The long night before dawn reached its deepest dark.
Ryan stood on the winding mountain road at the edge of the Arklay Mountains, looking down at Raccoon City far below. Wind tore at his ruined clothes as he leaned against the roadside guardrail, turning a fragment he'd pried off G-Nemesis between his fingers.
That power from earlier. He had a pretty good idea what it was.
X-ray vision, HP lock, infinite ammo, zero recoil... and now something new.
Super damage.
He glanced down at his right hand. Fingers together, fist closed, released. He could feel it. His body had been reinforced. Not some vague increase in raw strength, but something deeper: bone density, muscle resilience, the load capacity of his nervous system. The corner of his mouth twitched. The modifier was getting more and more serious.
At the far edge of the horizon, a meteor-like streak of fire punched through the heavy cloud cover with a piercing shriek and plunged into the dead center of the city.
Ryan stopped fidgeting with the fragment and lifted his chin.
"Can't hide the evidence, so you flip the table..." A cold, mocking smirk. "Sore losers."
Hmmmmmm...
Every sound in the world was sucked away in an instant. Then a sphere of pure white light, more blinding than ten thousand suns, swelled silently from the city center and bloomed.
The light stripped every color from existence. For one frozen moment, Ryan's hard features were bleached pale. But he didn't shield his eyes or dive for cover. He didn't even blink. He stood there, quiet, almost admiring, and watched the tens-of-thousands-of-degrees heat vaporize the entire city along with every sin buried beneath it.
Then the shockwave came, an eardrum-shredding roar riding a tsunami of force.
Scalding wind and debris slammed into him. The asphalt beneath his feet cracked and splintered, but he didn't move. Not an inch.
The storm passed.
A massive mushroom cloud rose slowly, blotting out the sky.
Ryan brushed the ash off his shoulder like he was flicking dandruff off his jacket.
He tossed the fragment over the cliff, turned, and walked toward the road.
Gray-white radioactive fallout from the blast drifted down like an eerie snowfall, filling the sky.
Ryan walked through the absolute silence.
The asphalt underfoot had gone soft from the heat, coated in a thick layer of pale dust that crunched faintly with each step.
A few dozen meters ahead, a black SUV sat on the road. Its body was caked in gray dust, and the driver's door hung half open. An Umbrella U.B.C.S. mercenary in a tactical vest was slumped over the steering wheel, dead.
Ryan walked over, grabbed the back of the man's collar with one hand, hauled him out of the car like a ragdoll, and tossed him into the drainage ditch by the road.
"Borrowing your ride. Hope you don't mind." He said it to the corpse in the ditch, utterly insincere.
He dropped into the driver's seat, grabbed the tactical scarf the mercenary had left on the passenger side, and wiped the black blood off his hands.
VROOM... rrrrrrrr!
The dormant engine roared to life, a raw mechanical snarl that ripped through the dead silence of the wasteland.
Ryan gripped the wheel one-handed and shifted into gear.
He glanced up at the rearview mirror. The massive mushroom cloud was still churning on the horizon, a silent monument to the city's tragedy.
He looked at the nuclear aftermath in the mirror. Then he reached up, grabbed the edge of the rearview mirror, and snapped it clean off.
Click.
He tossed it onto the back seat.
Foot to the floor.
The tires screamed against the road, kicking up a storm of gray dust. The black SUV lunged forward like an unchained animal, smashed through a rusted barricade, and roared toward the hazy horizon.
Due north.
...
At the same time.
Beneath the Raccoon City municipal center. Two thousand meters underground.
This was the absolute forbidden zone, beyond the reach of even a nuclear bunker-buster's shockwave: Umbrella Corporation's highest-level secret facility.
The violent tremors had just subsided. Emergency red lights on the ceiling flickered on and off, pulsing with a steady tick, tick, tick of alarm.
The vast, frigid, all-metal sterile chamber held no living person. Only a massive silver-black cryogenic hibernation pod standing in its center.
Thick frost coated the pod's surface. Countless heavy cables fed into its housing, maintaining an impossibly demanding near-absolute-zero environment.
The instant the nuke erased the surface and turned all of Raccoon City to ash, the bunker's backup power system switched on automatically.
Hissss...
A hairline crack split the frost on the pod's surface, accompanied by the faintest sound of a pressure valve releasing.
The red warning light swept across the front of the pod, illuminating a designation stenciled in harsh red paint:
[G - 001]
Then, from behind the ten-centimeter blast-proof glass, something struck from the inside.
Thud.
A pale, bloodless hand, flawless as a Greek marble sculpture, pressed slowly against the glass from within.
On the system panel, the vital-sign monitor that had been flatlined gave a single, abrupt spike.