"I... I think I just saw... Uncle Ryan crack that cult leader's skull open from behind with a brick?"
Ashley was gasping for breath, her eyes still clouded with sheer absurdity and confusion.
Leon, Luis, and the two girls exchanged a look and silently swallowed what they'd just witnessed. Since Saddler's mind control had been forcibly broken by that "holy sword of physics," their only job now was to use this opening to cut their way out of the Castle.
"Move! Up to the Hall of the Sacred Path on the top floor. Luis says there's an elevator up there that goes straight outside!" Leon yanked Ashley to her feet and kept pushing forward with his shotgun leveled.
The group climbed the spiraling stone steps and passed through a concealed iron door, emerging into the mechanical waterworks that kept the Castle's elevators running.
The temperature dropped sharply. Thick bronze pipes and roaring gears filled the space, and groundwater streamed down the walls, glinting coldly under the dim emergency lights.
"Everyone watch yourselves. The layout here's a nightmare," Leon said, giving a tactical hand signal for Sherry and Becky to cover the flanks.
Drip... skrrrkk...
Overhead, a grating metallic scrape ripped through the tangle of pipes. The sound was fast, like something was racing along the ceiling.
Luis pulled Ashley behind a thick pillar, where she crouched in the shadow with her hands clamped over her ears, shaking. Becky planted herself in front of them, rifle up, barrel locked on the dark above.
"Up there!" Becky snapped her electromagnetic rifle to her shoulder, sights fixed on the shadows.
Bang!
A heavy, rust-eaten iron grate was ripped down from the ceiling by unnatural force, crashing to the floor in front of them. A pitch-black, elongated, almost alien silhouette clung to the overhead pipes like an inverted spider.
It had shed the red robe it used as a disguise, exposing an impenetrable black carapace, a bone-spiked tail lashing restlessly behind it. Most striking of all was its right claw, now just a ruined stump, green ichor oozing steadily from the wound.
Salazar's personal bodyguard. The top-tier mutant known as the Right Hand.
Its pupil-less compound eyes, through the dim light, locked on Sherry below with pure, venomous hatred. It was the strange weapon in that girl's hands that had shattered its absolute defense, the defense it had been so proud of.
"That's the ugly bastard whose claw I took off," Sherry said with a cold snort, gripping her rifle tighter. "Looks like it came back for revenge."
"Roaaarrr!"
The Right Hand let out a shrill screech, its massive body launching off the ceiling like a bolt of black lightning, straight at Sherry's face. It was so fast it left afterimages, and in the tight, tangled pipework, it was an absolute apex predator.
"Scatter!" Leon roared.
Sherry didn't flinch. Her electromagnetic rifle fired instantly. Blue armor-piercing rounds tore through the air with terrifying kinetic force, but the Right Hand had learned its lesson. It refused to take the hits head-on, instead bouncing wildly off walls and pipes, pushing its agility to its absolute limit.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Rounds slammed into the pipes behind it, throwing up sparks. High-pressure steam burst out in hissing jets, clouding an already dim field of view.
"It's too fast! Too much cover in here, we can't lock onto it!" Becky shouted, covering Ashley and Luis.
The Right Hand moved through the steam like a ghost. Its remaining left claw whipped out and sliced a thick steel pipe clean in two. The broken segment whistled through the air straight at Leon.
Leon hit the deck and rolled, barely dodging. Half-kneeling in a puddle, his gaze swept the machinery around him like a hawk's. His eyes landed on a cluster of massive red storage tanks hooked into the main piping along the wall, their surfaces coated in thick white frost, stamped with the unmistakable hazard symbol for liquid nitrogen.
The Castle's liquid nitrogen tanks, used to cool the heavy machinery.
An ace agent's combat instinct fired off all at once.
"Sherry! Becky! Forget where it is. Drive it under that red tank!" Leon shouted, pointing up and to the side while steadying his riot shotgun.
Sherry and Becky didn't hesitate. The two sisters whipped back-to-back. They stopped trying to track the Right Hand's blurring afterimages and instead walled off both of its escape routes with pure firepower coverage.
The wall of bullets forced the Right Hand to flee up along the wall, into the one zone that wasn't under fire. Its narrow, revenge-drunk instincts left it blind to the fact that it was being herded, step by step, into a carefully laid trap.
When the Right Hand was forced to leap onto the thick crossbeam hanging directly above the liquid nitrogen tank, it let out a furious shriek, its one remaining claw sinking into the beam as it coiled to deliver a final, killing pounce down on Sherry.
"Now!"
Leon's gaze was ice-cold. He pulled the trigger without hesitation.
Boom!
The shotgun blast didn't hit the creature. It hit the main valve of the red liquid nitrogen tank, dead on.
The valve blew apart. Super-cooled liquid nitrogen under high pressure erupted out like a dam breaking. White fog at nearly two hundred below zero swallowed the Right Hand in midair in under a second.
"Shhhh... rrrgh... krk krk krk!"
The Right Hand screamed in sheer despair. The biological carapace that had supposedly been able to deflect bullets flash-frosted under the nitrogen bath, its physical structure undergoing irreversible embrittlement. Frozen in the middle of its pounce, it became a black ice sculpture and dropped straight down off the beam like a statue.
"Hit it while it's down! Finish it!"
Leon shouted.
Sherry and Becky already had their barrels trained on the falling sculpture. No wasted words. Both electromagnetic rifles roared simultaneously.
Bang! Bang!
Two armor-piercing rounds carrying devastating kinetic force punched into the Right Hand's frozen, glass-brittle shell.
This time, there were no sparks. No green blood.
Just a crisp sound, like crystal shattering. The top-tier mutant that had terrorized the entire Castle exploded in midair into countless shards, clattering down across the floor. Not a single intact piece remained.
"Phew..." Leon lowered his still-hot shotgun and wiped the cold sweat and condensation from his forehead. "Nice working with you, girls."
Sherry let out a long breath and stepped forward to kick one of the ice shards across the floor. "Now it doesn't have to keep obsessing over that claw. Uncle Leon, that ice-and-fire combo was beautiful."
Luis poked his head out from behind a pipe, stared at the field of icy debris, and swallowed. "Good lord... shattered like that, you think we could still put it in an exhibit?"
"Quit joking and let's go." Leon shook his head with a wry smile and waved over Ashley and Luis, who had been tucked into a corner.
Crunching over ice shards and mechanical wreckage, the group finally reached the heavy elevator at the far end of the passage, the one that ran straight up to the top floor.
The lift groaned into motion with a heavy mechanical rumble. Above them, the Hall of the Sacred Path, the stage for the final confrontation, was opening its doors.
And waiting there, Ramon Salazar, now fully consumed by despair and madness, had his last card ready to play.