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Man. f*ck DRG sometimes.
It was single-player mission: Point-extraction in the Dense Biozone. Just a scout (me) and BOSCO. We've done this before.
Except it's point-extraction and gunk-seeds. It's going to be a lot of heavy lifting: lugging big lumps to the minehead. Seven aquarqs. Twelve seeds. That's a lot of freight.
I'm a scout. Pockets full of nitra, morkite and gold can be zipped back to the minehead by grapple. Not so with these hefty loads. They have to be walked. I'm skilled with the toss-and-run technique, something I learned getting Doretta back to the pod.
But then this is the Dense Biozone. The layout of the level is confusing. Stacked, tilted levels with plenty of openings that drop to the level below like a giant three-dimensional pinball machine.
And then DRG, in its infinite corporate wisdom drops the minehead at the top level. So when the gunk-seeds drop into the pits, I'm going to be schlepping them by hand. Any toss risks an aquarq or seed rolling back, or worse, dropping to the level below. I toss anyways, often with the results I feared.
I get clever. I use my first aquarqs as stones† to light the path from the lower level up to the minehead. Why the heck does DRG not make a way to mark a point (or three!) more permanently? This wouldn't be the first time I used gems as light sources before depositing them.
I need to keep sh*t moving at pace. The waves in point-extraction start small but are ongoing and. I'm not great at navigating corridors, let alone complex caverns. I'm searching the darkness for fallen seeds. I'm gathering loot into collections to toss slowly towards the minehead, losing track of them and finding them again later.
The swarm starts with shocker naedocytes (we call them jellyfish), purple web-spitters and common grunts. Soon guards and slashers appear rarely. Then commonly. The same with praetorians: they start rare. Then they're common. Then there's two or three in a wave.
I'm at six aquarqs and nine gunk-seeds when the bulk detonator shows up. It's a running fight and I never quite have the time to investigate the resulting crater, somewhere in the darkness. I shot it from the other side of the chamber before fleeing again to evade the swarm.
I'm at seven aquarqs (done!) and eleven gunk-seeds when a massive swarm comes in followed by three praetorians and a second bulk detonator moves in. I just run.
From that moment onward, I never stop running. I couple of good sniper shots get the detonator's health low, but I have to abandon my vantage because the swarm catches up to me, numbering in the dozens. I never find out the fate of the detonator. Maybe BOSCO got him in the chaos, but I never heard the explosion. All I could hear was the screeching of dozens of grunts as more dig themselves up to the surface.
Giving up on the last gunk-seed I swing by the rig to launch the minehead take. It goes off as I continue to zip rings around the cavern, the ever-growing swarm only a second or two behind me.
The drop pod lands in a remote pit, far away from the decommissioned rig. Not that I care, I'm not even there. But just as I'm approaching the drop-ship I see the last gunk-seed laying there nearby.
Grunts and shockers biting and zapping at my heels, I hurl the last seed toward the drop-ship, run over, and hurl again. Lather, rinse, repeat for a few times until the pod is in sight.
But it's positioning makes it impossible to reach the deposits. I run up the ramp and am extracted as green Praetorian breath blasts at me from behind. Final seed in hand, I am lifted out by the drop-pod, unable to complete the secondary mission.
This was just painful.
f*ck DRG. f*ck aquarqs. f*ck the drop-pod. This whole situation feels contrived to force me to lose. I'm pretty sure dispatch has it out for me.
And there's nowhere to file a complaint, not that I think one would do me any good.
f*ck this corporate bullsh*t.
Lloyd, a full round of Blackout. No, I want four of them. Yes, I see that there's no-one else here. They're all for me. You can watch as I slam them, and management can pick up the f*cking pieces.
† The common parlance of breadcrumbs from Hansel and Gretel always bothered me. Hansel's stones lead them back home. The breadcrumbs got eaten by birds.
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