Before G-001 could answer that taunt, a fist had already filled his entire field of vision.
It wasn't a wound-up haymaker. It was a completely casual smash, effortless to the point of contempt.
Ryan's knuckles caved into G-001's face. The crack of his nose bridge shattering hadn't even finished echoing before his entire skull was blasted backward into a spray of pulp. Pale, liquid cells tried to reconverge in midair, but Ryan didn't give them the chance. He stepped forward, swinging his left fist upward in a rising arc that split G-001's headless torso clean in half at the waist.
The upper half was still airborne when Ryan pivoted and whipped a kick into it. The mass of ruined flesh flew like a baseball off a bat, slamming into the volcanic rock wall dozens of meters away and punching a deep, spider-webbed crater into the stone.
"That's one," Ryan said.
The rubble hadn't finished falling before the mangled flesh was already writhing back together. G-001 tore himself free from the rock face, his ribcage barely reformed, skin not yet regenerated, and found Ryan already standing in front of him.
One punch. Clean through the abdomen. His spine exploded out his back in a shower of bone fragments and grayish fluid.
"Two."
G-001's body crashed into the lava pool at the crater's edge. The heat seared his reassembling cells, hissing and crackling as they burned.
He dragged himself out of the magma. Half his body was still on fire. The other half had charred to cinder.
Ryan stomped down on his freshly regrown left knee, shattering it. The instant G-001 crumpled, Ryan's hand came down like a blade across his neck, shearing his head clean off his shoulders.
"Three."
The head spun through the air, still falling, while new flesh was already budding from the stump of G-001's neck, trying to grow a replacement.
Ryan didn't even let it happen. He launched himself upward, caught the still-blinking head in midair, closed both hands around it, and crushed it like an egg.
He landed and drove his foot through the headless torso in the same motion.
"Four."
At the bottom of the crater, G-001 reassembled again. Noticeably slower this time.
The first reassembly had taken less than a second. This one took nearly three. Ryan didn't pursue. He stood a few steps away, arms hanging at his sides, not even bothering with a fighting stance.
G-001 pushed himself up out of the rubble, gasping hard.
For the first time, something pure and undeniable surfaced in those mismatched eyes: fear.
Not fear of death. He'd never considered his own death possible. This was the fear of the humiliation of it: being utterly helpless, taken apart again and again like a toy.
"Why aren't you fighting back?" Ryan tilted his head. "Can't you transform? Liquify? That whole... control thing? Go ahead. Show me."
G-001 roared. His body liquified and reconverged in an instant, solidifying into a towering, multi-meter aberration sheathed head to toe in dark gold chitin.
This was his strongest combat form, the culmination of G-Virus proliferation, T-Veronica hardening, Ouroboros crystallization, and the Megamycete network. Every bone spur could punch through warship armor. Every breath released concentrated neurotoxin into the air.
Ryan glanced at him.
Then he raised his right hand, fingers splayed, palm aimed at the beast's chest.
He didn't use any new power.
An identical dark gold bone spur erupted from Ryan's palm, faster and harder, and punched clean through G-001's own chest.
The beast let out a deafening shriek as its massive body toppled backward, demolishing half the crater rim on impact.
"Your stuff. Giving it back." Ryan lowered his hand. "What else you got? All of it. Let's go."
The beast's body began to shrink. G-001 peeled away from the wreckage, reverting to the pale boy's form.
But this time, he didn't reassemble. He just knelt there, hands braced against the ground, sucking in ragged breaths.
He couldn't feel his lower body anymore. His spinal regeneration was visibly decaying.
G-001 said nothing. His lips were trembling.
"Your regeneration has a ceiling," Ryan answered for him. "Nobody's ever been able to hit it before, so you always thought you were immortal."
He straightened up. "Now you know. You're not immortal. You just hadn't met me yet."
G-001 finally broke. Not physically. Mentally. He'd been raised from birth as Spencer's "Ultimate Compatible Body," spent over a decade in a cryopod, and after waking, every opponent he'd faced crumbled before him without effort.
Wesker had been a laughable half-finished prototype in his eyes. Chris and Leon were insects he could crush with one hand.
He had never faced anything like this. No, not even "faced." This wasn't a fight. This was annihilation from an entirely different plane of existence.
"Again." Ryan's voice came from above. "Let's see how many more you've got in you."
"No." G-001 threw up a hand in front of his face. It was shaking violently. "Wait... wait!"
Ryan didn't wait. His fist came down and the ground buckled outward from the point of impact, the rock splitting and curling back in every direction. G-001 and the entire layer of stone beneath him were hammered into the depths below.
G-001 had lost count of how many times he'd reassembled. He lay in the rubble, chest heaving.
The skin that had once been flawless and pale was now laced with dark, spidery cracks, like a porcelain figure smashed apart and crudely glued back together.
His regeneration had slowed to a pathetic crawl. A finger-length wound now took over ten seconds to heal. It used to take less than half a second.
"Still talking?" Ryan stood over him, looking down at the pale boy who'd once thought himself untouchable. "Then let me ask you something. Back in the lab, you said you'd been looking forward to meeting me for a long time. Did you want to kill me, or did you want me to accept you?"
G-001 managed to lift his head. The arrogance had finally drained from those mismatched eyes completely, replaced by a flicker of confusion he wouldn't even admit to himself.
"...I don't know," he said, his voice raw. "Maybe... I just wanted to see if there was anyone in this world like me. Not the same species. Just... someone standing at the same height."
"And?"
G-001 was quiet for a long time. "Turns out you're not at my height at all." A bitter smile crossed his face. "You're somewhere far above it. So far I never should've looked up."
Ryan didn't say anything more. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a syringe. A faint blue liquid swayed inside the transparent barrel, identical to the dozens he'd given Jill back in the lab.
G-001 stared at the vaccine. His pupils contracted. "You're going to kill me?"
"You should've been dead a long time ago." Ryan crouched down and pushed the needle into the side of G-001's neck. His thumb pressed the plunger down, slow and steady.
G-001's body seized. The moment that blue liquid entered his bloodstream, it felt like countless hair-thin ice needles piercing every cell in his body at once.
Not pain. Something worse than pain. Every virus still inside him, G-Virus, T-Veronica, Ouroboros, was being forcibly neutralized.
"So this is... what the end feels like?" G-001's body began to disintegrate from the edges. His fingertips crumbled into ashen dust first, then his wrists, his forearms, like a sand sculpture eroding in the wind.
G-001 looked up. His fading pupils reflected Ryan's silhouette.
"You came looking for this yourself."
G-001's lips twitched, like he wanted to smile, but he didn't have the strength to finish the expression.
The disintegration reached his chest. He could feel his consciousness dimming as his cells died, bit by bit. Not the kind of mental collapse Wesker had suffered, beaten into vegetative dementia. This was real, irreversible dissolution.
"Is the outside world really more interesting than viruses and test subjects?" he asked.
Ryan looked down at this boy who had been trapped since birth in laboratories, cryopods, and endless experimental data. He'd been alive for over a decade, but he'd never truly lived a single day.
"The outside world has some pretty terrible parts," Ryan said. "And some parts that make it worth it. There are hot dogs from street carts so bad you want to cuss out the vendor. There are buddies who drag you out drinking at three in the morning. There are women in red who keep disappearing and then showing up again just to cause trouble. And there's someone waiting for me to come back."
The disintegration reached G-001's throat. He couldn't make a sound anymore.
In that final moment, those mismatched eyes shed every last trace of arrogance, obsession, and madness. All that remained was an expression Ryan had never seen on his face before, something almost peaceful. A quiet, resigned envy.
Then he shattered into a cloud of ashen dust.
Sea wind rushed up through the cracks in the island's foundation and lifted the dust into the air. Ryan stood where he was, watching those gray particles spiral a few times in the wind before scattering completely under the clear blue sky above the volcanic island.
Nothing was left.
Ryan looked away and pressed his earpiece. "Jill, G-001 is down."
A brief pause on the other end, then Jill's voice: "Copy. Are you hurt?"
"No. His clothes held up pretty well, though. Kind of regretting not asking where he shops."
Jill swore at him, then her tone shifted to business. "Ryan, the vaccines you shoved at me earlier, Annette confirmed every single one is identical to the original. We have enough. Full stratospheric coverage, worldwide."
Ryan looked at his right hand. His palm still tingled with that strange sensation from when he'd duplicated the vaccine. A new ability, unlocked in the heat of the moment. He knew now was the time to use it.
"Get the dispersal ready. I'm on my way back."
Ryan turned, kicked off the ground, and shot forward as a dark blur, retracing his path back across the ocean surface.
Behind him, the volcanic island stood alone in the swells of the North Pacific, its crater still trailing thin wisps of smoke.
A few seabirds cautiously settled back onto the shattered reef rocks, pecking at debris the waves had washed ashore.
The deck of the Dawn. When Ryan stepped back onto the bridge, everyone was already in position.
Jill stood at the holographic tactical table, coordinating the dispersal sequence. Chris and Leon leaned against a nearby ammo crate, still catching their breath.
Sherry and Becky sat side by side in the corner, cleaning their weapons. Ada leaned against a porthole. The moment Ryan walked in, her fingers quietly lifted off the pistol at her hip.
Jill finally turned around and studied him for a few seconds. Once she'd confirmed he still had all his limbs, she held out an empty vaccine container. "Annette says she wants to study your Duplication mechanism. This is the sample she's sending you."
"Sending me?" Ryan took the empty container and looked it over. "Isn't this hers to begin with?"
"She knows you can duplicate just by touching something." Jill smiled faintly. "So she wants to see what you can do with an empty tube."
Ryan held the empty container. A faint blue fluorescence still clung to the inside of the glass, the last trace of evaporated vaccine. His fingertips touched the cold glass surface, and that crisp chime rang through his mind again.
The next second, Jill watched a blue glow bloom from Ryan's palm.
Vaccine flooded out like a spring, pouring between his fingers, piling into a small mountain on the tactical table, then rolling off the edges and clattering across the floor.
The entire bridge was bathed in that soft blue light. Annette, watching through the surveillance feed, pointed at the screen and opened her mouth to say something. Then she lowered her hand and just started crying.
"That's enough! Enough!" Carlos's voice exploded over the comm channel, barely containing his excitement. "Boss! That's enough! The bombers can't carry any more!"
Ryan let go. The glow faded from his palm. A thick carpet of blue vials covered the floor beneath his feet. He looked down at the vaccines, then up at Jill.
"Then let's do this."
Twelve Star Fire stealth bombers swept overhead in sequence. Their payload bay doors opened, and blue vaccine cascaded into the sky like a meteor shower, arcing toward stratospheric dispersal points across every continent.
The instant the vaccine hit the atmosphere, it burst into a fine blue luminous mist. The mist was so thin it was nearly invisible to the naked eye, but it spread rapidly through the high-altitude currents and collided violently with the sky-darkening cloud of golden spores. No explosions. No fire.
Just a visible neutralization. The gold met the blue and receded layer by layer, like flames being doused.
The North Pacific sky cleared first.
Sherry and Becky stood side by side at the bridge porthole, watching the gold-stained sky begin to fade from its center, revealing a blue so clear and so long absent that it made their eyes sting.
The clouds split open. Sunlight poured through the gap and laid a glittering golden road across the surface of the sea.
"It's beautiful," Becky said. She rarely spoke first.
Sherry didn't answer. She was wiping her eyes with her sleeve, carefully, like she was trying not to be noticed. Becky didn't call her out. She just leaned a little closer until their shoulders touched.
Seattle. A middle-aged man who'd barricaded himself inside his apartment for three days peered through a crack in his window and saw the sky changing.
The dark gold pressing down over the city was breaking apart from the edges.
Where the gold peeled away, it revealed the blue he remembered. The blue he thought he'd never see again.
He stood there for a long time. Then, hands shaking, he turned the deadbolt and walked out onto the empty street. The light overhead grew brighter, bluer. The shadows retreated from his feet inch by inch.
He pulled off the mask he'd worn for three days and breathed in the cool air in deep gulps.
"It's over," he murmured, not sure who he was talking to.
Inside a temporary shelter, a nurse who'd been working for two straight days and nights thought she was hallucinating.
The sky beyond the quarantine window was changing color. Not the infected gold, but something unique to the vaccine's neutralization reaction: a shimmering aurora of blue and pale gold intertwined.
She pushed the door open and walked out into the plaza. Thousands of people were already standing there. Nobody spoke. Everyone was looking up at the same sky.
The golden haze was cracking apart, inch by inch, like a vast curtain being slowly pulled back.
Behind it was the blue sky she thought she'd never see again. She slowly crouched down, buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook.
London. A small boy who'd spent the whole day digging through rubble pulled a dust-covered football from under a collapsed eave.
He looked up. The golden cloud cover was receding overhead, and blue luminous mist was spreading across the upper sky, like someone had knocked over a bottle of ink up there. He stood holding the football, watching that band of blue stretch all the way to the horizon.
"Mama, the sky's glowing," he said.
No one answered him from the rubble behind him. But the sunlight fell on his face again, warm.
He wiped the dust off the football, tucked it under his arm, and kept walking down the broken street.
The bridge of the Dawn. When the last bomber's return signal appeared on the radar screen, the entire bridge fell into a strange kind of quiet.
No cheering. No applause. Everyone just watched the main screen in silence as the curve of the Earth slowly returned to blue.
The territories that had been smothered in gold were regaining their original colors, one by one. Not borders redrawn by war, but the base color of life itself.
Jill let out a slow breath. She turned and found that Ryan had come up behind her at some point.
Volcanic ash still clung to the shoulders of his coat. The cut on his face had dried. His hair was a mess from the sea wind.
He didn't say anything. He just stood quietly beside her, watching the blue planet on the screen piece itself back together.
"It's over," Jill said.
"Yeah," Ryan said.
"'Yeah'? That's all I get?"
"What do you want?" Ryan turned his head to look at her.
Jill didn't answer. She just reached out and gently brushed the volcanic ash off his shoulders.
Dawn light streamed in through the portholes and fell across both of them, stretching their shadows long across the floor.
On the horizon, the blue was still spreading.
From the North Pacific to the Asian continent, from the African rift valleys to the South American rainforests, every sky that had been shrouded in gold was being wiped clean in that moment.
The world was waking up. And the two of them stood in the morning light, like two trees that had grown their roots side by side.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]