Half an hour earlier. The reef-rock high ground on the west side of The Island.
Carlos was chewing on a blade of dry grass, sprawled without a shred of dignity in a crack between the wet, cold rocks. He adjusted his scope and turned his head to murmur to Tyrell behind him.
"Honestly, if we pull a few more missions like this, I'm filing for early retirement. Boss leads the op himself, and Shadow Force basically becomes the 'battlefield janitors'. We come out, catch some sea breeze, see if the moon over Spain is nice and round."
The way he saw it, this Island trip was basically a paid vacation. That monster Ryan had already infiltrated the interior, and based on past experience, any structure he walked through would need rebuilding and any villain he met would start questioning the meaning of existence. Their job on the perimeter was just to stop a few stray small fry from slipping out on a rowboat.
"Captain, target spotted, but... something's off." The voice of Sniper One came through the earpiece, taut with suppressed tension.
Carlos's grin dropped. The sea wind surged into his collar, and the biting cold snapped him awake instantly. He pressed flat against his shooting position, his finger steady on the trigger, and through the high-magnification scope he locked onto the dark figure strolling along the rock-strewn beach.
It was a boy with an unnaturally slight build, his skin a sickly pale under the moonlight. His steps were absurdly light, as if the jagged rocks beneath his feet weren't obstacles but a smooth red carpet.
The instant Carlos got a clear look at the boy's profile, it was like being struck by lightning. The fingers gripping his rifle jerked.
That's... A file Ryan had flagged with the highest classification of forbidden flashed through his mind. "ARK-M-092... no, wait, that's wrong. G-001!"
What he'd thought would be an easy 'outing' had collided head-on with Umbrella's true ultimate nightmare.
"Captain, range one thousand six hundred ten meters, wind correction complete, requesting permission to fire." The sniper's breathing was heavy, like a working bellows.
Cold sweat soaked through Carlos's tactical vest in an instant. The instinct honed in the corpse piles of Raccoon City told him to call it off, but letting the tiger back into the mountains now meant it would be ten times harder to put down later. He gritted his teeth and forced out two words. "Open fire."
BANG.
A 12.7mm armor-piercing round tore through layer after layer of sea mist with a searing trail of flame.
Then, the next second, Carlos's pupils lost all focus. The blade of grass fell from his mouth into the mud.
The boy didn't even turn his head. At the fraction of a second before the bullet would have grazed the hair at the back of his skull, he casually raised his right hand, index and middle finger snapping together with perfect precision.
It was almost possible to hear the crisp, metallic clink, somehow audible even over the roar of the surf.
The boy stopped walking and turned around at his leisure. Pinched between his slender fingertips was the round itself, still steaming, crushed flat by nothing more than the pressure of two fingers.
From over a thousand meters away, he seemed to look directly through the scope and meet Carlos's eyes. Then he smiled, a pure and almost curious smile, the kind a child wears when he finds a noisemaking toy on the side of the road.
Then the boy raised his left hand, elegantly extended a single finger, and pointed through the air toward the center of the island.
He let the bullet slip from his fingertips into the rocks. His figure wavered slightly, like a ghost dissolving into the thick mist, and he vanished from view.
Carlos slumped down where he sat and pressed the radio with trembling fingers. "All units, pull back. Now. Boss... we ran into G-001. We took a shot at him. He... he caught the bullet."
Atop the communications tower on The Island.
Ryan was contentedly shoving Wesker's expensive sunglasses into his pocket. He pulled out a camera and went to town on Wesker's freshly shaved, utterly bald head, which was gleaming beautifully in the moonlight. All angles, all coverage.
"Tch. Wesker's got a surprisingly nice skull curve. Gonna send these to Jill later, she'll laugh hard enough to get abs," Ryan muttered to himself.
Then the radio in his pocket crackled to life with Carlos's parched voice. "Boss, the west-side reefs... we ran into G-001. He caught the sniper round with his fingers..."
The amusement on Ryan's face froze solid. His pupils contracted sharply.
He caught the bullet? Ryan's heart skipped a beat.
He leapt down, and the moment he hit the ground he exploded into a terrifying burst of speed, racing for the reef zone.
The observation point.
When Ryan arrived, Carlos was still staring fixedly at the flattened bullet. The moment he saw Ryan, he skipped the greeting entirely. "Boss, he just pinched it like this, then pointed that way."
Ryan crouched down. His fingertips brushed the two deep finger-indents embedded in the slug, and a chill climbed up through the gaps between his fingers.
His head snapped toward the direction Carlos was pointing. The cargo yard was already a pillar of fire and flame.
He focused his senses in that direction. Saddler's presence was swelling at a rate that defied biological logic, turning chaotic, violent, unhinged.
"That kid wasn't provoking us. He finished feeding the animal and thought he'd remind me it's time to come back and harvest." Ryan narrowed his eyes, a trace of dry amusement in his voice.
"Hold the perimeter. If anything happens, tell me immediately."
With that, Ryan burst into motion, his form dissolving into an afterimage that left a long trail of white smoke across the broken shingle. One thought filled his head: Leon and those two girls would never hold up against a mutation at that level.
The cargo yard.
"ROAARRR!"
Saddler's massive bulk, now a mass of tumors, tentacles, and countless crimson eyes, had lost the last faint outline of anything human. With the G-Virus forced into the equation, his original regeneration had been amplified a thousandfold. Every surge of new flesh came with the deafening sound of meat grinding against meat.
The half-broken military knife in Leon's hand was chipped and useless. Sherry and Becky's electromagnetic rifles had long since run dry. The three of them shielded Ashley as they retreated step by step.
Saddler's right claw, mutated into a colossal bone scythe, rose high, trailing the shadow of death as it prepared to flatten these 'insects' into paste.
At that knife-edge moment, with the bone scythe less than half a meter above Leon's head, a total dead-end...
Ryan didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. Mid-sprint, his right hand swept down across the ground and snatched up a red brick that had been blown off some building and landed there. His fingertips closed on it with perfect precision.
The instant he gripped it, the ordinary red brick seemed to be endowed with some destructive law of physics. Every bit of Ryan's momentum, every ounce of muscle, plus that unreasonable bonus of his, poured into the brick.
He slammed his charge to a halt. Using the inertia, his right arm drew back like a fully bent great bow and hurled the brick at that overweening flesh mountain dozens of meters away.
WHOOSH.
The instant the brick left his hand, the air itself seemed to tear open. The initial velocity was so absurd that the edges of the brick flashed red-hot from friction, trailing a long meteor-like streak of sparks through the night sky. It defied every rule of aerodynamics, a cannon shell carrying the will to kill, crossing the distance in a breath.
Ryan didn't even look to see the result. The moment the brick left his hand he was already walking again, striding toward the center of the battlefield. He had absolute confidence in that throw.
BOOM.
A dense, thunderous impact finally reached him, and the entire cargo yard shook beneath it.
Saddler's nearly three-story flesh mountain was blasted clean off the ground by the horrific kinetic energy of that single brick. The whole mass of flesh was like an artillery shell forced off its trajectory, slammed deep into the wall of shipping containers behind him.
The row of heavy steel containers crumpled and caved on impact, three full stacks shoved five or six meters sideways by the sheer overflow force of that brick, the shriek of tearing metal echoing across the entire yard.
Leon froze, his broken knife still raised stiffly in the air.
Sherry and Becky whipped their heads around, the hearts that had already sunk to rock bottom slamming back into a wild rhythm.
Through the drifting dust, Ryan's figure walked slowly into the fading glow of the spotlight. He lowered his throwing arm, slid both hands into the pockets of his trench coat, his chest rising and falling faintly, the corners of his mouth tugging up.
"Not bad. Everyone's still breathing. Looks like I wasn't too late. Jill would've killed me otherwise."
He turned his head, looked at the stunned group, and the familiar, lazy curve returned to his lips.
"Girls..."
"Sorry. Some ill-mannered kid held me up on the way. Now, would someone like to tell me what this ugly code-violation of a building was about to do to my employees?"
[Read 50+ chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]