REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!
Chapter 62: The Purpose of the Arc Reactor —
The dim room.
The dial tone from the other end reached Saddler's ear and his hand closed around the phone on pure instinct.
The plastic casing produced a small sound under the pressure.
Then he remembered that he still needed the phone to receive the extraction route and destination. He pulled the grip back before he finished what he'd started.
His knuckles had gone white. The screen flexed in his palm. It didn't crack.
Amber. Amber. Amber.
"These bastards." He got the words out through his teeth. "All they want is my research."
The footsteps outside were getting closer.
He didn't deliberate further. He turned and stepped into the elevator waiting beside him. The car carried him upward toward the helipad on the facility's roof.
Enclosed in the elevator.
Saddler gripped his staff, and the hatred and fury working through his eyes had no one to direct themselves at.
Decades of work. Built from nothing. Gone in one night.
Who did this. Who let the information out.
He drove his fist into the elevator wall. The interior panel caved inward.
But then he thought about HYDRA's offer. His background. His capability. He would rebuild. He always had.
He was still constructing this vision when something hit the roof of the elevator car from above.
Not a mechanical fault. The sound of something heavy landing.
The elevator lights flickered twice and went out. Darkness filled the car completely.
Two large hands covered in black leather reached through the ceiling, tearing through the steel panel as if it were foil. Fingers closed around Saddler's skull and dragged him upward through the gap.
In the elevator shaft.
A T-103 Tyrant stood on top of the car, expressionless. It held Saddler at full arm's length and began applying force.
As the final boss of Resident Evil 4, Saddler's body was not going to go the way a normal human body would under those circumstances.
He roared. The skin on either side of his spine split, and four thick tentacles launched from his back, filling the available space in the elevator shaft in the same instant.
Four tentacles. Contracting. Like four pythons trying to crush what was in front of them.
The force cracked the concrete surface of the shaft walls. Small debris dropped from above.
But the Tyrant's body was considerably harder than Saddler had expected. The sound the tentacles produced against it was not the crack of breaking bone. It was the sound of steel being wrung, dense and grinding.
The Tyrant's eyes registered no pain. Something moved behind them that was almost too small to see.
Unable to crush the Tyrant's head, Saddler found himself being used as a weapon instead. The Tyrant swung him upward and drove him into the floor of the shaft.
Once. Twice. Three times.
The elevator cables took the impacts and screamed.
On the third blow: the cables snapped.
The car dropped.
Saddler, half-convinced this was the end, braced for the bottom of the shaft.
The elevator stopped.
Two seconds of free fall, then motionless.
Saddler pried the Tyrant's hand from his skull and looked up.
At the top of the shaft, one hand wrapped around the severed cable, was a figure considerably larger than the Tyrant below.
Nemesis.
Saddler registered Nemesis. Nemesis registered Saddler.
Nemesis pulled the cable upward.
The car came up at the speed of something pulled from water by a deep-sea fishing rig, cutting air all the way, and Saddler's face rose toward Nemesis's line of sight. The Tyrant was still tangled in Saddler's tentacles beside it.
Nemesis did not wait for the car to stop. It did not particularly concern itself with the fact that the Tyrant was on the same side. It threw a right punch at the Tyrant's chest.
The Tyrant went through the concrete wall of the shaft and into the ventilation duct on the other side.
Nemesis took the Tyrant's position and closed its hand around Saddler's head.
Every alarm Saddler's dominant-type Las Plagas could produce went off simultaneously.
Danger.
He understood in that instant that what was holding him was not in the same category as what had been holding him before. He hammered at Nemesis with every tentacle he had.
Nothing moved.
Nemesis punched through Saddler's head.
Blood and tissue scattered.
Saddler did not die.
The headless body began to twitch. To expand. The flesh multiplied from the inside, wrapping the remains in layers of biological mass, and in the space of a few seconds, what had been Saddler became a four-legged creature of flesh and parasite, three stories tall. Its surface was matted with teeth and tentacles and eyes that had no business belonging to a single organism. The head that Nemesis had destroyed grew back from the creature's mouth.
The transformed Saddler looked at Nemesis with undiluted fury.
"You wretch!"
"You have destroyed my perfect body!"
"If you won't let me leave — then you die with me!"
The creature drove toward Nemesis.
Nemesis, well past the cognitive limitations of its earlier configuration, did not attempt to absorb that impact directly. It jumped to the tower crane standing nearby.
On the crane's arm: a large black weapons crate, roughly three meters across.
Nemesis kicked the lid open.
Inside: a railgun.
The weapon that had, in Resident Evil 3's original story, been the instrument of Nemesis's own death. In that telling, the railgun had required a full generating station dedicated exclusively to powering it. Drawing on that volume of electricity, it had been capable of melting grooves several meters long into the metal laboratory floor from energy bleed-off alone. Biological material in the surrounding area had ignited from the heat of the scattered fragments. After killing Nemesis, the round had still passed through multiple feet of steel wall.
Matthew had remembered this.
That was why he had taken the risk of acquiring the second-generation arc reactor.
He had needed it for exactly this. After the arc reactor was incorporated, the railgun had been rebuilt as a single-operator weapon — portable, carried and fired by Nemesis alone.
Nemesis looked down at Saddler's transformed body surging toward the base of the crane. It raised the railgun in one hand, aimed at the mass below, and applied light pressure to the trigger.
Blue electromagnetic ionization rings formed around the barrel. The air around the muzzle distorted visibly as the field compressed — lightning reduced and packed into a metal tube. The charge built over tens of seconds.
Saddler watched the weapon being aimed at him. Every instinct screamed.
He pushed harder.
He was not fast enough.
The shot fired.
A beam of intense light crossed the sky. Rain that contacted it vaporized without transition. The recoil moved through Nemesis's body enough that it had to raise its free hand to hold position.
The beam hit Saddler.
From below, Hunk and the teams had a clear line of sight to what followed. Saddler's muscle tissue stripped away in layers like ash leaving a surface in a strong wind, exposing the mutated bone beneath. The bone disintegrated and carbonized under the combined heat and magnetic force in the same instant.
One shot.
Saddler's body was completely destroyed.
No life remaining.
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