Jill's orders shot down the highest-level encrypted channels like lightning, reaching military units across the globe.
The coordinates were wildly scattered. Some pointed to abandoned bunkers in Iceland. Others to the depths of the Sahara Desert.
Humanity had less than two hours left. This was a breakneck race against death itself for the right to keep breathing.
Iceland. A Cold War-era military base buried under ice and snow.
Agents cut the doors open with high-temperature welding torches. Three blast-proof glass tubes filled with crimson liquid were carefully extracted.
But the base had been abandoned for decades. There was no runway, no facilities for fighter jets to land or take off.
"No time to wait! Build a runway right here!"
The squad commander screamed into his comms, eyes bloodshot. Two heavy engineering mechs smashed straight through the base's outer perimeter walls.
Like tireless steel beasts, they bulldozed a rough five-hundred-meter dirt strip across the frozen wasteland of hardened permafrost and gravel.
Two heavily modified supersonic jets ignited their engines and forced a takeoff on the cratered dirt road.
The landing gear kicked up a trail of blinding sparks from the violent jolting. A chunk of armor plating was punched clean through by flying debris.
The pilots ignored every alarm. The instant the jets were airborne, they shoved the engines straight past the redline into full overload.
It was flying with zero regard for cost. The turbine blades glowed a dangerous dark red under the strain of triple-sonic speeds.
Above the Siberian wasteland. A top-secret intercontinental missile silo.
A jet streaked in trailing thick black smoke, its fuselage on the verge of disintegrating from air friction.
"Tower, I've reached the designated airspace. Drogue chute failure. I can't land."
The pilot's voice was dead level. He watched the crash warnings flashing frantically across his instrument panel, then ripped the comms cable out.
He strapped the shock-resistant case containing God's Blood tight against his chest and pulled the ejection handle beneath his seat without a second's hesitation.
The ejection hatch blew apart. The pilot was launched thousands of meters into the sky, slamming into winds of minus forty degrees.
Behind him, the cutting-edge fighter jet worth hundreds of millions spiraled out of control and plowed into a distant snow-capped mountain range.
A massive fireball bloomed between the peaks, but nobody spared it a glance.
The ground recovery team kept their eyes locked on the parachute drifting slowly down from the sky.
The pilot had barely touched down. Before he could even unhook his chute lines, engineers had already ripped the case from his hands.
The same insane relay race was playing out simultaneously at launch silos in the Nevada desert, the Black Forest in Europe, and beyond.
Inside the ICBM silos, harsh red lights strobed wildly. Alarms screamed at deafening volume.
Engineers worked drenched in sweat, using brute-force methods to tear the nuclear warheads off the missiles.
"Get that goddamn warhead off! Swap in the shock-dampening cradle!"
The God's Blood vials were far too small to fit the massive warhead payload bays. The engineers wrapped them in industrial tape and shock-absorbing foam, binding them tight.
It was a crude, almost laughable assembly job. But what it carried was the ultimate weapon capable of rewriting humanity's fate.
...
In the command center, confirmations of readiness trickled in from nation after nation.
"Give the order, Commander Valentine. Whether humanity lives or dies comes down to this." An elderly general turned to Jill.
Jill looked at the world leaders on the holographic display, then at the people still working frantically around her, and gave a firm nod.
"All silos report payload replacement complete! Lock onto pre-designated targets: stratospheric long-wave atmospheric nodes!"
"Countdown. Three, two, one, fire!"
In that moment, the global joint defense network demonstrated a grim, devastating efficiency.
Beneath Siberian permafrost. In the Nevada desert. Deep in the European Black Forest.
Massive silo covers ground open with the roar of heavy machinery.
Countless searing exhaust plumes tore across the horizon. Intercontinental missiles carrying humanity's ultimate destructive force punched skyward.
Air-raid sirens screamed simultaneously across North America, Asia, and Europe, their wailing cutting through the ruins of every city.
Countless civilians stepped out of their shelters and looked up.
They saw no enemy aircraft. Only hundreds of long white contrails streaking across the sky.
The missiles rose like a meteor shower falling in reverse, driving straight into the suffocating golden canopy above.
Minutes later, the first ICBM carrying God's Blood detonated in the stratosphere thirty thousand meters above the North Pacific.
There was no deafening blast. But the light outshone the sun.
An enormous blazing-white fireball swelled instantly within the golden clouds.
The horrific energy vaporized every golden spore within hundreds of square kilometers.
Then came the second. The third. The hundredth.
Chain detonations formed a blinding ring of fire across Earth's upper atmosphere, encircling half the planet.
Catastrophic shockwaves collided and compounded in the stratosphere, forcibly shredding the stable atmospheric circulation.
The extreme heat generated massive high-pressure zones, crushing a wall of vacuum into the sky that nothing could cross.
The golden spores that had been spreading wildly on the winds slammed into an invisible wall of sighs.
They were ripped apart by the turbulence, incinerated by the heat. Their expansion ground to a halt.
It was a desperate act of self-mutilation to survive.
Humanity had paid the price of wrecking its own home to smash a bottomless crack into Wesker's extinction blueprint.
And at that moment, thousands of kilometers away on the boiling surface of the North Pacific.
Wesker's freshly reassembled, battered body went rigid.
His pure gold, slit-pupiled eyes contracted sharply. He raised his head in disbelief toward the distant horizon lit up by the blasts.
Despite the vast distance, his consciousness network linked to the global spore cloud was being torn apart.
"They... detonated warheads in the stratosphere?!"
"No, wait. Those aren't nukes. What the hell are those?"
Wesker's expression turned ugly. It was the first time since he'd declared himself a god that he looked rattled.
The vacuum band from the stratospheric explosions had severed his mental link to nearly half his spore clouds.
Worse, every spore vaporized by the heat was burning through his psychic reserves.
His flawless infinite-resurrection system had been forcibly disrupted by humanity's near-suicidal brutality.
"Damn Old Humans... you'd rather destroy this planet than accept evolution?!"
Wesker snarled through clenched teeth. He could feel his power draining rapidly as the spores died.
He couldn't afford to stay here any longer. If the atmospheric circulation was permanently disrupted by the turbulence, his spores would never achieve global coverage.
He had to get airborne immediately, cross that detonation vacuum zone, and manually repair the severed atmospheric nodes.
Wesker's legs exploded with force. His body became a golden streak rocketing skyward, trying to break free from the boiling sea.
But the instant he cleared barely thirty meters above the surface.
A shadow, fast as a phantom, ripped through the air and appeared directly above him.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Ryan's voice, cold enough to freeze the blood, cracked like thunder over Wesker's head.
Before Wesker could react, Ryan's right leg was already swinging down like a battle axe, trailing a sharp shockwave of compressed air.
The impact landed with a heavy, bone-deep thud.
Ryan's heel connected dead center with Wesker's face, precise and savage. The brutal kinetic energy discharged instantly.
Wesker's ascending body became a meteorite struck by a heavy interceptor missile.
He plummeted at ten times the speed he'd been rising, driven straight down by Ryan's strike, and crashed into the boiling sea below.
A towering column of water laced with golden dust erupted skyward.
Ryan flipped neatly in midair and landed on the ocean surface, steady as stone.
He didn't care about the blinding flashes on the distant horizon. He didn't care about humanity's desperate sacrifice.
He had one job. Pin this self-righteous piece of trash to this stretch of ocean and make sure he stayed dead.
Seconds later, Wesker dragged himself back together from the seawater, looking absolutely wrecked.
His features were twisted from the violent drain on his psychic energy and from sheer rage.
"Ryan! You rabid dog! Do you have any idea what they're doing to this world?!" Wesker roared, golden spores whipping around him in a frenzy.
Ryan looked at Wesker losing his composure and let a razor-thin, mocking smile cut across his face.
"Whether the world burns isn't up to me. But your road ends right here."
Ryan rolled his wrists. His knuckles popped.
"You like your infinite respawns so much?"
His eyes held something that went beyond violence. Something absolute.
"Then let's find out how many times you can come back under my fists before every last one of your spores is gone."
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]