"It's done," Kaplan panted, slumping against the console. "She's down."
"Good riddance," Matt muttered, leaning against the railing.
But none of them celebrated. Because deep in the distance, echoing through the miles of tunnels and shafts of the Hive, a sound began to resonate.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
It was the sound of thousands of magnetic locks disengaging at once.
The doors to the labs were opening.
The doors to the holding cells were opening.
The doors to the Kennel were opening.
Alice looked at the others, the Red Queen's final warning ringing in her ears.
"We need to move," Alice whispered. "Now."
---
Sector 3 – Laboratory Zones B, C, & E.
Atlas moved through the labyrinthine corridors of the laboratory like a phantom made of silver and rot.
He was currently in Zone E, a sterile white hallway lined with reinforced glass observation decks. Or at least, it used to be sterile. Now, it looked like the inside of a slaughterhouse.
Squelch.
His heavy boot landed in a pool of coagulated blood. Atlas ignored it. He ignored the shattered glass crunching under his feet, the sparks raining down from a broken light fixture, and the horrific stench of death that permeated the air.
Broken glass crunched beneath his boots. Torn blast doors hung crooked on bent hinges, forced open earlier when he had heard movement inside and decided to erase it. Dried blood streaked the walls in wide, violent arcs, while the floor was littered with limbs, organs, and husks that no longer looked human.
He was hunting.
The corpses he left behind were wrong.
They weren't just dead.
They were drained.
Skin pulled tight against bone. Muscles shriveled. Faces frozen in expressions of hollow terror, as if something had been taken from them beyond flesh. They looked like mummies dragged straight out of a tomb.
A Cerberus—a skinless, infected Doberman—lunged from the shadows of a broken supply closet. It moved with frightening speed, a blur of muscle and teeth aimed at his throat.
Atlas didn't even slow his stride.
SHING.
His right arm snapped out in a backhanded blur. The silver-bone claws caught the beast in mid-air. The impact was wet and final. The three blades sheared through the dog's skull, severing the brain stem instantly. The creature dropped to the floor, twitching once before its essence was sucked dry, leaving behind a shriveled, mummified husk.
Atlas flicked his wrist, cleaning the gore from his blades.
'Boring,' he thought, stepping over the carcass. 'Too slow. Too weak. Is this all Sector 3 has to offer?'
He paused to catch his reflection in a dark window panel. He looked like a nightmare. His new grey security uniform was shredded, hanging off his new, muscular frame in bloody tatters. Pieces of flesh and viscera from a dozen different zombies were stuck to his skin.
Tried to wipe his claws. Tried to tear off contaminated fabric and replace it with whatever he found lying around.
He had tried to clean himself earlier, wiping the grime away in a restroom in Zone B. But he had given up after five minutes.
'Pointless,' Atlas mused, picking a piece of dried tissue off his shoulder. 'The moment I step out, another mindless drone throws itself at me. They don't care about hygiene. They just bite. Scratch. Claw.'
Zombies had no fear.
They didn't retreat. Didn't hesitate. Didn't learn.
They threw themselves at him endlessly, biting, clawing, scratching—every attempt pointless.
Their teeth broke against reinforced bone claws. Their nails scraped against his skin leaving scratch behind.
Even when they managed to bite him, it meant nothing.
No infection.
No weakness.
Just irritation.
And hunger.
The air itself tasted metallic, thick with blood and decay. Atlas inhaled deeply, and to his faint surprise, relief washed through him.
He ran his tongue over his new sharp teeth. The air tasted heavy—thick with iron and copper.
'Good,' he thought. 'At least I didn't lose that.'
'At least the taste is distinct,' he noted with a grim sense of relief. 'I can taste the blood in the air. That means my gustatory nerves are intact. Good. I lived my previous life for good food. If transmigration took away my ability to taste, I might not be able to enjoy one of the greatest wonders of life.'
As a human, food had been one of the few simple pleasures he'd always taken for granted. Losing taste—losing sensation entirely—would have been a silent kind of torture.
But this undead body still allowed him that much.
He continued his patrol, leaving a trail of dried, grey corpses in his wake. He had cleared Zones A, B, and C. The silence in Sector 3 was now absolute.
And then, the world shifted.
Voooooom.
The steady, low-frequency hum of the Hive's ventilation system died. The bright, clinical fluorescent lights overhead flickered once and cut out completely, plunging the lab into pitch blackness.
A second later, the emergency system kicked in.
Click.
Deep, amber-red rotary lights began to spin, casting long, rhythmic shadows across the walls. The atmosphere shifted from "hospital sterile" to "industrial hellscape."
Atlas froze. His enhanced ears twitched.
From deep within the walls, he heard the sound he had been waiting for.
Clack... Clack... Clack…
The sound of heavy magnetic locks disengaging. The hydraulic hiss of pneumatic seals losing pressure.
He tilted his head slightly, listening.
No camera hum. No servo movement.
Silence.
Atlas stood perfectly still in the center of the corridor. He slowly turned his head, his grey, predatory eyes locking onto the security camera in the corner of the ceiling. The small red LED that indicated recording... faded to black.
The lens stopped moving. The electric whine of the zoom motor ceased.
A raspy breath escaped his throat—half sigh, half laugh.
'She's down,' Atlas realized, a smirk touching his pale lips. 'Alice and her team actually did it. They rebooted the Red Queen.'
He stared at the dead camera lens.
'I knew you were watching, you digital voyeur. I could feel your gaze on my neck for the last hour. Enjoy your nap, Your Majesty. By the time you wake up, I'll be long gone.'
He knew—he had always known—that the cameras had been watching him. Every step. Every kill. Every evolution-induced scream.
And now that they were gone, the absence felt… noticeable.
His senses had sharpened dramatically since the full-body evolution.
Not just sight. Not just hearing.
Something else.
A pressure in the air. A subtle awareness radiating outward from him like ripples in water. He could feel the world around him, not through sound or sight alone, but through instinct.
He closed his eyes, testing his new senses in the dark.
With the Full-Body Structural Optimization and his Mind Stat at 25, the world felt different. It wasn't just sight and sound anymore. It was... texture.
He could feel the vibrations of the air currents. He could smell the ozone from the emergency lights. He could sense the spatial geometry of the room.
'Ten meters,' Atlas calculated. 'My perception acts like a biological sonar within a ten-meter radius. I can feel everything—the dust settling, the airflow, the heartbeat of... well, nothing, since everything here is dead.'
That was the range.
Walls. Corners. Empty rooms. Motionless corpses.
All mapped in his mind like a living radar.
It was an instinct akin to a predator in a wild forest—a tiger sensing the shift in the wind before it sees the prey.
He opened his eyes, analyzing the fight data from the last hour. His brain replayed the skirmishes with photographic clarity.
'That swing in Zone B was sloppy. I overextended. If that zombie had been a Licker, I would have lost an arm. And the kick in Zone C... too much force, not enough balance. I need to tighten my center of gravity. Too wide a swing there. Should've stepped left instead of forward. That bite could've been avoided.
And next time—there would be a next time—he wouldn't repeat them.'
This was the power of Mind: 25. It wasn't just "intelligence"; it was processing speed. It allowed him to learn martial arts in real-time, correcting his form by analyzing his own memories.
'So that's what Mind does… or at least part of it,' Atlas thought.
His mind is far beyond normal human limits. It wasn't just intelligence—it was clarity. Processing speed. Spatial awareness. Combat cognition.
Atlas flexing his silver claws. 'It turns me into a supercomputer. Or maybe this is just the natural result of having a brain that doesn't rot. Either way, I'll take it.'
Whether this was purely the Mind stat, or a hidden benefit of full-body evolution that the system hadn't explicitly listed, he didn't know yet.
But he felt it.
His body was learning.
He turned toward the massive, blast-proof steel door at the end of the main corridor.
Half an hour ago, he tried to open it. He had slammed his shoulder against it, even raked his claws across the surface. It hadn't budged. It was a hermetically sealed bulkhead designed to withstand a bomb.
Even tested whether brute strength alone could bend them.
Nothing worked.
Umbrella hadn't designed their primary containment exits for monsters to simply claw their way through.
The thought of jamming his claws into the mechanism to pry it open—the signature Wolverine breach—crossed his mind, but he instantly dismissed it. That move required unbreakable metal. Against industrial Titanium, his organic bone claws would shatter on impact. Or he'd end up getting a lethal crash course in high-voltage conductivity. Jamming organic, wet bone into live circuitry was a surefire way to light himself up like a Christmas tree. He wasn't about to cripple his own hands trying to replicate a comic book panel.
But now?
The control panel on the door flashed green. The heavy locking bars retracted with a groan of ungreased metal.
The door drifted open an inch, inviting him out.
"So... it begins," Atlas rasped.
His voice was still raspy, sounding like dry leaves skittering on pavement, but the tone was undeniably menacing.
"Hehehehe..."
He chuckled, the sound echoing down the empty, corpse-filled hallway.
"Finally out of this prison. The appetizer is finished."
Atlas stood before the massive, blast-proof steel door. The magnetic locks had disengaged, the green light on the panel beckoning him forward.
The metal surface was cold, unyielding, scarred with faint claw marks left from his earlier, failed attempts.
He felt powerful. He felt unstoppable. With a Strength of 17, he was nearly twice as strong as a peak human athlete. He imagined ripping the door off its hinges, a display of raw dominance to announce his arrival to the Hive.
Atlas stepped forward, his boots crunching on the glass shards littering the floor. He placed a pale, clawed hand on the cold steel surface. He planted his feet, braced his core, and pushed.
Nothing happened.
The door didn't budge.