The Island. The ancient ruins plateau.
Cold rain slanted down against the broken stone pillars. Leon stared hard at the "fake Amber" in his hand, the cheap LED still stubbornly flickering inside it. He took a deep breath and forced down the urge to crush the thing in his fist.
"I swear, once I get that damn bug out of Ashley, I'm going to shove this resin plastic block with a lightbulb in it straight down Ryan's throat!" Leon ground out through clenched teeth, a vein twitching at his temple.
"Save your energy, Uncle Leon. If Uncle Ryan doesn't want to swallow it, you won't even get to touch the hem of his coat." Sherry slung the electromagnetic rifle back over her shoulder and twisted the knife without mercy.
"No time for jokes! Ashley's in bad shape!" Luis came rushing up from behind, drenched in sweat. "My private lab is just up ahead. Move!"
Everyone's expression tightened. Leon scooped up Ashley, who had already slipped into a half-conscious state, black-green veins bulging along her neck, and sprinted for the underground facility at full speed.
...
Ten minutes later, Luis's lab.
"Hold her down, Leon! The laser extraction is about to reach the parasite's core!"
Luis's fingers flew across the control panel, a sheen of sweat forming on his brow. The laser probe lowered slowly, hovering over Ashley's chest. She was face-down on the operating table, both hands gripping the edge, knuckles white. She could feel the thing inside her moving, burrowing deeper.
"Don't move." Luis's voice was tight. "Whatever you do... don't move, little princess. We're almost there."
The machinery let out a piercing alarm. The shadow on the screen was writhing, thrashing. The Plaga parasite had sensed the threat, and it was frantically trying to escape the laser's range, fleeing deeper into her spinal cord.
"Saddler's lost it! He's burning through the whole island's neural network without caring what it costs him. Ashley could crash any second!" Luis shouted, eyes locked on the numbers climbing on the screen.
Out in the corridor, Sherry and Becky stood guard on either side of the lab door. Ashley's screams carried through the steel. Sherry's shoulders tensed without her realizing, and her fingers on the electromagnetic rifle had gone slightly pale. Becky was crouched behind and to her side, eyes fixed on the dark end of the corridor.
More than half the fluorescent tubes in the hall were dead. Only two or three at the far end still clung to life, slicing the passage into alternating strips of light and shadow. Somewhere in the distance, structural groans rumbled through the walls, like the entire island was in pain.
Sherry's palms were sweating. She adjusted her grip and wiped the slick one against her tactical pants. That was the third time she'd done it tonight. Uncle Ryan had told her once, shaky hands you can deal with. Slippery hands will get you killed.
It was unnaturally quiet. The instruments were humming, Ashley was screaming, the distant building was splitting apart. Plenty of sound, and yet Sherry felt like something was wrong. Because this was the heart of the cult's stronghold, and the enemies that should have been crawling everywhere had vanished. Not one of them in sight.
"It's too quiet," Sherry said under her breath, voice low enough that only the two of them could hear.
Becky didn't answer, but her grip on the rifle tightened a notch.
Right then, a very faint sound drifted up from the far end of the corridor, like something being dragged across the metal floor, a grinding scrape that set your teeth on edge, coming closer.
Sherry snapped her rifle up, scope trained on the blast door at the end of the dark.
"Here it comes." Becky's voice was cold as ice.
And then...
"BOOM!"
A massive bulge suddenly burst outward from the reinforced steel door at the end of the corridor. Three violet-red, barbed bone claws punched clean through the half-meter-thick alloy like it was tofu, metal shrieking as it tore.
"Focus on the surgery. We've got the door." Leon called out sharply without even turning his head. He stepped out of the lab, pulled the door shut behind him, and racked the riot shotgun in his hands with a sharp click.
Out in the corridor, Sherry and Becky took cover back-to-back, the muzzles of both electromagnetic rifles locked onto the blackness at the far end.
Something was there, something putting off a malice so thick it felt like it could freeze the soul, rolling toward them through the cold damp air at a terrifying speed. The emergency lights along both walls buckled under the pressure, popping out one after another with dull bangs.
"Incoming... extremely dangerous. The power level is off the charts!" Becky whispered a warning, finger already locked against the trigger.
"THUD!"
That was not a sound any human could make. The blast door didn't last ten seconds. It shattered inward into a storm of flying steel fragments. A chunk of debris weighing over a hundred pounds grazed past the side of Leon's face and slammed into the wall behind him hard enough to shake the floor.
Through the smoke and dust, something twisted to the absolute extreme, something that flat-out violated every rule of biology, forced itself into the narrow corridor.
It was Saddler. But what he looked like now was a nightmare that turned the stomach.
The ornate black robe on his body had long since split apart. The left half of him still held the traits of the Plaga parasite, covered in hard gray-brown jointed limbs and chitinous plating. But the right half of his body had swollen up like a balloon to nearly three meters tall. Fresh pink flesh was regenerating madly, the right arm fully transformed into a huge violet-red bone claw that dragged on the ground. On the tumorous mass of his swollen shoulder, several bloodshot, enormous eyeballs had pushed their way out at random.
"Die... every one of you... will become a sacrifice to the Holy Plaga!"
Saddler's voice carried an eerie double register, one half the hoarse tone from before, the other half a shrill, agonized scream like a dying beast. Two extremes of power were tearing at each other inside him, driving him near the edge of reason.
"Open fire!"
Sherry's eyes went cold, and the electromagnetic rifle spat out a burst of deadly light. Becky was half a beat behind her, and two crossing streams of electromagnetic armor-piercing rounds hammered straight into Saddler's chest.