Star Fire Global Oceanic Fleet. Outer deck perimeter.
The brutal air-defense battle had finally reached its end, but there were no victory cheers.
The sea was choked with the massive carcasses of countless Flying Leviathans, drifting across the surface like some grotesque sacrificial offering.
The warship's CIWS barrels were venting scorching white smoke from the sustained high-frequency firing. The gun surfaces had even begun to glow a molten dark red.
Every last deep-sea mutant had been torn apart by the fleet's devastating electromagnetic fire net.
Wind swept across the deck. The air reeked of acrid gunpowder smoke and the stench of high-concentration protein scorched by laser fire.
Chris and Leon stood side by side at the edge of the waterlogged deck, their tactical vests splattered with the enemy's black blood.
They'd just finished the deathmatch with HUNK. Their stamina was spent to the absolute limit.
But neither turned toward the medical bay. Instead, they both raised their heads at the same time and stared at the sky above.
The entire sky had changed color.
The blue vault of heaven was now a suffocating, faintly luminous pure gold.
Billions upon billions of golden spores hung suspended like a drifting galaxy, blotting out the sun and filtering its light into an eerie twilight.
They rode Earth's atmospheric circulation, spreading silently toward every corner of the world.
The fleet's heavy firepower could easily shred thousand-ton monsters, but against this microscopic genetic storm, it was useless.
Physical defense looked clumsy and laughable in the face of a virus's natural dispersal.
Jill stood at the bridge's floor-to-ceiling window, her fingernails digging deep into her palms.
Everyone's last hope now rested on the sealed core laboratory buried deep inside the warship.
The fate of all humanity hinged on whether Annette could turn the vaccine from theoretical model to reality before the infection countdown reached zero.
...
Thousands of kilometers away, on the surface of the North Pacific.
The battle between "gods," a fight that had long surpassed human comprehension, was still grinding on in a manner that was both brutally monotonous and devastatingly violent.
From yesterday evening until now, a full twenty-four hours had passed.
This once deep and brilliant stretch of open ocean had been turned into a dead zone in the most literal, physical sense.
Hundreds of kilometers of sea had been repeatedly vaporized, boiled, and displaced by the terrifying kinetic energy of the two combatants.
The seabed rock had been shattered completely. Dark-red mantle magma oozed through the cracks, only to be instantly cooled by the cold seawater flooding back in.
A thick white fog hung permanently over the surface, like a stretch of Silent Hill abandoned by the world itself.
Ryan stood quietly on the rolling ocean surface, the water beneath his feet still gurgling with boiling bubbles.
His black coat was completely soaked through, clinging to his body.
He wasn't sweating. He wasn't gasping. His breathing rhythm remained perfectly steady.
No matter how many crust-shattering punches he'd thrown, Ryan's heart rate hadn't changed by a single beat.
Twenty meters away, golden dust was gathering with agonizing slowness in the salt-spray wind.
Wesker was trying to reassemble his body again. But this time the process took nearly ten full seconds, far, far slower than the instantaneous regeneration he'd started with.
Finally, Wesker's tall frame reappeared in the golden light.
But his complexion was a sickly, almost translucent white.
Those golden slit-pupils that had once burned with zealotry and arrogance were dim now, drained, filled with exhaustion he could no longer hide.
He didn't understand. He truly didn't understand.
An entire day and night. Twenty-four hours. He'd used every attack method he could conceive of.
He'd triggered undersea volcanic eruptions. He'd raised hundred-meter extinction-level tsunamis. He'd even compressed the spores into ultra-high-frequency cutting blades.
Every single attack, any one of which could have annihilated a carrier strike group, hadn't managed to cut a single hair on Ryan's head.
This wasn't a fight anymore. It was a one-sided beatdown with no floor.
"Give it up, Ryan." Wesker's voice had gone hoarse, like sandpaper grinding against his vocal cords.
The lofty superiority was gone. There was even a note of concession in his tone.
"This pointless war of attrition needs to end. I can accept you. We can share the new world that's about to be born."
He was trying to use words to stop the endless torment. Proud as he was, even he couldn't endure this one-sided destruction any longer.
"Accept me?" Ryan looked at Wesker, the corner of his mouth pulling into a thin, cold arc.
"You mean tag along with you and rule a world full of golden freaks crawling around on the ground under your control?"
Ryan shook his head slightly, looking at Wesker the way someone looks at a pile of trash.
"Hard pass. A garbage dump for a world isn't really my thing." Before the words had fully left his mouth, Ryan vanished from where he stood, ripping through the white fog like a bolt of black lightning.
Twenty meters closed in a thousandth of a second. Ryan materialized in front of Wesker.
His right fist broke the sound barrier with an ear-splitting crack as it punched clean through Wesker's chest, the force instantly destroying every molecule in Wesker's body.
The savage kinetic energy erupted out through his back, carving a bottomless vacuum trench across the ocean surface.
Wesker's body shattered like a porcelain vase hit with a sledgehammer, scattering into a cloud of dim golden dust. "I already told you... it's pointless."
More than ten seconds later, Wesker reformed a short distance away with visible difficulty.
He was on one knee on the ocean surface, chest heaving violently, as if every breath cost him everything he had.
"As long as the spores keep spreading, you can never kill me."
"You sure about that?" Ryan slowly pulled back his right fist, flicked the water droplets off his knuckles, and stood still.
Ryan's eyes held no emotion at all. Only an absolute, piercing coldness that saw through everything to its core.
Faced with that casual reply, Wesker went silent.
Those pure-gold slit-pupils trembled, just slightly.
An emotion called "fear" spread through the deepest layer of his consciousness for the first time, like a poisonous vine running wild.
Yes, the spores could resurrect him infinitely. On a physical level, he had achieved true immortality.
But he'd overlooked the most fatal problem of all.
Reassembling consciousness required enormous psychic energy.
Every time his body was completely obliterated and forcibly reaggregated through neural pathways, his mind experienced the searing agony of being ripped apart alive.
And he had to keep reassembling, because he needed to actively accelerate the spores' spread.
The spores would eventually reach the entire world on their own through the Rossby Wave Nodes, but that was too slow. If he waited for natural dispersal, the vaccine would be finished long before then. By that point it'd all be over.
But one day and one night. A full twenty-four hours.
Ryan had obliterated him over a thousand times with that extreme, raw violence.
This continuous, one-sided flaying was eroding his sense of self at a terrifying rate.
If this hopeless grind continued, he genuinely feared his consciousness would collapse entirely.
He would go from a lofty "god" to a mindless cloud of golden dust running on nothing but survival instinct.
"You're a monster through and through." Wesker ground his teeth, his voice trembling with dread.
He staggered back half a step, threw his arms wide, and jabbed a near-manic finger at the golden cloud layer spreading across the sky toward every corner of the globe.
"But you can't win, Ryan! You can't afford what this game costs!"
"The spores have already entered the global atmospheric cycle! Once infection is complete, I'll have seven billion sources of life force!"
Wesker's face twisted with madness. "My consciousness will be permanently bound to the neural network of the entire human race! Every breath they take becomes an anchor for my psychic energy!"
"Unless you kill every last person on this planet, you will never erase me at the root!"
It was a vicious play made in the open. Chaining his own life to the lives of all humanity on the same scale.
This was no longer a contest of force. It was the ultimate test of humanity's moral bottom line.
Wesker stared into Ryan's eyes, searching for a trace of compromise, despair, even the slightest hesitation in this unbeatable man.
He was disappointed. Ryan just casually rolled his neck.
A long string of sharp pops crackled from his cervical joints, cutting through the dead silence of the ocean.
"Won't know till I try." Ryan's voice was still as flat as stagnant water.
No weight of being held hostage. No grief for the fate of seven billion lives. Not a single ripple of anger.
In his logic, whenever a villain posed a problem, the fastest answer was never to solve it. It was to rip the one who posed it to shreds.
The next second, Ryan shattered the waves beneath his feet.
Like a tireless, fearless black predator, he charged straight into the storm of golden sand and launched himself at Wesker once more.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]