"Warning: primary control system offline. Sub-level nuclear reactor core temperature has exceeded critical threshold. Facility-wide self-destruct countdown: sixty seconds."
The flat, affectless female voice echoed through the crumbling platform like a death warrant stamped by a machine.
Ryan stared up at the thing filling the platform. G-Nemesis. A mountain of meat dozens of meters tall, idly swinging a dozen thick tentacles, twisting the heavy steel maintenance ladders into pretzels and shredding them to scrap. Every step it took dented the reinforced steel plating deep into the subfloor.
No Gatling was solving this. No Desert Eagle. The thing was a walking meat grinder.
But panic wasn't what Ryan felt. He'd already mapped his exit.
Back when he'd been hosing down William and Nemesis with the Gatling, he'd been scanning escape routes on the side. His vision cut through the dozens of meters of reinforced concrete and bedrock like they were frosted glass, and locked onto what hid behind a sealed blast door at the platform's far end.
A vertical freight shaft. Thirty meters across.
Umbrella's dedicated channel for hauling large test subjects to the surface under cover of night. Better yet, tracing the shaft upward, he could see exactly where it opened: straight to the surface of Raccoon City, right beneath the massive crater near Gun Shop Kendo, the one blown open during the earlier biohazard chaos.
"No time to play, big guy."
He ripped a high-explosive grenade free, bit the pin out, and hurled it dead at the giant eyeball in G-Nemesis's chest.
A tentacle swatted the grenade out of the air and detonated it early. No damage, but the flash and smoke bought him a blind spot.
Ryan exploded from cover. Legs driving with everything they had, he threaded through falling rubble at a dead sprint, headed for the control console at the platform's far end.
"Move!"
A sliding tackle ducked him under a bone spur that would have cut him in half. His fist smashed through the console's safety glass and he yanked the heavy red lever marked EMERGENCY LIFT.
Gears screamed. Hydraulics groaned. The blast door blew open and a massive metal platform, rated for dozens of tons, rose from the shaft on thick hydraulic arms and locked flush with the platform edge.
Ryan vaulted onto it without breaking stride.
"Warning: self-destruct countdown: thirty seconds."
The lift lurched upward, climbing fast into the vertical shaft.
G-Nemesis followed. It launched itself with a vertical leap that defied every law governing something that size, cleared the gap, and slammed down on the opposite end of the platform.
BOOM.
Hundreds of tons hit at once. The platform pitched hard, specialty steel cables at all four corners shrieking under the strain, throwing sparks.
"You persistent piece of shit."
Ryan white-knuckled the reinforced hydraulic railing and looked up. His vision cut through the rock overhead. The crater near Gun Shop Kendo was still over two hundred meters above them.
At the lift's current speed, they'd make it halfway before the clock ran out.
Below, the annihilation rising from the reactor core climbed the shaft like a waking dragon. Searing white light bled up through the metal grating under his feet.
"Ten. Nine. Eight..."
Ryan holstered the Desert Eagle. One deep breath. He curled into a ball, locked both hands around the thickest crossbeam on the platform's underside, and cranked every muscle in his body to the edge of tearing.
"Three. Two. One."
"Self-destruct sequence: initiated."
The reactor core collapsed.
BOOM.
Force beyond language hit the bottom of the platform in a fraction of a millisecond.
The vertical shaft became a gun barrel hundreds of meters long. The nuclear detonation's plasma wave and superheated blast front were the primer charge. The platform carrying Ryan and G-Nemesis was the only round in the chamber.
Ryan's eardrums ruptured instantly. His vision flooded red.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The platform rocketed up the shaft, punching through five emergency containment doors designed to seal biohazard breaches. Half a meter of blast-proof steel might as well have been candy wrappers. Each one burst into a shower of glowing fragments.
The instant that force hit, the spike in cranial pressure blacked Ryan out.
Half a second of nothing.
In that half second, even with the HP lock forcing his body to persist, the supersonic acceleration put him through a brutal cycle of destruction and repair: bones shattered and re-knit, lungs compressed flat and reinflated. The g-forces pinned him to the crossbeam like a pressed flower.
G-Nemesis, on the far end of the platform, showed its own desperate survival instinct. The ultimate fusion of G-Virus and parasite, it felt the heat and kinetic shock and pulled every tentacle inward, wrapping them tight around its core tumor in a dense cocoon. Its biological will forced out a thick dark green mucus that hardened across its surface into a heavy, keratinized shell. The cost was visible: its body shrank dramatically, all remaining life energy compressed into that armored husk.
The thing had evolved a structure capable of surviving the fringe of a miniature nuclear blast.
On the surface. Raccoon City.
The street around Gun Shop Kendo had long since crumbled to rubble. The hundred-meter crater sat quiet, leaking thin tendrils of toxic vapor.
Then the ground shook without warning.
The rock at the bottom of the crater disintegrated. A column of red-hot flame, scalding steam, and shredded metal punched upward from the abyss with a sonic boom that split the air, blowing through the surface like a cork from a bottle.
The heavy lift platform erupted from the crater and kept going, riding enough kinetic energy to flip an entire city block, screaming toward the clouds.
The instant it cleared the shaft walls and lost their support, internal stress tore the platform apart in midair.
Ryan and G-Nemesis launched free like two shells fired from the same cannon, flung hundreds of meters into the night sky by raw inertia.
Below them, the familiar blocks around Gun Shop Kendo had vanished. The nearby buildings were nothing but charred concrete skeletons, swaying, ready to fall. Heat thick enough to scorch lung tissue hung in the air. The asphalt streets had crystallized under the temperature, reflecting the glow with an alien shimmer.