Steel wreckage was still raining from the air. Acrid smoke and condensation mixed together, making the core laboratory's atmosphere suffocating.
Ryan stood quietly between G-001 and the shock-dampened tray.
His signature black coat, after punching through over a dozen decks, didn't have a single crease or speck of dust on it.
The pale boy's mismatched pupils contracted slightly. The indifferent mask finally cracked into a feverish, sickly grin.
"You're finally here." G-001 tilted his head, bare feet planted in the black blood pooling across the floor, his tone carrying a strange, unsettling intimacy. "I've been looking forward to meeting you for a very, very long time."
Ryan didn't spare him half a glance.
Under G-001's choked, stunned gaze, Ryan turned around and left his completely unguarded back facing the most terrifying bioweapon on the planet.
He bent down slightly, reached out with long fingers, and plucked the last faintly blue-glowing vaccine vial from the wreckage-strewn floor.
The instant his fingertips touched cold glass.
A sudden, crisp electronic chime that only Ryan could hear echoed through the depths of his mind.
Ryan didn't pause for even half a second.
Not a ripple crossed his eyes. Like a junk notification popping up on his phone.
He turned and walked straight to Jill, half-kneeling on the ground, clutching her head and gasping in pain.
"Sorry." Ryan put one arm around Jill's shoulders and steadied her to her feet. The bone-chilling cold was gone from his voice, replaced by something tired and gentle. "Got held up on the way. I'm late."
"Ry..." Jill's vision was blurred from the psychic trauma. She gripped Ryan's arm tight, staring in despair at the single lonely vial in his hand, her voice shaking. "The vaccine... it's destroyed... this is the only one left..."
Not just Jill. Leon, coughing blood. Chris, his chestplate eaten through. Ada, slumped against the wall. All of them had the same heavy, helpless look in their eyes.
The fate of all humanity now hung on less than ten milliliters of liquid in Ryan's hand.
"One? Says who."
Ryan let out a quiet laugh. He pressed the blue vaccine vial into Jill's hands, and then, as everyone stared in disbelief, he casually reached into his coat pocket like a magic trick.
A second vial. A third. A fourth.
Glass clinked against glass as Ryan pulled out glowing vaccine concentrates one handful after another, like digging cheap candy out of his pockets, and shoved them into Jill's arms without a care.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Jill froze. Leon's hand stopped mid-wipe, blood still on his chin. Ada's eyes were wide with open disbelief.
This was the ultimate product of Annette burning through every last drop of the Dawn's computing power and top-tier resources to barely purify three vials. Now they were piling up in Jill's arms like discount glass tubes at a flea market.
Being completely ignored, combined with this scene that spat in the face of reality, shattered G-001's superiority complex on the spot.
"You really are... so full of yourself it makes me sick!"
The humiliation drove G-001's voice to sub-zero.
His pale body instantly dissolved into a raging fluid mass, condensing into a high-frequency vibrating liquid blade that tore through the air with a spatial shriek, aimed straight at the pile of vaccines in Jill's arms.
He would impale Ryan's body and this pathetic hope together.
The impact rang out like a hammer striking solid steel ingot.
That liquid blade, sharp enough to slice through aircraft carrier armor, capable of melting Chris's Abyss greatsword, slammed full force into Ryan's back.
No blood. No penetration. It didn't even scratch him.
Ryan's body didn't shift a single millimeter.
HP lock and absolute defense. The power of the rules made themselves known.
The unstoppable liquid blade hit Ryan's coat and crashed into an absolute wall of sighs that existed above the laws of physics. It couldn't advance an inch. The horrific reactive force shattered it to pieces instead.
Ryan didn't even turn around. He just tilted his head slightly and glanced back at the violently churning pale fluid with cold, peripheral contempt.
"You done?"
Within a thousandth of a second of those words, before G-001's mind could even restart, a human hand clamped down on his pale face like an inescapable iron vise.
A visible white shockwave erupted from under Ryan's feet.
One hand pinning G-001's face, Ryan launched forward like a heavy ICBM leaving the tube, smashing through the core laboratory's alloy bulkhead in the most savage way possible.
The warship's hull, meters thick, was tissue paper against Ryan's absolute violence.
They burst out of the Dawn and streaked above the boiling North Pacific, trailing a white sonic boom cloud thousands of meters long.
The brutal kinetic energy and the horrific wind pressure of supersonic speed ripped an agonized scream from the face-pinned G-001.
He tried to liquify. Tried to attack with psychic force. But under Ryan's overwhelming suppression, every bioweapon ability he was so proud of was ground down at the friction limit, unable to take shape.
The ocean parted violently to either side, carving a trench dozens of meters deep.
Ryan held him like that across over a hundred kilometers of open sea, and drove him headfirst into a barren volcanic island.
The island's bedrock shuddered from the apocalyptic impact. Rock strata collapsed instantly, leaving a crater over a hundred meters wide.
Dust billowed. At the center of the crater, Ryan slowly released his grip and straightened up.
Beneath his feet, G-001's pale body, infused with countless ultimate viruses, had been reduced to a nauseating slurry by the sheer, unreasonable force of the beating.
But the vitality of a bioengineered ultimate lifeform was terrifying.
Seconds later, the slurry began writhing and recombining frantically, condensing back into the pale boy.
G-001 knelt in the crater, breathing hard.
A flicker of genuine fear toward this absolute power had surfaced deep in his eyes, but he forced himself to hold onto his last shred of pride, twisting his face into a mocking sneer.
"It's useless. Pure physical attacks can't kill me. My cells can divide infinitely. My form can reassemble infinitely. I am immort..."
"Heh."
Ryan looked down at him and let out a short, clipped laugh. No anger in it. Just the kind of pity you'd show a dead man.
"Wesker said the same thing."
...
Meanwhile. Thousands of kilometers away.
Under a sky streaked with dark red and gold, on a dead-still ocean littered with floating debris.
Albert Wesker sat quietly on a large sheet of metal wreckage.
This man who had once looked down on all of humanity from behind his sunglasses, who had crowned himself "God of the New World," now had his slicked-back hair tangled into a bird's nest. His black leather coat hung off him in shredded strips.
He wasn't controlling the golden spores that could end civilization. He wasn't plotting any grand evolutionary blueprint.
Wesker's head lolled to one side. A long string of cloudy drool trailed from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were vacant and hollow.
"Hehe... golden... butterflies... flying away..."
He giggled like a vegetable, waving both hands through the air the way a toddler would, grabbing at golden spores drifting on the sea breeze.
Two days and one night.
A full thirty-six hours. Over ten thousand cycles of physical obliteration and forced reassembly.
Ryan hadn't killed him on a physical level. That was true.
Ryan had simply used the most savage, most brutal, most unreasonable method possible to beat this "god's" mind and consciousness into irreversible, pulverized dementia.
...
And now, on this shattered volcanic island.
Ryan slowly raised his hand. His long fingers cracked at the knuckles. He looked at the pale boy who had just finished reassembling, that last glimmer of hope still in his eyes, and spoke in a tone as flat and final as a death sentence being read aloud.
"Not sure who lasts longer, you or Wesker. So, ready for round one thousand and one?"
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]