Hijacking

There's an old saying that even a village dog, after three years, can recite poetry.

It means that given enough time, anyone adapts to anything — but whether because not enough time had passed yet, Eugene's editor still couldn't get a handle on things.

This manifested itself in the fact that Eugene was dumping armfuls of legendary moments into every single broadcast — the kind of clips most streamers would be lucky to produce once every three days. He ran Eugene's fan space himself, and as a Dark Zone player, he knew better than anyone.

Domestic or overseas, it didn't matter — every one of those absurd highlight reels was guaranteed to rack up all-time-high view counts wherever it landed.

They weren't the usual montages or "epic moments." These were something else entirely — creative plays, if you were being generous; the kind of thing that left your brain scrambled, if you weren't.

And when material like that poured out of every single stream, one person simply couldn't keep up. A cleanly edited ten-minute video was scheduled to go up on her channel soon enough, but that would inevitably take time.

So the method he chose was simple.

YourSpace Shorts.

Drop a snappy one-to-two-minute edited clip the moment each broadcast ended.

A minute if he kept it tight, two if it ran a little long — short enough that editing and review could be done in two or three hours at most. The advantages were surprisingly solid. For one, something was always going up, so subscribers never got bored.

And second: by cutting out nothing but the climax ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and dumping it raw, he forcibly injected curiosity straight into people's brains.

Naturally, that also had the effect of driving more viewers to Eugene's streams.

"The outside air feels especially fresh — must be the gunpowder mixed in."

"…Right. Of course it does."

"I was joking."

Too much.

Truly, the world had grown harsh. Had we finally arrived at an age where my jokes no longer landed? Back in the day, one quip from me and everyone would snicker along… wait. Had they just been laughing out of politeness even then?

No way. My seniors had loved me that much.

Anyway, I wasn't the kind of bad person who forced people to laugh. Rather than asking them to at least chuckle at the joke, I simply put on a slightly sulky expression.

The surroundings were pure chaos. Charred and blackened buildings and floors, debris, small flames still crackling and spitting sparks. And scattered among it all, countless corpses. Not that they were depicted with any particular brutality.

The grenade attack I'd launched in a surprise strike while every enemy had their guard down was more than enough to send everyone inside the kill radius straight to the afterlife. The vehicle itself was sturdy enough in various ways to soak up the return fire, too.

Just like that, roughly twenty of the forty-seven evaporated within three seconds. Another six or so who tried to return fire became polygons a little later than that, and the large explosion from the small sticky bomb Harmony fired took about four more with it.

Which left seventeen. But Harmony and I hadn't just sat around twiddling our thumbs — we'd opened the blast shields and poured fire into them while they were still reeling, so mopping up the rest hadn't been particularly difficult.

Crow had fled with a handful of his subordinates, and so the remaining forces here: zero.

"Two people evaporated a whole company in three minutes. Well done."

"…Don't tell me riding around in the vehicle was for this too?"

"Who knows. Their mistake was loitering near the vehicle we hijacked."

It was an unavoidable fact, really.

Whether the enemies knew it or not, everyone understood you shouldn't hang around a powder magazine holding a lit flame. Though to be fair, that kind of thing had been fairly common back in the day. Urban combat was always crawling with booby traps to a maddening degree.

No matter what anyone said, surviving and completing the objective was what counted. First priority: survival. Second: the mission. This engagement had achieved both, so the process could be discussed at the debriefing.

I'd repeated this schedule for four years and six months — the first two of which I'd spent just surviving, learning English, and getting to know my seniors — so fretting over every little detail of the process actually felt stranger to me than not.

And so my brain was already discussing the next objective.

As the necessary memories flashbacked in an instant: according to the earlier scan via Artemis IFF, the personnel deployed here numbered a little over eighty.

Roughly fifteen handled at the backup power facility, and forty-five of the forty-seven waiting outside. Which meant that across this entire sprawling complex, what remained was barely a platoon's worth.

The red triangles marking hostiles were scattered like dots across the nuclear power plant grounds, and if you had to pick the densest concentration, it was obviously the main control center.

The enemy had already been reduced to a meaningful degree.

"Any issues with your gear?"

"One moment."

Click.

Magazine out, chamber cleared, dry fire. Then check the charging handle if nothing's wrong. After that, confirm zero. Once the weapon inspection was done: spare magazines on the plate carrier, remaining rounds, grenades, everything else.

It was something I always did, so it didn't take long.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I scanned the surroundings, there was nothing left worth riding. The armed buggy we'd arrived in and put to such good use until mere minutes ago… well.

"…Wow. I can't even make out its shape."

"It's a wreck."

How to put it.

Blackened, severely twisted and shattered fragments of steel frame, plus a few crushed and demolished iron lumps that might have been the engine, scattered in every direction. The floor and walls were considerably damaged from the massive explosion. In any case, it wasn't a pretty sight.

A short but memorable time together.

We couldn't afford to linger any longer. I gave a simple hand signal indicating we'd proceed on foot and pulled up the route to the main control center. Roughly four hundred meters to cover, but it wouldn't take long.

The high-powered grenade launcher had cut our time considerably. Fortunately, it looked like we'd finish the mission within the window.

"Let's go."

She was managing to keep up with my pace reasonably well by now.

There was still plenty that needed work, but there was time — and going forward, there wouldn't be life-or-death situations like before.

Together with her, hurrying along behind me in short steps, I headed for the main control center.

Humans are animals that never quite live up to the word "rational."

And when that fact is most relevant needs no explanation — obviously, people surrender themselves to the most instinctive judgments when backed into a corner.

In a hair-trigger moment they yank the trigger out of pure rage, mash the detonator button. They light the fuse of an irreversible act of stupidity with their own hands. And unlike a fuse you can snuff out, actions steeped in instinct cannot be taken back.

Under normal circumstances, it isn't that dangerous. Even a terrorist wrapped head to toe in explosives, finger hovering over the detonator, can be neutralized with a precise shot.

But inside a nuclear power plant's control center, with no fewer than ten people backed into a corner — that changes things somewhat.

I wasn't exactly an expert on power plant architecture, but I could at least predict that if those lunatics decided to start pouring grenades, rocket launchers, and chain guns into the containment vessel, the results wouldn't be pretty.

And so, these people who could already be called terrorists left not a single inch of room for negotiation.

Besides, if you half-heartedly left bastards like this alive… this was a game, so nothing would actually happen, but I didn't want to. Anyone who poked at my sore spots was going to die. Every last one of them.

On that point, at least, I was being completely honest.

───Thoom!

A heavy recoil slammed into my shoulder.

It repeated several times. This was by no means easy terrain for a firefight. Without Harmony's Pulse, the enemy's guerrilla tactics inside this extremely complex facility layout would have been an absolute headache.

The engagement didn't have to be calm, but the progress did. Rather than charging in mindlessly, if you snipped off the protruding points one by one, the enemy would gradually lose their combat power the way clothes soak through in a drizzle.

Meanwhile, I hacked the facility security to restrict where Artemis PMC personnel could go. The more of their allies died one by one, the higher the risk of their impulsive actions — in reality, that is.

Fortunately, they were a collection of virtual polygons.

Stiff behaviors and mechanical movements that real special forces personnel would never display. Textbook tactical maneuvers were a gift of opportunity.

Working in tandem with Harmony: one of us pulled enemies out of cover, the other seized the opening and cleanly snuffed them out. Whether by grenade, sticky bomb, or launcher round — anyone who bolted out in a panic had their head burst open like a watermelon.

That was how most of the enemies under the LPVO scope's crosshairs met their end.

As the front line shifted in our favor, Artemis was driven into an ever tighter corner, and the final moment arrived.

Only when the last one among them had become a permanently abandoned polygon lump that no one would ever recover did Harmony and I realize the mission had reached its end — not in the dynamic fashion of previous ones, but an ending nonetheless.

A flash before my eyes, and ISO's voice rang in my ears.

"Ugh, this one was really hard."

"Keeping up with the pace?"

A nod.

She nodded boldly. I couldn't say much about that. With not much time left until the prelim ranks, it was true I'd pushed her a bit hard on this mission.

The fact that Harmony could keep up with my pace even a little was, in its own way, tremendous progress. Was "a sense of the ages" the right phrase for this?

In the end, what you needed to become an operator was grit and mental fortitude. With just those two, you naturally tempered yourself under a brutal schedule. In this game's case, that schedule was live combat.

I wasn't the type to be stingy with praise.

"You always work hard. I know keeping up isn't easy — matching pace is no simple thing. Stick with it a little longer and you'll be more than capable of carrying your own weight."

"Wow, I've never gotten praise like this before!"

…Everyone was going completely nuts, honestly.

Anyway───the time had finally come.

The watch on my left wrist lit up. EXP climbing, blueprints this and that, various rewards rolling in — and in the middle of it, Harmony took a short sharp breath to steel herself, then asked me:

"So are we heading straight into the next mission?"

"Ah, I don't think so."

"Huh?"

Apparently she'd already forgotten what I'd told her earlier.

I showed her the brightly glowing watch.

As shafts of light wrapped around my body, I gave a small wave and added:

"I've got somewhere I need to be."

And then my vision went dark.

The last thing I saw was her completely dumbfounded expression.

"…What a weird person. Seriously."

The space Eugene had briefly vacated.

After holding that blank expression for a few seconds, she finally broke into a broad grin mixed with a snort of laughter and muttered to herself.

Anyway, as someone had said — they really were a duo you wouldn't find anywhere else.