Gatecrasher
Harmony stared at the wall and smiled faintly. “You know what? I thought the others were all chatting with the teachers because they didn’t want to split the reward, but this map is so huge that most players probably don’t even bother coming here.”
She popped open the map, even though the part she saw was only a tiny slice. Still, it looked like a massive sprawl that would take forever to walk through.
Forty players. A lot on paper, sure, but Dark Zone didn’t shrink the safe zones like normal battle royales, and once you were inside a building you were basically untouchable. So here we were—forty scattered points of light in one of the biggest empty zones anyone had ever seen.
Doesn’t matter if they came to kill us or not. Right now it didn’t change a thing.
She kept quiet on comms on purpose, in case her team needed every second. But human curiosity is a force you can’t ignore.
She had stepped out again and was leaning against the wall near the entrance, watching the building like a hawk. The inside was completely silent.
“Should we go in?” she asked.
Harmony’s voice exploded across the chat. “NOOOOOOOO—!”
“Oh crap, the ally marker isn’t showing again. This is so frustrating.”
“Team-down or death alerts automatically pop up, so just chill.”
“Someone turned the power back on and now the whole party’s gone. This is so dumb.”
“This is the worst game ever, real talk.”
Yeah. It really was the worst game. Pure horror.
She watched one chat log pop up and vanish in the corner—someone screaming about missing teammates—and Harmony just couldn’t help feeling every bit of that pure fear. Especially since she was already a total scaredy-cat to begin with.
But then, from the thick darkness inside, one silhouette started walking out.
Both the chat and Harmony’s stomach flipped at the same time. The weather in Manhattan was nothing compared to how chaotic her nerves were right now.
High chance it was Eugene, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She took a big breath and locked onto the silhouette with her crosshair the second it was clear.
Green light flared in the dark.
“Put your gun down. I’m done cleaning up inside.”
“…”
The figure that stepped out wasn’t the super-tall Anaconda. It was Eugene, gripping a tomahawk in one hand.
She took a deep breath the moment she came outside and spoke. “Grab whatever items you can carry and let’s head straight into the contamination zone.”
“…Yeah. I kinda figured we’d end up here.”
“Hehe.”
Harmony couldn’t explain the feeling, but she stayed glued to Eugene’s back the whole way. She had to get stronger before she became useless to the woman who had once saved her life.
—[Virus Filter Crafting Complete.]
—[Filters high-level environmental toxins. Multi-layer design removes not only non-volatile organic compounds and particulates, but also acid gases, ammonia, and more.]
“Whoa, one of the enemies just got wiped out and the items and materials are everywhere…”
“No big worries before we even enter.”
Inside the shelter’s crafting bench. Near the enormous black box carved with Ikarus’ logo, Harmony watched everything she’d scavenged get disassembled and rebuilt with sparkling eyes.
It was weird, but this was exactly the crafting bench in Survival Mode. Not some little wood shop where you slap guns together.
Touch the box and it showed how many items and materials you had. Grab the ones you needed and the nanite printer inside would do all the work according to the blueprint you picked.
That had been the first system feature in Survival.
Holding the virus-filter mask around her neck, she fiddled with it in amazement. “These masks… I’ve never seen anything like them in real life. They look super dangerous.”
“That’s exactly why we’re going there.”
“Oh… yeah, duh. We’re heading into a contamination zone.”
Her reply was so perfectly timed it was almost too good to be true. While she was still talking, the two of them were already turning into proper operators who could survive anything.
Of course the chat was still spamming “use upper-tier items to upgrade” advice, so they had to save some materials anyway.
Before long the two of them, looking every bit like seasoned operators now, opened the shelter door carefully.
The blizzard outside was still raging.
“Let’s go.”
“Yeah.”
They pushed through the storm that hadn’t fully died out. The wind hit them like fists, proving it wasn’t a complete shelter yet. But the ads and lights inside the buildings still blazed bright against the dark—something beautiful with no one left to enjoy it.
Then, at the same moment, a colossal wall rose up.
The line that split city from city.
—[Warning: Entering the vicinity of a contamination zone.]
QUARANTINE.
The single word painted in big yellow paint on the wall hit harder than anything else could have. Everything inside was jammed—no signals, no way to see what was on the other side, whether anyone had escaped, or what hell was waiting.
Just a mysterious space wrapped in secrets.
Two very different expressions. One set of eyes shot upward, the other drifted toward the endless horizon line where the wall disappeared.
One stared in pure awe, mouth open. The other… just shook her head like she really didn’t want to see it.
“Whoa.”
“What do you think?”
“Well, if you ask ‘what do you think,’ it’s just… the atmosphere is so perfectly creepy for a game.”
Pandemic Apocalypse.
It was a giant tombstone for the dead who could never see this anymore.
Eugene let out a small breath. “We should keep moving. There probably isn’t an entrance, but there are ways in. Maybe a half-built wall with a fence blocking it.”
“Then let’s hurry. We’re running out of time.”
She nodded and the two of them sprinted, the towering wall on their right.
Harmony’s curiosity was fading fast—she still didn’t know why Eugene knew so much about the game. She must have practiced even when she wasn’t playing.
“Shit… Survival’s no joke. Adaptation is the real killer.”
The word “snipe” had always existed, but when streamers exploded onto the scene, one term suddenly meant something brand-new.
Short version: someone—usually one or more—interfering with a streamer’s broadcast while they play multiplayer games. It was the complete opposite of SimulCast. Usually it just pissed the streamer off, which made it perfect for trolls.
Tech had improved, so traditional sniping had died out, but stopping it entirely? Almost impossible.
Harmony’s own stream hadn’t escaped it either. Of course it hadn’t. Her fans—the so-called Harmony Army—were just part of it. There were also the ones who live for ruining streams, no matter how low they had to go.
And that explained it perfectly. One single user. The one with the impossible-to-read username.
“Hey, this session is definitely the right one. Where the hell did those two go?”
His stream was flickering on screen.
Dark Zone had ultra-hard anti-snipe measures for PVP—broadcasts would auto-cut if you joined the enemy team—but he had found a workaround.
He opened a separate computer in the room, accessed the internet, and added one more camera that let him watch the game remotely.
He was only doing it to ruin the stream. No deeper reason. Twisted sadism and a born-instinct for pain were the only fuel he needed.
He had been blocked from hundreds of streams over the years and even got added to a blacklist. Still he kept going—because the reports against him hadn’t reached the hardware-ban level yet.
“Hah, you damn kids. The game’s way too weird. Why do you keep spinning around like that?”
The blizzard outside hit -30 °C, but the upper UI now showed the temperature dropping to only -17 °C. The wind still slammed snow like fists. On the streets of Manhattan one person walked through the thick white blanket, mouth full of curses, heading toward the direction that sounded like the most fighting was happening.
He cut corners, rounded alleys, sometimes deliberately took detours to avoid other players and get closer to where he thought Eugene and Harmony might be.
Even though the external computer could finally see the two who had just started Survival Mode, the chat logs of the people still broadcasting live were genuinely helpful.
Meanwhile, an idea popped into his head on how to hit the streamer with the worst feeling possible.
Kill her. Specifically when she’s at her most helpless—right in the middle of fighting another player, with no time for Eugene to react. Helipad had invincibility frames, so avoid that.
Best to meet her by chance and join her party.
For that, some prep was needed.
—Scuffle.
While the sound of fighting grew louder, he started stripping off everything except the bare minimum items Survival Mode required. He wanted to look like a fresh newbie who had barely made it inside the zone.
Even if it was Eugene, it would all work out eventually.
Once he was ready, he rounded the corner of the block.
—Screeech!
Far away, the familiar scene hit him. Harmony and Eugene were wiping out a patrol squad that had been wandering the streets, completely unaware of the danger.
Combat was almost over now.
He forced his face into the calmest expression possible and started running toward them with both hands raised. “Hey you two, wait a sec—!”
First to react was Eugene, who had just finished recovering the cluster seeker mine she had made.
Her sharp eyes swept over him from head to toe. Because of his ragged appearance, she lowered her gun slightly and answered with a careful look.
While he was still close, Harmony looked up for a second and spoke. “Stop! Put your gun down!”
“Ah, yeah! I really want to try killing you! I don’t have anything to eat otherwise!”
At the same time he dropped to the ground, hands behind his back. If Eugene and Harmony had overheard what he was thinking, they would have realized he had no right to survive.
But they didn’t. He had no idea what they were planning to do to each other right then.