Ten thousand meters up, the half-mechanical colossus that had been punched clean through didn't plummet into the deep sea as expected.
With a teeth-grating tearing sound, its hundreds-of-meters-long body began to rapidly disintegrate in the wind.
Every bone, every plate of armor, every growth of excess flesh collapsed at once, dissolving into countless pure golden spores.
Freed from their shell, the spores rode the powerful currents of the Rossby Wave Nodes, flooding outward in every direction.
The sky above the North Pacific was stained by the golden dust into a color caught between despair and divinity, the hue of a dying sunset.
Ryan lost his footing and fell, pulled by gravity toward the ocean in freefall.
He made no attempt to slow down. He let himself drop like a black meteorite, tearing through the heavy cloud layer and trailing a single straight contrail behind him.
Below was a barren volcanic island. Ryan slammed into the hard rock surface with catastrophic force.
The kinetic energy discharged instantly. The entire island shuddered, and bottomless cracks spiderwebbed outward in every direction.
The heat of impact melted the surrounding rock on contact. Seawater rushed into the crater and erupted into towering columns of white steam.
Ryan stood up from the impact crater, dozens of meters deep, and casually brushed the dust from his clothes. Not a scratch on him.
He looked up at the sky, now completely dyed gold, and a cold understanding settled in his eyes.
"So that's what you did. Gave up having a single physical body and turned yourself into an omnipresent contaminant."
The instant those words left his mouth, the air around the crater began to warp and shudder.
The golden spores drifting down from above were yanked together as if caught in a powerful magnetic field, converging violently in front of Ryan.
The golden dust worked like the most precise biological 3D printer, reconstructing a perfect human body in under two seconds.
Black leather coat. Signature slicked-back hair. And those inhuman vertical pupils burning with golden fire.
Albert Wesker stood on the molten rock. The heat was assimilated by the spores the instant it touched his soles.
He looked at Ryan and slowly spread his arms, face lit with a fervor and arrogance that had transcended the boundary between life and death.
"Can you feel it, Ryan? I'm immortal now. This golden wind across the sky is my will. As long as a single golden spore survives anywhere on this planet, I will never truly die."
Wesker's voice was produced by the collective vibration of countless spores in the air, carrying an ethereal, oppressive echo.
Ryan looked at this display of supreme confidence. His eyes stayed dead calm, flat as stagnant water, without a single ripple of emotion.
He didn't bother responding. His right foot stomped through the rock beneath him and his body blurred into a streak of black lightning.
Ryan's fist crossed ten meters in a fraction of a second, carrying nothing but raw violence, and connected squarely with Wesker's face.
The savage kinetic energy detonated. Wesker's entire upper body blew apart like it had taken a direct artillery hit, bursting into a cloud of golden powder.
The shockwave continued past him undiminished, carving a vacuum trench a full kilometer long across the ocean surface behind him.
But Ryan's eyes showed nothing. He hadn't felt the resistance of hitting something solid.
The instant Wesker's upper body disintegrated, the surrounding golden spores swarmed into the empty space.
In less than half a breath, Wesker's head and torso had fully restored. Not even the creases in his coat had changed.
"I told you. It's pointless." Wesker's reconstructed lips curled into a mocking sneer. He hadn't retreated a single step, letting Ryan's fist hover right in front of his face, eyes full of provocation. "You have that freakish power that can erase matter on contact. But can you punch the entire atmosphere to death?"
Wesker's golden slit-pupils contracted sharply, an unprecedented killing intent and fighting spirit igniting in his gaze.
"Come to think of it, from the moment you first showed up to now, we've never actually fought for real."
Before he finished speaking, Wesker's figure vanished. Not high-speed movement. Instant disassembly and reassembly.
He reformed in Ryan's blind spot, his right arm already reshaped into a massive bone blade condensed from high-density golden spores.
The edge flickered with a terrifying high-frequency oscillation wave capable of severing molecular bonds, and it came down hard on the side of Ryan's neck.
A metallic clash loud enough to rupture a normal person's eardrums rang out as the bone blade struck Ryan's skin.
A blow that could have split a heavy tank in two threw off a shower of sparks and failed to leave so much as a white mark.
A flash of shock crossed Wesker's eyes, but he didn't pause. He dissolved again into a storm of golden afterimages.
He launched a three-dimensional blitz around Ryan, high-density spore whips lashing out like vipers, compressed kinetic blasts and alloy-corroding poison clouds crashing over Ryan like a tsunami.
Under this near-natural-disaster level of assault, the volcanic island began to rapidly disintegrate.
Massive boulders were shredded without mercy. Boiling seawater was blown back by pressure waves. The ocean for kilometers in every direction became a grinding kill zone.
And Ryan, standing at the dead center of the destruction, hadn't moved a single step. He hadn't even raised a hand to block.
"All flash, no substance." Ryan slowly turned his head amid the barrage, his voice dripping with impatience.
He pinpointed the exact instant Wesker reassembled and shot out his right hand, clamping down on Wesker's face in a vice grip.
Ryan's arm flexed. He lifted Wesker clean off the ground and slammed him into the shattered bedrock below.
The island's foundation collapsed entirely under the force. Ryan held Wesker down and drove him straight through the earth's crust.
They plunged into freezing seawater. Under the crushing pressure of the deep ocean, Ryan's left fist fired like a pile driver, blow after blow after blow.
Each punch created a massive vacuum cavity in the deep water, obliterating Wesker's body outright.
Wesker's flesh was pulverized into golden powder again and again, and restored by the spores again and again, instantly.
He fought back in kind, spewing jets of high-concentration corrosive acid during each reassembly, trying to dissolve Ryan's eyes.
The acid hit Ryan's face and slid right off. Ryan didn't even blink. His fingers punched through Wesker's throat in the same motion.
The fight locked into a brutally violent, almost absurd mechanical loop. The seawater was blasted apart by the kinetic forces over and over.
Every strike Ryan threw precisely and savagely dismantled Wesker's body. Skulls crushed, limbs ripped away, chests punched clean through.
But Wesker always drew on his global spore energy network to rebuild in an instant and launch another lethal counterattack.
None of Wesker's methods, cutting, blasting, corroding, could breach Ryan's absolute physical invulnerability.
And Ryan's super damage, powerful enough to pulverize mountains, couldn't permanently kill a ghost that had bound its consciousness to the planet's atmosphere.
The volcanic island had sunk entirely. With no ground left to stand on, the two faced off on the churning, boiling surface of the ocean.
Waves roared around them. Twenty meters apart, they stood opposite each other, the sea still rolling from the extreme heat.
Wesker's chest rose and fell slightly. The spores could reassemble him endlessly, but the continuous fragmentation of his consciousness was taking a heavy toll.
He stared at Ryan across the gap, and for the first time, something unmistakable surfaced in those golden slit-pupils: gravity.
Ryan stood calmly on the water's surface. His black coat was soaked through, clinging to his body.
But there wasn't a single wound on him, not even the faintest scratch. His breathing was as steady as a walk through a garden. No fatigue whatsoever.
The ultimate in physical defense against the ultimate in biological regeneration. This deathmatch, born from a fall of ten thousand meters, had reached a total deadlock.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]