Above the ruins of the ancient Colosseum, the air warped from extre heat.
Andre let out an inhuman roar, each shockwave splintering fine cracks through the surviving stone pillars around him.
His ten-ter-tall body was in a state of grotesque "hyper-evolution," dark-gold keratin layers squirming and thickening across his surface like living things.
Hundreds of tentacles erupted from his back in a frenzy, the sucker-tipped ends sprouting rows of tiny serrated teeth.
"Miranda! Heisenberg! You relics of the old era, every last one of you will beco fuel for the Ouroboros!"
Andre's crystallized face split open, revealing densely packed compound eyes spinning in their sockets.
A tentacle two ters thick slamd into the fifty-ter tal colossus like a battering ram. The colossus raised an arm welded from tons of tank plating to block. The tallic impact rang across Ro, sparks showering down like rain.
Pure kinetic force against kinetic force. The recoil alone vaporized the surrounding rubble into dust.
"Shut up, you overgrown pus-covered octopus."
Inside the core cockpit, Heisenberg yanked the magnetic control lever hard, a flicker of manic energy sparking behind his eyes.
The colossus's twenty-ter chain-saw whip spun up again, its teeth tearing through the air with a shriek that set your teeth on edge.
The whip lashed across Andre's midsection and sheared through a dozen growing tentacles in one stroke. Dark-gold viscous blood gushed out like a fountain, hissing and sizzling where it hit the tal armor.
Andre didn't retreat. He grinned savagely as his remaining tentacles coiled tight around the colossus's ankles, trying to drag it underground.
In that instant of deadlock, a lone figure appeared silently atop the bell tower wreckage.
Ethan Winters looked down at the rampaging beast below, his expression blank. A deep blue glow flickered in his eyes.
His left hand had been almost entirely corroded in the earlier engagent, but now black Mold was visibly reweaving the finger bones back into place.
"This is supposed to be a 'god'?" Ethan murmured. No fear in his voice. Only a bone-deep weariness.
He stood on the edge of the ruined bell tower, the heavy shotgun in his hands still radiating a nacing residual heat.
A few days ago, when he'd learned Mia was pregnant, Ethan had been over the moon, practically bouncing off the walls. But once the excitent faded and he rembered the bioterror attacks raging everywhere outside, the need to get stronger set in.
When he asked Ryan if there was a way to power up fast, Ryan brought him to the sealed chamber housing the gamycete.
Nobody knew what kind of reboot Ethan had gone through behind that locked door in the Star Fire lab.
To bridge the gap in combat experience, Miranda had activated the gamycete's consciousness network. In that illusory space beyond physical dinsions, ti stood still.
Ryan gave him one instruction: kill everything you can see inside the mindscape, or die trying.
The first year, Miranda conjured countless battle-hardened elite soldiers. Ethan lost count of how many tis his heart had been run through, how many tis his limbs had been snapped clean off.
He had no technique. He traded his life for theirs, grinding down every opponent with that "God of War with the Hand Sanitizer" regeneration of his.
As the drugs kept flowing into his body in the real world, the enemies inside the gamycete's illusion began to warp and mutate. The phantoms that had once been human gradually beca towering monstrosities swinging blades of raw flesh.
He fought in an endless rotting swamp until every cell in his body had developed a killer's instinct.
When he could stand up from mountains of corpses without flinching, the enemies in the illusion upgraded again. Miranda dug into the gamycete's unfathomable mory banks and extracted beings that had once been worshipped as "gods."
Inside the illusion, these "gods" had torn Ethan into powder too fine for the naked eye tens of thousands of tis. With each reconstruction, his gaze grew a degree colder, and the Abyss energy inside him fused a degree deeper with the Mold.
He learned to find the physical-layer fractures in a god's defenses. He learned to dismantle divine thrones with the most primal violence imaginable.
"This level of mutation wouldn't even count as an appetizer in the gamycete's dreamscape." Ethan whispered, the mory of tearing apart the last "dark god" with his bare hands flashing through his mind.
A dying tentacle from Andre lanced through the air toward him, its tip shrieking with enough force to shred tal.
Ethan didn't even look up. His left hand shot out like lightning, catching the barbed tentacle bare-handed. Pure physical grip. The Mold in his palm hardened instantly, pinning it in midair. A single squeeze, and the tentacle that could have punched through a tank burst into blood mist.
"I've killed more gods and torn down more thrones than you've seen buildings in your entire life."
Ethan racked the slide hard. Two osmium alloy slugs loaded with Abyss dissolving enzy chambered with a solid click. He fired both barrels almost simultaneously, twin muzzle flashes erupting as the slugs punched clean through Andre's last two pulsing compound eyes.
The dissolving enzy detonated inside the monster's body like an incendiary charge. The dark-gold crystal layers disintegrated under the rampant corrosion, peeling apart sheet by sheet.
Andre let out one final howl of defiance before his entire body violently swelled and collapsed into charred slag.
With the fall of this "false god," the dark-gold fungal carpet across the entire southern European theater began to wither and carbonize.
Ethan dropped from the rooftop. The ground cratered under his feet on impact, an aftershock from power he hadn't fully reined in yet.
He didn't spare a glance at the smoking pile of at. He just looked down at his hands, hands that hadn't belonged to a human being for a long ti now.
Heisenberg jumped out of the tal colossus's core cockpit, the ember of his cigar glowing and dimming. "That look in your eyes... reminds of Miranda before she lost it. The way she used to look at ants."
Ethan spat a mouthful of bloody saliva. His tone was flat. "Just give a minute to co down."
Jill's steady, asured voice ca through the comm, carrying a thread of relief. "Southern Europe cleared. Wesker's ambition just hit its first full stop right here."
"Clean work, Ethan. You've evolved even more than I expected. Hold position and stay alert. This front is secure, but the other two theaters... the show's just getting started."
Ethan raised his head and looked east.
Sowhere out there, a blizzard that could swallow the world was brewing.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon/NiaXD]
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