Today's Theme Is Space
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The inter-floor racket started up first thing in the morning. I scrubbed a dry palm over my face and pushed myself upright.
Should I just round them all up and beat the living hell out of them? I could butcher them so thoroughly they wouldn't even be able to whimper.
BANG!
"Hey, you sons of bitches! Keep the barking down!!"
I barked a half-assed threat at those colorfully dyed beasts who hadn't learned a damn thing, and the hallway went quiet for a moment. It wasn't long, though, before the noise started up again like nothing had happened. The instant I shoved open the barred door sheathed in bulletproof glass, I found a mob of fully armed inmates crowding the corridor.
I tilted my chin just enough to slip the blade coming in from the side, then grabbed the arm of the guy whose hands had gotten a little too busy this early in the morning and snapped it.
Crunch.
"GAAAAAH!"
"You should've just used a gun, pal."
Not that he could have. Every inch of every cell block was under the prison AI's watchful eye. The only places you could fire a gun in this prison were a handful of blind spots, or the so-called "legal" Crime Zones that a whole lot of inmates had banded together to carve out on purpose.
Cell Block H-050 was a place I ruled without quite governing. It wasn't home to any real criminal syndicate, but it wasn't a bottom-tier cesspit of total lunatics either. Put generously, it was a dumping ground for assorted nobodies. Put less generously, it was a backwater that couldn't even crack the prison's mainstream.
"You gotta read the room before you pull a stunt like that. Or what, does somebody pay you if you stick a knife in me and post the proof?"
"Th-they said they would! Ghk!"
"For real? Then why'd you try to stick me without even running it by me first? That's just selfish, man. You can't live like that."
If you've got something good, you share it with the guy next to you. Ever heard of putting people first? Then again, if he had, he wouldn't be in prison.
I yanked the knife from the inmate whose arm I'd just broken and flung him over the railing. A meaty thud echoed up from below, but nobody so much as glanced over. In Cell Block H-050, that kind of thing was just part of the morning scenery.
I wasn't particularly bothered by the crowd of heavily armed guys milling around this early, either. Day-one me and current me were in completely different weight classes. I'd injected Alpha Fluid and Beta Fluid into my body, boosting my Sixth Sense and Strength. At this point I could pick my nose and still handle a decent ambush.
And if I ever got my hands on the other Fluids and enhanced my Cognition or Cardiopulmonary Endurance? That was the moment I'd step into true transhuman territory—without a single implant in my body.
"Ah. Right. Today's the start of a new week."
That was when I finally understood why everyone—faces I'd never seen and faces I'd passed in the hall a dozen times—was geared up to the teeth. Last week, everyone had been more or less the same grade of nobody. Starting this week, the ones who'd actually made it would be calling the shots.
Surviving the Dark Zone meant you'd beaten the trial by any means necessary. That experience alone was precious enough that the formation of a kind of vanguard was only natural.
"Lower clan members, assemble! After breakfast we drop into the Dark Zone through the designated isolation chamber!"
"Looking for a tank! If you think you've got the durability, don't ask questions—just apply! We'll cover your gear!"
"H-061 Cell Block is recruiting a Pathfinder! Any solo who wants the Pathfinder slot, follow me!"
It was a complete flea market out here.
I yawned wide and watched these commendable industrial workhorses throw themselves into productive activity with a zeal they'd never shown before. If you asked why they were working so hard when every last one of them knew they were nothing but flies waiting to be swatted, most of them would give you the same answer.
What other choice do I have?
Yeah. Because there wasn't another way. If you were going to die, you at least wanted to have your fill of fun first—and that was why they were all this desperate. Staking your life with this much passion for a single hit of dopamine. How contradictory was that?
Well, if I'm being honest, I'm not that different from them.
My goal was to see the ending of EFD that I'd never managed to reach in ten years of playing. From a bird's-eye view, I was also betting my life on a single hit of dopamine. The only difference was that I wasn't a rotten criminal down to my bones—and even that was thin enough that we could've called each other brothers.
"Ah, well. Who the hell sleeps in a situation like this."
A uniquely Korean specialty: the firm belief that you sleep when you're dead.
I worked the stiffness out of my muscles and leisurely gathered my gear. Look at those ants, up at the crack of dawn putting together pickup parties and scouting talent left and right. The picture of diligence.
Click.
A semi-auto shotgun fitted with a custom suppressor. A dedicated pouch stuffed tight with shells. And the big, reliable backpack that always came with me. Once I had those, the rest was the usual routine. Pretty the claw hammer and a few throwing knives as sidearms. A plate carrier shrugged on over my shirt. Consumables slotted into the right pockets by purpose. Done.
Unlike my first Dark Zone run, when I'd gone in with an extreme lightweight kit the second I set foot in this prison, I was running a perfectly balanced heavy loadout now—and it was doing wonders for my confidence. The old-timers always said nothing beat a steaming bowl of gukbap with a bottle of soju on the side. I was feeling the truth of that in every bone.
I cracked a few inmates across the back of the head for clogging the hallway like they were trying to cause a traffic jam, carved a path through, and finally made it to the cafeteria. Instead of my usual bulgogi rice bowl, I ordered a burger combo.
Gukbap and bulgogi rice are filling enough, but every now and then you've got to grease the tongue a little.
A mystery-meat patty of unknown origin, a sauce that was a carnival of artificial additives, and a soda with a refreshment so aggressive it bordered on assault—I rammed the whole lot down my throat without mercy. Then I dunked the fries and chicken nuggets in a half-mustard, half-ketchup slurry and felt my blood sugar rocket skyward.
It was a terrible eating habit, honestly. But for me right now, it was legal doping—a temporary brain boost without the nasty side effects of actual drugs.
Especially since inmate-on-inmate competition is about to kick into high gear this week. I need to wake the brain up in advance.
On the surface, it made the surrounding inmates wary—here was a guy who could smash a whole burger combo first thing in the morning. Underneath, I was efficiently pumping calories into a body that needed more and more of them. A guy with zero implants suddenly eating like a hog? Surprisingly, that was grounds for reasonable suspicion in the dystopian Republic of Korea of the 2040s. I needed to start being careful about it. Better to demolish one burger combo than two bowls of bulgogi rice, if you wanted to draw less heat.
And there are more eyes on me by the day.
Plenty of them pretended otherwise, but more than a few were sending me those sly, measuring looks. Lately I'd been living the untimely life of an alpha male. Had I ever been this popular in my entire life? Aside from the supply sergeant who'd always singled me out for work details in the army, I'd never felt so much as a sliver of this kind of attention. It was honestly a little disorienting.
It wasn't like I had no idea why they'd started watching me, or what they were cooking up behind those looks. A bounty on my head was all but confirmed at this point. And even without the bounty, there were more than enough people who held a grudge or just plain envied me. Maybe some of them were watching out of pure curiosity, no angle at all. The problem was that dealing with them one by one was way too much of a hassle.
I crumpled the burger combo wrapper, tossed it in the trash, and casually scanned the groups moving in party units. One scrawny inmate in particular caught my eye. He was one of the contracts I'd taken this time—a guy the prison had flagged as Black.
His party was an unusual one: not original death-row inmates, but guys who'd been converted from regular convicts to death row. And despite that, they showed no interest in joining any existing faction or forming an alliance. You could tell at a glance they wanted to rise as a powerhouse party of non-original death-row inmates, then climb into a third-party force that even the clans wouldn't dare touch.
Unfortunately for them, luck wasn't on their side this time.
Should've kept that mouth of yours in check.
They'd survived the Dark Zone a few times and it had gone straight to their heads. Problem was, they'd forgotten what season it was: the culling was over. Right after a culling, everyone's eyes went blood-red trying to maximize their profits however they could. The ones who didn't know their place and strutted around like that were always the first to get painted as targets.
And that was before you factored in the dangerously stupid things they'd blurted out—wording inflammatory enough to give the prison administration a seizure—plus the several pieces of contraband they were carrying, quietly enough that they thought nobody knew, but not quietly enough to slip past the prison AI.
I hadn't paid the prison a fortune for a private space with limited-but-respected privacy out of the goodness of my heart. I'd done it so I wouldn't become prey.
The Dark Zone run with Lucy is locked in for the weekend. Today I'll go solo and knock out a job first.
If I felt like it, I could run seven jobs in seven days and still have steam left over. But I couldn't ignore the current level of Dark Zone knowledge in this world, or the scale of the prison's market economy. When a government floods the market with cash, the economy heats up for a while—but there's no way to stop prices from skyrocketing. And if what you're flooding the market with is Dark Zone knowledge? Even worse. I wanted to keep my one unique advantage for as long as possible.
Time to move.
I watched the target's party leave the cafeteria, then trailed after them at a lazy shuffle, sucking on the lemonade I'd ordered as a chaser. I usually used the Dark Zone insertion point closest to Cell Block H-050 for convenience. These guys, apparently hungry for a change of scenery, had gone out of their way to cross over to another block.
The trail led to the isolation chamber at H-061 Cell Block's Dark Zone insertion point. As expected, this one was used by party-scale operators, not clan-scale ones. The guy who'd been bellowing about recruiting a Pathfinder back in Cell Block H-050 seemed to have found his talent. He was hanging around with his party, smoking and cracking jokes.
Then a guard confirmed the first-wave deployment was all present and shut the isolation chamber door—and an interesting conversation drifted over from nearby.
"I'm telling you, it's solid. The vanguard informants who dropped in before dawn and extracted this morning already figured out today's Dark Zone theme."
"Is that intel reliable? I heard Dark Zone theme info that the vanguard informants risked their lives for goes for a pretty steep price."
"I've got a connection on that side, so I got it cheap. You guys should count yourselves lucky. Don't talk too loud—other people might hear."
Oh, now this was genuinely interesting.
The Dark Zone's theme reset every day at midnight—which was also the biggest reason anyone who hadn't extracted by twelve a.m. got marked deceased. That meant the later waves had no choice but to buy intel from people who'd already gone in and come back out.
Think about it for a second and you'd realize this was a pretty decent hustle: skip farming and hunting almost entirely, just scout the theme, the major terrain, and which Native Species were spawning, then extract immediately. An informant who got the core intel and made it out alive just sold the information at a premium. Done.
It was the same logic as the first-person slasher movies Vladimir Borshch had the inmates filming: the solo informants attached photo and video evidence and got paid hazard pay instead of walking the beat. Do it this way and you satisfied the rule requiring at least one Dark Zone deployment per week, made money, and stacked Dark Zone experience on top of it. Three birds, one stone.
I'd only ever known EFD as a game, and I'd always done my own mapping and clears, so I hadn't thought much of it. But the people here, who'd only just started treating the Dark Zone as reality, had come up with a remarkably creative way to make a living.
"So what is it already? Stop teasing and spit it out."
Fuck.
I had to physically restrain myself from screaming at the guard to open the isolation chamber door right now. If I'd sent a 5,700-character rant to the author of an original novel and ended up in this situation, at least I could've felt wronged. I was a hardcore EFD fan!!!
Whether I sighed with a face like I'd just chewed a mouthful of shit or not, the guys who didn't know any better just stood in front of the insertion gate, buzzing with excitement at the word space.
"……"
You suddenly feel like a dream workplace. Best. Company. Ever.