The morning over the Po Valley should have been wrapped in milky fog and the scent of earth.
But today, the air churned with a nauseating dust that carried a dark-gold metallic sheen.
Major General Lorenzo stood atop the turret of his Ariete C1 main battle tank, clutching a yellowed photograph. His wife and five-year-old daughter, smiling bright, the warm Florentine sun behind them.
He smoked the last half of a cigar in silence, the ember flickering against the dim filter of his gas mask.
Ahead of him stood the last pride of the Italian Army: the 132nd "Ariete" Armored Brigade. Over two hundred main battle tanks sat in rows like silent steel beasts of a bygone era, casting long, hopeless shadows in the morning light.
"General, Star Fire's second shipment of inhibitors still hasn't made it through." His adjutant Antonio's voice came hollow and raw through the comms, tinged with despair he couldn't quite suppress. "The Mediterranean shipping lanes are blocked by those massive sea creatures with the dark-gold spines. Our destroyer squadron... went down without even getting a signal out. Command has gone completely dark. We're on our own."
Lorenzo exhaled a thick cloud of smoke that dissolved fast in the cold air. He pointed at the heavy cloud bank on the far horizon, dense as lead yet shimmering with an eerie golden light, and spoke slowly. "Antonio, do you hear that?"
Antonio froze. He pulled off his headset and held his breath.
It was the sound of countless blades scraping across a floor at high speed, layered over a dull, rhythmic pounding. Dense as an endless hailstorm, closing on their position faster than anything he'd ever heard.
"Here they come." Lorenzo tucked the photograph back into his breast pocket, sealed the tank hatch, and his eyes turned cold and absolute. "Pass the word. Nobody retreats. Even if we're the last unit standing on this soil, we make those things understand that steel isn't dead yet. Italy didn't build thousands of years of civilization just to vanish without a sound."
"Tank companies one through twelve, load rounds! All units, free fire!"
Lorenzo's roar tore the plain apart.
Over two hundred 120mm smoothbore cannons fired simultaneously, the deafening reports merging into a thunderclap that could rupture eardrums. Hundreds of fin-stabilized armor-piercing sabot rounds punched through the air at fifteen hundred meters per second, their muzzle flash dyeing the morning fog a brutal orange-red.
The barrage blanketed a three-kilometer fan ahead of them, churning every inch of ground meters deep.
Allied soldiers stared at their monitors, waiting to see those dark-gold shapes blown to pieces.
But there were no screams from the smoke. Only the clicking, faster now.
"Report! Thermal imaging shows... targets are not slowing down! They're... they're moving through the fire!"
Dozens, then hundreds of dark-gold afterimages smashed straight through the walls of flame, tracing jagged paths the eye could barely follow, streaking across the horizon in long broken lines.
"They're dodging artillery?!" Antonio screamed. "No, they're toying with us! They're calculating our trajectories!"
One creature, lean-bodied and sheathed in dense dark-gold scales, crossed eight hundred meters of no-man's-land in three seconds flat. It kicked off the ground and launched itself dozens of meters into the air as if gravity meant nothing. Through his periscope, Lorenzo saw the creature's eyes: no longer human pupils, but two pools of flowing, cold, dark-gold nebulae.
The creature landed on an Ariete's turret and drove both claws in. Composite armor rated to stop armor-piercing rounds peeled apart under its fingertips like aluminum foil. It let out a piercing shriek, wrenched its arms, and ripped the multi-ton turret clean off the hull, then hurled it like garbage into an IFV behind the line.
Explosions and screams erupted all at once.
"This is Third Company! Flank breached! They're inside the tank formation! Can't get a lock!" "Gunner! Shoot me! They're on me! They're on m..."
The comm channel dissolved into a hellscape of screaming.
Lorenzo watched a New Human grab a fleeing soldier mid-sprint without killing him, using the man as a shield against 25mm autocannon fire from the flank. Rounds burst through the soldier's body in sprays of red, and behind the blood mist the creature let out a skin-crawling cackle, mocking the impotence of human weapons.
"General... look at the soldiers back there." Antonio pointed out the viewport, hand trembling.
Behind the defensive line, vaccinated soldiers were on their knees in agony. The spore concentration Wesker had deployed in this sector exceeded the atmosphere's carrying capacity. The vaccine had kept their minds free of the virus, but their fragile bodies were collapsing under the assault of the saturation-level spores.
Their skin was hardening, turning brittle, taking on a translucent dark-gold hue.
"Help me... sir... I don't want to turn to stone..." A young soldier reached toward Lorenzo, his eyes lucid enough to break your heart. His fingers made a crisp snapping sound halfway through the gesture. Then, as everyone watched, his entire body became a dark-gold crystal statue frozen in a pose of supplication, beautiful and hopeless.
The assimilation was spreading across the entire position. Lorenzo watched green dots wink out on his display one after another. Every one of them a soldier he'd trained himself.
"This isn't war... this is slaughter."
Lorenzo watched the dark-gold spores drifting down from the sky. He could already feel a knifing cold deep in his lungs, every breath like inhaling a thousand tiny blades. He glanced at Antonio beside him, already gone blank, crystallizing slowly. Half the adjutant's face had turned to translucent dark-gold stone.
Lorenzo gave a broken laugh and slowly drew his sidearm.
"God... if you can really hear us." He pressed a kiss to the photograph. "Please... burn this hell to ash."
A single gunshot, small and meaningless against the roar of the battlefield. When the last soldier was assimilated into a statue, the two hundred tanks across the plain had all gone silent, frozen in postures of charge and fire, cold and eternal epitaphs in a forest of dark gold.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]