Flood
The mission system in Dark Zone boasted a degree of freedom that put every other game to shame.
That freedom had been made concrete during Eugene's last West Point infiltration mission—Very Hard—where players could freely choose their own entry points, routes, and even the basic outline of their operational plan.
Of course, that kind of liberty could easily become an overwhelming burden, so every mission still came with a fixed narrative frame. The person who had to be rescued absolutely had to be rescued; the target that had to be destroyed absolutely had to be destroyed.
The Artemis infiltration operation Eugene and Harmony were currently running was no exception. In this particular mission, preventing the information leak was hard-coded to fail, and the EMP was scripted to go off no matter what.
But flip that around, and everything outside those fixed points could twist into an almost infinite number of variations.
Which is how this happened.
[Choice: Extract additional Artemis data.]
Right after the EMP should have forced the two players to run for their lives, a little side objective popped up out of nowhere. These sudden mini-missions were hidden triggers—and the main way to push a clear rank higher.
Today, as always, it was all because of Eugene's tactical-handed spike hammer.
"Thanks for the thousand-won dona—uh."
───CRUNCH!
Artemis missions were defined by small-scale infiltration and the countless data servers that filled the facility. Most of them demanded close-quarters combat on a scale players almost never saw elsewhere—and shooting the servers before the objective was complete could stack damage and fail the entire mission.
So on Very Hard days, a lot of players carried high-powered, large-caliber pistols like Desert Eagles as sidearms, hoping to drop enemies in a single round with the fewest possible shots.
Of course, the old joke that if force wasn't solving the problem you simply needed more force occasionally turned out to be literal truth.
One thing was certain: Harmony was both eyewitness and living proof.
"…You know it scares the hell out of me every time you do that, right, Teacher?"
"Heh."
Harmony glanced once at the enemy corpse—caved in so thoroughly that even a polygon model looked wrong—then rolled her eyes over to Eugene.
A fact no one but Harmony knew: that avatar was basically a lie. Eugene had simply slammed her real body into the game as-is.
In other words, Eugene was currently advertising to the entire world, I can do this in real life too. How was anyone supposed to not be terrified?
She tore through the server room like a storm, smashing anyone close enough and stitching the ones a little farther out with the MK18. Eugene was a perfect aggro magnet, and that gave Harmony room to move.
A cross-shaped intersection ahead. One UGV racing straight through it slid into Harmony's cover-sight. A strange floating sensation washed over her as Pulse swept the area. The reticle of her red-dot settled over the marked weak point.
Her long, slender finger settled on a trigger that weighed only a few grams.
───BRRRRRRT!
Sparks and fragments sprayed into the air.
In less than a second the bolt cycled again and again, sending a dozen 5.56 mm rounds across empty space. The tungsten cores inside them punched through whatever hardness they met without the slightest hesitation.
Even as holes opened all over the UGV's chassis, the fire never stopped. A little over a second later, thirty-one rounds had found homes in every awkward angle imaginable.
While Harmony, riding the movement assist, smoothly swapped magazines and yanked the charging handle, a dull whump announced the unmanned vehicle's return to scrap-metal status.
[Alert: Artemis data-center access node confirmed. Network synchronizing. 7 minutes 32 seconds until data transmission complete.]
A kind of flow state.
Combat demanded monstrous concentration, and every time that focus loosened or tightened, subjective time stretched and shrank like taffy.
Enemies kept pouring in without end. The server room's structural complexity meant reinforcements couldn't all rush in at once—that was good—but it also meant a lot of them were waiting just outside.
There was a reason sudden side missions were hard.
And yet—
───KRA-BOOM!
"Waaaah!"
Whump.
Then a long, wet sssshhhhh.
Harmony had just finished another Pulse and barely managed to hack the drone charging her when three grenades, their trajectories twisted upward by an ominous triple thump-thump-thump, arced toward the ceiling.
The explosion that followed shook her whole body.
"Teacher! Water's leaking from the ceiling────!!!!"
"What on earth did you just do?"
"I'm the victim here too!"
The cooling pipes had been buried deep in the concrete, but three dual-purpose high-explosive rounds slamming into the wall one after another cracked them open—and ice-cold water began pouring into the server room.
Modern defense industry, materials science, and structural engineering had all gone head-to-head, and the result was one step away from catastrophe. Grenades advanced enough to punch through more than ten centimeters of armor plate with a single shot had no trouble turning concrete into rubble.
Ceiling sirens flashed, announcing that every system was now out of alignment.
Warning. Leak detected. Warning. Leak detected. Backup power cut-off has disabled the water-supply shutoff system. 3 minutes 22 seconds until server failure. 10 minutes 52 seconds until complete facility flooding.
[Alert: 56 seconds until data transmission complete.]
"Aaaah! Water's pooling on the floor! Do we have to stay here?!"
"The network's already synchronized, so the data will keep extracting until the servers die. Just lock down the exit route and the positions of the pipes buried in the ceiling."
"Ah, right! Let's see—shortest exit route, shortest exit… climb the ascender… got it!"
Eugene splashed through the shallow water already collecting on the floor and added,
"Once the data's transferred, the servers can die for all I care. We'll reverse the way we came, then take the side path toward the water-control room and out the main entrance."
"What about all those enemies?"
"Let's pull some nice, clean aggro."
Whirrrr.
The triple-shot grenade launcher still mounted on the UGV—more than twenty rounds left—swiveled freely to follow her gaze.
It was aimed at the ceiling, at the multi-meter-thick cooling pipes buried beyond it. A rare smile touched Eugene's lips.
"Ready for a water park?"
Thump-thump-thump.
After the flash and the explosions, water came down like a waterfall.
As they scrambled out of the server room to escape the deluge that threatened to turn the entire world into an ocean, Harmony caught a glimpse of that donation notification—and she knew she would never forget it for the rest of her life.
"Heh."
Every pro gamer's schedule was brutal in its own way, but AP solo queue was basically a forced march. You entered the room at the appointed time, shot everything that moved, and walked out. Either you died or you were the last one standing.
At least Dice only did solo queue. Most of the other SSM players juggled solo, duo, and squad queues at the same time—they were living the real forced march.
Anyway, Dice was currently gathered with the rest of the SSM pros in the team's lecture room.
It was a debriefing space. How had her play looked? What had she done well, what had she done poorly, how was her pathing… the whole package got dissected here.
And of course, these days Eugene's name never left anyone's lips. Plenty of reasons: she had come in as SSM's temporary coach, she had put on a monstrous performance, and then… and then…
And Dice herself was no exception.
She was the one who had openly declared a Wildcard right at the start of the scrims, and she was the one who had dragged Eugene into SSM even if only temporarily.
Still, the talk had died down a little compared to the early days───
"You don't watch Eugene's streams much, do you? The kids are going crazy right now."
"Ah—Coach Pierre…"
Never mind.
It was Eugene again. Probably pulling another stunt. Come to think of it, this was exactly when she would be live. The density of today's matches had left Dice unusually tired, so she had completely forgotten.
She watched the coach toss out the casual remark and vanish, then curiosity bubbled up and she opened Tricky. The title read [Harmony & Dark Zone Collab]… and the viewer count next to it was roughly twenty-seven thousand.
It was even sitting at number one on the real-time HOT list. Unable to resist, she clicked.
And then—
It was clearly the underground levels of Artemis HQ… but what the hell had happened to make a water bomb drop on the basement?
The blueprint panel off to the side of the UI offered a brief explanation: the EMP had damaged the water-supply system and killed the shutoff function, and then every cooling pipe had been smashed open, so the entire underground facility was flooding…
"What kind of insane nonsense is this, you people…"
Looks like she was going to have even more questions to ask tomorrow.
Absolute maniacs, the lot of them.
As thanks for the sudden donation war that broke out, here's a chubby little Eugene for you all haha.
Cute, right?