Lanshiang. The helipad atop the Quad Tower.
Wind and rain lashed the polished landing surface. A heavy helicopter bearing The Family's insignia sat at the center, its rotors already spinning up to a deafening roar.
Simmons stood before the helicopter's cabin door, knuckles white around a tactical tablet, his face an ugly shade of grey.
On the screen, every one of his offshore accounts, his Security Agency encrypted access credentials, even the core command network of The Family that he'd been so proud of, had all gone solid red. ACCESS REVOKED.
What chilled him to the bone was the high-definition broadcast of Vice President Adam Benford, currently overriding the signals of every major international news channel.
The Cathedral basement ledgers. The C-Virus experiment logs. They were scrolling across headlines worldwide like a blizzard of damning evidence.
"Those spineless old fossils! They dare abandon me!" Simmons hurled the tablet into the standing water. The screen shattered on impact.
He knew. The Family had cut every tie to him to save themselves.
He was no longer the uncrowned king pulling strings behind American politics. He was a bioterrorist wanted by the entire world.
"Looks like your private jet isn't getting clearance to take off."
A cold, hard voice cut through the curtain of rain.
Simmons whipped around. The steel door to the rooftop had been kicked open. Leon and Helena emerged from the shadows one after the other, assault rifles up, muzzles locked on his head.
"Leon Kennedy..." Simmons ground his teeth, the muscles in his face twitching.
"You think you've won? You have no idea what kind of order this world needs! Star Fire is the real threat to all of humanity!"
"Shut your mouth!" Helena cut him off, her voice sharp as a blade. She strode forward, eyes burning with bone-deep hatred. "You used living people as stepping stones to cement your power. You used my sister to threaten me... Today, you're not going anywhere!"
Staring down the barrel of their guns, Simmons let out a strange, cold laugh.
"You think cornering me means you get to judge me?" He ripped a syringe from inside his suit jacket. It glowed deep red.
"Stop him!" Leon's pupils contracted. He squeezed the trigger without hesitation.
But Simmons was faster. He jammed the Enhanced C-Virus straight into his own carotid artery.
The bullets hit him like they were striking tough leather. Simmons's body underwent a horrifying transformation in an instant.
His suit burst apart. His bones proliferated and restructured in ways that defied physics. Grey-white keratinous plating encased his entire body.
What had been a human being warped into a monstrous beast over five meters long, a nightmarish hybrid of sabertooth and centaur.
The mutated Simmons let loose an ear-splitting roar. His massive forelimb slammed the ground and cratered the helipad's reinforced concrete.
"Fall back! His hide's too thick!" Leon grabbed Helena and pulled her into a tactical retreat.
Standard assault rifle rounds sparked uselessly off Simmons's mutated bone armor.
Then, from above, two piercing beams of blue-white searchlight stabbed down through the storm, flooding the entire helipad in artificial daylight.
Two slender figures carrying terrifying momentum dropped from a Star Fire stealth aircraft hovering overhead and slammed into the open ground between Simmons and Leon.
Standing water exploded skyward. When the spray cleared, Sherry and Becky stood side by side.
"The low-tier mutants in the city are mopped up." Sherry flicked her wrist and the high-frequency vibration long blade snapped out, blue arcs of electricity crackling wildly along its edge. "Uncle Leon, looks like you saved the biggest piece of trash for last."
"Sherry?" Leon looked at the girl radiating combat power and felt some of the tension finally leave his shoulders. "Careful. This thing's hide is seriously thick."
"Thick hide? Then let's give him the armor-piercing treatment."
Becky didn't waste a single word. She shouldered the electromagnetic sniper rifle, nearly half her height, pressed her right eye to the scope, and pulled the trigger.
A tungsten alloy armor-piercing round trailing a blue streak punched through Simmons's prized beast-form right foreleg at several times the speed of sound.
The supposedly impenetrable keratinous bone armor crumbled like a cracker under the electromagnetic kinetic force. Simmons's right knee joint vaporized into a cloud of red mist, and his massive body crashed to the ground.
"Damn insects!" The faintly visible human face on his chest let out a shriek of fury.
The C-Virus's rapid regeneration kicked into overdrive. Masses of grey-white granulation tissue erupted from Simmons's severed leg. His body swelled again.
With a gut-churning sound of bone tearing apart, the centaur form stretched and elongated, mutating into a towering skeletal tyrannosaur over a dozen meters tall.
The enormous dinosaur skull split open its jaws. Teeth capable of crushing an armored vehicle dripped with slime as it threw its head back and unleashed a roar that shook the entire city.
"You think getting bigger means you win?" Becky smirked, ejected the spent casing without so much as a change in expression, and loaded a specialized high-explosive thermite armor-piercing round. "You're just a bigger target."
The tyrannosaur Simmons charged at the four of them in a frenzy, every footfall shaking the rooftop violently.
"Leon, covering fire!" Sherry shouted and shot forward like a bolt of blue lightning, charging head-on at the tyrannosaur.
Leon and Helena opened fire immediately. The dense volley couldn't penetrate its armor, but the rounds struck precisely around the tyrannosaur's compound eyes, disrupting its vision.
The tyrannosaur opened wide, trying to swallow Sherry whole out of mid-air.
But boosted by Dawn, Sherry twisted at an impossible angle in the air. She didn't just dodge the lethal bite. She planted a foot on the tyrannosaur's snout and launched herself higher.
"Get down!"
Mid-air, Sherry gripped the high-frequency vibration long blade with both hands. The blue arc surged to over two meters in length as she brought it crashing down on the tyrannosaur's thick cervical vertebrae.
The high-frequency blade sliced through the tyrannosaur's heavy neck armor like butter, trailing the stench of scorched flesh.
High-voltage current flooded its central nervous system. Simmons let out a wretched wail. His massive body pitched forward uncontrollably, jaw slamming into the helipad and plowing a deep furrow across its surface.
From a distance, Becky's follow-up shot was surgical. The high-explosive thermite round bored straight into the wound Sherry had carved open, punching inside the tyrannosaur's body before detonating.
Thousands of degrees of heat ravaged the beast from within, blasting half its spine to pieces.
"Why?! I am a god! I am the true god who controls this world!"
Simmons's ruined body writhed violently in the inferno. He couldn't comprehend it. His ultimate evolution, the pinnacle he'd been so proud of.
Reduced to a bad joke by a couple of girls and a few guns.
Despair and terror consumed him. The virus spiraled out of control, dragging in the helicopter wreckage and metal debris around him.
In the throes of extreme distortion, he underwent a third mutation. He became a grotesque monstrosity covered in countless compound eyes and sharp bone spikes, a nightmarish cross between a giant fly and an arthropod.
It beat its tattered flesh-wings. Concentrated corrosive venom pooled in the massive maw on its abdomen as it tried to take flight, desperate to escape this rooftop that filled it with pure terror.
"Leon, Helena! Uncle Ryan says the last shot is yours." Sherry executed a clean backflip in the air and landed beside Becky.
Two small Star Fire drones glided silently up to Leon and Helena's sides and dropped a pair of heavy, blue-glowing armor-piercing electromagnetic crossbows.
Ryan's voice came through their earpieces, carrying that familiar lazy tone laced with a note of judgment:
"Conventional weapons won't work on him. Use these. Shoot the human face on his abdomen. Put this relic of the old guard down for good."
Leon and Helena exchanged a glance, picked up the electromagnetic crossbows simultaneously, and aimed at the massive, grotesque shape frantically beating its wings in a desperate bid to flee.
Dead center of the monster's abdomen, Simmons's crushed, distorted human face stared back at them, still forcing out one last piece of defiant bluster: "You... can't kill me... Star Fire is... the real monster..."
"Save it for hell."
Leon and Helena pulled the triggers at the same time.
Two bolts carrying devastating electromagnetic kinetic energy ripped through the air and punched into the dead center of the human face on Simmons's chest with pinpoint accuracy.
The micro-thermobaric charges inside the bolts detonated instantly.
Simmons's defiant face vaporized in the blast. A chain of secondary explosions tore through the massive deformed shell.
A miniature sun bloomed in mid-air.
Simmons's body, the one he'd proclaimed divine, disintegrated completely before the sheer technological force brought to bear. He dissolved into a shower of blue, spark-trailing ash that drifted down through the storm over the Lanshiang night sky.
The wind and rain raged on, but the threat atop the Quad Tower had been snuffed out for good.
Helena stared at the ash covering the ground. The crossbow slipped from her fingers and clattered against the wet surface. She let out a long, deep breath, as though every burden she'd been carrying had finally lifted.
Leon looked at the empty sky, then turned to Sherry and Becky. "Couldn't have done it without you two. Would've been a nightmare otherwise."
"Wrap it up, everyone." Ryan's voice came through the open channel. "The truth about Tall Oaks is out, Simmons and Carla are both dead. Leave the Lanshiang cleanup to the locals."
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]