The downpour outside the cabin had eased to a drizzle, but the suffocating pressure in the air only grew heavier.
The frenzied villagers that had been surging in like a tide retreated into the dark tree line, as if responding to some silent command. Everything went quiet. Nothing left but the drip of rainwater off the eaves.
"They pulled back?" Luis poked half his head out from behind the fireplace, still clutching the metal case with the Amber, and let out a long breath. "Thank God. Even lunatics need a midnight snack, I guess."
Leon didn't relax. He kept his pistol up, eyes fixed on the riddled wooden door. "Something's wrong. They're not retreating. They're clearing a path."
Heavy footsteps sounded in the mud outside.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Each one deliberate, weighty, carrying the absolute authority of something that ruled this place.
The door, already hanging by a thread, exploded inward under a single black-gloved hand. Through the spray of splinters, a man ducked under the shattered frame and stepped inside. Over two meters tall, draped in a black priest's cassock, a dense beard covering his jaw.
Bitores Mendez. Village chief of Valdelobos.
His pale, pupilless eyes swept the room and settled on Ashley.
"Lost lamb..." His voice was low and raw, like two rough stones grinding together. "You must receive the baptism of holy blood."
Leon raised his gun and fired without hesitation.
Three 9mm rounds punched into Mendez's chest. He didn't flinch. The bullets lodged in muscle hard as iron, and not a single drop of blood came out.
"Extremely high physical defense. Standard caliber ineffective." Becky stood in the shadow of the stairwell, her voice cool and clinical.
Mendez snorted and threw a right hook at Leon, the air reeking with the force of it. Leon ducked and rolled clear. The fist hit the solid load-bearing pillar behind him, and the thigh-thick column snapped clean in two.
The cabin began to shake.
"Uncle Leon, fall back."
Sherry's clear voice rang through the room. She walked past him with a Desert Eagle in each hand, her eyes bright with anticipation.
"This is the exam Uncle Ryan left for us. Don't steal our points."
Leon looked at this girl who barely came up to his shoulder, then at Mendez and his monstrous strength, and grit his teeth. "This isn't a joke! That thing isn't some regular villager!"
"I know." The corner of Sherry's mouth curved up in a smile identical to Ryan's. "Becky, go!"
The instant the order dropped, Becky moved from her flanking position.
She closed the distance like a black streak of lightning, slipping into Mendez's blind spot. Her tactical kukri flashed cold and precise, slicing at the tendons behind his knee.
Mendez was huge, but he wasn't slow. He roared and spun, grabbing for the pest.
Becky didn't overcommit. One cut and she was gone, sliding out of his range like water through fingers.
And in the moment Mendez turned, his broad back lay wide open to Sherry's guns.
Both Desert Eagles roared at once. Large-caliber Magnum armor-piercing rounds slammed into either side of Mendez's spine with devastating kinetic force.
He bellowed in pain, his massive frame lurching forward.
"Not done yet." Sherry alternated fire between both pistols, pouring rounds into his joints and weak points like a storm.
The sustained barrage drove Mendez back step by step, and then he snapped.
"HERETICS!"
A spine-shredding howl tore from his throat, and his body made a sound that set teeth on edge, bones cracking and splitting. His torso ripped away from his lower half at the waist.
A horrific segmented spine, meters long and thick as a giant centipede, erupted from the severed stump, connecting his upper body. His back split open and two sharp, jointed limbs stabbed outward.
Second form. Full rampage.
Ashley stared from the corner, swallowed hard. "Leon, what is that thing? Did biology just stop being a thing?!"
Mendez's speed in his centipede form exploded. He used his jointed limbs to launch himself upward and latched onto the second-floor crossbeam, hanging overhead with those pale eyes locked on Sherry.
"Above you! He's fast!" Leon shouted, trying to track Mendez as he scuttled between beams at impossible speed, but the movement defied every law of physics. He couldn't get a lock.
Mendez crawled across the ceiling like a massive poisonous centipede, then lashed out with a bladed limb and severed a burning support beam, sending it plummeting straight down at Sherry's head.
"Sherry, three o'clock!" Becky's cold voice cut through the chaos.
Sherry didn't even look up at the falling beam. She trusted Becky's call completely and slid left on pure instinct.
The burning timber clipped the edge of her jacket and crashed to the floor in a shower of sparks.
"Blind-spot anticipation. Uncle Ryan's first lesson." She smiled and gripped both Desert Eagles tight, but she didn't fire. She closed her eyes.
"What is she doing?!" Leon shouted.
Mendez hissed from the beam above, missed strike be damned, and launched himself off the wall in a diving lunge. Two bladed limbs spread wide like the shears of a reaper, aimed straight at Sherry's head.
The instant Mendez committed to the drop, hanging in midair with nothing to push off of, Sherry's eyes snapped open.
"Becky!"
"Copy."
Becky had already used a stack of broken crates to launch herself into the air. The folding grenade launcher in her hands was loaded and ready.
No hesitation. A specialized electromagnetic high-explosive grenade fired from the barrel, its trajectory anticipating Mendez's fall path perfectly, and punched straight into his gaping mouth.
He swallowed it on reflex.
Becky tucked into a neat roll and landed.
The muffled detonation came from inside Mendez's body, followed by raging blue arcs of high-voltage current. His body seized violently in midair, the centipede spine blowing apart segment by segment, and he crashed down through the first-floor boards.
"Done." Sherry walked up, pressed the muzzle of her Desert Eagle against Mendez's still-twitching skull.
One shot. The head burst.
Burnt stench and dark green fluid pooled across the floor. The pitiful village chief, puppet of Saddler, found his release at the hands of two young girls working in perfect tandem.
The cabin fell silent as a grave.
Leon slowly lowered his gun. He looked at the two of them, neither one breathing hard, and felt like his years of agent training had been a complete waste.
"You... just took him out. Like that?"
"What, you want us to keep him around for the holidays?" Sherry holstered both pistols with practiced ease and dusted off her hands.
"Nice work, girls."
A low, unhurried voice drifted down from the shadows of the cabin's second floor.