More Than One Friend
Goddamn Super Rookie.
Choi Yeonjong clicked his tongue under his breath and picked his way through the space still choking on smoke, the haze pouring thick from the grenades.
Sending the vanguard ahead to pin down the location of this massive facility—and the Super Rookie's whereabouts—had been a solid plan. When he'd seen the signal flare go up, he'd even felt a rush of something like exhilaration.
The problem came after.
Monsters already prowling in every direction, worked into a frenzy and hunting for humans, had reacted instantly to the flare bursting overhead. That left him no choice but to push toward the facility with a trail of uninvited guests on his heels, and in the process he had lost three precious combatants.
The casualties hadn't come from the transport team hauling the farmed loot, so the material loss itself wasn't catastrophic. Losing three fighters, though—that price was steep.
"Aaaagh! They got me!!"
"Forget him! We leave stragglers behind!"
"W-wait! Don't you leave me, you sons of bitches!!"
They had started twenty strong. Four from the vanguard were presumed dead, and with the three they'd sacrificed on the way, the force had collapsed to thirteen in a blink. Thirteen was hardly a small number, but strip out the four-man transport team and the actual fighting strength was nine.
Nine people to punch through infectious spores, venom, razor teeth and claws, crushing tentacles, and sinkhole traps—a gauntlet paved with every malice this place could invent. Nowhere near enough.
"Punch through! Just punch the hell through! Make it out and we split every last share the dead men left behind!"
And yet Choi Yeonjong had done it.
He had manufactured a cause with money, browbeaten them with authority, and somehow dragged his men through that road to hell. Another unlucky soul had caught an arrow from the Communication Tower and died or taken a crippling wound, but in the end ten of them had thrown themselves into the smoke in one piece.
Watching a force of twenty shrink by half in under an hour was enough to crush anyone. But human beings, as a rule, hunted for hope even in despair—and even a death-row convict still dreamed of tomorrow.
The moment the smoke deployed, Choi Yeonjong had given the order he'd planned in advance: move in five-man teams. Ten people blundering through a smoke screen as one mass was a recipe for tangled feet and friendly accidents. Splitting them in half again, covering each other as they advanced, was the safest play.
And the plan had worked. The monsters that had charged in after them without a thought were easy enough to pick off one by one in the haze.
"You son of a bitch!"
"One's coming your way! Hard to see, but it's a small one!"
"Leave it to me!"
Unlike humans, the monsters had no confirmed capacity for communication, and "planning" wasn't even in their vocabulary. Variables like this left them wide open. Was it any wonder humans sat at the top of the food chain? Any wonder they were social animals?
They talked. They used tools. And when they had to, they cooperated with anyone at all without hesitation—betrayal included. That was how they had come to rule the world.
If they had had more information, if they had been able to prepare properly, they would have smashed these monsters to pieces long ago and claimed this Darkzone for themselves.
And if you traced it all the way back, that was the Super Rookie's fault too.
That goddamn bastard.
Choi Yeonjong chewed his lip as he pushed through the fog. The man they called Super Rookie had always been an oddity, even inside the prison. He was human, same as anyone, and yet he refused to belong to a group, rejected the very idea of mutual aid, and now he had gone a step further—trying to physically sever the bonds that held collectives together.
I'm a criminal, so maybe I don't have room to talk. But people like the Super Rookie are exactly the kind of "evil" this society hates most.
A fool who didn't understand that the majority had to exist as a majority before any crumbs fell his way. This time, Choi Yeonjong would kill him and make an example of it. And if he couldn't kill him, they would at least escape and warn everyone around them just how dangerous the man was.
"Stay sharp, all of you. If he was holding this place so he could extract alone, he'll have seeded it with plenty of surprises. Watch the ground under your feet, the gaps between buildings, the spaces between pillars. We've got intel that he's good with booby traps."
"The vanguard did clear some of the traps on the way through, but with the smoke this thick, visibility's shot…"
"Then use your ears. Unlike those monsters, the noise a human makes has a signature all its own."
The scrape of a boot sole dragging on concrete. The harsh rasp of breath through a gas mask. The whisper of gear and cloth rubbing together. Any man who had done time as a soldier or a mercenary on the outside knew how to read a human presence from sound alone.
"Not a bad way to tell us apart. Shame you decided to mutter it in the middle of hostile ground instead of briefing your people before you moved. You're ex-mercenary and you don't know what a briefing is for?"
Above?!
The unfamiliar voice rang out from overhead, and Choi Yeonjong and the men around him snapped their eyes upward in a rush. In a proper bounding overwatch you never, ever broke visual like that—but these were convicts, not professionals, and there was no reason they would have known. They also, of course, were not supposed to open fire without authorization.
Two shots cracked through the smoke.
"What the fuck! Don't shoot! Which one of you fired?!"
Choi Yeonjong bellowed it. They could barely guess one another's positions in the haze, let alone pinpoint them, and some idiot had just started blasting. Even if shouting like that was a blunder that advertised his own location, a professionally trained man had a reflex for it: you warned your people when one of them did something stupid.
That was why a mixed force of trained and untrained men was dangerous. The problem wasn't simply who hit harder. It was that you could neither shape the situation you wanted nor keep full control of the one you had.
Immediately after, Choi Yeonjong had no choice but to slap the nearest shoulders in a rapid, prearranged signal to pick up the pace. Barking something like punch through, now in here would only have tangled them in the smoke and gotten them all killed. That much, at least, they had agreed on in advance.
But the man on the other side was the Super Rookie. He was not the type to let a gift like this go.
Gunfire erupted overhead—a sudden, hammering burst. The men, already rattled, flinched and bunched up even as the signal told them to move. No one screamed, so no one had been hit, but shots cracking that close chewed through a person's reason with frightening ease.
This bastard isn't spraying to hurt us.
A veteran mercenary's instincts made the Super Rookie's intent easy to read.
He wants to pin us here until the smoke lifts.
If they covered enough ground before the screen fully cleared, they would reach the train platform at the heart of the facility without much trouble. Fail to make that distance in time, and the monsters they had just shaken would come boiling after them again. From the Super Rookie's perspective, it was getting what he wanted without lifting a finger.
Fine. No other way.
Choi Yeonjong flicked the selector on his cheap submachine gun to three-round burst and roared.
"I'll cover you! Move!"
The gun hammered in controlled bursts, each one advertising his position with insulting honesty. Send the others forward first, and what was the Super Rookie going to do about it alone? Either he would have to show himself and fight to keep them from getting past—or he would have to abandon the fight entirely and run for the extract.
You force an either-or on us, we force one right back on you!
The magazine ran dry almost at once. A click, a clack—Choi Yeonjong turned his back. It might have looked like a sacrifice. In truth, all he had done was snag the Super Rookie's attention for a few seconds and feed him a little chaos. Choi Yeonjong had no interest in dying in a place like this, so he moved after the men he had sent ahead.
Shots stitched the smoke behind them.
So he chose to hose down a bunch of people already on the move. Dumb bastard.
Spray enough rounds into a smoke screen and you still wouldn't hit much. Nobody was dropping. Nobody was screaming. The Super Rookie would be left behind, empty-handed, and all Choi Yeonjong's people had to do was deal with a possible ambusher—one of the Super Rookie's teammates, if he even had one—and they would walk out clean.
That was how it should have gone.
A wet crunch.
The head of the man moving just ahead of him, still pushing at a fast walk, came apart. Brain and blood sprayed into the pale smoke.
A wet hiss.
Another subordinate clutched at his throat, blood sheeting between his fingers, and folded without a sound.
The ambusher, then? But there's no way one person could—
Choi Yeonjong snapped the muzzle up, led the movement he expected, and pulled the trigger. What answered him was a thin, piercing scream. The man in his sights was his own subordinate, held by the nape of the neck, blood pumping from his chest in thick, ugly surges—held there by the Super Rookie.
"You were… you were supposed to be back there! How the hell?!"
"That wasn't me. That was my friend. An aggro buddy who shoots whenever I twitch a finger."
"What the hell are you—"
A single shot cracked from behind them, right on cue, the Super Rookie flicking a finger as if to demonstrate. A faint line showed against the cloth wrapped around his hand. Wire. The kind you used for a booby trap.
And just like that, the picture came together.
"…You talked to us first to grab our attention, dumped the corpse you'd already wired to a pistol, and moved immediately. That's why none of us got hit."
He should have been suspicious from the start. That much gunfire, and not a single person tagged. Corpse traps and psychological feints came in a dozen flavors; missing that, as a former mercenary, had been the first real failure.
"The ones I sent ahead… tch."
Four men, pushed forward while he deliberately lit himself up. One with his skull caved in. Another still dying slowly in the Super Rookie's grip, a meat shield and nothing more. The quiet around them said the other two were already gone.
The five in the rear still wouldn't know what was happening here. They would be even more bunched up now, creeping forward an inch at a time. Should he shout for them? Call them in?
That ends as badly as it can end.
They didn't even know the Super Rookie had already slipped past them and gotten ahead. Bellowing that news would only rattle them further—and unlike him, not one of them had ever been professionally trained.
"You look like a man with a lot on his mind. Whether to just kill me and force a path open somehow, or fall back and link up with the friendlies still creeping along behind you."
"Cunning bastard. Where'd you come from? If you'd worked the mercenary circuit, I'd know the name. Black-ops? Some army special unit?"
"Beats me."
"…What?"
"I'm serious. I have no idea what I did to catch a death sentence at my age and end up behind bars."
"What kind of lunatic—"
Was that it? A mind worn so thin it had started to slip? If he was a psychopath, the ghostly tactics, the monstrous combat ability, and that unhinged personality all snapped into place. Some black-ops asset, used hard and thrown away. Nothing else made sense.
"Ah. Time's up."
"……!"
Had he held the standoff too long, muzzle trained on a man using a corpse as a shield? The smoke around them was thinning, peeling back by degrees. If it had come to this, he would extract alone. Choi Yeonjong kept his eyes locked on the Super Rookie and began to ease his feet sideways.
The man had left a pistol on a corpse to fool them and come forward empty-handed. A muzzle was on him now. He would not be getting past Choi Yeonjong.
"Shame you missed me. You should've at least kept a gun."
He would lose every last one of his people. But if he walked out alive and put the Super Rookie down, the trade still came out ahead. And once word spread that he was the man who had handled the Super Rookie, his position inside the prison would be untouchable. The final winner was the one who had stayed careful to the end—
"Oh, fuck!"
A monster shouldered out of the thinning smoke. Choi Yeonjong jerked the trigger in a panic, bursts hammering into it, but the thing just stood there, staring, and refused to fall. Confusion hit him first. Then, a beat later, he realized the silhouette was wrong.
"Didn't I mention?"
A voice behind him, thick with a laugh he didn't bother to hide.
Monster, human, monster, human. In that crowded little gallery of variety, one fact was obvious: every last one of them was a corpse. Look closer and you could see them posed along every major path his people had been about to take, blocking the way in a dozen ugly attitudes.
The men he had sent as a vanguard. The monsters that had chased that vanguard. All of them, arranged in the pale smoke so that the first thing you would take them for was another monster.
"You son of a—"
The wasted ammunition registered, and instinct screamed that the Super Rookie would be on his back. He wrenched his head around—
A wet crunch.
A hideous pain detonated through his left knee. From behind a corpse that had soaked up every round he'd fired, a scrawny figure a full head shorter than the average adult man burst out and swung a club into him.
The thought arrived as he toppled sideways.
The Super Rookie was holding a military combat knife. That much was certain. So why had he assumed the subordinate whose head had been smashed open in the smoke had been killed by the Super Rookie too?
"Ah, fuck."
Played. Thoroughly, all the way to the end.
And of course, by the time he understood that, the club was already coming down on his skull.