Compared to the silent crystal funeral on the Po River plain, the Colosseum district of Rome was enduring combat at its most primal.
The Eternal City, bearer of thousands of years of human glory, had become a dark-gold abattoir of flesh and bone.
The Colosseum, once packed with tourists, was now a massive killing floor where Wesker's New Humans butchered the European coalition.
The sky was blotted out by dense clouds of dark-gold spores. No sunlight penetrated the suffocating haze.
The streets were littered with burning wreckage and mangled corpses. Fungal carpet was swallowing ancient brickwork and modern asphalt at a visible pace.
"First and Third Companies, hold the line! Keep firing! Put every armor-piercing round you've got downrange!"
Major General Moretti's ragged voice echoed through the comms channel. All that answered him was a barrage of screams and the stomach-turning shriek of tearing metal.
He stared in despair at the street less than three hundred meters ahead. Dozens of dark-gold afterimages were weaving through the coalition's heavy armor positions at impossible speed.
These things they called New Humans had shattered everything Moretti understood about warfare.
A sixty-ton Ariete main battle tank had just begun rotating its turret to aim when a dark-gold monster nearly three meters tall blinked to its flank like it had teleported.
The creature let out a piercing shriek. Claws sheathed in thick dark-gold keratin punched through the tank's composite armor like a hot knife through butter.
Its arms bulged with muscle, and with a bone-chilling groan of twisting metal, the creature ripped a gaping hole in the side armor. The crew inside didn't even have time to call for help before they were torn apart.
Conventional firepower against creatures this fast and this heavily armored was like trying to stop a shark with a paper net.
"General... we can't hold. They're too fast, and they won't die..." His aide-de-camp lay in the trench, drenched in blood, eyes brimming with tears. "Have we been abandoned?"
Moretti watched his soldiers falling all around him, closed his eyes in anguish, and drew his sidearm.
As a soldier, he could accept death. What he couldn't accept was this pointless, one-sided slaughter.
He chambered a round, ready to swallow the last scrap of human dignity he had left.
Then, at the final possible second.
A violent electromagnetic pulse ripped across the entire Colosseum district, so powerful it warped the air itself, with zero warning.
Every hair on Moretti's body stood on end. His sidearm began shaking in his hand as though it had come alive.
And ahead of him, the dozens of New Humans mid-rampage all froze in place at the exact same instant.
The dark-gold crystal coating their bodies groaned and cracked under the pull of some terrible invisible magnetism, as though a giant unseen hand had clamped down on each of them.
"Trashing the place with somebody else's toys. That's bad manners."
A voice dripping with mockery and arrogance boomed down from above.
Moretti jerked his head up. Beneath the heavy dark-gold cloud cover, a Star Fire heavy stealth transport in bold livery had appeared at low altitude without anyone noticing.
Its bay doors were wide open. A man in a battered leather coat and sunglasses, fat cigar clenched between his teeth, stepped out and dropped from dozens of meters up.
No parachute. No landing gear.
He hit the street in front of the coalition's forward position like a heavy meteorite, punching a crater several meters wide into the asphalt.
Dust billowed. Heisenberg straightened up, took a long drag on his cigar, and blew out a thick ring of smoke.
He tugged the brim of his hat, shouldered that absurdly oversized metal warhammer, and didn't spare the stunned European soldiers a glance.
"Coalition boys, step back a bit. Things are about to get messy, and I'd hate to get blood on your uniforms."
"Who... who the hell are you?!" Major General Moretti stared at the man in disbelief.
"Star Fire. Heisenberg." He flashed a wide grin full of white teeth. "Here to take out your trash."
In the distance, the dozens of New Humans pinned by the brief magnetic burst finally broke free.
The uninvited guest who'd dropped from the sky had clearly pissed them off. They abandoned the tank wreckage around them and charged Heisenberg en masse, dozens of them like bullet trains at full speed, the air screaming as they tore through it.
Facing a charge that could shred an infantry battalion in seconds, Heisenberg didn't back up an inch. If anything, his grin got wider.
"Fast? Tough armor? In my domain, you're just scrap metal with legs!"
Heisenberg slammed his massive warhammer into the ground and clawed both hands toward the empty air on either side.
"Up!"
With that roar, every metal pipe buried beneath Rome's streets, hundreds of wrecked cars lining the roads, even the rusted iron bars entombed for a thousand years in the Colosseum ruins, all of it came alive at once.
Countless tons of steel wreckage ripped free of gravity and surged skyward like a waterfall of metal flowing in reverse.
Heisenberg didn't hurl the metal at the monsters. Instead he slammed his hands together and assembled it all mid-air into a grinding metal storm over a hundred meters across, built from thousands of high-speed spinning gears, steel plates, and jagged iron shards.
The dozen-plus New Humans at the front of the charge couldn't brake in time and plowed straight into the whirling maelstrom.
The shriek of metal grinding against metal and the creatures' agonized wails blended into a single sound that split the sky.
Those dark-gold keratin shells that had laughed off coalition artillery held up for less than three seconds under tens of thousands of tons of metal grinding at horrific speed before they were shredded into a mist of dark-gold blood and crystal fragments spraying in every direction.
One creature, in the last instant before the storm swallowed it, caught a glimpse of Heisenberg's face through the gaps between the spinning gears. The man was smiling around his cigar.
A symphony of industry and violence played out across the ruins of Rome.
"Hahaha! Now that's more like it! Come on, you brainless mutant trash!" Heisenberg laughed wildly, driving the massive metal storm down the streets like a bulldozer. Everything in its path, New Humans and dark-gold fungus alike, was ground to powder.
But there were still too many.
The remaining New Humans used their extreme agility to leap onto the walls of buildings on both sides, trying to bypass the metal storm from above and the flanks, closing in for a point-blank kill on Heisenberg.
Their silhouettes flickered through the shadows of the ruins at blistering speed, tightening the circle from every direction.
Heisenberg bit down on his cigar. The magnetic hammer hummed in his palm like a beast that hadn't finished eating.
However many came, that's how many he'd grind.
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