The door cracked open, and a wall of smell hit them first. Disinfectant layered over mildew layered over the thick copper reek of blood. The kind of air that made your lungs clamp shut on reflex.
The room was small and wrecked. Pill bottles littered the floor. An examination bed lay toppled against the far corner. Dark stains climbed the walls, long since dried to black. Richard sat propped against the back wall, half-slumped, his face the color of printer paper. His lips had gone a wrong shade of blue-violet. One pant leg was torn wide open below the knee, exposing two deep bite wounds that went nearly to bone. The skin around them had ballooned, a mottled black-purple creeping upward like ink through wet paper. One look was enough to know the venom was savage.
Rebecca knelt in front of him. The young medic's face was bloodless, her fingers trembling, but she kept pressure on the wound with a strip of clean cloth, doing everything she could to slow the spread. Cold sweat beaded at her temples. Fear lived in her eyes, but her voice stayed as level as she could force it.
"Hang on, Richard. We'll figure something out."
His throat worked. Each breath came thin and labored, as though the simple act of drawing air cost him everything he had left.
"Giant snake... venom's spreading too fast. I don't have long." His gaze dragged toward Jill. "The underground laboratory... there's a serum. If you don't hurry... it'll be too late."
Jill crouched beside him, scanning the wound in one quick sweep. S.T.A.R.S. field medic training told her everything she needed to know, and none of it was good. Her brow furrowed tight.
"Stop talking. Save your strength. I'll handle it."
The words had barely left her mouth when Ryan's eyes narrowed.
An ordinary person would have heard nothing more than a faint, wet shifting sound from somewhere beyond the wall. Ryan saw through the concrete. Every detail, razor-sharp: a body thick as a barrel, armored in dense scales, a forked tongue tasting the air in slow, methodical flicks. Muscles coiling. Winding tighter. Preparing to charge.
No blind spots. He saw it all.
"Behind you!" he barked, grabbing Jill and pulling her sideways.
She moved on pure reflex, riding his momentum into a dodge.
The wall exploded.
Concrete blew inward. Dust and rubble erupted across the room. The giant snake smashed through like the wall was cardboard, its massive body forcing into the cramped medical room. Grey-black scales caught the dim light with a hard, oily sheen. The stench hit like a physical thing, hot and rotten, flooding every corner.
The instant it landed, its tail lashed sideways. The steel examination bed might as well have been made of tin foil. It launched across the room and crumpled against the opposite wall with a shriek of twisted metal.
"Shit!" Jill swung the shotgun off her back.
No hesitation. She aimed center-mass and pulled the trigger.
The blast punched into the scales and kicked up a spray of dark blood. The snake shrieked, an alien, grating sound, and reared up. Its body lifted off the ground with terrifying speed, hanging in the air for one impossible second before slamming down where Jill had been standing.
She rolled clear. The floor cracked under the impact. Before she could get her feet under her, the tail whipped around like a steel cable, carving a horizontal arc through the air. She ducked. The medicine cabinet behind her detonated into glass shards and broken bottles.
Ryan held his position on the flank. He didn't fire wild.
Through X-ray vision, every twitch of the snake's musculature was an open book. Each contraction, each shift in direction, each attack trajectory mapped out before it happened. He placed his shots with precision, tagging weak points and soft tissue, never chasing a killing blow. The goal was simpler: keep the snake's attention split so it couldn't focus entirely on Jill and Rebecca.
"What the hell is in this mansion..." Jill muttered between dodges.
The crossfire drove the snake into a frenzy. It whipped around and changed tactics. No more sweeping strikes. The tail shot forward in a straight thrust, aimed dead at Jill. Fast. Vicious. No time to react.
Ryan stepped forward on instinct and put himself between them.
The impact landed square across his shoulders and back.
A hit like that would have cracked an ordinary man's spine, maybe killed him outright. Jill flinched, bracing for the worst.
Ryan grunted. His body rocked forward half a step, then held. His brow creased. God, that hurts. But his skin was unbroken. No fractures. No internal damage. HP lock held, invisible and absolute. From the outside, he looked like a man who could take a beating.
Jill stared for half a second, disbelief flickering across her face.
"You..."
"Don't lose focus." He didn't turn around. Couldn't turn around. His eyes were watering from the pain, and he wasn't about to let anyone see that.
In that split-second gap, the snake coiled and locked its slit pupils on Jill. Its jaws yawned open, fangs gleaming wet in the shadows. It struck, lunging straight for her face.
Jill threw herself backward. She cleared the fangs, but the tail caught her wrist on the way past. Pain lanced up her arm. Her fingers spasmed open. The shotgun clattered free and skidded across the floor, coming to rest at Ryan's feet.
The snake's head was already bearing down, jaws wide, the stink of venom washing over her. Fangs inches from her throat.
Rebecca pressed both hands over her mouth. No sound came out.
Ryan scooped up the shotgun, hauled Jill behind him with his free arm, and in one fluid motion brought the barrel up and fired.
The blast caught the snake under the jaw at point-blank range, killing its forward momentum dead. The creature thrashed, skull whipping side to side, its tongue nearly grazing Ryan's forehead, the stench thick enough to gag on.
He didn't step back. He stepped in.
Finger steady on the trigger. No reloading. No pausing. No worrying about running dry. Infinite ammo stripped the fight down to its simplest form: suppress and destroy. Shotgun blasts hammered through the cramped room one after another, each round finding a wound or a weak point with methodical precision.
The snake screamed. Its body convulsed, crashing through what little furniture remained. Tables, shelving units, metal cabinets, everything reduced to wreckage. Rebecca shielded Richard's unconscious form in the farthest corner, not daring to breathe.
Ryan read every counterattack before it came, X-ray vision tracking each coil and lunge in advance, keeping him a half-step ahead at all times. He didn't shout. He didn't showboat. He fired, repositioned, and fired again. Calm, steady, relentless.
Minutes stretched into what felt like hours.
The snake's thrashing weakened. Its movements turned sluggish, then clumsy. One last shotgun blast, and the massive body seized rigid. The head dropped and hit the floor with a heavy, final thud. A few twitches ran down its length, and then nothing.
Silence flooded the room. Gunsmoke. Blood. Three people breathing hard.
Jill leaned against the wall, chest heaving, cold sweat tracing lines down her face. She looked at Ryan, and her expression was hard to read.
She'd seen the tail connect. Dead center, full force across his back. Yet there he stood, nothing but a little dust on his clothes. Not a scratch. Not a wince. His breathing was steadier than hers.
"You took a direct hit from that thing," she said.
Ryan rolled his shoulder, tone casual, as if they'd wrapped up a pickup game. "I'm fine. Took it okay. Thing hits hard, though. Almost put me through the wall."
Jill's mouth twitched into something that was almost a smile. "First time I've seen someone eat that and stay on their feet."
"Maybe I'm a jock." He handed the shotgun back.
Jill stared at him. The explanation was so absurd it circled back around to useless. But in a mansion crawling with monsters, one unusually tough guy wasn't the strangest thing she'd encountered tonight. She took the gun and let it go.
No questions about the bottomless ammunition. No interrogation about why he was uninjured. There wasn't time for that.
Rebecca crawled over to Richard and pressed her fingers to his carotid. Her eyes welled up almost instantly.
"His pulse is fading. If we don't get the serum now, he's gone!"
Jill's expression hardened, decision already made.
"I'm going to the underground laboratory for the serum. You two stay here with Richard. Watch the perimeter. Anything moves, call for me."
"Be careful," Ryan said, and nodded.
Jill checked her weapon, turned, and sprinted out of the medical room. Her footsteps faded down the corridor and were gone.
Quiet settled back over the room. The snake's corpse lay in a heap amid the destruction.
Ryan moved to the doorway, put his back against the wall, and stood watch. X-ray vision fanned out across the corridor, every inch of it mapped and monitored. Nothing was getting past him unseen.
Behind him, Rebecca stayed at Richard's side, murmuring words of encouragement in a small, steady voice, even though he could no longer hear them.