In the morning light off the coast of Lanshiang, the deck of the Star Fire recovery vessel held a rare moment of peace.
Ryan pushed a plate of sliced cake toward Sherry and Becky, whose eyes lit up. He picked up his own glass of bourbon.
The smooth burn traced down his throat and chased out the last of the deep-sea cold.
At the long table nearby, Leon and Chris clinked glasses. Helena and Piers were working through cuts of premium wagyu.
After dancing with death, this band of elites who'd been walking the razor's edge of despair finally had a moment to breathe.
"Ryan, living like this almost makes me feel guilty." Leon bit into a dripping piece of beef and looked out at the calm sea. "I almost forgot we're still at war. Seriously though, with Simmons dead, Washington's probably a total mess right now. Graham's gonna have a hell of a time cleaning up The Family."
"That's not our problem anymore. Let someone else handle the mop-up. You all earned it!" Ryan raised his glass with a grin. Crystal clinked across the deck. "Double bonuses for everyone on this op. Take it easy for a while."
"That's the Ryan I know. Big spender." Leon set down his glass and stretched long and hard. "Skip the bonus for me though. My salary as a direct-report agent is already ridiculous. You really want to treat me? Put in a word with Graham to get me a few days off. I never want to set foot on any vehicle ever again."
"Same here." Chris looked at his own forearm, veins standing out hard under the Dawn Type III enhancement, a note of reflection in his voice. "BSAA HQ sent me three strategic briefings this morning. Every single one had Starfire Pharma listed as the top authorization authority. Ryan, you're not just a boss anymore. The entire global anti-bioterrorism defense line is effectively under your control."
"So go on vacation without a worry. If the sky falls, Star Fire can hold it up."
Ryan was about to continue when the holographic projector at the center of the deck erupted without warning into a blinding crimson glare.
A piercing alarm wail split the air. Jill's face changed. This was Star Fire's highest-level disaster alert.
Since the system had been designed, it had never once been triggered in the field.
The easy atmosphere was severed like a blade had cut through it.
The fork froze in Sherry's hand. Half a piece of cake dropped onto her plate.
Chris kicked his chair back on reflex, snatched up the tungsten-steel rifle beside him, and the killing edge that had just faded from his eyes boiled right back.
The holographic display cut through heavy electromagnetic static to a violently shaking feed.
On screen, Carlos, the Shadow Force commander stationed in Africa on perimeter surveillance, was gasping for air.
His Star Fire third-gen heavy armor, rated to tank heavy machine gun fire, looked like it had been eaten through by concentrated acid. The surface was cratered and pitted. Half his face was caked in thick black blood.
"Boss..." Carlos's voice scraped like sandpaper. Behind him, deafening explosions, collapsing buildings, and a skin-crawling sound like millions of insects gnawing through bone.
"Carlos, report! Is it the African division under attack?" Jill rushed to the comm station, fingers flying across the keyboard to stabilize the signal.
"It's Wesker's people. We... couldn't hold. No, we couldn't even try. Conventional kinetic weapons get absorbed on contact. Incendiary rounds just accelerate the spore dispersal!" Carlos coughed violently, spitting blood-laced saliva. "This isn't a bioterror attack. This is a slaughter!"
The feed lurched as Carlos aimed his combat recorder at the distant horizon.
Everyone on deck, including Leon and Chris who'd seen it all, sucked in a sharp breath.
There was no army of mutant monsters on the horizon. Across the far end of the Great Rift Valley, the yellow sand, the scrubland, the tropical jungle had all vanished completely.
In their place, a dark-gold fungal carpet crawled and writhed, expanding outward without end.
Dark-gold veins spread like the earth's own blood vessels, devouring everything in their path.
Solid rock was forcibly assimilated into dark-gold crystal. Towering trees had their life sucked dry in an instant and crumbled to golden dust.
"A few hours ago, the defense lines of three countries around the mining zone were completely vaporized in ten minutes. Every carbon-based organism was overwritten!"
Carlos pulled the lens back. This iron-willed man who'd never flinched in Raccoon City had genuine shock in his eyes. "Those dark-gold spores are deadlier than any virus! Anyone who comes into contact, their genetic chains get forcibly resequenced in seconds. And the really terrifying part? A small percentage of them undergo a targeted evolution during assimilation. They gain speed and strength beyond human limits, but their minds are completely gone. They turn into killing machines hijacked by some kind of external will!"
"Carlos, you're sure they still retain a basic human form?" Chris lunged forward, locked onto the screen.
"See for yourselves. We lost half our advance squad just to capture one alive!"
Carlos whipped the camera sideways to a reinforced metal cage behind him, wrapped in multiple layers of high-voltage electrified netting.
Inside the cage, a soldier who'd been wearing local military fatigues had transformed beyond recognition. His skin had taken on a cold, eerie dark-gold sheen. Beneath it, instead of veins, golden patterns flowed like liquid metal.
The thing sensed the camera and slammed into the electrified netting. The force visibly warped the reinforced alloy bars.
Its eyes had no pupils, just two flickering pools of dark-gold light, cold and savage.
"Standard rounds don't even leave a mark. It can predict our firing trajectories." Carlos spoke rapidly. "It's not human anymore. This isn't a simple viral infection. This is ecological rewriting! The entire African continent has fallen!"
"Thank God you made us pack every type of virus serum before we deployed, Boss." Carlos wiped the blood from his face, still shaken. "During our breakout, the airborne spore concentration was hundreds of times over the safe limit. We ran emergency cross-inoculations on the whole team, and that barely suppressed the mutations in our systems. Without all that broad-spectrum vaccine we'd brought, every last one of us would've turned into one of those things."
The creature let out a shrill pulse-like screech, and the comm feed cut to dead static.
The holographic display auto-switched to Star Fire's global satellite overlay.
On the map, the dark gold marking danger had already consumed sixty percent of the African continent and was spreading at a terrifying rate toward surrounding waters and continental shelves.
Dead silence on the deck. The sea breeze still blew, but the air felt frozen solid.
That dark-gold territory metastasizing across the satellite map pressed down on everyone like a mountain on their chest.
"What the hell is that thing..." Piers stared at the screen, unable to hide the tremor in his voice. "If it reaches the oceans, or disperses through atmospheric circulation to other continents, the entire human race goes extinct in three days."
"Somebody's in a real hurry. Hope he doesn't choke on his own ambitions this time."
Ryan set his bourbon glass down on the table. The soft clink broke the suffocating silence.
The lazy look in his eyes was gone. For the first time, they were dead serious, a cold edge glinting deep beneath.
This wasn't some local biohazard where you put down a few mutant Tyrants. This was a fight for the survival of the entire world.
"Everyone, downtime's over. Gear up. Lock and load." Ryan turned. His black coat snapped in the wind.
He didn't shout some rousing save-the-world speech. His voice was flat, calm, and carried an absolute confidence that pinned every person in place.
"Ryan, how do we fight this? Against a whole infected continent, even if we throw every soldier Star Fire has, it won't be close to enough." Chris gripped his rifle, expression grave.
"Who said we're doing this alone?" Ryan looked to Jill and issued orders without missing a beat. "Jill, patch me through to the UN Security Council and every head of state on our direct lines. Tell them there's a global emergency summit in three hours. And unlock every one of Star Fire's underground strategic cold-storage vaults. I want our entire reserve of broad-spectrum vaccine shipped to transportation hubs on every continent!"
Ryan braced both hands on the holographic display, looking down at that dark-gold Africa that represented Wesker's ambition, and delivered the final order:
"If our old friend wants to flip the table and end the world, then we lock down Africa first and put every chip humanity's got on the table. Get ready. This time, we're fighting him for real."
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]