"RAAAAAGHH!!!"
The roar hadn't finished echoing off the ruins before the thing moved.
Five meters of wrecked flesh launched from the far rim of the crater, slammed into the basin floor, and bounced back up on all fours like an animal that had lost its mind entirely. Dark green fluid trailed behind it in a slick line. Bone spurs scraped across the glassy ground, kicking up sparks.
It didn't care about the wounds. Didn't care about the severed tentacles. Didn't care that its body was still falling apart. It wanted Ryan in pieces.
Fifty meters. Forty. Thirty.
Faster now. The fresh tissue buds tore open in the wind of its own charge, fluid spraying out behind it. It didn't slow.
Twenty.
Fifteen.
Ten.
The creature leapt. A massive bone claw came hammering down from above.
Ryan raised the pistol.
Bang.
One shot. At the edge of that dead-silent crater it wasn't deafening, but it cut through the dark with a finality all its own. The round punched clean into G-Nemesis's newly formed eye. Green pus and a fine mist of blood burst outward. The creature bellowed in pain, its bulk rocking backward from the impact.
Ryan's arm held steady, locked solid. No pause. His finger worked the trigger.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
The muzzle spat weak tongues of fire, stark against the red-tinged dark. By rights the magazine should have been empty. In Ryan's hands, the gun kept firing like it was tapped into some other dimension's ammo supply.
"RRRGH!"
G-Nemesis swung its ruined tentacle stumps and hurled chunks of concrete, multi-ton slabs flung like toys, straight at him.
His legs still shook with phantom pain, but combat instinct overrode everything. He threw himself into a sideways roll behind a tilted support beam. Rubble exploded where he'd been standing.
Through X-ray vision the creature's body resolved into something more than a blurred mass of red meat. Energy pathways, complex and racing, lit up beneath the charred shell. He could see thousands of tiny blood vessels branching outward from the core in its chest, threading toward the limbs, working to knit shattered bone back together.
"Too fast." No time for awe. He pushed off hard, weaving through the wreckage.
He didn't close the distance. Kept it at thirty meters, the ragged edge of control, and aimed not for the skull but for the fresh growths, the soft pink buds of new tissue still wet and tender.
Bang. Bang.
Surgical. Every round found a bud.
Those spots were where the creature's nerve endings clustered thickest, the most sensitive points on its battered frame. Ryan was using a dull blade on purpose, hacking at its rhythm, breaking its ability to feed and evolve.
The monster lost all restraint. It abandoned the corpses in the rubble and threw itself at Ryan with everything it had. Each stride of that five-meter frame sent tremors through the ground.
Ryan flickered between broken walls and collapsed pillars. X-ray vision mapped every lunge before it landed. He slipped clear by inches each time, dodging strikes that would have turned him to paste.
A lunatic dancing on the edge of a knife.
"Over here, ugly."
He burst from behind a toppled billboard, pistol shoved almost flush against the underside of the creature's jaw.
BANG.
The bullet punched through the mandible and shredded the vocal organs in its throat. The howl collapsed into a wet, hissing wheeze. The massive body actually staggered backward, driven by wave after wave of nerve-deep agony.
Ryan pressed the opening. He backpedaled fast, pouring fire without pause.
Rounds hammered into joints, the remaining eye socket, exposed nerve clusters. None of it was lethal. But the relentless impact and the precision pain kept the creature pinned at the crater's edge, unable to rally.
His eyes got colder. He could feel it: the thing's rage was building toward a threshold.
The kiting game burned through stamina fast. His lungs felt raw. Every hard sprint tested the outer limit of what his nerves could take. But he knew he couldn't let up. Not for a second.
Then G-Nemesis stopped thrashing.
Its one surviving eye locked onto Ryan. From somewhere deep in its torso came a sound like muffled thunder, low and resonant enough to feel in the teeth.
The pink tissue buds quit growing. In their place, a black substance, dark and slick as ink, seeped out from the region of its heart and spread across the body in seconds.
No more patching small wounds. All remaining energy funneled into the spine and upper back.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Pale bone spikes punched through the skin one after another, grinding against the air with a sound that made the fillings ache.
The sulfur stench spiked tenfold.
The already deformed frame began to swell. The spines along its back wove together into a pair of grotesque, semi-translucent wings of stretched membrane and bone. Not enough to fly. More than enough to reshape its balance and explosive power into something on a different level entirely.
"Changing the rules again?"
Ryan wiped bloody rain off his face. No fear in his expression. If anything, a wild, reckless edge.
"Fine. Let's see who drops first."
The creature's eyes, flooded black, held no more surprise. Only annihilation. A will stripped down to its single purest purpose: grind Ryan Cole into nothing.
The fight had entered hell mode.
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