Ten thousand meters up, the stratospheric airflow had been smooth as glass.
Then, with a metal-tearing shriek loud enough to burst eardrums, Ouroboros No. 1 went berserk.
It was no longer a flying vessel built from precision components. Driven by Wesker's will, it had forcibly mutated into a twisted colossus, half-machine, half-organism.
Thick dark-red blood vessels erupted from the seams of the wings, wrapping the fuselage like chains, binding and reinforcing it.
The nose radome shattered. Three massive eyes grew in its place, weeping golden pus.
Every engine blade was forcibly reshaped into enormous vents for expelling spores.
Ryan stood on the violently shaking, slime-coated floor, watching the flesh masses proliferating around him.
No surprise in his eyes. Just indifference toward the aesthetic catastrophe.
This forced marriage of industrial engineering and biological grotesquerie was, to him, nothing more than a last-ditch bluff.
"This is your trump card?" Ryan's voice was quiet, but it cut cleanly through the deafening vibration of the hull.
Wesker stood before the ruins of the control console. His lower body had already fused with the beast's central nervous system.
He didn't answer. He simply pressed a red activation key.
Every pore on the bio-colossus ripped open at once, expelling payloads both inward and outward simultaneously.
What came out this time wasn't that cheap dark-gold mist. These were golden spores, radiant as pure gold, almost heavy enough to feel their weight in the air.
Caught in the stratospheric sunlight, they looked like a miniature golden sandstorm erupting at ten thousand meters.
The high-concentration golden spores filled every inch of the command room in an instant, so dense they were nearly opaque.
They carried extreme corrosive and parasitic properties. Even the tempered glass in the command room crystallized on contact and crumbled apart.
These tiny particles of death swarmed toward Ryan like a cloud of starving hornets.
Ryan didn't retreat. He didn't even hold his breath. He let the golden death-dust engulf him completely.
Massive quantities of golden spores entered his lungs through respiration, seeped into his bloodstream through his pores, attempting total annihilation and reconstruction at the genetic level.
This was the Ouroboros virus's highest evolutionary form. In theory, it could liquefy an elephant in seconds.
One second. Ten seconds. A full minute passed.
Wesker stared at the blurred silhouette at the center of the golden fog, waiting for the screams of Ryan's genetic chain collapsing.
But the golden spores withered and died the instant they touched his cell nuclei. They couldn't infect him at all. Every spore that entered his body decayed into meaningless waste on contact.
An invisible force parted the golden fog. Ryan walked out, perfectly composed.
A layer of gold dust coated his black coat. He brushed it off with one hand and it scattered to the floor like common dirt.
He looked at Wesker. The corner of his mouth twitched. The most straightforward mockery possible of an extinction-level weapon.
"Wesker, after all that buildup, all you've got is sprinkling powder?" The flat question hit harder than any rage. It was a total rejection of everything Wesker had worked toward.
Wesker's golden slit-pupils contracted sharply, but his face showed neither fury nor despair. Instead, a cold, vindicated expression settled over his features.
It was the fervor of a hypothesis confirmed. He looked at Ryan the way someone would look at a monster from another dimension entirely.
"Not even the highest concentration of pure golden mother-strain can corrode you in the slightest..." Wesker murmured, his voice laced with an excitement that made the skin crawl.
"You really are an anomaly operating outside all known rules."
Ryan had no patience for a biology seminar. The cold wind at altitude was starting to get on his nerves.
"I'm bored of this game." Ryan slowly raised his right fist. His knuckles cracked against the air with a faint percussive pop, forcibly compressing the surrounding kinetic energy. "Got any last words?"
Wesker threw his head back and laughed, the sound bouncing through the beast's innards, dripping with deranged glee.
"Such arrogance, Ryan! You think killing me saves this world?"
Ryan didn't respond. His answer was the right fist he threw, an absolute violence capable of rewriting the density of matter itself.
The instant the punch connected, the air between them was evacuated in a flash, forming an absolute vacuum.
No physical structure could withstand that level of force.
Ryan's fist tore through the layer of golden spores without resistance and punched clean through Wesker's chest.
A horrifying, incalculable surge of kinetic energy erupted from Wesker's back.
There was no messy spray of flesh and blood. Everything within the force radius of the blow simply collapsed.
A massive circular hole opened through Wesker's body. And the residual force didn't stop.
The translucent shockwave punched straight through the biological wall behind him. Then the second layer of armor. The third layer of skeletal structure. The bio-colossus's hundred-meter mechanical spine. A thunderous chain of detonations followed.
Under the sheer power of that single punch, Ouroboros No. 1 was bored clean through from the center.
A tunnel dozens of meters in diameter appeared through the heart of the fortress. Sunlight poured in through the breach.
Through that hole, you could see straight down to the deep blue surface of the ocean ten thousand meters below.
Ryan's arm was still buried in the center of Wesker's disintegrating remains. The damage had exceeded his biological ceiling by a factor of billions, and Wesker's body was coming apart at the molecular level.
But before his upper body fully crumbled to dust, Ryan saw his face.
Wesker showed no pain whatsoever. His lips were curled into a faint smile. Ice-cold, restrained, and triumphant. The smile of a plan coming together.
That smile, haloed by the glow of the golden spores, was deeply wrong.
Ryan's brow creased slightly. For the first time, something about Wesker's death felt off.
That smile wasn't mocking death. It was celebrating a rebirth.
Wesker's last fragment dissolved into the high-altitude wind and was gone.
"Ryan! Target's life signs are gone, but the entire fortress is breaking apart!" Jill's urgent voice crackled over the comms channel.
Ryan pulled back his fist and stood at the edge of the massive, wind-howling breach. The gale whipped through his short hair.
The bio-colossus beneath his feet let out one final death cry as its entire body began to disintegrate.
Just as Ryan was about to leap into the cloud sea, he noticed the golden spores that had been drifting loose hadn't disappeared.
They were circling, converging in the air, moving with what looked like autonomous will, rapidly dispersing along the Rossby Wave Nodes.
"So this was your real trump card, Wesker." Ryan watched the pure-gold dust dancing across the sky.
He could feel it. Wesker's consciousness hadn't been extinguished with his body. It had spread into every last spore.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]