The African continent. D-04 mining zone.
This mysterious land that had once cradled the ancient Ndipaya tribe had been completely transformed into a living hell.
From high above, the entire mining zone looked like a massive, beating dark-gold heart. Thick crystalline veins burrowed deep into the earth's crust like blood vessels, greedily siphoning the planet's energy.
Wind howled across the wasteland. A blinding streak of light plummeted from the sky at a speed that shattered the sound barrier, driving straight into the grandest dark-gold tower at the center of the mining zone.
Ryan hit like a blade wrapped in divine fury, smashing clean through the tower's missile-proof dome without slowing down. The deafening crack of shattering crystal followed him all the way down as he slammed into the central hall at the tower's core.
Dust billowed. Dark-gold crystal fragments rained down like hail.
Ryan slowly straightened up, his black coat snapping in the turbulent air currents. Those deep eyes swept the room. The anticipation and intensity in his gaze cooled in an instant.
Too empty.
This central control room, flagged by Star Fire intelligence as "Wesker's HQ," was crawling with dark-gold Ouroboros fungus, but it lacked the crushing pressure of a top-tier fighter holding court. No elite New Human guards, no signature black-clad spec ops teams. Even the bioelectric signatures in the air were scattered and disorganized.
"He ran?"
Ryan frowned, his shoes clicking sharply against the trashed alloy flooring. He walked toward the massive supercomputer flickering dimly at the center of the hall. He was about to crack the terminal when a shrill, agonized scream tore out from the shadows behind the console.
"Albert... why... you told me I was worthy of witnessing the new world with you..."
Ryan stepped around the console. What he saw made even him raise an eyebrow, and he'd seen plenty.
Excella Gionne, the once untouchable, imperious head of Europe's pharmaceutical empire, was curled up on the ground like a skinned dog bleeding out.
Her expensive silk gown was soaked through with black-purple blood. Worse, dark-gold leech-like fungi were bursting continuously from her chest, back, and limbs, devouring her flesh at a frenzied pace, trying to forcibly assimilate her.
"Looks like even you, Your Majesty, got thrown out with the trash by your god." Ryan looked down at Excella writhing on the floor. Not a shred of pity in his voice.
"Save... save me..." Excella forced out a hand already half-crystallized, clawing at the hem of Ryan's coat. "He lied to me... he took all the core data... he went to..."
Click.
The supercomputer activated on its own.
A massive holographic projection blazed to life in midair, revealing that cold figure in sunglasses and slicked-back hair. Albert Wesker.
"Ryan. If you're watching this, it means your remarkable speed still wasn't quite fast enough." The holographic Wesker stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a smirk dripping with arrogance curling at the corner of his mouth.
"D-04 was never a throne. At best, it was an incubator for the Ouroboros." Wesker adjusted his sunglasses. "The moment I noticed your Star Fire's impossible rate of evolution, I knew putting all my eggs in one basket would be foolish."
Ryan stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the pre-recorded message. A flicker of genuine respect crossed his eyes.
"Gotta hand it to you. Nose sharper than a bloodhound's. So where'd you run off to with your inner circle after ditching this mess?"
Wesker couldn't hear Ryan's question, but the recording seemed to anticipate his reaction.
"Don't waste your time trying to track me. When the perfected Ouroboros spores blanket the globe, that will be the true new world."
"As for Excella..." Wesker glanced down at the woman on the floor, his eyes as cold as if he were looking at garbage. "She was too weak. Couldn't even withstand the lowest-grade assimilation. But as a welcoming gift for you, I injected her with an over-spec dose of the original virus sample. Have fun, Ryan."
The projection flickered several times and died.
The instant the image vanished, the entire tower and the mines beneath it began to shake violently.
Excella let out one final, piercing scream.
Her body inflated like a balloon in the span of a heartbeat. Dozens of dark-gold tentacles, each meters thick, ripped through what had been her face and torso, erupting outward like a volcanic detonation.
In barely ten seconds, a colossal Ouroboros mutant tens of meters tall had materialized before Ryan, nearly filling the entire central hall. It had no fixed shape, just a writhing flesh mountain built from countless squirming dark-gold leeches and crystalline mass. At its very peak, Excella's face was still faintly visible, twisted beyond recognition.
The monster unleashed an ear-splitting roar. Over a dozen tentacles thick enough to flatten a tank came crashing in from every direction, sealing off every avenue of escape.
Ryan didn't even blink.
"You think a pile of fungal garbage is going to slow me down?"
He let out a quiet laugh. No weapon drawn. No dodge. He simply raised his right hand.
A field of pure, absolute gravity, something beyond any scientific explanation, expanded outward from Ryan in an instant.
The tentacles, each carrying enough force to level a building, slammed into an invisible wall five meters from his body and detonated with heavy, muffled concussions. The backlash shattered the dark-gold crystals at their tips on impact.
Ryan stood at the heart of the raging flesh mountain as casually as if he were out for a stroll. Within his five-meter exclusion zone, not a single drop of toxic fluid could penetrate.
He turned toward the supercomputer. Since Wesker had bolted, the mainframe might still hold residual data on the final-version virus and its core experimental parameters.
The mutant, repelled by the gravity field, went completely berserk. Dozens of massive pustules split open across its surface, unleashing a downpour of superheated acid and violently corrosive spores.
"Too loud."
Ryan kept his back to the monster, fingers flying across the keyboard. Multitasking, he pulled a specialized storage core from his coat with his left hand and flicked his right hand backward with a casual wave.
A soft hiss, and the rain of acid and spores simply vanished in midair.
Then the mutant's mountainous body seized up.
A chunk of flesh over ten meters in diameter had disappeared from its midsection. Gone. The cross-section was mirror-smooth, not a single drop of blood at the edges. As if some higher-dimensional force had taken an eraser to that patch of space and simply wiped it from existence.
Another agonized shriek. The mutant thrashed wildly, but its enormous bulk was nothing but a giant target practice dummy against Ryan's dimensional erasure.
Data transfer... 80%... 90%... 100%.
Ding.
Ryan pulled the Star Fire high-capacity data storage core from the console.
This drive contained every layer of Wesker's research on the dark-gold Ouroboros, from incubation through mutation, the entire underlying framework. With this, Star Fire's R&D division could develop a targeted countermeasure to eradicate the spores in record time.
"Alright. Homework's done."
Ryan tucked the data core into his coat pocket and slowly turned to face the remains of Excella, now missing most of her body, barely clinging to life.
"You're a sad piece of work, getting tossed aside like that. But leaving this kind of biohazard lying around to pollute the environment isn't how Star Fire operates."
Ryan bent his knees and appeared above the mutant's grotesque head as if he'd teleported.
His right fist clenched. The terrifying power inside him, something that transcended mortal comprehension, concentrated entirely at the point of his knuckles. Even without any enhancement serum, Ryan's baseline stats, maxed out by the modifier, were enough to tear apart any living thing on the planet barehanded.
Ryan threw the punch.
No blinding light. No flashy special effects. Just pure, raw kinetic force.
The instant his fist connected with the mutant's skull, the air compressed into a visible white shockwave ring. The impact didn't just atomize the tens-of-meters-tall dark-gold mutant into a cloud of molecular dust in a single frame. The force punched clean through the creature's body and hammered into the deepest layer of the D-04 mining zone's bedrock.
The earth itself convulsed.
Radiating out from the dark-gold tower, the ground across several square kilometers began a catastrophic collapse. The dark-gold fungal carpet and breeding chambers buried deep underground shattered like brittle glass under the shockwave, disintegrating and vaporizing.
Ryan's figure rocketed upward from the crumbling tower and hung motionless in the sky.
He looked down. In just a few seconds, the D-04 mining zone, the place that had bred terror in countless hearts and spawned untold horrors, had been erased from the map of Africa entirely. All that remained was a bottomless crater.
The counterattack on Africa's stronghold had lasted less than five minutes and ended in Ryan's one-sided physical demolition.
Ryan pressed his earpiece and connected to Star Fire's global encrypted channel.
"Jill, cancel the African airdrop. Tell Heisenberg and the others to hold position."
"What happened, Ryan? You're not hurt, are you?" A thread of worry ran through Jill's voice.
"I'm fine. But we came up empty." Ryan watched the thick smoke rising slowly from the crater, a slight curve forming at the corner of his mouth. "That old fox Wesker used this whole place as bait. His real army and the final-version virus were never underground."
"Not underground?" Chris's rough voice cut into the channel. "Then where the hell did the bastard hide? Don't tell me he flew."
"Got it in one, Chris. He literally went up." Ryan pulled the blue-glowing data core from his pocket, his eyes razor-sharp. "I've got the research data he left behind. Get the tech division on it immediately. I want a full scan of the global atmosphere."
Ryan lifted his gaze to the sky, shrouded behind dark-gold clouds.
"Suit up, everyone. We're taking this to the sky and dragging that self-proclaimed god back down to earth."
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]