North Pacific Ocean. Star Fire Global Oceanic Fleet.
Black waves churned across the surface of the sea. Above, the sky had turned an eerie, almost holy, and utterly hopeless shade of pure gold.
Inside the command bridge of the flagship Dawn, blinding red light and the shriek of air-defense alarms clashed together.
"Port-side barrage is too thin! Why did CIWS Three stop firing?" Jill stood at the holographic tactical table, both hands braced against its edge, eyes locked on the dense swarm of red dots covering the radar screen.
Beyond the screen, beyond the heavy ballistic glass, hundreds of Flying Leviathans were using the golden spores as cover, throwing themselves at the fleet's air-defense net in a frenzy.
These deep-sea titans, already massive to begin with, had sprouted bat-like membranes of flesh under the golden spores' catalysis.
They ignored the electromagnetic rounds the Star Fire fleet poured into them completely, diving kamikaze-style, trying to smash through warship decks with the sheer mass of their bodies.
"Turret Three's coolant lines were corroded by monster acid! Engineers are on emergency repair!" the comms officer shouted.
"Force-cool it with backup nitrogen! No gaps in the air-defense net, none!" Jill gave the order, then immediately cut the bridge channel's open mic and patched into the core laboratory deep below.
"Annette, the sky outside has gone completely yellow. The fleet's electromagnetic reserves can hold six hours, tops. What's the actual status on the vaccine?"
The feed switched to the highest-clearance biolab buried in the warship's depths.
Inside the sterile isolation hood, several large quantum centrifuges spun at overloaded speeds, emitting a piercing whine.
The air reeked of disinfectant. Annette Birkin pushed her slipping safety goggles back up. Her eyes were shot through with red.
"It's worse than we expected, Jill." Annette's voice was heavy with exhaustion.
"Wesker's golden spores aren't a conventional virus at all. They're closer to a nanoscale machine with micro-level intelligence."
Annette sent a complex base-pair map to Jill's screen. The sequences on it were visibly rearranging themselves in real time.
"They keep self-encrypting. Every time we crack a protein shell layer, they instantly mutate a new antigen."
"I've already derived the underlying neutralization logic, but clinical synthesis would take forty-eight hours at minimum."
"Forty-eight hours?!" Jill's voice spiked over the comm channel. "That's not an option!"
"The monsters outside are throwing their lives away against our air-defense net. If Ryan wasn't up there pinning Wesker's main body down, we'd already be finished. We don't have two days."
Jill drew a deep breath, forcing down the panic clawing at her chest. "I don't care how you do it, Annette. Overclock every processor you've got. Get that number under twenty-four hours."
"If you can't, this ship, every last person on it, the whole human race, ends up like those golden things out there."
Jill cut the comm, drew the custom pistol from her hip, and strode toward the bridge blast door.
"Seal every corridor to the core lab. I'm heading to the deck to take command on the front line."
The heavy alloy doors slammed shut behind her. The laboratory sank back into suffocating silence.
Annette turned to face the dozen-plus researchers behind her, all of them running on fumes, and clapped her hands.
"You heard her. There's nowhere left to run. Initiate the backup Project Tinder. Prepare for forced synthesis of our own virus."
But neither Jill, fighting tooth and nail on deck, nor Annette, racing the clock in the lab below, noticed what was happening at the very bottom of the Dawn.
At the flagship's lowest wastewater discharge port, five ghost-like black figures had already silently melted through the high-strength titanium-alloy grating and slipped inside the warship.
The man at the front wore a jet-black tactical dive suit. On his face sat that unmistakable red-lensed gas mask.
HUNK. The Grim Reaper.
The four spec-ops soldiers behind him were armed to the teeth, their tactical movements stripped to bare efficiency. They advanced through the flooded pipes without producing a single splash.
HUNK raised his right hand. At the edge of his black tactical glove, faint golden veins pulsed beneath the surface.
This was Wesker's "gift." The golden spores hadn't just granted them limitless stamina. They'd given them the ability to perfectly mimic the spore environment around them.
Every infrared and thermal imaging sensor inside the warship registered them as "background, no life signs detected."
"Target: Star Fire core research team. Objective: eliminate all researchers with knowledge of the vaccine. Destroy all vaccine data." HUNK issued the order through his bone-conduction earpiece, his voice a dry rasp. "Move fast. The people upstairs are busy with those flying slabs of meat. No survivors."
HUNK dropped from the ventilation shaft first, landing silently in the buffer corridor outside the laboratory perimeter.
At the far end of the corridor, two fully armed Star Fire interior guards watched the elevator doors with alert eyes.
HUNK didn't draw a gun. He pulled a tactical blade from the small of his back, and his body carved a golden afterimage through the air.
The two guards never even felt a breeze.
HUNK was already behind them. The blade severed their carotid arteries and vocal cords with surgical precision.
He caught the bodies as they fell and lowered them to the floor. The whole thing took less than two seconds. Not a sound.
"Sir, the door ahead is a top-grade blast door. Conventional explosives won't breach it."
One of his men finished a quick scan and reported in a low voice. HUNK stepped forward, pulled off his glove, and pressed his palm, threaded with golden spores, against the electronic lock panel.
The spores wormed into every gap in the circuitry like living things.
A faint crackle of shorting electronics, and the half-meter-thick blast door gave a heavy mechanical thunk as the locks disengaged. It slid open.
On the other side stood Annette, eyes fixed on a microscope, and over a dozen unarmed researchers.
Behind the mask, HUNK's eyes held nothing at all. He raised his suppressed submachine gun.
The instant his finger moved to the trigger for an indiscriminate sweep of the room, the reinforced blast-resistant glass wall on the right side of the laboratory, twenty centimeters thick, suddenly buckled violently inward without any warning.
The entire glass wall detonated like it had taken a direct hit from a bomb, exploding inward. Razor-sharp shards sprayed through the air like a shotgun blast, forcing HUNK's squad to throw their arms up to shield their faces.
"Die, you sewer rats!" A savage roar tore through the storm of glass.
Chris Redfield came through the wall like a human tank, smashing straight into the dead center of the enemy formation.
He hadn't bothered with firearms. His massive frame carried terrifying momentum as he slammed a brutal shoulder charge directly into one operative's chest.
The nauseating crack of splintering bone rang out. The spore-enhanced soldier was launched a good ten meters back. His body crashed through a row of culture tanks, sternum caved in completely. He wasn't getting up.
At the same moment, a second figure slipped through the breach Chris had made, moving fast and light.
Leon landed five meters in front of HUNK, steady as stone.
No gun drawn. He held a tactical hatchet in each hand, reverse grip, the edges catching the cold lab light with a lethal gleam.
"Annette, get your people into the safe room." Leon didn't look back. His eyes were locked on the man in the gas mask. "Chris, the other three are yours. Watch you don't smash those vials. That's humanity's last shot in there."
Chris snorted, drew a heavy tungsten-steel combat knife, and cracked his thick neck.
"Leon. You worry about the freak in the mask." He launched himself at the remaining three operatives like a raging grizzly.
One corner of the laboratory turned into a close-quarters meat grinder, blades drawing blood with every swing.
The other side went deathly still.
HUNK didn't spare a glance for his men. Those red lenses fixed on Leon across five meters of dead air.
He tossed the submachine gun to the floor, pulled a brutal-looking tactical hatchet from behind his back, and reversed his grip on the bloodied short blade in his right hand.
The two of them stood motionless, facing each other. The air between them was thick with killing intent.
A muffled, gravelly voice came from behind the mask: "Leon S. Kennedy. We finally meet."
Leon spun one hatchet in a flashy twirl, then locked both hands tight on the grips. His eyes carried a brazen, mocking edge.
"Who the hell are you? Middle of summer and you've got your head wrapped up like a mummy. Want my autograph?"
"I don't do autographs." HUNK lowered his center of gravity. Every muscle in his body coiled tight. "I just collect lives."
Before the last word left his mouth, the floor beneath HUNK's feet cracked apart.
Golden light erupted through the muscle fibers of his calves, launching him forward at a speed beyond human perception.
He became a black blur, closing five meters in an instant.
The tactical blade in his right hand struck like a viper's tongue, angling for Leon's throat at a vicious, impossible angle.
The ultimate close-quarters deathmatch between an ace of the old era and an agent of the new had officially begun.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]