The core laboratory on the lowest level of the flagship Dawn reeked of high-concentration disinfectant and blood.
HUNK, "the Grim Reaper," and his squad's bodies still lay scattered across the wreckage, but nobody spared the dead remnants of an old era a second glance.
Every eye in the room was locked on the quantum centrifuge running at full overload.
A crisp mechanical chime sounded. "Synthesis complete."
The sterile isolation cover slid open.
White condensation vapor dissipated, revealing three crystal vials resting in a shock-dampened tray, glowing with a faint, dawn-pure blue light.
Annette Birkin peeled off her sweat-soaked sterile gloves and braced both hands against the console, gulping air in ragged breaths.
Her bloodshot eyes shone with an exhausted, feverish intensity.
"It worked." Annette's voice was so hoarse it was barely audible. She looked toward Jill. "This is the final purification of all antigen data. The perfect vaccine. But the purification process has a hard ceiling. These three vials of concentrate are all there is. Detonate them in the stratosphere, and they'll completely neutralize Wesker's golden spores."
Jill took a deep breath and strode forward.
She knew these three vials, less than ten milliliters of liquid, carried the weight of seven billion lives.
"Ada, good timing." Jill's peripheral vision caught a flash of signature red in the collapsed gap in the lab wall. Ada Wong had appeared there at some point, silent as a ghost.
Ada toyed with an elegant grappling gun, leaning against the rubble. "Golden dust everywhere. I can't even be bothered to touch up my makeup. Now that the cure's ready, let's wrap up this boring apocalypse."
"Chris, Leon, prepare for maximum-priority escort..."
Before Jill could finish, the air in the entire laboratory turned thick without warning.
Not a change in pressure. A distortion of space itself, purely on a psychic level.
It felt like an ice-cold hand had seized the heart of every person in the room.
No alarms. No surge of energy.
In front of the sterile platform holding the vaccine, where nothing had stood a second ago, the air rippled like water.
Then a barefoot boy materialized out of thin air.
He simply stood there, dark gold light still burning in his eyes.
"Wesker, that idiot. Never had what it takes."
The pale boy tilted his head slightly. His voice was crystal clear, like a choirboy's, but carried a skin-crawling indifference.
"So boring. I much prefer watching you fall into despair the very second you think you've grabbed hold of hope."
"Look out!"
Jill's danger sense screamed. She drew and fired without hesitation.
But he was fast. Faster than nerve signals could travel.
The boy didn't even lift his eyelids. He extended one pale finger and flicked it forward.
Two crisp sounds of shattering glass rang out, and every person in the room felt the floor drop out from under them.
Of the three blue-glowing vaccine vials, two were instantly crushed to powder by an invisible, horrific force.
The precious blue concentrate splashed across the blood-stained alloy floor and lost its glow on contact.
Only one lone vial remained, rocking gently in the shock-dampened tray.
"No!!!" Annette screamed in despair.
"You're dead!"
Chris's fury erupted. He roared like a maddened bear, his boots cratering the alloy floor beneath him.
The terrifying strength granted by the Abyss serum surged to full output. His custom tungsten-steel greatsword, weighing hundreds of pounds, became a black bolt of lightning, carrying enough force to split a tank as it hammered down toward the boy's skull.
G-001 didn't dodge. He simply raised his pale, slender left hand.
No sparks flew. Only a sound that made scalps crawl: the hiss of corrosion.
Chris's tungsten-steel greatsword, a blade capable of cutting through dark gold armor, melted like a popsicle thrust into boiling water the instant it touched the boy's palm.
The boy's arm shifted into an eerie state of liquid reconfiguration, becoming a pool of highly corrosive fluid that devoured the blade's edge and raced up the shaft, latching onto Chris's heavy armor.
Chris gasped in pain. His Star Fire custom heavy armor dissolved like wet paper before the gray-black liquid. Massive holes corroded through his chestplate in an instant, the searing burn forcing him to abandon his sword and stagger back.
"Chris!"
Killing intent flared in Leon's eyes. His twin axes spun into a lethal silver storm as he cut in from the flank like a hunting cat.
At the same time, Ada's tactical submachine gun spat tongues of blue electromagnetic fire, and Jill's armor-piercing rounds sealed off every escape route.
The absolute ceiling of humanity's remaining combat power, executing a flawless kill combination.
But they weren't facing an ordinary mutant. This was bioengineering's ultimate creation.
"Too slow."
A smile crossed G-001's lips, innocent and cruel at once.
His body melted the instant Leon's axes and the storm of bullets were about to connect. His entire form dissolved into a pale, shapeless fluid.
Leon's tactical axes, strong enough to cleave an advanced mutant in half, slammed into empty air. Then two violent shockwaves erupted from the pale pool of liquid.
Leon's specially forged alloy axes shattered into a cloud of metal shards under the impact. The recoil launched him off his feet and into the wall. He hit hard and coughed up blood.
Before Jill and Ada could redirect their fire, something far worse descended.
A direct invasion of the mind.
G-001's ultimate psychic power, fusing the Megamycete network with Las Plagas control, formed invisible spikes that drove straight into the brains of all four fighters.
Jill grunted and dropped to her knees, legs buckling.
Deep in her mind, the burning hell of Raccoon City, teammates dying in front of her, crashed against her sanity like a tidal wave.
Ada bit down on her lip hard enough to draw blood, her movements slowing to a crawl as she tried to raise her weapon. Chris clutched his head in agony, eyes flooding with burst vessels.
Physical defenses meant nothing against a psychic attack from a higher dimension of warfare.
The pale fluid pooled together in front of the four of them and reformed into the barefoot boy.
He looked down at the four elite fighters on their knees, then slowly lifted his foot and set it on Chris's corroded, ruined chestplate.
"Your struggling isn't even entertaining enough to count as an intermission."
G-001 withdrew his gaze, done with these beaten opponents, and turned toward the precision tray holding the last vial of vaccine.
He extended that pale hand. His fingertip hovered less than an inch from the vial's faint blue glow.
One twitch of effort, and humanity's last hope would go dark forever.
Jill tried to stand. The agony in her skull wouldn't let her move a single finger. Despair closed over the ruined laboratory like a black net pulled airtight.
Then, at the last possible second.
The bottom-layer armor plating of the entire flagship Dawn let out a tortured groan of structural failure.
It wasn't the sound of something hitting the hull. It was the spatial compression of something so impossibly massive forcing its way into existence.
G-001's hand froze in midair above the vaccine.
For the first time, something other than boredom and amusement flickered through his mismatched eyes. A rare flash of gravity.
"Who said you could touch my stuff?"
A voice, cold, flat, radiating an authority that could not be defied, cracked through the air above the laboratory.
The next second, the lab's composite alloy ceiling, a full meter thick, along with over a dozen decks above it, was punched clean through from top to bottom by a surge of kinetic energy so violent it defied comprehension.
Through the rain of steel wreckage and debris, a tall figure in a black coat descended like death itself come crashing down, carrying the force of a thousand thunderbolts, and slammed into the space directly between G-001 and the vaccine.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]