Wind screamed across the cliffs of the Himalayas, but it still couldn't drown out those heart-stopping heavy footsteps.
Thirty meters. Twenty meters. Ten!
The New Humans that had survived the bombardment, bodies swollen to ten feet tall, hit the defensive line trailing waves of scorching heat and the thick reek of blood.
A flicker of confusion passed through their emotionless dark-gold pupils.
Their biological recognition systems registered the humans ahead in black tactical armor as having life signs no stronger than insects.
Past experience said one pounce was all it took. These fragile carbon-based organisms would pop like blood bags.
The lead advanced monster let out a piercing shriek and launched itself forward like a shell from a cannon. Two claws studded with dark-gold barbs screamed through the air, slamming down at the frontmost Star Fire soldier.
A deafening crash of metal on metal exploded across the line.
No flying gore. No screams of agony.
The Star Fire soldier, five-foot-eleven at most, hadn't given a single inch against the ten-foot armored monster.
His legs bent slightly. The high-density permafrost beneath his boots cracked in a spiderweb pattern under the force.
He raised a custom tungsten alloy arm-shield on his left arm and stopped the monster's tank-crushing blow dead with nothing but raw physical strength.
"Monster? That all you got?"
Under the advanced monster's disbelieving stare, the soldier lifted his head.
His face, veins bulging from the Dawn Type III injection, split into a savage grin.
The next instant, the high-frequency oscillating blade in his right hand became a searing streak of blue light.
"Die!"
With a roar, the muscles in his arm expanded and contracted at a terrifying frequency. The high-frequency blade, cycling at thousands of cuts per second, sliced through the monster's jaw and straight up through its skull like a hot knife through butter.
Dark-gold crystal fragments and blackish-purple brain matter erupted outward, drenching the soldier head to toe. He wrenched the blade free and booted the massive corpse off the ice cliff.
That was just one snapshot across the entire line.
"Formation! Grind them down!" The frontline commander's roar thundered across the snowfield.
Star Fire's close-combat armor company became a meat grinder.
Three-man tactical squads, coordinating flawlessly.
This wasn't some tragic epic of humanity making its last stand against a bioweapon tide. This was a pack of superhumans wearing human skin, dismantling mutants one-sided.
Dawn Type III gave them more than strength and speed rivaling or exceeding the monsters. It erased the instinctive fear response to higher-order creatures at the genetic level.
On the left flank, two Star Fire soldiers pinned a monster to the ground with titanium alloy spears while a third leaped high and took its head clean off with a heavy battleaxe.
On the right flank, a soldier's arm-shield was eaten through by monster acid. He ditched the shield without hesitation, charged bare-handed into the monster's guard, and drove a devastating knee strike straight through the dark-gold shell plating over its chest cavity, caving it in.
The black-and-white snow line of the Himalayas was stained in minutes into a churned mess of blackish-purple and dark gold.
But the advanced monsters' vitality was simply too tenacious. As more and more clawed their way up the ice cliffs, the pressure on the line doubled, then doubled again.
The hardened permafrost at the center of the Star Fire position suddenly heaved violently upward.
A Formation-Breaker variant, a terrifying sixteen feet tall with dark-gold crystal plating as thick as heavy tank armor, drilled straight up from underground.
It ignored the regular soldiers. Its massive arms swung like twin siege rams, swatting three Star Fire soldiers off their feet and sending them flying.
Even with Dawn Type III enhancement, the three coughed blood from the sheer kinetic force, slamming into armored vehicles behind the line.
The Formation-Breaker roared at the sky. Its sheer bulk tore a gap in the Star Fire defense line, and a swarm of regular monsters surged toward the opening.
"Damn it, the standard serum's ceiling isn't enough for these big bastards."
A cold, clear girl's voice cut through the chaos of the battlefield.
"Dawn Corps, fall back ten meters and seal the line." Sherry walked calmly down from the high ground. "Toys at this level are ours."
Before she'd even finished, her figure vanished from the spot.
Fast. Faster than the human retina could track.
In the Formation-Breaker's dark-gold pupils, still mid-blink, there was only a black afterimage trailing a razor-straight white line through the snow.
What the Abyss Enhancer granted was physical performance from another dimension entirely. Through Sherry's eyes, glowing a deep spectral blue, this sixteen-foot, seemingly invincible Formation-Breaker moved like it was doing morning calisthenics in slow motion.
"First cut. Sever the load-bearing structure."
Sherry's voice drifted past the Formation-Breaker's ears like a whisper. The two deep-blue tactical short blades in her hands crossed in midair like twin bolts of lightning in the dark.
The Formation-Breaker's thick right knee joint, layered in crystallized armor dense enough to deflect electromagnetic armor-piercing rounds, split open like wet paper under her blades.
The massive body pitched forward, balance gone.
"Second cut. Destroy the central nerve."
Before it even hit the ground, Sherry was already running up its body as if gravity didn't apply, reaching the back of its neck in an instant.
Both blades merged. Reverse grip. One thrust.
Blue steel blazed with blinding light, punching through the back of the Formation-Breaker's neck and out through its throat.
Sherry's wrists torqued hard, shredding the dark-gold neural cord inside its spine to pulp.
The sixteen-foot colossus collapsed in under three seconds.
And that was barely a glimpse of what Abyss-tier combat power looked like.
A dozen more advanced monsters at the breach saw it happen and immediately broke into frenzied screeching, abandoning their assault on the regular soldiers to swarm Sherry like a hive.
"Ganging up on someone isn't very nice, you know."
Becky had appeared on the other side of the breach. No one saw her move.
She pulled off her heavy gloves, revealing a pair of slender pale hands. Between her ten fingers, an almost invisible ultra-fine luminescence flickered.
Star Fire's most classified weapon: Nano High-Frequency Cutting Wire. Only someone inoculated with the Abyss serum, possessing the extreme micro-precision awareness it granted, could wield it.
Becky smiled, her hands moving as if playing an invisible piano, fingers crossing and dancing rapidly through the air.
The dozen-plus advanced monsters lunging at Sherry froze in midair.
Their bodies still held their leaping postures, but time seemed to stop.
"Reel."
Becky snapped her fingers lightly.
A skin-crawling chorus of wet shearing sounds erupted in rapid succession.
Those dozen powerful advanced monsters, their impenetrable dark-gold armor and hulking musculature, came apart in an instant. Becky's nano-wire net had sliced them alive into hundreds of uniform chunks of meat.
Dark-gold organs and purple-black blood rained down like a sudden storm, splattering across the snow and piling into nauseating mounds of flesh.
The Star Fire soldiers nearby, Dawn Type III and all, watched the two girls dance like twin reapers and swallowed hard.
They were already strong. But faced with the absolute violence of the Abyss, they finally understood what Ryan meant when he talked about upper limits.
"Line is clear. Tactical squads, keep pushing. Drive them off the cliff for good!" Sherry stood atop a mountain of corpses, flicked the blood from both blades, and gave the final order.
Star Fire's troops, morale surging, poured forward like tigers out of the gate and drove the front line all the way to the cliff's edge.
Those once-unstoppable dark-gold monsters, caught in the combined slaughter of steel, superhumans, and Abyss-tier reapers, lost any chance of advancing.
Half an hour later, the wind and snow raged on.
But above the snow line, not a single dark-gold monster was left breathing. The pristine white southern slope of the Himalayas had been painted over in a wash of deathly dark color.
Sherry pressed her earpiece, breathing steady, not a single drop of sweat on her. "Aunt Jill, this is the Asian defense line. The door's welded shut. Invading force, total annihilation."
"Nice work, girls." Jill's steady voice came through the comms. "Hold position, stay alert. Asia's secure, but the real show's just getting started."
Sherry looked up, gazing toward the far side of the ocean.
The Americas theater. Where the true deep-sea nightmare was making landfall.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]