The underground train platform thrummed with engine noise, vibrations crawling up through the metal grating underfoot.
The train sat idling, primed to launch. Leon stood at the open doors, eyes locked on the dark corridor they'd come through, cold sweat slicking his grip on the pistol. Inside the car, Claire held Sherry tight against her chest. Annette sat slumped in a seat, hollow-eyed and spent. Marvin and Ben paced near the doors like caged animals.
"We can't wait any longer! NEST's self-destruct countdown is under ten minutes!" Ben's voice cracked high with panic. He clung to the door frame, looking ready to stomp the gas himself.
"Shut up! He said he'd come back!" Leon whipped around and barked it at him, but his own eyes betrayed the same fear.
Then, from deep in the corridor, footsteps. Fast ones. The sharp, unmistakable click of heels on metal grating.
Leon snapped his gun up, then froze. His eyes went wide.
"The FBI agent?!"
Ada Wong didn't spare him a glance. She burst from the corridor, dust streaking her red dress, chest heaving. Her hand shot out and seized the edge of the train door, knuckles white.
"Drive! Now!"
"Where's Ryan?!" Claire lurched to her feet. Her voice cracked.
"He's holding the Abyss Bridge. Buying time against William." Ada's jaw clenched. The image flashed behind her eyes: Ryan shoving the most important thing he carried into her arms, turning his back, facing the monster alone. Something squeezed tight behind her ribs. "He told us not to look back."
"What?!" Leon didn't think. He grabbed his gun and lunged for the corridor. "I'm going after him!"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Before Leon made it two steps, a deafening chain of gunshots erupted from deep inside the passage. A figure came staggering out of the dark, trailing a storm of sparks and concrete dust.
Ryan was coated in grey filth, his left arm hanging wrong, the tactical vest shredded with deep claw marks. He stumbled onto the platform, looked up, saw the train doors still wide open and every face staring at him.
"Shit! I told you to go! NEST blows in minutes!"
"Save the lecture and get on!" He sprinted to the doors and shoved Leon bodily into the car.
The words barely left his mouth before the world split open.
BOOM.
The platform ceiling detonated without warning. Tons of concrete rained down like meteor fragments beside the tracks, the whole platform bucking and heaving as if the earth itself was tearing apart.
Through the dust, a massive shadow dropped from the breach. Nearly three meters tall. It plummeted with horrifying momentum and landed dead center on a load-bearing column, crushing half a meter of structural steel to powder under its feet.
Nemesis. The thing that had devoured the Tyrant.
It didn't look at the train. Didn't glance at the others. Its one remaining eye, bloodshot and red as a furnace coal, fixed on Ryan with pure, distilled hatred. Blown off a rooftop by an explosion. Shot through the skull on a building ledge. Buried alive in a crater. Every directive in its programming had been overwritten by a single imperative: kill this man. It would crawl back from hell itself to tear him apart.
"Oh, hey. You again." Ryan spat on the grating. "Persistent son of a bitch. Knew you wouldn't stay dead..."
He started to raise the Desert Eagle.
"HRAAAAAAGH!"
From the corridor behind him, a second roar, wilder and more ragged than the first. G3 William, one eye shot out, mangled from the cliff fight, smashed through the corridor wall like a derailed bullet train. Acid blood and shredded tissue clung to its frame as it barreled onto the platform.
Nemesis ahead. G3 William behind.
Umbrella's two apex bioweapons sealed off every inch of open space. Inside the car, Ben pissed himself on the spot. Even Marvin, a veteran cop who'd seen the worst this city had to offer, felt something cold and final settle in his gut.
"Close the doors! Leon, get to the cab! Floor it and don't let up!"
Leon opened his mouth.
Ryan didn't give him the chance. He spun and slammed his boot into the emergency close button on the platform side of the doors.
The heavy steel panels began grinding shut.
"Ryan!!" Claire threw herself against the closing gap, tears streaming. Ada bit down on her lower lip until it went white, nails digging crescents into her palms. Little Sherry clutched the hem of her shirt, wide eyes brimming with terror and grief. The slit of light between the doors narrowed inch by inch, swallowing the view, but every person in that car stared through the shrinking gap at the man standing alone between the abyss and the monsters, burning his outline into their memory.
"Stop staring! I'm not gonna die!"
He didn't look back. One hand reached behind him and ripped a Gatling gun off the supply barricade on the platform.
He slung the heavy ammo belt around his neck, hefted the steel beast one-handed, and planted himself in front of the sealed doors. Two howling nightmares bore down on him from both sides.
Click. The doors locked. The engine screamed, and the train lurched forward, grinding into the black tunnel.
Through the car windows, every face pressed to the glass, they watched him brace the Gatling and spin the barrels up. A tongue of flame nearly a meter long roared from the muzzle. Leon's fist cracked against the blast-proof window hard enough to split his knuckles open, blood smearing the glass. He stared at the sealed door, fury and helplessness warring across his face, and a sound tore from his throat like a wounded animal. "Damn it! Why is it always him?!"
...
"Come on! Both of you ugly bastards!"
Ryan screamed it and locked the trigger down. His cheat kicked in at full force: infinite ammo, pure and uncut. Six thousand rounds per minute dissolved into a solid wall of steel and fire, swallowing Nemesis and William together in a single annihilating stream.
Muzzle flash lit the platform white, lit the savage grin on Ryan's face. Long after the train vanished into darkness, the thunder of that gun echoed through the tunnel, refusing to die.
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