"Major!" I saluted Major Bane sharply as he followed my second-in-command down into the secure subterranean floors of the General Hospital, directly toward the containment lab holding Project Goliath.
"How are the assets?" Major Bane didn’t bother with pleasantries.
"The bionic implants have been successfully integrated into Project Goliath with zero signs of tissue rejection. It’s fully locked, loaded, and ready for deployment," I reported smoothly. "As for Project Aegis, it escaped into the field during the chaos. Our people are currently trying to locate her through the city’s surveillance system."
Major Bane swiped his high-clearance keycard to enter the restricted Project Goliath Lab, his expression completely flat, as if he had already known about her escape all along. I slipped inside right behind him while the rest of the tactical soldiers stood guard outside the blast doors.
"Marvelous," Major Bane breathed, drinking in the sight like a hunter appraising a gate boss he’d personally commissioned.
Before us stood a true human turned monster. A four-armed giant, its massive frame completely encased from head to toe in segmented, hardened, organic plating that resembled a thick, chitinous insect exoskeleton. The creature was currently heavily sedated, hooked up to a massive network of pulsing medical monitoring systems that lined the sterile room.
This was Project Goliath. In Resident Hazard I and II, his name was Mark Davis, a former C-rank Hunter and the guard captain of the Enclave’s security force during the outbreak. He was the one who had actively helped the environmentalist protagonist, Aegis McColon, who was just a regular human at the time, infiltrate the facility to expose the Red Clover Corporation’s illegal bioweapon experiments.
Now, he had been twisted into a bio-weapon himself. After contracting the virus during his desperate escape from the Enclave, the infection had mutated violently. With a bit of help from the corporation’s lead scientists, the mutation had forced his original rare rank ’Sclerite Skin’ skill to evolve into an super rare rank ’Goliathus’ skill, turning him into Project Goliath.
The mutated skill didn’t just harden his skin to sclerite, it mutated him into a humanoid goliath beetle — astonishingly, unlike a true beetle’s dead chitin, the exoskeleton self-healed in perfect synchronization with his cellular regeneration. The mutated skill came at the cost of his sanity, turning him into a mindless feral monster — a vulnerability the corporation’s invasive bionic implants wasted no time exploiting, binding him to eternal servitude.
"If you don’t mind," Major Bane said with a deep voice, walking over to the control terminal. I nodded immediately and turned around to face the wall, strictly respecting protocol while he was finalizing the command sequence that would bind Goliath’s bionic implants directly to his personal biometric signature — making him the only living human being capable of controlling it.
"Arise, Goliath!" Major Bane commanded with the manic enthusiasm of a billionaire admiring his first custom supercar. He stared transfixed at Goliath’s polished, obsidian-black shell. The giant insectoid monstrosity shuddered, violently tearing away from the medical sensors and monitoring lines, and stepped down heavily from its pedestal.
The Major tilted his head back far enough to lock eyes with the creature’s massive, bionic, compound lens visor. Moving forward without a shred of fear or reservation, he walked right up to the beast, running his fingers across its thick chest plates, utterly mesmerized by his expensive new toy.
"Are the underground tunnels still usable?" Major Bane ordered, turning his head back to look at me while his hand still rested flat against Goliath’s thick chest plates. "Prepare them for deploy—"
Before he could finish, Goliath’s massive primary arms shot forward.
The insectoid colossus swiftly grabbed Major Bane by the skull, twisting his head a full 360 degrees before crushing it like a ripe watermelon. Brain matter and bone fragments splattered across the glass walls while the headless corpse collapsed onto white tiles dyeing them red.
[You killed a Hunter and gained: +1Pp, +1.5 Sp.]
I hadn’t expected the hunter system to still be active inside the novel. I definitely hadn’t expected Goliath’s kills to count as mine. But despite the rank difference between Major and me, I gained too few stats for killing him. Was it because I used Goliath?
A moment later, a warm surge of energy washed through my body and soul, refreshing and invigorating me like spring water after a long journey. For a brief moment, I simply stood there, savoring the sensation as the newly acquired status points settled into me.
I gazed upon what remained of Major Bane, a decorated A-rank hunter that the Red Clover Corporation had paid top denars to recruit, now reduced to cooling meat on a sterile floor, and allowed myself a single, unhurried smirk.
Then, I looked up at Goliath, eight feet of engineered extinction standing perfectly still, awaiting its true master’s next command.
"Kill them all," I said softly.
The creature’s compound eyes flared with a low, red light. With a deafening hiss of hydraulic strength, Goliath turned toward the reinforced blast doors, its massive primary arms slamming into the heavy steel and peeling it open like cheap foil.
Simultaneously, its two pairs of arms reshaped. One pair folded its fingers into a five-barrel machine gun, firing a rapid, deafening volley of six-inch nails harvested from the hyper-dense material of its own exoskeleton. The other pair formed a massive hand cannon, discharging thick rail-like spikes that blasted clean through anything in their path.
Behind it, shrapnel and bone rained down the corridor as Goliath charged out to systematically butcher the waiting guards.
[You killed a Hunter and gained: +0.3 Pp, +0.2 Sp.]
[You killed a Hunter and gained: +0.23 Pp, +0.17 Sp.]
[You killed a Hunter and gained: +0.21 Pp, +0.15 Sp.]
.
.
.
The system notifications continued to flash before my eyes, one after another, as my tactical comms buzzed with frantic reports about the unfolding situation. Desperate calls for backup, shouted orders, and the chilling, static-cut cries of dying men poured through the channel.
I ignored them all.
Standing calmly in the center of the blood-soaked laboratory, I watched the notifications continue to accumulate while waiting for Goliath to finish the purge.
The command key for Project Goliath was classified far above my pay grade—known only to a select few in upper management. Crispin Cross, a mere head of security, had no business knowing it.
But I wasn’t just Crispin Cross.
In the few minutes I’d secured in the Project Goliath lab before Major Bane arrived at the facility to take charge, I had used my knowledge of Resident Hazard II to input the exact command sequence from the novel, binding Goliath to my own biometric signature instead of his. By the time the Major even stepped into the lab, Goliath was already mine.
However, Major Bane was still a veteran A-rank Hunter. Confronting him directly was never an option, if he’d suspected anything, he could have torn me apart or escaped, hence the charade. As for the rest of my squad, they were loyal to the corporation to a fault. I needed them gone.
After all, dead men don’t chase traitors.