The rumble of the train engine faded into the depths of the tunnel, carrying away the last few people Ryan knew in Raccoon City. And with them, his last reason to hold back.
On the underground platform, muzzle flash tore the darkness apart.
The Gatling's barrels blurred into a single spinning phantom under the electric motor's scream. Six thousand rounds per minute turned the steel beast into something that sounded like fabric ripping on a cosmic scale. Brass casings poured from the ejection port in a golden waterfall, clattering across the metal grating, piling into a small mountain around Ryan's boots.
Gunsmoke choked the air. The barrels glowed a dull, angry red from friction and heat.
Pure violence, nothing else. A solid curtain of metal slammed into the two apex bioweapons ahead of him.
But Ryan knew better than anyone: the Gatling looked terrifying. Against these two, it was suppression fire, nothing more. Killing them would take something bigger.
Nemesis bulled forward into the storm. Heavy-caliber rounds punched into its shredded green coat and the pale, hardened muscle beneath, ripping away clouds of blood mist and chunks of tissue, but the thing's steps never faltered. Its lone red eye stayed nailed to Ryan, hatred so thick it looked ready to bleed.
Beside it, G3 William had gone fully berserk. The massive eyeball on its right shoulder flinched and wept under the bullet impacts. It shielded the weak point with its mutated left arm, three bone-white claws each a meter long, and bulldozed forward through metal benches and support columns, grinding everything to scrap.
Too close.
Ten meters. Eight. Five.
Nemesis struck first. A guttural roar, and that grotesque right arm, a patchwork of dark red tentacles forcibly fused and stitched together, swung high and came hammering down like a siege ram, aimed to flatten Ryan and the gun both.
A clean hit would've pancaked an armored vehicle, let alone a man.
Ryan's eyes sharpened. Every coiled muscle fired at once. He didn't try to block. Both hands released the Gatling's carry handle, letting the heavy killing machine drop, and he used that split-second of freed momentum to kick off hard. His body skimmed the brass-littered floor in a brutal combat roll to the left, pushing the limits of what joints and tendons could take.
CLANG-BOOM.
Nemesis's claw crushed the Gatling dead center. The gun body shattered, parts and twisted barrel fragments spraying in every direction.
But the hate behind that swing carried too much force. After smashing through the gun, inertia dragged the massive arm forward in a horizontal sweep, impossible to pull back.
And directly in that path stood William, who'd just charged through the gunfire from the opposite side.
WHAM.
The wet, heavy crack of flesh on flesh.
Nemesis's deformed right arm caught William square in the gut.
That same gut still carried the gaping wound Nemesis had ripped open on the rooftop, barely half-healed. The blow tore it wide again, peeling away a slab of hardened grey tissue along with it.
Dark green fluid and shredded meat erupted from William's abdomen like a burst hydrant, drenching Nemesis's face.
Time seemed to stop.
William had already been driven to the brink. No virus sample, no Sherry, one eye blown out by Ryan's grenade. All that unfocused rage found a new target the instant that fist connected.
Hatred, redirected.
A shriek ripped from William's throat, shrill and inhuman. It didn't even acknowledge the fluid pouring from its gut. The massive eyeball on its right shoulder swiveled toward Nemesis, the pupil flooded with killing intent.
William's mutated left arm rose high. Three bone-white claws, each meters long, curved like reaper's scythes, came screaming down toward Nemesis's chest with enough force to level a building.
CRACK.
Bone splintering echoed across the open platform.
All three claws punched clean through Nemesis's torso and burst from its back. William thrashed its left arm and hurled Nemesis, all three meters and several tons of it, into the air like a rag doll.
The agony of a perforated chest ripped a howl from Nemesis that rang off every wall.
Then something worse happened.
The Nemesis parasite, sensing its host on the edge of death, lost all restraint. The parasitic core buried in the chest cavity, the thing that had replaced the creature's heart, erupted with a sick, dark red glow.
A sound like wet canvas tearing, over and over. Dozens of thick, barbed tentacles, dark red and glistening, came flooding from the puncture wounds in Nemesis's chest like a dam giving way.
The tentacles moved with their own intelligence. They didn't attack William's claws. Instead they swarmed up William's arm like a colony of maddened snakes, wrapping its massive body, binding tight. Then the barbs sank in, boring deep into William's flesh, drinking every scrap of biomass they could reach.
Ryan, crouched behind a reinforced support column a dozen meters back, wiped dust from his face, leaned out, and saw the whole thing.
"What the f..."
His eye twitched. The profanity slipped out on reflex.
They were merging?
He'd played the games more times than he could count. This was never in any script.
Two of Umbrella's supreme viral creations collided in a reaction their own creators could never have predicted.
The G-Virus: infinite proliferation, rapid mutation, genetic rewriting at the cellular level.
The Nemesis parasite: absolute control, forced host modification, and a will to survive that bordered on immortal.
When William's G-infected blood met the parasite's tentacles, they didn't reject each other. They devoured each other. Compromised. Merged.
In under twenty seconds, the platform became a theater of biological horror beyond anything a sane mind could process.
Nemesis's body liquefied, slumping over William's frame like molten slag. Dark red tentacles wove into William's pale, overgrown muscle tissue, stitching and fusing. Broken bones regrew thicker and burst through skin, layering into slabs of bone armor as heavy and white as fortress walls.
The massive eyeball from William's shoulder was crushed downward, settling deep in the chest cavity. The Nemesis parasite's pulsing core merged with the G-Virus nucleus just above it, forming a huge, throbbing tumor that glowed a faint, sickly purple.
One last grinding pop of misaligned bone, and the two creatures became one.
Dozens of meters tall. Sheathed in pale bone armor. A giant eye and a beating heart exposed at its chest. Scores of thick tentacles writhing from every surface.
G-Nemesis. Born.
Its body nearly scraped the ceiling. The pressure rolling off it made the air feel like syrup.
G-Nemesis idly flicked a few tentacles behind its back.
BOOM.
The reinforced concrete pillars, each one thick enough that three men linking arms couldn't encircle them, snapped at the waist like dry crackers. Rubble and rebar rained from the ceiling. The entire underground space groaned, ready to collapse.
"That size. That... everything." Ryan stared up at it. "Buddy, are you sure this is Resident Evil and not some Lovecraft shit?"
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