Xi
It might sound obvious, but being good at urban combat and actually liking it were two entirely different things.
Even among the handful of lunatics who genuinely missed the battlefield, most of them probably didn't enjoy the fighting itself — so there was no chance I was going to enjoy urban warfare. If Dark Zone hadn't been a game built on the bones of real cities from the past, I never would have touched an FPS in my life.
Anyway, back then, there was a joke that made the rounds among me and my teammates.
The worst battlefield in the world was urban combat first, urban combat second — and the absolute worst of the worst was urban combat when the enemy held the high ground.
Which was exactly why I muttered under my breath, so quietly that even the viewers couldn't hear me:
"Figures it'd be Artemis. Never been here before and it already sucks…."
The entrance into the research facility.
What greeted us the moment we stepped inside was something that looked less like a military installation and more like a modern art museum — a peculiar, streamlined structure of… how to put it… curved buildings stacked layer upon layer into a single interior complex.
I'd expected something like this to a degree — balconies offering cover in every direction, no shortage of places to hide, and a layout that let anyone on the upper floors look straight down onto the ground level. It was a textbook graveyard for attackers.
We were lucky this was a research facility. If it had been a properly armed fortress designed with interlocking fields of fire in mind, I would have needed to bring about fifteen rocket launchers just to get through the door.
"…We're not just charging in, right?"
"Given the AI level, I think the better approach is to draw their attention once, then cut down whoever comes after us one by one. Let's hold near the entrance."
Thank god the AI was dumber than a real person.
It wasn't a word that sat comfortably alongside modern firearms combat, but baiting and range control were absolute essentials in the urban warfare category. They were especially effective when a small team had to force a breakthrough at a chokepoint that refused to give — which, put simply, meant pulling back from ground that favored the enemy and luring them onto ground that favored you.
And sure enough, a short while later—
With a racket of noise, the enemies started coming, gun drones and UGVs in tow.
"If things get ugly we can always fall back to the front courtyard, so don't worry about ammo. Just shoot."
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!
Armor-piercing rounds carved clean lines through the air, shredding body armor and punching through soft flesh. The enemies who'd been charging in with zero cover and zero brains kept their momentum all the way to the floor, face-planting into the ground.
Whether it was the difficulty or just the AI, their return fire was sluggish, and their dispersal and cover discipline were just as bad. Harmony's skill was also better than I'd expected, so clearing them out wasn't hard.
We repeated the same process a few more times, then stepped over the growing pile of corpses and confirmed a movement route that would keep us as clear of enemy fire as possible.
Taking the stairs ahead up to the second floor looked like the right call.
"Stay right on my back."
"Got it!"
Gunfire cracked hard against the wail of sirens mounted on the ceiling and walls. A dozen rounds either skimmed past our bodies by a hair or slammed into the protective barrier generated by the nanomachines of the Icarus Gear, filling the air with the vicious sound of torn atmosphere.
Bullet fragments and shattered stone sprayed in every direction as we barely made it behind cover, and I picked the next route as a matter of course. The barrier was going to break after roughly eight more hits.
With the enemy's firepower superior to ours, sitting still in one spot was a bad idea. I sent the squeeze signal and we started running again.
Halfway up the gentle spiral staircase to the second floor, an enemy with a shotgun popped his face out from the front as if he'd been waiting for us.
My climbing speed was too fast to answer with gunfire.
Almost on pure reflex I dodged right — half a beat later, flame bloomed from the shotgun's muzzle and twelve lead pellets came screaming in.
I shoved the shotgunner's chest with my left arm at the same time my right hand clamped onto his face, and I drove him hard into the wall.
───CRACK!
"Guhk—!"
The back of his skull met the office's concrete wall at full force. Something broke with an ugly, unmistakable sound, and the enemy died on the spot.
If this game rendered corpses a little more realistically, the wall would probably have been painted with a thick mix of blood and something pale and wet — but that wasn't something I particularly wanted either.
He was dead. That was the end of it.
Once we'd driven the spike in, Harmony and I didn't pull back — we tore through the interior in earnest, converting enemies into former enemies. The whole process didn't take long.
Once every last one of them was cleared out, the script kicked in.
"How do these people even survive without field agents?"
"Who knows."
Field agents had always been like that. Central Park TOC, the Department of Defense, the U.S. government — they'd all constantly whined about how they were supposed to function without the Dagger team I was assigned to.
Anyway, I'd told her we wouldn't be seeing the sky for a while once we went inside the building, so the way things had turned out left me feeling a little awkward. Fortunately, Harmony didn't seem to care.
Turning every enemy that blocked our path into a motionless statue, we climbed stair after stair until we reached the rooftop, where snow was already starting to pile up.
The antennas were already operating on their own, and the area around the control room that governed them was crawling with hostiles. Judging by the alerts popping up on the UI, one of them was operating equipment inside the control room while the other was moving around outside, connecting to the antennas directly.
Naturally, the dirty work fell to me.
"Handle the machines inside for me, please. Leave the outside cleanup to me."
"Uh… yeah. You'll be fine, I guess."
No further conversation was needed.
The muzzle spat fire.
"Hey, man. You busy right now? Can you talk?"
"Oh wow. So scrap paper comes with working network and phones these days?"
"No — that's why I'm dealing with you and grinding hard ranked right now."
The voice on the other end of the smartphone belonged to none other than Russ — coach of a second-tier pro team, and one of the connections who'd pulled Kato out of the Unidentified Zone back when the man had been roaming like a feral animal hunting for Redex, Intel, graphics cards, and every keycard he could find.
Apex Predator was a rank where the skill floor was so high that the line between pros and top-tier players was relatively blurry to begin with, and streamers inevitably picked up all kinds of information whether they wanted to or not. Put those two things together, and Kato had naturally come to know a fair amount about the pro scene.
Russ was someone he'd met that way.
"So what's up? You hit Tier 2 yet?"
"Ugh. I could climb that with my eyes closed. Last season I closed out at Tier 1 with 571 LP. If I actually try, I'm Challenger material."
"Your tongue sure runs smooth. So did you get a hole blown through your head during the Tier 2 promotion series?"
"Ha, no… that was really…."
He had nothing to say.
It was true he'd been playing casually and gotten wrecked, and it was equally true that even after he'd snapped out of it and started playing seriously, he still hadn't managed a single clean win against that player.
On top of that, he still hadn't gotten a proper look at them. Every time he finally reached a position where he could put his muzzle on target and fire, a shot of insane accuracy would arrive first — before he could even pull the trigger.
Bluntly put, the player named Eugene had no business lingering at that tier. Kato might as well have been caught in a freak natural disaster.
At least, that was how he saw it.
"I'm kidding, man. I watched that promotion series of yours — you had every reason. There's a reason her name's been popping up all over the internet lately."
"Right? See? It's not that I suck — it's that she's just that good."
Right on cue, Russ steered the conversation in the direction he'd wanted all along.
Eugene.
Even if she fell a little short of the real pro gamers who burned their entire lives into the game to generate fame, revenue, and value, Kato could still walk into any room and confidently say he was good at the game.
And that person had casually dismantled him, head-on, over and over again.
Which meant this was the real point.
As an individual gamer he might have lost — but looking at the bigger picture, with the Asian Qualifiers coming up, this was clearly a windfall.
She'd appeared like a comet, and without even a single scrim under her belt it was still too early to make any firm judgments. Even so, he could say this much with certainty:
That player was going to send massive shockwaves through this year's Asian Qualifiers in more ways than one.
That was exactly why he'd made the call.
"Anyway, Russ. Are there a lot of scrim slots open these days? It's the end of the tournament-rank season. Things should be settling, right? Any promising kids floating around?"
"Of course there are — this year's stacked. The pro teams you know are all scraping together everyone they can find, first string and second string still not enough, and running scrims nonstop. Prospects worth recruiting are popping up one after another. These days the pro side is the one sending out scrim requests first."
"Yeah? Then how come I've never once seen that player in a scrim?"
"You know full well you can't stream scrims because of strategy leaks. Come on. What happened to the Katographer who used to fly around everywhere?"
"No, I know that, but—"
And with that, he started unpacking the rest of the story one piece at a time.
He hadn't caught every single broadcast, but from the ones of Eugene's streams he'd managed to watch… these days she wasn't doing scrims, ranked, or anything else. She was just busy collabing with some other streamer named Harmony.
Even rewatching other VODs, there wasn't so much as an S for scrim anywhere in sight.
An ominous feeling started creeping in.
"I just get the sense this person is ignoring every message and only doing whatever she feels like…."
"…Yeah, that tracks."
There was no way the messages hadn't gone out.
Especially not for a player who'd thrashed Kato — someone who could hold his own against pros to a meaningful degree — like she was swatting rats, over and over again.
And since she'd been grinding with the Asian Qualifiers as her goal from the start, there was no reason she wouldn't be interested in scrims either.
Which meant….
"…Hey. You think this person blocked all whispers and friend requests?"
"…Probably?"
Considering that Kato himself had only gotten a friend request accepted after slamming a Prime sub and a 50,000-won donation into her stream at the same time, begging her to please just check her messages….
Wait a second.
Why had he been assuming that what happened to him wouldn't apply to everyone else the exact same way?
Meanwhile, at that very moment—
Eugene — congratulations on earning qualification for the Dark Zone Apex Predator Asian Qualifiers through your promotion series.
Our organization has sent multiple scrim invitation messages, but we believe they may not have been seen due to message blocking or similar settings. We are therefore reluctantly conveying our intent through this method during your broadcast. We would be truly grateful if you would participate.
"Xi IMPRESSIVE, thank you for the 50,000-won donation… yes, I'll take a look."
…What is this?