“S.T.A.R.S.——”
Just as Luo Guang had expected, the Tyrant called “Nemesis” was targeting the members of S.T.A.R.S.
who had taken part in the Mansion Incident.
And since most of the S.T.A.R.S.
members who had survived the Mansion Incident had already left Raccoon City, the first ones in the line of fire were naturally Jill and Brad, who had stayed behind after the incident to continue secretly investigating Umbrella Corporation.
Aside from silencing them for good, the S.T.A.R.S.
members who had once defeated the Mansion Tyrant also made the perfect test subjects for Nemesis, which had been developed by Umbrella’s European branch.
This was the European branch researchers’ chance to prove that they were more capable and more reliable than William Birkin and Albert Wesker over at the American Arklay lab.
Perhaps because Jill had called Luo Guang by name, Nemesis directly identified him as Jill’s teammate.
Its eyes flickered, and just like that, Luo Guang was added to its attack list.
Nemesis’s left hand had already transformed into a writhing mass of tentacles.
With one thrust, those tentacles shot toward both Luo Guang and Jill like spears.
“Fuck.”
Luo Guang, who had originally intended to act scared, run off to the side, and watch the show without getting involved so he would not draw aggro, cursed aloud.
Before that single word had even faded from the air, Luo Guang had already thrown himself into a rough forward roll, barely dodging Nemesis’s lightning-fast attack.
Then, just as he was about to drop into a half-crouch and counterattack, his body unexpectedly tipped sideways and slammed to the ground, narrowly avoiding a sweeping strike from the very tentacles Nemesis had just launched.
Looking down, Luo Guang saw a banana peel on the ground.
When he had gone into that half-crouch, he had stepped right on it.
His foot slipped, his balance vanished, and by sheer luck, he avoided the attack.
Jill had been struck and sent flying, rolling several times, yet she still looked lively enough to get back up and counterattack.
Luo Guang, however, had no intention of personally testing just how strong Nemesis’s attacks really were.
Nemesis clearly intended to eliminate the seemingly weaker Luo Guang first, restoring the situation to a one-on-one against Jill.
Because the tentacles had swept toward Luo Guang, Jill found her chance to strike back the moment she evaded the attack.
She fired several quick, precise shots in succession, sending rounds toward Nemesis’s ugly, decidedly unhandsome face.
Because Nemesis had turned its attention to Luo Guang, Jill’s bullets did not strike its relatively soft eye area.
So instead of doing real damage, her counterattack only rang against Nemesis’s skull with a series of metallic clangs.
Even so, Jill’s attack successfully drew Nemesis’s attention.
In Nemesis’s estimation, Jill was obviously far more dangerous than Luo Guang.
The moment Nemesis’s attention shifted under Jill’s fire, Luo Guang scrambled back to his feet to avoid staying pinned in a passive position.
Now that Nemesis had attacked him, Luo Guang no longer had the luxury of worrying about anything else—such as how he might explain this later if he ran into Umbrella personnel.
He raised the little pistol in his hand and fired several shots at it as well.
Once someone got placed on the kill list, they would inevitably have to endure Nemesis’s pursuit.
The reason it only seemed to be hunting the two S.T.A.R.S.
members was because they were its primary targets.
As for secondary obstacles like Luo Guang—people who got in the way—they had mostly already been crushed to pieces by Nemesis long before anyone could notice.
Nominally, Luo Guang was an Umbrella intelligence operative.
But he knew full well that if those damned European branch researchers learned what had happened, they would not do a thing to help him.
They would only sneer at the fact that he had gotten himself dragged into the situation instead of having the sense to stay away from their masterpiece.
True, if Luo Guang had stayed in the alley, Nemesis would not have put him on its kill list.
But that alley was a dead end, and beyond the wall on the other side, a large number of zombies had already gathered.
Luo Guang had to leave the alley if he wanted to keep even a little initiative, rather than remain trapped there, passively praying that Jill’s battle with Nemesis would not spill over onto him.
Back to the fight.
Because Luo Guang was not used to using a gun, and because the number of times he had fired one since transmigrating could still be counted on one hand, his marksmanship was terrible compared with Jill’s—or even that of an average police officer.
At less than twenty meters, one of his four shots still missed completely, while the other three struck Nemesis’s restraining coat, the bulletproof one, and amounted to little more than a scratch.
And Luo Guang had actually been aiming for Nemesis’s head.
Nemesis, for all its monstrous appearance, was far from stupid.
It instantly analyzed the difference in threat between Jill’s shooting and Luo Guang’s.
The tentacles it had just drawn back lashed out again—but this time, they were all directed at Jill.
Nemesis had just downgraded Luo Guang’s threat level to the absolute minimum.
Jill darted to one side to evade, but because there were more tentacles this time than before, her Glock 18 was struck and immediately smashed to pieces by one heavy blow from Nemesis.
Jill had no time to mourn the sacrifice of that pistol.
In one smooth motion, she pulled a shotgun from behind her back, and one sharp “Motherfucker” burst out along with the sound of the weapon firing.
Boom.
Clack.
Boom.
Jill was not aiming at Nemesis’s main body.
She fired two blasts straight into the retracting cluster of tentacles.
Unlike Nemesis’s hard skull and bulletproof restraining coat, the tentacles had been made soft and pliable to preserve their ability to extend and contract. Read the latest chapters at novelping dot com.
That also meant they were much less resistant to bullets.
Jill’s two shots severed nearly a third of them, forcing Nemesis to hastily retract the rest.
On the other side, Luo Guang kept moving laterally while having the system search for Nemesis’s weaknesses, forming a pincer angle against it together with Jill.
The little pistol in Luo Guang’s hand could only do slight damage if it hit the enemy’s head.
But as long as Nemesis felt compelled to protect that not-too-big, not-too-small weak point, Luo Guang could at least play a restraining role.
What they lacked now was a way to break the stalemate.
Although Luo Guang was actively trying to find a solution, inwardly he felt deeply baffled.
He had absolutely no desire to get mixed up in the story of the protagonist group and their mess.
Yet after leaving the apartment, he had run into Jill.
They had finally split up, and now he had run straight into the scene of Nemesis trying to commit murder.
If things kept going like this, that monster really was going to silence him for good.
Of course, if you handed me an infinite-ammo rocket launcher, that’d be a different story.
That thought triggered an immediate response from the system.
“This system does not support an exchange function.”
Luo Guang did not reply.
Instead, he vented his frustration by firing two more shots.
This time, because Nemesis’s attention was focused entirely on Jill, Luo Guang—who had already gotten back to his feet—had enough time to properly settle into his stance before shooting.
After the earlier exchange, Luo Guang had gained a whole new appreciation for the recoil of the weapon in his hands.
He relaxed his grip slightly instead of trying to fight the recoil with brute force.
Thank Brad for that.
The Glock 17 suited Luo Guang even better than he had expected.
After adjusting his grip, both shots landed cleanly on Nemesis’s head as it slowly advanced toward Jill.
Clang.
One of the rounds ricocheted off, but the other one, by a stroke of luck, embedded itself slightly into the target.
It interrupted Nemesis’s next attack on Jill at just the right moment, giving her the opening she needed to blast apart several more of its tentacles.
Just as Luo Guang and Jill were still cautiously entangling themselves with Nemesis, trying to find a chance to escape, shapes of zombies began appearing around them.
Luo Guang noticed it, but had no particularly good solution.
Nemesis, however, changed first.
It retracted all of its remaining tentacles, twisted them together into a giant fist, stepped one leg slightly backward, and dropped into a half-crouch like a sprinter about to launch.
Jill immediately recognized the attack posture and intent.
She ran straight for an abandoned car at the roadside.
Another oppressive roar exploded from Nemesis.
Shielding its head with its right arm, it charged Jill with its huge left fist raised high, then swept that fist across and sent an old Ford spinning off to the left.
Jill, crouched behind another car, saw it all.
But she also noticed something else: Nemesis had only observed her position before starting its charge.
After that, its right hand stayed locked over its head—and that same arm also obstructed its own vision.
Seeing that it had not withdrawn its right arm to check her position again, Jill darted left and successfully avoided the smashing punch that came crashing down.
She had evaded the attack, but the distance between them had now closed to only five meters, and the surrounding zombies were gradually drawing near.
The situation was turning bad.
Nemesis, which had been moving with leisurely menace before, had now started running.
That made escape much harder for both of them.
On Luo Guang’s side, zombies were also approaching from behind.
To avoid being surrounded, he had no choice but to start clearing the ones behind him, leaving him unable to help distract Nemesis from Jill any longer.
However, although neither Jill nor Luo Guang had found a way to break the deadlock, the one who could break it had arrived.
A rocket, trailing smoke, streaked toward Nemesis.
Nemesis, focused entirely on Jill, failed to react in time and slammed right into it.
The resulting explosion engulfed it whole.
Wrapped in flames, Nemesis still remained standing, letting out a roar that could chill the blood.
Both Luo Guang and Jill noticed it at once and instinctively turned toward the direction the rocket had come from.
The one holding the rocket launcher was a man in military gear.
He wore a tactical vest loaded with magazines, along with body armor, combat trousers, knee pads, and combat boots.
Slung across his back was a brand-new M4A1 carbine.
Seeing that Nemesis was still standing, the soldier did not hesitate.
He fired a second rocket straight into it.
This time, Nemesis finally stopped standing.
It dropped to both knees and went still, all sound gone save for the crackle of burning flames.
U.B.C.S.
Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service.
Umbrella Corporation’s private military force—also one of the many sacrifices fed into Raccoon City’s bio-weapon testing grounds.
Luo Guang still had some impression of this unit.
One member of the protagonist side came from it.
“You okay?”
The man immediately threw aside the four-shot rocket launcher and ran toward Jill, helping her up from behind the car where she had crouched in a defensive posture to shield herself from the blast.
Typical male instinct.
Luo Guang had no particular opinion about the man’s behavior.
He only shouted anxiously, “That thing’s not dead yet!
Keep firing!”
As he shouted, Luo Guang circled around Nemesis and moved to regroup with Jill and the others.
“That thing’s out of ammo.” The man looked at Luo Guang and replied helplessly, then asked, “That monster’s still alive?”
“That thing didn’t even get blown apart.
How could it die that easily?”
Luo Guang spoke as if reasoning it out.
“Even the most ordinary zombies have to be finished off with a headshot.
Let alone a monster like that.”
“True.
That thing’s tough as hell.” Based on all the times she had already tangled with Nemesis, Jill found herself agreeing with Luo Guang’s assessment.
“Then we’ll have to use this.” The man turned his head and gestured toward the weapon on his back.
“Not enough firepower.
Unless that thing gets blown to pieces, I’m still worried it’ll come back.”
Luo Guang shook his head.
There was a certainty in his tone that Nemesis was not dead, and that made Jill start to feel a trace of suspicion about who he really was.
Jill had encountered a similar horrific creature back at the Mansion—the Tyrant—so she had some idea of the bullet resistance of a comparable monster like Nemesis.
She understood that ordinary firearms could do only limited damage to it.
Just as Luo Guang had said, Nemesis had not been blasted apart.
Given the Tyrant’s monstrous vitality, there was every chance it could recover.
But if Luo Guang was just an ordinary civilian, then why was he so wary of Nemesis?
Or rather, why did he seem to know so much about it?
Once Jill’s suspicions were stirred, her thoughts began rapidly retracing everything about the circumstances of their meeting.
Luo Guang had never actually stated what his job was.
But aside from the fact that he rarely spoke about himself, nothing about him had seemed particularly strange.
He did not seem like Umbrella personnel at all.
“There’s no time to reload that launcher now.
We need to run.” Luo Guang cast a wary glance at the still-motionless Nemesis and the zombies steadily closing in around them, then hurriedly added, “The zombies are about to surround us.”
Luo Guang’s warning jolted both the man and Jill awake.
Whether Luo Guang was right or not, their top priority at this moment really was to get out of here.
Naturally, Luo Guang wanted to take advantage of Nemesis’s current silence and finish it off in one go.
But unfortunately, the conditions simply did not allow it.
Without a heavy weapon, and relying only on a few guns, who knew how long it would take to put Nemesis down?
And with more and more zombies appearing around them, Luo Guang was seriously worried that if Nemesis suddenly started moving again, the three of them would have no way out.
Jill might have grown suspicious of Luo Guang, but based on everything he had shown during this time, he had not displayed the slightest bit of malice toward her.
He did not seem like Umbrella personnel.
If she ruled out the possibility that he was an Umbrella lackey familiar with bio-weapons, then what was left?
Some third party she did not know about?
When she heard Luo Guang urging them to leave quickly, Jill—still in the middle of thinking—did not object.
She nodded in agreement.
Seeing that both Jill and Luo Guang were on board—especially the beautiful Jill—the man flashed Jill a flippant smile and said, “All right, follow me.
Our unit has already set up a small evacuation point at the subway station on Central Street.
It’s not far from here.
Let’s head there.”
Luo Guang already intended to go to the subway station and see what was really happening there, so he nodded and followed the man.
Jill followed as well, taking the rear position.
Because when the man had turned around, Jill had caught sight of the name on the unit patch on his right arm: U.B.C.S.
Jill had already come across that name while investigating Umbrella Corporation.
It was the abbreviation for one of Umbrella’s private military units.
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