The western shore of the Atlantic. Boston Bay, The Americas.
If the Himalayan blizzard was cold despair, the apocalyptic hurricane over Boston Bay was pure annihilation.
Not a sliver of light broke through the sky. Heavy dark-gold thunderclouds looked ready to crush down onto the skyscraper lightning rods.
Gale-force winds whipped up tsunamis dozens of meters high, pounding the coastline without mercy.
And within those waves, waves that looked ready to swallow the entire American continent, a shadow hundreds of meters long, massive as a mountain range, was slowly rising from the deep.
A thick bolt of lightning split the sky and briefly lit the thing in full.
It was a deep-sea aberration fused from whale, squid, and some ancient crustacean species.
Its skin was sheathed in dark-gold crystal as thick as fortress walls. Dozens of enormous tentacles, each over fifteen feet in diameter, thrashed wildly through the sea.
This deep-sea leviathan, the Dark-Gold Leviathan, merely rolled over, and the resulting wave swatted a fully armed Arleigh Burke-class destroyer in half like a toy.
"This is Coastal Defense first line... the line has been breached! Repeat, the line has been breached!" "Main guns are useless! Even bunker-busters can't penetrate its dark-gold shell!" "It's making landfall! God, save us..."
Inside the underground command center in downtown Boston, American military brass stared at the massive red dot on the screen, the symbol of absolute destruction, faces ashen.
Just as one of the beast's tentacles reared high, ready to split Boston's iconic Prudential Tower in two.
Three eardrum-shredding sonic booms tore across the sky.
No roar of transport aircraft landing. No sign of deceleration chutes deploying.
On the US air defense radar, three blackish-purple dots moving at over Mach 3 were plummeting from the troposphere in freefall, aimed straight at the downtown plaza.
"What the hell is that?! Meteors?!"
Three impacts shook the earth hard enough to drown out the raging thunder.
The bomb-shelter-grade reinforced concrete planters in Boston's plaza were cratered with three impact holes over thirty feet across.
The shockwave flipped dozens of abandoned cars into the air.
Smoke and rain swirled above the craters.
The massive tentacle poised to slam the building seemed to sense something and froze mid-swing.
"Ptuh..."
A black tactical combat boot crunched through the rubble at the crater's edge.
Chris cracked his neck, vertebrae popping like firecrackers.
He walked out of the impact crater without so much as a heavy breath.
"Thirty thousand feet with no chute. Gotta say, that's a little rough on the stomach." Leon strolled out with one hand in his pocket, the other spinning his custom large-caliber Desert Eagle variant. His eyes shimmered with a deep, dark blue glow, as if he could track the trajectory of every raindrop in the storm. "Tactical readout says the Abyss Enhancer absorbs a hundred percent of kinetic impact. Gentlemen, our bodies officially don't answer to physics anymore."
Piers vaulted out of the third crater carrying an oversized Star Fire electromagnetic sniper rifle, leaping straight to the roof of a nearby high-rise to claim the high ground.
"Then quit talking." Chris looked up at the sky-blotting deep-sea titan and battle fury ignited in his eyes. "Ryan's waiting on our after-action report. Let's go!"
He ripped the custom tungsten-steel greatsword from his back. The thing weighed hundreds of pounds.
As the Abyss power fully surged, Chris's arm muscles swelled instantly, blackish-purple veins pulsing beneath his skin.
He stomped the ground and launched skyward like a shell from a cannon, fast enough to trail a cone of vapor in his wake.
The Dark-Gold Leviathan was clearly enraged by this insect's challenge. The massive suspended tentacle, carrying millions of tons of force, shredded the air and hammered down at Chris in midair.
One hit from that would reduce a building to dust.
"Captain!" Piers shouted over comms.
But Chris made no move to dodge. He gripped the greatsword with both hands, charged headlong into the mountain of descending flesh, and let out a roar that shattered the curtain of rain:
"Break!"
The tungsten-steel greatsword met the dark-gold keratin in an explosion of sparks brighter than lightning. Then came the skin-crawling sound of rending flesh.
That tentacle, over fifteen feet in diameter, tough enough to shrug off anti-tank missiles, was cleaved clean in two by a single stroke that exceeded every biological limit.
Blackish-purple blood and dark-gold shrapnel rained down on the streets of Boston like a second storm.
The beast screamed in agony, its massive body thrashing violently in the water.
Countless disgusting tumors split open across its barbed back, and hundreds of parasitic flying mutants, each the size of a car with fleshy wings, launched out in a dense swarm, shrieking as they dove at Chris in midair.
A single deafening gunshot rang out from below just as the flying creatures were about to reach him.
The lead flyer's skull burst like a watermelon.
Down on the street, Leon held his pistol up one-handed.
In his enhanced perception, the flow of time had been forcibly slowed.
Wind trajectories, rain impact points, the wingbeat frequency of every flying monster: all of it rendered as precise three-dimensional coordinates in his mind.
Leon didn't even look up. He walked through the wreckage of abandoned cars, pulling the trigger at an impossible rate.
He didn't need to aim. His perception was the perfect scope.
Every shot punched through a flying monster's weak point. He was a reaper playing a death concerto with his eyes closed, violence distilled to its purest form.
"Leon, quit hogging the spotlight."
Piers's cold voice came through comms.
On the rooftop, Piers was down on one knee. The Star Fire electromagnetic sniper rifle had finished its overclocked charge cycle. Visible blue arcs of electricity crawled around the barrel from the intense electromagnetic field.
His enhanced vision cut straight through the layers of rain and locked onto a flickering red glow in the gaps of the beast's armor: its neural center.
"Checkmate."
Piers pulled the trigger.
The sound was less a gunshot than a deep, heart-stopping concussion. A searing deep-blue beam lanced across the entire harbor.
A depleted uranium armor-piercing round laced with Dawn-serum dissolving enzymes punched through the Dark-Gold Leviathan's armor gap at multiples of the speed of sound, buried itself in the neural center, and detonated violently from within.
"Nice shot, Piers!"
Chris used a dead flying monster's body as a stepping stone in midair, vaulting even higher.
He was now directly above the beast's enormous skull.
The tungsten-steel greatsword flickered with a reaper's gleam in the lightning.
Chris took a deep breath and poured every ounce of strength in his body into his arms without reservation.
"Get back in your ocean, you piece of shit!"
Chris plummeted like a meteor, his entire body a streak of blackish-purple light, greatsword inverted, and drove it into the Dark-Gold Leviathan's massive skull with the full force of gravitational acceleration.
The blade hit bone. Chris locked both hands on the hilt and rode his falling momentum to carve a gash over forty feet long through the beast's cranium.
Dark-gold energy went completely haywire inside the creature.
With one final despairing wail, the deep-sea nightmare that had brought endless terror to the American continent finally stopped thrashing and collapsed into the shallows of Boston Bay.
The splash flooded half a city block.
The rain began to ease.
Chris pulled his greatsword free and landed steadily on the Leviathan's massive corpse. Leon and Piers worked their way back to his side.
The three of them stood over the beast that had once seemed invincible. None of them were even breathing hard.
"Done. Americas coastline threat neutralized." Chris flicked the black blood off his sword and pressed his earpiece. "Jill, we're wrapped up over here."
"Clean work, boys." Jill's voice came through with a hint of a smile. "Now that the warmup's over, don't get lazy. There are a few New Human legion commanders running loose in the South American jungles. Mop them up while you're at it."
"Copy that. Was just thinking I hadn't stretched out yet." Leon spun his pistol, a hunter's glint in his eyes.
Three sonic booms split the air, and the American theater's final reckoning began.
Jill's voice cut in on all-frequency comms. Steady, measured, carrying a trace of fatigue almost too faint to notice.
"Ryan. Europe, Asia, The Americas. All fronts cleared. Wesker's ambition ends here."
Two seconds of silence on the comm. Then Ryan's voice came through, the background a wall of deafening explosions and the roar of massive structures collapsing.
"Clean work, everyone. Now that the warmup's over, don't get lazy. All mechanized elements, airdrop into the Great Rift Valley. I'm going to throw Wesker the grandest damn Ragnarok this continent has ever seen."
"Copy that, Boss! I'm bringing my big baby right over!" Heisenberg's manic laughter echoed above Rome.
Star Fire's war banner snapped in the wind over the ruins. The Southern Europe campaign was over, and the final gate to the war at hell's core had been blown wide open above the Great Rift Valley of Africa.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]