The bitter wind of Edonia carried the acrid stench of gunpowder and blood, scraping mercilessly across the devastated streets. Artillery fire still rumbled dully through the night sky. The small Eastern European town had long since become a living hell under the C-Virus's rampage.
Jake Muller trailed behind Sherry and Becky, picking his way unevenly over rubble and spent shell casings. His right arm, burned raw by corrosive fluid, had stopped smoking. Fresh granulation tissue knitted together beneath a thin layer of scabbing.
Even he found the inhuman healing speed hard to believe, but right now his mind was stuck on one thing: that promise of five hundred million dollars.
For a mercenary who'd clawed his way up through warzones since childhood, who'd risked his neck for a few hundred bucks, the number was pure fantasy. So fantastical that even if the two girls leading the way turned out to be man-eating demons, he'd follow them straight into hell without a second thought.
Just as the three of them were about to cut through a residential district and reach the temporary extraction point outside the city, a savage burst of gunfire shattered the dead silence of the alleyway.
It wasn't the sloppy full-auto spray of the resistance fighters. These were disciplined, tactically precise semi-auto shots, but the rhythm betrayed a desperation that couldn't be hidden.
Behind a pile of rubble not far ahead, two battered figures were pinned down by dozens of mutated J'avo. The situation had gone completely sideways.
They were two soldiers in BSAA uniforms, their tactical vests smeared with purple slime and the blood of their teammates.
The young Piers Nivans knelt on one knee, his assault rifle spitting fire in furious bursts as he fought to cover the hulking man behind him. His voice had gone hoarse from shouting. Three magazines spent, and the things kept coming like they couldn't feel pain.
"Captain! Shoot! We have to fight our way out of here!" Piers screamed himself raw, trying to reignite the fight in the man at his back.
But the man he was protecting with his life, built like a bull, just sat there with hollow eyes in the shadows.
That was Chris Redfield. The legendary hero who'd torn across bioterror battlefields around the globe and personally buried countless conspiracies along the way.
But now, after watching Alpha Team get played by the fake Ada, after seeing every last one of them mutate into monsters, his mind had shattered completely.
The two of them had originally pulled back to the rear, but when Chris came to, he'd bolted back into the combat zone like a man possessed. Piers had no choice but to follow, and that's how they'd ended up here.
Chris sat like a hollow shell, deaf to the gunfire and the shrieking monsters around him, clutching his head and trembling.
Piers's rifle clicked on an empty chamber. He reached for his belt and found the last backup magazine already spent.
Several mutants whose arms had warped into massive bone blades shrieked and launched themselves from above, their crimson compound eyes glinting with bloodlust. A heavy bone axe came whistling down, about to split Piers's skull along with the rubble beneath him.
Piers gritted his teeth and drew the tactical knife from his thigh holster, ready to meet his death. If he was going to die, he'd die in front of Chris.
In that razor-thin instant, a pale blue electromagnetic streak tore across the dark sky at near-teleportation speed, its devastating kinetic force punching clean through the airborne creature's skull.
There was no spray of blood. The superheated electromagnetic pulse vaporized the mutant's head and half its torso into red mist on contact.
A visible ring of blue arcs detonated through the air, swatting the next wave of lunging creatures away like ragdolls.
Piers froze. He stared blankly at the chunks of meat splattered at his feet, then turned his head to follow the trajectory back to its source.
Sherry emerged from the fog and darkness, her footsteps so light they made no sound. In one fluid motion she sheathed her long blade with a crisp click.
Behind her, perched on a broken wall, Becky stood with a heavy sniper rifle still trailing blue arcs of electricity, like a cold-eyed reaper.
"BSAA North America, Vice-Captain Piers Nivans. Right?" Sherry looked at the stunned young man, her tone so flat she might have been reading off a shipping label.
"Uncle Ryan told us to pick you two up on the way out. Looks like we got here just in time."
Piers stared at the Star Fire insignia glowing faintly on the two girls' chests, and a wild surge of relief hit him.
As BSAA front-line elite who'd spent his career fighting bioterrorism, he knew exactly what the name Starfire Pharma meant in today's world.
It wasn't just another pharmaceutical giant. It was a terrifying war machine that held the keys to humanity's genetic future and weapons that made everything else look like sticks and stones.
"Star Fire... thank you! Please, save the Captain, he's in bad shape!" Piers grabbed at the lifeline like a drowning man, his voice shaking.
Jake strolled up from behind Sherry with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the bearded man curled up against the wall.
The moment he got a clear look at Chris's wrecked face, Jake's pupils contracted sharply.
He didn't know why, but his blood felt like it was boiling. His heart started hammering out of control.
Jake forced down the inexplicable agitation clawing at his nerves, clicking his tongue irritably to cover it up.
"Hey, who's the big guy? Looks like some bum who drank bad moonshine and passed out in a dumpster for three years."
"Chris Redfield. BSAA legend." Sherry answered flatly. "Right now, though, he's just a lost soul."
Jake let out a cold laugh and said nothing more, but deep in his eyes flickered a hostility even he didn't notice.
A black Star Fire heavy tiltrotor descended silently from the fog, its powerful downdraft sending rubble skittering in every direction.
The cabin doors slid open on both sides. Several fully armed Shadow Team operators dropped out like ghosts, instantly locking down every defensive angle around the perimeter.
With the help of two Star Fire soldiers, Piers carried the barely conscious Chris into the cabin and set him down on a sleek metal bench.
"Give him a shot of Dawn Type III." Becky stowed her sniper rifle and stepped inside, issuing the order to the onboard medic without warmth. "It's a high-potency enhancement serum. Might snap his damaged brain back to some kind of clarity."
The cold needle pierced Chris's neck and pale blue fluid pushed into his vein. The big man's body seized once on instinct, then his clenched brow gradually relaxed as he sank into a deep unconsciousness. His breathing steadied noticeably.
The tiltrotor let out a low roar as its massive thrust lifted the airframe straight up through the cloud layer. The hellscape of Edonia shrank rapidly below them.
Piers leaned against the cabin wall and watched the distant firelight recede through the porthole. The tension drained out of him all at once, and exhaustion hit him like a tidal wave.
But just as everyone thought they'd made it out clean, a shrill top-priority radar alarm screamed through the cockpit.
Red light strobed through the cabin. The radar screen lit up with over a dozen red blips marking high-energy biological signatures and heat-source tracks.
"Neo-Umbrella interceptors. These lunatics are like flies you can't shake." Becky's eyes went cold as she strode to the fire-control console.
Jake pressed his face to the porthole and felt his pupils blow wide.
Outside, more than a dozen massive flying mutants beat rotting flesh-wings through the clouds, fading in and out of view. The things people called "Phantoms" spat streams of green corrosive acid that traced lethal arcs through the rain.
And alongside them, three aggressively styled gunships in bizarre paint schemes clung tight to the tiltrotor's tail.
A flash from the weapon pylon of the lead helicopter, and several small heat-seeking missiles roared off the rails, trailing fire.
The missiles carved eerie curves through the air, ripping through the rain, screaming straight for the tiltrotor's rear engines.
"Shit! They're not messing around! That kind of firepower, we're dead! Can this thing take a missile hit?!" Jake white-knuckled his harness, face drained of color.
For a mercenary used to street-level infantry fights in the mud, a high-altitude pursuit with heavy ordnance was way outside his comfort zone.
"Shut up and stop acting like you've never seen real hardware." Becky didn't even glance at the window, her fingers flying across the virtual keyboard.
She was calm. Like she was playing a boring video game. Then she pressed a red physical button at the center of the console.
Thick composite armor panels on both sides of the tiltrotor slid inward, revealing hidden clusters of complex mechanical arrays.
They weren't conventional guns. They were Heisenberg Heavy Industries' latest development: omnidirectional electromagnetic laser matrix systems.
"Let's show these rejects still using gunpowder and bargain-bin mutants what next-generation warfare actually looks like."
The words had barely left Becky's mouth. No deafening roar of cannons. No clouds of smoke.
Just several blindingly thick beams of deep blue high-energy laser erupting from the matrix, carving perfectly straight geometric lines through the black sea of clouds.
The incoming missiles didn't even make it within fifty meters of the hull before the lasers caught them and detonated them mid-flight.
Several brilliant fireballs bloomed in the air, and the shockwave rocked the tiltrotor slightly.
But that was just the beginning. The laser matrix turrets, locked on by the smart fire-control system, began sweeping in rapid micro-adjustments.
The massive flying mutants that came shrieking in were sliced apart like a hot knife through butter the instant they touched the blue beams. Charred stumps and severed limbs rained down through the clouds in a shower of black blood.
Then the beams locked onto the three gunships trying to pull up and evade. The high-energy lasers punched straight through their cockpits and engine fuel tanks, ignoring the bolt-on armor entirely, vaporizing each one into a massive fireball of burning wreckage.
From ambush to total annihilation: less than ten seconds.
The Star Fire tiltrotor hadn't deviated from its course by a single degree. It simply bulldozed through the intercept and continued at full speed toward Romania.
Jake stood there with his mouth hanging open, staring at the fireball debris falling through the sky outside like some kind of fireworks show. He couldn't form a single word for a long time.
He looked at Sherry sitting across from him, expression unchanged. Then at Becky, already powering down the fire-control system.
It finally sank in. Five hundred million dollars, to an organization called Star Fire, was probably pocket change.
He'd gotten himself tangled up with something truly, absurdly massive.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]