Lanshiang, central business district.
Leon and Helena hadn't made it two blocks before the asphalt beneath their feet began to shake violently.
Neon signs lining both sides of the street broke loose one after another, crashing into the flooded road and bursting into showers of electric sparks.
A roar from the intersection ahead nearly punctured their eardrums, raw and savage enough to rip through the curtain of rain.
The fog parted around two massive shapes. A pair of Ogroman, each over six meters tall, lumbered onto the main street with thundering steps.
These deployed B.O.W.s had enormous, pulsing red organs exposed on their backs. Every labored breath sent jets of scalding white vapor from their nostrils.
They moved like two runaway steamrollers made of flesh, kicking abandoned cars out of the way like empty cans.
Beneath their hulking frames, a dozen mutants with lizard-like heads and long, agile limbs fanned out the frill-like flesh around their necks and sprayed volleys of toxic, corrosive bone needles toward Leon and Helena.
"Damn it, did Simmons turn this place into a monster zoo?" Helena threw herself into a roll and ducked behind a thick concrete pillar.
Bone needles punched into the wall beside her, instantly corroding smoking black holes into the cement. She gritted her teeth and raised her rifle, laying down suppressive bursts at the agile lizard-creatures.
Leon eyed the two Ogroman closing in like walking hills, then calmly keyed his earpiece. "Ryan, I've got a roadblock. Two giant mutants plus a swarm of fast movers. Forcing through burns too much ammo and time."
"Copy, Leon." Ryan's lazy drawl came through the comms, accompanied by the sound of tea being sipped. "Come on, it's not the Middle Ages. Nobody wastes time playing ring-around-the-rosie with braindead punching bags that big. Look up. Your delivery's here."
The words had barely landed when a piercing shriek tore across the sky.
Two black tactical pods dropped from a Star Fire stealth fighter at high altitude, slamming into the open ground ahead of Leon and Helena with pinpoint accuracy.
A hiss of pressure release. The pod doors popped open, revealing two absurdly oversized grenade launchers dripping with heavy-industrial mechanical aesthetics. Beside them, rows of thick ammunition rounds marked with red hazard labels sat in neat racks.
"Miniature thermobaric thermite rounds." Ryan's voice drifted lazily into Leon's ear. "For thick-skinned big boys like these, just erase them from existence on a physical level. Open fire. My treat."
Leon grinned and hauled the heavy weapon out of the pod. He loaded it with practiced ease and lined the sights up on the chest cavity of the charging, bellowing Ogroman.
"Go file your expense report with Simmons in hell, big guy."
Leon pulled the trigger.
No earsplitting blast of conventional explosives. Instead, a muffled roar that seemed to suck the air from the surrounding block.
A dark-red fireball like a miniature sun erupted across the Ogroman's chest.
That mutated hide, thick enough to shrug off RPG rounds, crumbled like oil-soaked paper against Star Fire's custom thermite burning at thousands of degrees.
The beast didn't even manage a death scream before its chest and skull were melted through. The massive body carbonized in seconds, collapsing into a charred skeleton amid boiling rainwater.
Helena watched the other Ogroman vaporized just as instantly. She swallowed, looked down at the standard-issue rifle in her hands, and quietly slung it over her back.
"Let's go. Simmons is still waiting for us up ahead." Leon tossed the spent launcher aside and pushed forward through the ankle-deep ash.
...
At the same time, offshore, in the lower decks of the heavy aircraft carrier.
Chris and Piers had just forced their way through an airtight door. The air turned cold and damp, thick with the smell of blood and machine oil.
A grating, frenzied roar erupted from deep in the empty corridor.
It sounded like an industrial chainsaw running at full throttle, layered with the sickening screech of biological bone grinding at high frequency.
A twisted figure stepped out from the shadows around the corner.
Its right arm had completely mutated into a massive biological chainsaw built from pale-white bone and pulsing raw flesh.
Its lidless compound eye, nothing but a glistening crimson orb, locked onto Chris. The bone teeth on the saw spun at a visible, furious speed, flinging strings of nauseating slime.
"What kind of sick thing did Carla cook up now?" Piers raised his weapon, finger on the trigger.
"Stand down, Piers." Chris held out his left hand, stopping him.
He glanced at the tungsten-steel electromagnetic rifle in his grip, but instead of raising it, clipped it onto his tactical sling.
He rolled his wrists and cracked his neck, a rapid chain of pops.
"Captain? What are you doing?"
"Got a minute. Might as well run a test." A dangerous, almost feral excitement burned in Chris's eyes. "See where the limits of this body actually are."
The chainsaw-creature seemed to register the provocation. It let out an inhuman shriek and charged, swinging the massive biological chainsaw like a runaway tank.
The saw, capable of splitting dozens of millimeters of ballistic armor in half, screamed through the air straight at Chris's face.
The instant the spinning bone teeth were about to graze his nose, Chris moved.
No dodge. He drove off both legs and charged straight into the creature.
Under the hyper-acute dynamic vision Dawn Type III granted him, the lethal high-speed chainsaw looked like it was playing back in slow motion.
Chris's left hand closed like a hydraulic vise, locking onto the creature's thick mutated right arm joint with brutal precision.
A wet, stomach-turning crunch. Chris crushed the creature's hardened arm bone with one hand. The horrifying biological chainsaw froze in midair, unable to advance another inch.
The creature let out a piercing wail. Its remaining left hand swiped at Chris's eyes.
Chris gave it nothing. His right hand shot out and clamped down on the creature's lower jaw.
Every muscle in his body swelled grotesquely beneath his combat suit. That inhuman, terrifying strength unleashed in full.
"Break!"
Chris snarled like a raging lion, both arms locking tight like steel cables, and tore outward.
Dark-red blood sprayed the length of the corridor.
The chainsaw-creature, a nightmare capable of driving any elite special forces unit to despair, was ripped in half from the shoulders down, biological chainsaw and all, by Chris's bare hands.
The two halves of the body twitched violently on the metal floor, then went still. Nothing left but a heap of shredded meat.
Piers swallowed hard. He watched Chris flick the black blood from his hands like he'd just finished a warm-up set at the gym, and felt his entire understanding of the world take a critical hit.
"Captain. You're literally Superman."
"The stuff really is something else. I feel like I could rip a Tyrant apart barehanded right now." Chris wiped his hands on what was left of the mutant's shredded clothing and picked the tungsten-steel rifle back up. "Carla should be in the control room at the bottom of the ship. Let's go meet the impostor."
The two of them stepped over the carpet of shredded flesh and headed deeper into the carrier. What awaited Carla was a foregone conclusion.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]