Chapter 60: The First Boss in History to Be Killed by an Egg
Each step Nemesis took landed like a hammer blow.
The Verdugo ran.
It was running at full capacity, all four limbs working, and it didn't matter. Nemesis had been named for what it did best, and what it did best was close the distance. Its running speed was sufficient to catch a car at normal road speed.
The gap disappeared.
A large hand reached out and closed around the Verdugo's tail stinger.
What the Verdugo had always considered its most dangerous weapon was, to Nemesis, a convenient handle.
Nemesis grabbed it and pulled, and the Verdugo came back.
Then the punch landed.
The air around the impact compressed visibly. The carapace that had absorbed sustained fire from Ada's MP5 and SMG without so much as a scratch caved in on itself instantly, punched through in a single blow, providing nothing in the way of defense.
The Verdugo made a sound specific to things that were no longer fully one category.
Its eyes bulged.
Nemesis looked at the fear in its face and felt nothing about it. It pulled its fist back from the Verdugo's chest, raised it again, and brought it down.
Again.
Again.
Each punch landed like an artillery shell in the trees.
It continued until the Verdugo was no longer a thing that could be described as a Verdugo, and then it stopped.
With that done, the second container, the one that had been sitting unopened through all of this, quietly opened on its own.
The T-103 Tyrants inside looked at what Nemesis had left behind. Without any change in expression, each of them reached up and adjusted the hat on its head. Then all of them, in complete unison, walked in the direction that was not toward Nemesis.
Inside the castle.
Hunk and Leon's teams were pushing through the corridors in two separate lines. The space was narrow, and the advance moved considerably slower than it had in the forest.
Far away, on a separate island, Saddler appeared to notice something had changed. His dominant-type Las Plagas parasite activated, and the signal it sent out hit every infected host in the castle simultaneously.
The transformations began.
Skulls split open. Las Plagas parasites pushed through from inside the hosts, emerging into the air, still writhing. The soldiers around them had been difficult to fight before. What replaced them was considerably worse: berserk, not registering damage, faster than before, the tip of every Las Plagas tentacle edged with something blade-sharp. They moved through the corridor like visitors from the Parasyte set who had taken a wrong turn.
Gunfire moved through the narrow space.
Hunk's team had been through confined-space engagements before. Against the insect-form soldiers charging forward without any regard for what was being fired at them, his voice came out flat.
"Cover."
The two people at the front of the column unclipped the ballistic shields from their backs and locked them together into a wall. The team behind them settled into position and kept shooting.
Legs. Both legs, drop them.
The insect-form soldiers went down. The ones immediately behind them tripped over the ones on the ground.
The shield carriers stepped back.
A larger figure came forward from the rear of the column, moving without hurry. The black tank on his back stood roughly half his height. The nozzle at the end was connected to a custom flamethrower.
He looked at the pile of insect-form soldiers in the corridor.
He raised the nozzle and expressed his feelings about the situation.
At temperatures sufficient to melt steel, the insect-form soldiers reduced to black husks. The Las Plagas parasites inside had nothing to cling to and followed them.
"Push forward."
With both teams advancing, the castle's interior gave way section by section. The only portion that hadn't fallen was the center.
In the castle master's chambers, Salazar listened to the gunfire getting closer to his door.
The muscles of his face had been twitching for some time. Whatever remained of his self-image as a man of aristocratic bearing was not surviving the evening well. The veins under his skin bulged and writhed visibly, and even the white lead paste he had applied with such care was barely covering what it needed to cover anymore.
"Insolent rabble!"
"Does no one know that entering another person's home uninvited is extremely poor manners?!"
He opened his mouth to call for Pesanta and Verdugo, then remembered he had sent both of them away some time ago.
Not that it concerned him. Between the two of them, dealing with this kind of disruption should be routine.
He was still considering how best to address the situation when his door was kicked open.
An egg hit him in the face.
Salazar: ...
Leon: ...
Leon did not understand why Matthew had told him to throw eggs at a short man in a castle. But Matthew had been right about everything else, so he was continuing.
"...You insolentâ€""
Another egg hit Salazar.
He looked down at his skin where the egg had landed.
The area covered by the egg was visibly swelling and blistering at a rate that required no time to confirm.
"You worthless, INSOLENTâ€""
Salazar genuinely could not account for how this man had known about his severe egg allergy. Or why, rather than anything resembling a conventional confrontation, he had walked in and begun throwing eggs without saying a word.
What Salazar didn't know was that all of this traced back to Matthew â€" a player who, in the game, had once killed Salazar with two golden eggs, and who had been coaching Leon before the door went in.
Leon threw several more.
Salazar tried to activate his Las Plagas transformation. The anaphylactic reaction that had been progressing since the first egg had other plans. His airway was closing. His head had swollen significantly past what the white lead paste had ever been designed to conceal. His lungs were beginning to fill with fluid.
He hit the floor of his own chambers with his face set in an expression of pure, unresolved fury.
"...That's it?" Leon looked at the eggs still in his hand, then tried throwing a few more at the body.
It didn't move.
Apparently that was that.
And so the first boss in history to be killed by an egg took his place in the record.
"Following a walkthrough really does hit different," Leon said to no one in particular.
Saddler's island. Underground laboratory.
Nemesis was at work.
The task here was the same as the task in the forest: clear everything in the path of Hunk and Leon's teams so the retrieval of the Amber could proceed with as little friction as possible.
Faced with soldiers pouring in from every direction through the laboratory, Nemesis's forward momentum did not change.
When someone came at it with a weapon, or raised a gun to fire, Nemesis responded in the most straightforward way available.
One punch.
Enemies. Combination locks. Circuit breakers. Security access terminals.
One punch each. All of it.
Nemesis moved through the laboratory until there was nothing left in its path that could reasonably be called an obstacle, and its task was complete.
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