Sherry's right hand hung suspended in midair, and the air across the entire southern slope of the Himalayas seemed to freeze solid.
Behind the Star Fire Asian defense line, beneath miles of reinforced bunkers, hundreds of dormant steel behemoths slowly raised their menacing barrels.
"The hallucinations were just the appetizer." Sherry's voice crackled through the comms, ringing sharp and clear in every Star Fire gunner's ears. "Now scour them off the map with the truth of humanity. Heavy fire group, free saturation fire!"
Her right hand slashed down, and the entire world went silent.
It was that brief deafness that comes when the roar exceeds the limits of human hearing.
Star Fire's twin-linked electromagnetic railgun emplacements, hidden inside the mountain itself, fired simultaneously. Massive tungsten alloy shells tore through the blizzard at several times the speed of sound, leaving visible white shockwave rings hanging in the air behind them.
The railgun rounds struck the densest concentration of monsters in the same instant.
There were no screams. Against that kind of absolute kinetic energy, the supposedly evolved dark-gold monsters didn't last a single second before the violent atmospheric pressure shift atomized them into molecular residue invisible to the naked eye.
But that was only the beginning.
Hundreds of heavy thermobaric warheads followed, raining down like a meteor shower into the yellow buffer zone already carpeted with wreckage.
Blinding white light merged into a solid sheet across the mountainside. The violent combustion instantly sucked every molecule of oxygen from a radius of several kilometers.
That annihilating heat melted glaciers millions of years old in an instant, then flash-converted them into superheated steam in the freezing air.
The monsters' hardened dark-gold keratin began to rapidly soften and burn at two thousand degrees.
The entire slope became a massive hellish crucible boiling with dark-gold blood, mud, and steel debris.
"Holy shit..." A Star Fire gunner inoculated with Dawn Type III hefted a four-hundred-pound ammo crate one-handed, staring at the sky lit red by distant firelight, eyes blazing with fervor. "Whatever gods Wesker cooked up, they're all garbage in front of our steel flood!"
The saturated bombardment lasted a full twenty minutes.
When the last thermobaric warhead's glow died out, the once-steep slope had been shaved down by over forty feet. The ground was coated in a thick layer of blackish-gray crystalline residue that reeked of charred flesh.
Smoke drifted everywhere. Superheated steam dispersed slowly in the howling wind.
"Did we get them?" A young soldier couldn't help whispering over the comms.
"Stay sharp." Becky narrowed her eyes, a razor edge glinting in her pupils. "Wesker's Ouroboros is best at one thing... adaptive mutation."
She'd barely finished speaking.
A massive claw, thicker than any before and sheathed in denser dark-gold plating with a blackened metallic sheen, punched up from the edge of a still-smoking scorched crater and locked onto the rock.
Then, across the charred wasteland of debris, one enormous silhouette after another slowly rose to its feet.
The surviving monsters had ballooned from six feet to nearly thirteen.
During the annihilating barrage, they'd used their dead as shields and completed a terrifying evolution in a matter of moments. Their dark-gold armor had developed countless tiny honeycomb-pattern heat vents, capable of withstanding thermobaric temperatures.
Thousands of these advanced-stage monsters unleashed a roar that split the sky. They showed no fear. They charged even faster than before, barreling through the lingering heat like heavy tanks.
"Heavy artillery kill rate on these dispersed advanced forms has dropped sharply. Railgun recharge, forty-five seconds remaining." The spotter's voice was rapid-fire.
"Then we call roll one at a time." Sherry's expression was blank, her eyes calm as still water.
The instant the order went out, hundreds of pale blue laser designator beams sliced through the wind and snow from the high ground on both flanks, locking hard onto the advanced monsters leading the charge.
Star Fire's ace unit: the Shadow Sniper Brigade.
In the past, the custom sniper rifles they carried, 20mm bore, with recoil strong enough to crack a tank's optics, were absolutely impossible for a single soldier to wield.
But after full inoculation with Dawn Type III, these Star Fire snipers could not only hold these "infantry cannons" steady, they could pull off inhuman moves like tactical sliding shots.
Heavy, rhythmic gunfire erupted in overlapping waves. Tungsten alloy armor-piercing rounds trailing pale blue electromagnetic wakes tore through the advanced forms' prized dark-gold plating at multiples of the speed of sound like it was nothing.
The lead monster had just leaped when its skull detonated like a watermelon hit by a sledgehammer, 0.01 seconds later.
"Headshot! Keep going! Don't let them past the thirty-meter line!" The sniper team leader directed coolly.
With the extreme dynamic vision granted by Dawn Type III, the snipers played a ruthless game of whack-a-mole through the blizzard. Every shot turned a monster into pulp.
But there were still too many advanced forms, and they were getting smarter, weaving in high-speed S-patterns to evade.
"Fifty meters!" "Thirty meters!"
The snipers hadn't missed a single shot, but the tidal wave of monsters had already crashed right up to their faces. The thick stench of sulfur and rot was already seeping through the Star Fire soldiers' gas masks.
"Snipers fall back. Close-combat armor company, engage!"
Sherry let out a cold scoff, crossed her hands at her thighs, and with a hum of vibration, two high-frequency tactical short blades flickering with deep blue light slid from their sheaths.
Behind her, row after row of Star Fire infantry inoculated with Dawn Type III, eyes bloodshot, battle fury pushed to the breaking point, drew their alloy longswords in perfect unison.
The age of ranged firepower was over. The next thirty meters would be steel against bone, superhuman against monster, in a war of flesh and blood.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]