Black rain hammered down, scouring the city's remains.
G-Nemesis's roars had lost their original authority, degenerating into something hysterical. The flesh-wings on its back tore through the curtain of rain, and dozens of thick tentacles whipped downward like frenzied black pythons, blanketing the sky as they closed in on Ryan.
He wasn't looking at it. His gaze was half-lidded, resting quietly on his own right hand, as though the killing intent flooding the air around him were nothing more than a light breeze.
The stinking wind pressure bore down on his face. Ryan finally moved.
His feet traced a strange, weightless rhythm. A slight turn of the shoulders, a half-step, a lean back. He moved like he was strolling through his own backyard.
Whoosh.
Tentacles shattered the ground but couldn't graze the hem of his shirt. In Ryan's eyes, these attacks that had once chased him to the edge of death now played out in clumsy slow motion.
"Too slow."
He sighed, looked up, and reached out with his right hand, closing his fingers loosely around the empty air.
A faint, wet pop. The primary tentacle, thicker than a thigh and bristling with barbs, detonated into a cloud of dark green blood mist in his palm, as easy as crushing an overripe berry.
G-Nemesis's massive eyeball contracted violently. It wasn't convinced. Its five-meter frame kicked off the ground hard enough to crack it, transforming into a roaring mountain of flesh that hurtled forward with world-ending momentum.
This same charge had ground a subway platform to powder.
Ryan stood where he was, posture straight, relaxed. He watched the wall of meat bearing down on him and extended his left hand, slow and casual.
BOOM.
Absolute motion met absolute stillness in a catastrophic collision.
A visible ring of white shockwave exploded outward from Ryan, freezing the black rain mid-fall and forming a vast vacuum dome overhead.
The crystallized rock beneath his feet crumbled to nothing, but his left hand, pressed against the monster's enormous bone jaw, didn't budge. A five-meter ultimate bioweapon, hundreds of tons of impact force, pinned in place by a single hand.
The monster howled, its hind legs gouging deep furrows in the mud, unable to advance a single inch.
"That all you've got?"
Ryan tilted his head, and a mocking grin spread across his face.
He pulled back his left hand and swung the right in a backhand arc.
CRACK.
The sharp report of a slap, dripping with contempt, split the noise of the rainy night.
Monstrous force erupted. G-Nemesis's massive body lifted clean off the ground from that single blow, tumbling through the air like a broken bundle of rags for a dozen meters before crashing into the scorched earth.
Ryan shook out his wrist and walked toward it through the mud, unhurried.
The monster struggled upright. Half the bone plating on its face had shattered, and black fleshy granules squirmed frantically beneath. It roared and swung its deformed left arm with its three bone claws, each several meters long, chopping straight down at Ryan's head.
Ryan closed the distance instead of retreating. His body flickered, one foot landing precisely on the joint of the monster's overextended left arm, and both hands locked around the longest, sharpest bone scythe like iron clamps.
"Nice blade you've got." He looked into the monster's single terrified eye, his voice soft. "Mind if I borrow it?"
He torqued his core and ripped.
CRACK... SQUELCH.
A sound that set teeth on edge, bone tearing free from flesh, and the three-meter bone scythe wrenched clean from the monster's arm at the root. Warm black blood fountained into the air.
The monster screamed, a shriek pushed to the absolute limit of agony.
Ryan flipped the still-dripping scythe into a reverse grip, rotated his wrist without a moment's pause, and drove the tip through the monster's left shoulder.
Thunk.
"That one's for busting through my apartment wall." His tone was flat, like stating a fact.
The monster thrashed, but discovered with dawning horror that Ryan's savage force was pouring in through the wound. Its flesh grayed at visible speed, those vaunted regenerative cells withering and dying under a killing frost.
He pulled the scythe free in a spray of blood and drove it into the monster's right knee.
Thunk.
"That one's for chasing me across the rooftop."
The monster collapsed to its knees, its right leg dead gray from the joint down.
He pulled free and stabbed a third time, pinning it to the ground.
Thunk.
"And that's for the sewers."
Ashen decay consumed the monster's entire body. The pulsing parasitic core at its center began to shrivel.
Ryan wrenched the scythe out and looked down at the heap of ruined flesh beneath him.
"And last... interest on the beating you gave me a minute ago."
SQUELCH.
The sharp bone blade punched mercilessly through the primary eyeball in the monster's chest, and dark green pus erupted outward.
This ultimate nightmare, this fusion of two apex viruses, finally understood fear. The kind carved into the soul of every carbon-based organism, a terror that transcended even viral instinct.
It abandoned dignity, abandoned the kill, and what remained was the barest survival drive. It dragged half a gray, crumbling carcass over onto its belly and used its last broken tentacle stumps to worm through the mud like a pathetic grub, crawling away from Ryan toward the crater's edge with everything it had.
Ryan stood where he was, watching the long ashen-white blood trail it left in the dirt.
"Chased me all this way, and now you want to run?"
He held the three-meter bone scythe inverted in one hand.
He walked forward, dragging the blade behind him, its sharp tip scoring the crystallized scorched earth and throwing a line of sparks. The trail of fire in the pitch-black rainy night was cold beyond measure.
Ten meters from the monster.
Ryan bent his knees and the ground cratered beneath him. He launched upward against the rain, soaring into the air. Under the dark red sky, his silhouette cut a razor-sharp outline.
Both hands on the grip, borrowing the full weight of gravity, he swung a lethal arc through the air, a perfect full moon of light.
Repaid in kind.
Shhhhk.
No resistance, barely any sound.
A brutal, exquisite smoothness. The bone scythe entered at the base of the monster's skull and slid through spine, core, and pelvis, parting everything in its path the way a hot knife goes through butter.
Clean in half.
Ryan landed steady on his feet.
He let go, and the blood-caked scythe clanged against the scorched earth.
He didn't spare the corpse another glance. He brushed the dust off the front of his shirt, shoved both hands into the torn pockets of his ruined pants, and walked out of the wreckage at an easy pace.
Behind him, G-Nemesis's bisected remains toppled.
The parasitic core pulsed one final time and went dark.
The next second, the entire mass of rotten flesh began to shrink and wither, as if every drop of moisture had been sucked away. Blood and muscle crumbled into gray-white powder that washed with the black rain into the depths of the crater.
The wind blew, and nothing was left.
Ryan walked through the storm without looking back. Behind him was hell. Ahead was the rain.
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