie in the gap and get out!"
"Don't spare the bullets! Once we're out of here we can buy hundreds more of those damn things!"
"Kieeeeeek!"
Native species and humans tangled together, and flames that water alone would never extinguish scorched the earth. Both the convicts who had been running without rest under the blazing sun and the native species were starting to creak in one place or another.
Severe dehydration and hunger-driven exhaustion, plus the crushing weight of relentless stress and adrenaline that never stopped pumping, crept up on the convicts in silence and closed around their throats. Meanwhile the colorless, odorless, tasteless poison gas slowly necrotized the native species' somatic cells, driving them into unceasing frenzy and self-destruction.
Ironically, this was not a game where stopping first meant survival. It was a chicken game where the first to stop died, no exceptions.
Lucy, her frame locked at a small stature because she had never fully grown in the culture fluid, loosed arrow after arrow with unbelievable force.
"Ghk!"
"Gheeeehk!"
Sometimes a sharp-eyed convict. Sometimes a threatening native species. A single glance, a single motion of her hand, and their lives were decided.
"Goddamn it! No choice! Throw them!"
The moment the man leading the convict pack shouted that, several of them pulled something from their coats and hurled it toward the approach path. The cylindrical objects flew a fair distance and immediately belched out an enormous volume of smoke.
"Smoke grenades?"
For an instant she thought, oh no — but it was already too late. The convicts abandoned the fight, accepting a certain amount of casualties, and plunged into the smoke.
The problem was that unlike the convicts who had boldly leapt into the smoke, the native species couldn't find the humans who had suddenly vanished, and began tangling among themselves in confusion. Ordinarily, native species tracked humans by sight, hearing, and smell — and smoke grenades had the advantage of wiping out both vision and scent. Hearing? No matter how sharp it was, in this chaos you couldn't tell a real sound from noise. Only a human wearing a specialized implant, or someone with innate physical abilities like hers, would manage it.
The moment she registered that fact, Lucy came down the ladder without a shred of hesitation. She intended to seize the initiative before the convict pack fully cleared the smoke, surrounded the Communication Tower, and seized the train platform.
Whether by coincidence or necessity, Han Seungho of the dual pistols — who had just finished off a pack of native species and one convict team that had rushed the train platform — was making the same move. Lucy ran into him as he was coming off the platform, and immediately warned him of the enemy's unusual behavior.
"Leader, the enemy has used smoke grenades to seal off visibility for both friend and foe."
Meaning they could no longer read the enemy's approach routes as if looking at the palm of their hand. Han Seungho paid Lucy's quiet warning no mind and swapped the magazines on his dual pistols. She didn't bother to mention the "friend" dangling from his back in place of a backpack.
"Them popping smoke doesn't mean they want a direct clash with us. It means they'll do whatever it takes to get out alive."
"Then even now, if we escape first on our own and leave the enemy stranded here..."
"It's not extraction time yet. We've got about three minutes left."
Three minutes was enough time for the enemy to push through the smoke, storm the platform, and board the train. If they let that happen, they'd end up making an awkward joint escape as unwilling bedfellows. Han Seungho, as if that was one sight he absolutely refused to see, pulled out his last remaining gas-mask filter and swapped it in.
"Anyway, now that they've deployed smoke, they won't be able to tell friend from foe either. So shouldn't we finish this while we're at it?"
At those words, Lucy wordlessly drew her alloy club. In truth, it was the answer she had been hoping for.
"Let's do it now."