Carlos's voice tore through the comms, half-shout, half-growl, the crack of gunfire and rounds hammering concrete nearly drowning him out. "Ryan! They're all pushing into the lobby! Three heavy machine guns set up at the stairwell, two sniper teams behind the columns, and they're driving for the lower level! Jill and I can't hold this!"
Ryan was already moving.
X-ray vision stretched out to its full range as he ran, painting a hundred meters of the building in sharp detail. Jill, tucked behind the corner of the main stairwell landing, her right side bleeding through the bandaging again. She was bracing herself against the wall with her left hand, right arm steady, picking her shots, each one forcing back whoever was pushing hardest down the stairs. Carlos, anchored at the fire door to the lower level, tourniquet soaked through on his left arm, running the rifle one-handed, using his body to block the passage behind him.
"I'm here!"
He dropped into cover beside Jill and pressed a hand to her side. The wound had opened. "You tore it again. Didn't I tell you not to move around?"
She knocked his hand away, leaned out, and put a round through the chest of a man charging down the stairs. "Focus. There's too many of them."
He scanned through the gaps in the cover. The lobby above was packed, twenty-plus fighters arranged in overlapping waves, three heavy machine guns hammering the stairwell without pause, chewing the concrete to dust. The two sniper teams were tucked behind the columns on either side, barrels locked on every angle of the landing. Anything that came up got hit before it cleared the corner.
"Two snipers behind the left column, two behind the right, four gunners behind the steps at the entrance." He kept his voice low, fast. "Jill, draw the right-side snipers, make them pull back. Carlos, suppress the left-side gunners. I'll handle the rest."
Neither of them hesitated.
Jill swung out and fired twice, both rounds cracking into the right column, driving the snipers behind it. Carlos cut loose with the rifle one-handed, burning a full mag across the entrance and pinning the machine gun crews down.
Ryan broke from cover and went straight up the stairs into the fire.
Two rounds hit him center mass. The pain was immediate and total, like being struck with a sledgehammer, but his legs didn't stop. He raised the pistol and fired four times. Both snipers on the right, both machine gunners on the left. None of them had time to react. Four shots, four bodies.
Carlos watched from behind cover and couldn't find words. He'd seen it once already and it still didn't make sense, watching Ryan take rifle rounds to the chest, mid-charge, and come out shooting straighter than before.
Without the heavy weapons, the remaining fighters lost their shape. Jill and Carlos pushed the pressure up, and together the three of them drove the assault back into the lobby.
But that was only the first wave.
Two minutes later, more boots on the stairs. Fresh troops, new gun emplacements, the same crushing weight of fire. They knew better than to use anything that could spread, not with their target somewhere below, so they fell back on numbers, sending men down in rotating waves, grinding against three people who were already hurt and already bleeding.
Four charges in ten minutes. The stairwell filled with bodies. Spent brass covered the floor in a solid layer.
Carlos's right arm was shaking from holding the rifle one-handed for so long. Jill had gone white, her breathing shallow, running on stubbornness. Ryan had taken three more rounds to the chest across those ten minutes and was still standing straight, still shooting clean.
The fifth wave didn't come.
Through the wall, he watched the enemy shift. Half of them pulled smoke grenades. The other half swapped to thermal imaging helmets.
"Smoke incoming," he said. "They're running thermal. Stay in cover, they'll track body heat."
The grenades came down the stairs before he finished, a dozen of them tumbling end over end, and the white smoke bloomed and filled the stairwell completely. Visibility dropped to nothing in seconds.
"They're pushing through the smoke!" Carlos was already raising his rifle.
"Hold your fire. Save the ammo."
The footsteps came, steady and close, the thermal rigs letting them walk through the white without slowing down. Tight formation, methodical, no hesitation.
They had no idea that the smoke did nothing to Ryan's vision either. No helmet, no lag, no narrow field of view. Every man in the white showed up clean, position, muzzle direction, the faint bloom of heat through the scope on each rifle.
They could see heat. He could see everything.
"Stay in cover. Move when I say."
He went up the stairs without a sound, keeping low, and started working through the front of their formation from inside the smoke. One shot per man, same spot every time. The front rank dropped and the rank behind them kept advancing on thermal, stepping over the bodies, still pushing forward.
Thirty seconds. Eight men down, silent.
The survivors finally registered the casualties and opened up blind, spraying into the white. He marked four more and dropped them.
"Pull back! There's something in the smoke! Thermal's useless!" The commander's voice cracked.
Too late. Ryan was already at the top of the stairs, inside the lobby, moving through the white at full speed. The smoke that was supposed to give them the advantage had flipped completely, blinding them, leaving him untouched.
Jill and Carlos came up behind him through the thinning haze and they cleared the rest of the lobby together.
Carlos leaned against a column, chest heaving. "Idiots. Thought smoke and thermal was some kind of winning move."
Jill let out a slow breath and stumbled slightly. Ryan caught her before she went down and eased her back against the wall, working the bandaging on her side again. "I told you not to move around."
She looked up at him and managed a tired pull at the corner of her mouth. Her hand found the dents in his vest, pressing lightly at the impact points. "You ran straight into their guns."
"That's different."
"Is it."
Then Tyrell's voice came through the comms, ragged and stretched thin. "Ryan! More of them through the ventilation in the courtyard! At least six! I can't move, I can't stop them, they're almost at the ward!"
Kendo followed on top of him. "Ryan! They're at the door! I'm holding but there's too many!"
Ryan went cold. He'd just cleared the lobby. While he was up here, they'd sent a second flank around the other way, knowing exactly where his attention would be.
He turned for the stairs.
The building shook.
A sound ripped through the hospital from the direction of the entrance, metal tearing under something enormous, and the walls vibrated with it. On the heels of that came screaming through the comms, the crunch of bone, and underneath both of those a wet dissolving hiss, sticky and corrosive, a sound that sat wrong in the back of the teeth.
Carlos snapped his rifle up at the entrance, sweat on his temple. "What the hell was that? What else do these people have?"
Ryan closed his eyes and pushed his X-ray vision through the walls, out through the lobby, out through the entrance, into the street.
His grip went tight on the pistol.
Outside, in the wreckage of the armored vehicles that were still burning, something stood.
It was close to five meters tall. The shape was wrong in every way, the human frame it had once been buried under layers of warped muscle and hardened chitin, the pale tissue threaded through with thick black veins running close to the surface. Where its head had been, a split jaw had opened wide, the serrated teeth inside slick with dark green fluid that dripped to the pavement and ate through it, leaving craters trailing white smoke. The two massive forelimbs had extended into long tentacles, still draped with torn armor plating and pieces of the men it had just walked through.
He knew it. He'd put it down twice already, driven it through its limits, watched it mutate under the accumulated damage.
It had finished the last mutation now.
Third form.