Above the ruins of the ancient Colosseum, the air warped from extreme heat.
Andre let out an inhuman roar, each shockwave splintering fine cracks through the surviving stone pillars around him.
His ten-meter-tall body was in a state of grotesque "hyper-evolution," dark-gold keratin layers squirming and thickening across his surface like living things.
Hundreds of tentacles erupted from his back in a frenzy, the sucker-tipped ends sprouting rows of tiny serrated teeth.
"Miranda! Heisenberg! You relics of the old era, every last one of you will become fuel for the Ouroboros!"
Andre's crystallized face split open, revealing densely packed compound eyes spinning in their sockets.
A tentacle two meters thick slammed into the fifty-meter metal colossus like a battering ram. The colossus raised an arm welded from tons of tank plating to block. The metallic impact rang across Rome, sparks showering down like rain.
Pure kinetic force against kinetic force. The recoil alone vaporized the surrounding rubble into dust.
"Shut up, you overgrown pus-covered octopus."
Inside the core cockpit, Heisenberg yanked the magnetic control lever hard, a flicker of manic energy sparking behind his eyes.
The colossus's twenty-meter chain-saw whip spun up again, its teeth tearing through the air with a shriek that set your teeth on edge.
The whip lashed across Andre's midsection and sheared through a dozen growing tentacles in one stroke. Dark-gold viscous blood gushed out like a fountain, hissing and sizzling where it hit the metal armor.
Andre didn't retreat. He grinned savagely as his remaining tentacles coiled tight around the colossus's ankles, trying to drag it underground.
In that instant of deadlock, a lone figure appeared silently atop the bell tower wreckage.
Ethan Winters looked down at the rampaging beast below, his expression blank. A deep blue glow flickered in his eyes.
His left hand had been almost entirely corroded in the earlier engagement, but now black Mold was visibly reweaving the finger bones back into place.
"This is supposed to be a 'god'?" Ethan murmured. No fear in his voice. Only a bone-deep weariness.
He stood on the edge of the ruined bell tower, the heavy shotgun in his hands still radiating a menacing residual heat.
A few days ago, when he'd learned Mia was pregnant, Ethan had been over the moon, practically bouncing off the walls. But once the excitement faded and he remembered the bioterror attacks raging everywhere outside, the need to get stronger set in.
When he asked Ryan if there was a way to power up fast, Ryan brought him to the sealed chamber housing the Megamycete.
Nobody knew what kind of reboot Ethan had gone through behind that locked door in the Star Fire lab.
To bridge the gap in combat experience, Miranda had activated the Megamycete's consciousness network. In that illusory space beyond physical dimensions, time stood still.
Ryan gave him one instruction: kill everything you can see inside the mindscape, or die trying.
The first year, Miranda conjured countless battle-hardened elite soldiers. Ethan lost count of how many times his heart had been run through, how many times his limbs had been snapped clean off.
He had no technique. He traded his life for theirs, grinding down every opponent with that "God of War with the Hand Sanitizer" regeneration of his.
As the drugs kept flowing into his body in the real world, the enemies inside the Megamycete's illusion began to warp and mutate. The phantoms that had once been human gradually became towering monstrosities swinging blades of raw flesh.
He fought in an endless rotting swamp until every cell in his body had developed a killer's instinct.
When he could stand up from mountains of corpses without flinching, the enemies in the illusion upgraded again. Miranda dug into the Megamycete's unfathomable memory banks and extracted beings that had once been worshipped as "gods."
Inside the illusion, these "gods" had torn Ethan into powder too fine for the naked eye tens of thousands of times. With each reconstruction, his gaze grew a degree colder, and the Abyss energy inside him fused a degree deeper with the Mold.
He learned to find the physical-layer fractures in a god's defenses. He learned to dismantle divine thrones with the most primal violence imaginable.
"This level of mutation wouldn't even count as an appetizer in the Megamycete's dreamscape." Ethan whispered, the memory of tearing apart the last "dark god" with his bare hands flashing through his mind.
A dying tentacle from Andre lanced through the air toward him, its tip shrieking with enough force to shred metal.
Ethan didn't even look up. His left hand shot out like lightning, catching the barbed tentacle bare-handed. Pure physical grip. The Mold in his palm hardened instantly, pinning it in midair. A single squeeze, and the tentacle that could have punched through a tank burst into blood mist.
"I've killed more gods and torn down more thrones than you've seen buildings in your entire life."
Ethan racked the slide hard. Two osmium alloy slugs loaded with Abyss dissolving enzyme chambered with a solid click. He fired both barrels almost simultaneously, twin muzzle flashes erupting as the slugs punched clean through Andre's last two pulsing compound eyes.
The dissolving enzyme detonated inside the monster's body like an incendiary charge. The dark-gold crystal layers disintegrated under the rampant corrosion, peeling apart sheet by sheet.
Andre let out one final howl of defiance before his entire body violently swelled and collapsed into charred slag.
With the fall of this "false god," the dark-gold fungal carpet across the entire southern European theater began to wither and carbonize.
Ethan dropped from the rooftop. The ground cratered under his feet on impact, an aftershock from power he hadn't fully reined in yet.
He didn't spare a glance at the smoking pile of meat. He just looked down at his hands, hands that hadn't belonged to a human being for a long time now.
Heisenberg jumped out of the metal colossus's core cockpit, the ember of his cigar glowing and dimming. "That look in your eyes... reminds me of Miranda before she lost it. The way she used to look at ants."
Ethan spat a mouthful of bloody saliva. His tone was flat. "Just give me a minute to come down."
Jill's steady, measured voice came through the comm, carrying a thread of relief. "Southern Europe cleared. Wesker's ambition just hit its first full stop right here."
"Clean work, Ethan. You've evolved even more than I expected. Hold position and stay alert. This front is secure, but the other two theaters... the show's just getting started."
Ethan raised his head and looked east.
Somewhere out there, a blizzard that could swallow the world was brewing.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]