A Week to Live
Over the past week, the atmosphere inside the prison had changed completely.
Or rather, it had been flushed out.
A considerable number of inmates had been half-forced into the Darkzone, only to die there or come back as half-wrecks. The shift was only natural. Among them were bastards who'd swaggered around claiming they'd seize a pillar of the prison by force, and others who'd thrown themselves into a new power struggle on the strength of their ample Darkzone experience.
But the ones who took the worst of it were, as always, the riffraff.
The ones with no will to change anything through effort. The born worms who only picked on the weak and grovelled to the strong. And the idiots who'd treated the Darkzone like a joke.
I sat in the cafeteria with a newspaper whose headline ran to that sort of sensationalism, leisurely savoring my morning bulgogi.
In a cutting-edge fictional 2040s Korea, a paper newspaper should have been absurd. And yet, surprisingly, it was a thriving little business inside the prison. Not everyone had a Smart Link with round-the-clock access to PrisonNet, and plenty of inmates had spent their lives with their backs turned to high technology. Analog had more than enough room to slip in.
"This paper writes a solid article. Should I get a subscription?"
The fairest and most accurate source of prison news at the moment was the one in my hands: the Prison Daily.
That said, a stodgy newspaper like this wasn't to everyone's taste, so there were outfits that specialized in the kind of vicious copy stuffed with sensationalism and rumor. The Thug Daily, the Crime Daily, the Gangster Daily — the garbage those illiterate thugs churned out would have put a cyber-wrecker to shame.
"Articles ought to be fair and based on fact, but honestly. Tch."
Reading the paper over bulgogi, I must have been possessed by the ghost of a crusty old boomer. I suddenly wanted to run a twenty-four-hour marathon of full-length patriotic Korea-boosting videos.
That was when a man quietly approached and sat down across from me.
He was carrying a tray with a reasonable amount of food on it, so at a glance it looked like he intended to have a normal meal. Expecting anything "normal" in this prison, however, was far too great a luxury.
"You're the Super Rookie, then?"
"Not me."
"Inmate number 77777. Super Rookie. That's you, isn't it?"
"Could be some guy impersonating him, for all you know. It's not like forging an inmate number is hard."
Hell, you just ripped the nametag off a uniform and slapped a new one on. I'd even heard of inmates who, when they were dead set on burying a particular target, pulled a full swap. You went to Ted Chan, had him do full-body work until you looked exactly like the person in question, then killed the original. After that you extracted the eyeballs, digitized the iris data, and slotted it into an ocular implant. In theory, you could become that person in everything but the brain.
"That's enough joking around."
"Did that sound like a joke to you? What do you even know about him?"
"Eats bulgogi every morning. Has never once failed a Darkzone reconnaissance mission. The colossal newcomer who took Cell Block H-050 and Cell Block H-088. Still not enough?"
"Nice homework. Now add one more to the list."
I lifted a cup I'd been hiding between the folds of the newspaper.
"I drink lemonade. And wouldn't you know it — this one's empty."
"...I'll buy you one."
He ordered a lemonade remotely through the prison AI, and a massive mechanical arm appeared a moment later to set a fresh cup down in front of me.
It was the kind of heavenly lemonade you could imagine being pressed from golden lemons raised on warm sunlight, clean air, and nothing but pure water.
Sluuuurp.
"So. What's your business?"
"I'd like to buy a piece of information from you."
"No reason I can't. I'll tell you anything except my measurements."
"Unexpected. I figured someone like you would hide as much about himself as possible."
"I've never particularly hidden anything. If I were actually trying to keep myself under wraps, would I have been this conspicuous?"
"...Fair point."
He nodded as if that settled it, picked up one of the sandwiches in front of him, and took a bite. It was, as expected, awful. He forced it down his throat with visible effort and set it back on the tray.
The one thing you absolutely never picked from this prison's menu was anything with raw ingredients in it. It had to be grilled over fire, fried in oil, steamed, or boiled before it became anything approaching edible. Why else would I eat bulgogi every single day?
"Ahem. Anyway, the information I want from you isn't anything special. Just information on the Darkzone."
"What kind, exactly?"
"Anything that'll keep me alive."
The man's expression looked quite serious. Whether he had a knife scar on his face or a reasonably solid build didn't matter in the slightest. What I could see, clearly, was that the light in his eyes was still alive.
"Information that'll keep you alive, huh..."
I kept scanning the article in front of me, drawing lemonade up through the straw. Fortunately, this world had told eco-consciousness to go to hell, so I was using a proper plastic straw instead of one of those disgusting paper ones.
"Which clan are you with?"
"...Crow."
"Not the type that swarms around in a pack. A small elite. So you like stealth play — which means you didn't really need to come find me, did you?"
"I was told that on the lowest floor of this prison, people who know the Darkzone as well as you do are rare."
"That's just a rumor. In a world this big, there have to be a few people besides me who are stupidly lucky, right?"
"If it were really just a rumor, you'd already be dead. Not in the Darkzone. Here."
Well. He wasn't wrong.
I folded the newspaper with a snap and looked him in the eye.
"If you want to live that badly, I don't mind teaching you how to survive."
At that, his face seemed to brighten a little.
"First, go tell Boss Vladimir. I'll be coming by soon with the bodycams and GoPros I've collected, so tell him not to rush me."
"......"
"Next, tell those buddies of yours trading coded nonsense on the PrisonNet chatter board. If they want to know about me, they can come find me in the Darkzone themselves — not in the prison."
"......!"
"And one last thing. If you want to take my information to Boss Jin at the casino and make a deal, you'd better do a more competent job of collecting it. Boss Vladimir's a decent guy — he'll laugh it off. Boss Jin values credit more than money or information."
"No, that's—"
"I just told you how to survive. You should be thanking me."
For a man with such a tough face, he bowed his head far too quickly. He'd probably practiced hard for this moment, but in a den like this, it was thirty-point acting on a generous day.
"If you're done talking, get lost. You lot can handle the fallout yourselves. Oh — and you can consider that the lemonade money."
Playing both sides between Vladimir Borshch and Jin Ja-gyeong, trying to resell my personal information and my future movements — the attempt itself was fine.
The problem was that it was only an attempt.
Watching his face change by the second as he hurried out of the cafeteria, I couldn't help a quiet snort of laughter.
What the hell do they think they're going to get out of this?
Teaching people how to survive the Darkzone wasn't actually difficult. Nobody in this world or the real one had smashed their head against the Darkzone as many times as I had. Most of the guide videos, most of the speedrun videos — I'd made them. When people talked about the top-ranked players, it was stranger if my name wasn't mentioned.
With that much experience and knowledge, sharing survival methods with everyone would have been nothing.
But I couldn't.
It's not even about whether I lose my edge. It's too dangerous.
The moment I spread that information, the moment its accuracy was confirmed, the cold laws of capitalism would see me locked in a secret underground lab belonging to the government or a Mega Corp, starring in a brain-in-a-jar ending. That much was obvious.
Except for Lucy, who I could more or less trust, I had to exist in front of everyone strictly as the Super Rookie.
Lucky at first, stringing together successive successes — then, as the frequency climbed, becoming a veteran with real experience, until I was Super Rookie in name only. That was the immediate goal.
The fact that more people are starting to probe me means some of them have started finding my track record strange.
I was the only one with consistently high yields. I was the only one who kept coming back safely. And the people who went into the Darkzone with me were the only ones who kept taking heavy casualties. Of course suspicions would pile up.
Of course, I'd already signed contracts with the Mega Corps and secured their backing specifically to kill those suspicions, so for now I could relax. It was enough if I looked like just another garden-variety talented guy who only succeeded with the support of massive power and capital.
"Time will sort it out."
The ones who were going to die would die on their own, Darkzone or prison. Whenever the existing roster got flushed, the prison was always ready with a mass of new inmates to fill the empty beds. And today was that day.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
"Hey, you pieces of trash! Get over here and receive the newbies alreadyyyyy!"
"Newbies?! Did he just say newbies?!"
"Sniiiiiff. Hah. That sweet newbie smell. We're so fucking dead."
"Taking a newbie who hasn't had the outside world washed off him yet and dyeing him in my colors? Yeah, I can't pass that up."
"I... I wanna get my hands on a newbie too!"
I was just as excited as the rest of them, so I slammed out of the cafeteria with the other inmates and ran for the common area.
This game is a blast! Come play with us!
"Bluh-haah! Ghk! Cough!"
"Down."
"W-wait— blubblubblub!"
Loud, messy splashing. The sound of someone gulping down water and vomiting it back up, layered over each other, made an already gloomy space even gloomier. And the explorer currently plunging his head in and out in a spirited search for the origin of water was not alone.
Five men in total hung upside down, their pants and shirts soaked through with something other than water, with no idea when their own turn would come.
The being who held all of their fear-soaked gazes sat in silence with her legs crossed, a long pipe between her lips.
"Up."
"Guh-haaaaah! Cough! Cough!"
"Still not enough?"
"No! No, it isn't! Not at all! Please, I beg you!!"
"Good."
A woman who looked worn down yet healthy, pure yet dazzling, harmless at a glance yet armed with thorns and poison you couldn't see, jerked her chin at the people arrayed around her. One by one the men hanging upside down were released and forced to their knees on the water-slick floor.
Standing in formation around them were not the casino's heavy-set guards, but beauties, every one of them boasting a sensual figure.
The fact that each of them packed the combat power of an entire casino security team was not widely known. Most of the people who had learned it had already vanished without a sound.
"So you're the information brokers who've been active of late. You hire inmates through PrisonNet to collect information on your behalf, or you buy what they've gathered cheap and sell it expensive to whoever needs it. That's the business. Correct?"
"Y-yes, ma'am!"
"But we all trade on our honor! We check everything as carefully as we can so we never pass on bad information—!"
She quietly raised a hand, and the five mouths closed. She hadn't even raised her voice to tell them to shut up. They had already been trained, like Pavlov's dogs.
"I requested the exact same information from all five of you. Each of you named a different price, and I paid every one of them in full. What I received, however, was nothing. It was not even garbage."
If what she'd been handed had at least been garbage, it would have served, however trivially, as information, and she would have let it slide. But every piece of intelligence she'd received had been wrong. Things that could not even qualify as garbage. Things that were nothing at all.
"You said, 'The Super Rookie is a secret agent under government protection.' Was that it?"
"......"
The man who had provided that particular piece of information began to tremble. In fairness, without something like that, the Super Rookie's unchecked rampage would have been close to impossible, so the impulse to pad the product with a somewhat strained speculation was understandable. The problem was that the person they'd sold it to happened to be someone who valued credit.
"The Super Rookie possesses some remarkable implant, or a mutant biological ability. Was that it?"
"......"
Hardly. When he had visited the casino not long ago and, coincidentally, been hit with a dealer's false accusation, she had verified him with every means at her disposal. The result was a bust. His body was a clean zone that would have put a Purist to shame.
"The Super Rookie is not, in fact, a human of this world, but a human from the Darkzone. Was that it?"
"......"
By that point, she couldn't even manage a hollow laugh. As if she had no way of accessing information from the outside world. The Super Rookie was an inexplicable existence, that much was true — but it was an equally established fact that he had lived on the outside, stood trial, and entered this prison. She hadn't been able to uncover the circumstances of the trial, but even if he had crossed over from the Darkzone, he would have ended up as a lab experiment somewhere, not a prisoner.
In other words, this too was garbage.
"And the rest was just as ridiculous. Nobody knows anything detailed about the Super Rookie, so you figured you could invent something plausible and sell it as intelligence. Is that what you thought?"
"......"
With that, the five men's fates were decided.
Click.
Time-bomb collars, each set to one week, were fastened around the five men's throats.
And that was why the secret posts on PrisonNet heated up another degree.