The shot cracks through the dungeon like a whip.
"Bang—!"
The Desert Eagle's muzzle flash paints the ceiling for a heartbeat, but the round goes wide, punching empty air instead of the white-furred shape clinging to Havel's back.
The Eliminator reacts instantly, jaws peeling open as it lunges for his exposed shoulder.
At the last split-second, Havel snaps his head to the side, ramming the steel helmet between his neck and the incoming bite.
"Crack!"
"ROAR!!"
The sound is sharp and clean—bone losing an argument with forged metal.
The ape's fangs slam into the helmet and give out in an instant, shards of tooth snapping free.
The Eliminator howls, clutching at its ruined mouth, pain shuddering through its wiry frame.
Virus-enhanced or not, teeth are still teeth.
Steel wins.
"Nice bite, you flea-bitten mutt," Havel mutters.
"My turn."
Relief flashes through him under the adrenaline.
This is exactly why he'd armored up like a walking tank; if he'd come down here in a soft cap, he'd already be on his way to becoming a lab statistic.
He seizes the opening.
His right hand clamps into the Eliminator's white fur, and he heaves, twisting his hips.
"Boom!"
The ape slams into the ground with a dull thud.
The impact jolts it, but it rolls and springs up almost immediately, like someone installed springs in its joints.
T-virus resilience and primate agility make for a nasty combination.
Which is fine.
Havel has something nastier.
"How about you try this instead?"
"Better than getting pinned under Five-Finger Mountain, right, Great Sage?"
He raises his free hand, fingers already closing around the grip of the S&W M500 at the small of his back.
"Namo… Gatling Bodhisattva—no, wait. Namo Magnum Bodhisattva," he intones, face solemn and utterly insincere.
"Sixfold-purified hand-cannon rounds. One shot, one salvation. Deliver demons, gods, and mortals alike."
The Eliminator darts and weaves, white fur a smear across the filthy stone floor, looking for a blind spot.
Havel doesn't chase it with the barrel; he just tracks, breath steady, stance lowered.
The M500 comes up, its enormous blackened barrel like a chunk of industrial pipe.
This isn't a Desert Eagle.
This is a hand-held artillery piece.
One shot is breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
"BOOM—!!"
Yellow-orange fire vomits from the barrel.
The thumb-sized round tears downrange, the sonic shock punching the air flat around it.
For a fraction of a second, the ape freezes, pupils pinpricked by the concussion.
It never gets the chance to move.
The Magnum round hits square between its eyes.
The Eliminator's head bursts like an overripe watermelon, skull fragments and blood fanning out across the stones in a red-black spray.
"Namo Magnum Bodhisattva truly blesses," Havel breathes, pleasantly satisfied.
"As expected of the deity I devote myself to. Demon, god, random boss monkey… all delivered on schedule. Little Sage, next time check who you're pouncing on."
He blows a lazy stream of air across the smoking barrel, the absurd ritual somehow making the M500 look even more theatrical in his hand.
For him, this is how it's supposed to go: ambush, panic, then ridiculous overkill.
For Rebecca and Billy, watching through the bars, it's heart attack territory.
They'd gone rigid when the Eliminator dropped, faces pale as they saw those jaws aiming for Havel's neck.
They only let their shoulders sag when his helmet holds, when he rips the ape off and literally explodes its head in one shot.
As for the posing?
They're over it.
Fine.
He survived, and he's being… himself.
If he doesn't want to collapse on the floor and wheeze in relief like a normal person, that's his problem.
Striking a victory pose over a splattered B.O.W. is idiotic—but also, very much on-brand.
"Enough," Havel says finally, catching their looks.
"Stop staring at me like I'm some kind of lunatic. Show's over. Come pop this door from your side, would you? It opens inward. I can't get it from here."
"And keep your eyes open. We haven't cleared every room yet. Who knows what else they parked in this hellhole."
He clears his throat and straightens his posture, letting the theatrics slough off.
The electric panel still hums behind him, the air faintly warm from the revived power.
The whole setup is stupid, and the more he thinks about it, the more it grates.
Who in their right mind designs a cell block that can only be unlocked by crawling through a duct into a torture chamber, then turning on a hidden breaker?
If a test subject ever slipped out of restraints and hit the controls, that's not "security."
That's handing them a jailbreak key.
He feels a headache coming on just picturing Umbrella's "genius architect" sketching this out on a blueprint.
But this is Umbrella.
Every room so far seems built first as a trap and only second as something functional.
He steps toward the cell door, eager to leave the interrogation chamber and its dried blood and rusted horrors behind.
The longer he stays in here, the easier it is to imagine cold fingers grabbing his ankles and dragging him back down.
He gets three steps.
"Crack…"
"Rumble—!!"
The floor drops out from under him.
For a heartbeat, it sounds like a cave-in—stone shearing, concrete shattering.
The slab beneath his boots crumbles and falls away, dissolving into a cloud of dust as it plunges into the dark.
Beneath the collapsing floor yawns a wide, black void.
Far below, he hears the rush of water—a drainage channel or main sewer line, too dark to see but loud enough to know that anything dropping in will be swept away.
Havel's stomach lurches as he goes with the floor.
Instinct hits first.
Every human headed toward a fatal fall reacts the same way: hands flail out, clawing for anything that might hold.
His fingers slam into thin air, then scrape across cold metal.
By sheer dumb luck, they close around a twisted length of exposed rebar at the edge of the hole.
He clamps down with everything he has.
His body jerks to a stop, shoulders screaming as his full weight snaps onto his arms.
Below him, chunks of broken concrete splash and crash into the hidden waterway and vanish downstream.
For a moment, he just hangs there, swaying over the darkness, legs kicking uselessly.
Pull-ups were never his favorite.
Push-ups and dumbbells, sure.
Static hangs? Not so much.
His forearms burn immediately, fingers slicking with the damp grime on the bar.
The rebar is wet, rusted, and oil-slick from years of condensation.
"Hey!" he shouts, feeling his grip starting to tremble.
"You two done spectating? Little help over here, or I'm about to die for real this time!"
The ache in his biceps deepens, a slow, grinding fire.
He can feel his palms slipping millimeter by millimeter, his body a dangling, helpless weight over the void.
Now he understands why the breaker's here.
Not just for security.
It's bait.
Lure some poor bastard through the duct, make him walk across the "only way out," then drop him straight into the sewer.
Neat, clean, no ammo wasted.
If he hadn't grabbed that rebar, he'd already be fish food kilometers downstream, bones bouncing off tunnel walls.
And that's assuming the fall didn't break him first.
He can't help the bitter thought: protagonist-friendly passive skills are working overtime.
First, the monkey ambush—without a helmet, that bite would've meant infection and a one-way ticket to undead-ville.
Get infected, and maybe there's a ten percent chance you come back as something powerful.
The other ninety percent? You wake up as a drooling corpse with bonus hair and fangs because your "patient zero" was a rabid ape.
Then this collapse.
No survival instinct, no lucky grab, no him.
He wonders, not for the first time, how many disasters Rebecca and Billy will drag him through before his luck runs dry.
Still—this round, at least, he's winning.
Rebecca and Billy react the moment they hear the crash.
They wrench the cell door open, boots pounding across the stone as they skid to the edge of the fresh crater.
Rebecca's hand shoots out first, followed by Billy's.
They haul him up, boots scraping against the crater's lip as he scrambles, and together they drag him back onto solid ground.
Only then do they risk glancing down.
Blackness.
Only the sound of rushing water, echoing up like something breathing in the dark.
If he had gone in, they both know they'd never have seen him again.
"Haa…"
Havel drops onto his backside, breathing out hard.
He pats his damp trouser leg with a grimace.
"For the record," he says, "that's sewer splash, not me losing bladder control. This genius torture room is sitting right over a drainage line. Ten-plus years of moisture eating away at the concrete—of course it caves in."
"And we're in 1998. This place has been rotting for over a decade. If it wasn't collapsing already, I'd be more surprised."
He rubs his arms, still feeling the phantom burn in his muscles.
For a few minutes, he just sits there, letting the aftershock drain away.
Then he forces himself to his feet.
Life goes on, so long as you don't fall into a sewer.
Ten minutes later—
After one last silent acknowledgment of the fact that he almost died twice in the same room, Havel dusts off his backside and joins Rebecca and Billy again.
They leave the torture dungeon behind and push deeper into the complex.
The next chamber feels different immediately.
This one is bigger, the ceiling higher.
Judging from the smell and the scuff marks along the beams, this is where Umbrella kept the Eliminators penned.
White shapes flicker along the rafters and support beams.
Dozens of the infected monkeys cling to the wood and steel, chattering and pacing.
They see the intruders.
They leap.
Shotguns thunder.
Havel, Rebecca, and Billy plant themselves in the doorway, backs pressed to the wood, forming a tight wedge.
They don't give an inch.
Instead, they turn the entry itself into a bunker, barrels angled to cover high, mid, and low arcs.
The Eliminators are quick, bouncing from beam to beam, launching themselves in unpredictable arcs.
They aren't particularly strong, but one good jump onto an unarmored chest or back, and those claws and teeth will do the rest.
Rebecca has nothing but a thin shirt and a ballistic vest.
Billy is down to a black tank top.
Neither has the kind of full-body armor Havel enjoys.
A single rake of claws across bare skin would be bad enough.
A bite could be a death sentence.
Fortunately, the monkeys are dumb.
Fast, but dumb.
They never hide their intent.
Every leap is telegraphed, every route obvious once you know what to look for.
So the trio simply waits, shotguns ready, and meets every attack with a blast of buckshot.
Shells clatter to the floor.
"Clang…"
In a handful of exchanges, the room falls silent again.
The rafters are empty.
Only the scattered corpses of Eliminators and a carpet of spent shells remain.
They step inside properly for the first time.
At the center of the room stands a raised stone platform, like a crude altar.
Arranged on it in a ring are six statues, each carved with surprising care: an eagle, a deer, a wolf, a tiger, a horse, and a snake.
Each one rests on a plinth marked with a short inscription.
Eagle: I beat the air with my wings and hunt without-footed prey with my talons.
Deer: I stand tall upon the earth, proudly bearing my antlers.
Wolf: I am cunning and keen, bringing down the horned wild.
Tiger: I am the jungle's judgment. No prey escapes my grasp.
Horse: No matter how sly, none can outrun my speed.
Snake: I crawl silent without feet and conquer the strongest king with my venom.
Six animals.
One law: eat or be eaten.
To the side of the statues sits a stone brazier, its basin ready to be lit.
The intended solution is obvious—ignite the flames in the correct order and the mechanism will trigger.
The sequence itself is practically spelled out.
The deer is prey, a simple grazing animal with antlers that attract hunters.
The wolf boasts that it brings down the horned.
The horse claims speed even wolves can't match.
But the tiger, king of the jungle, needs no speed to bring down a mere horse.
The snake's venom can topple the tiger, king of the beasts, yet it can do nothing about an eagle soaring where no fangs can reach.
Deer, wolf, horse, tiger, snake, eagle.
Havel takes one slow look around the room, reads each inscription once, and snorts softly.
He doesn't even need to think about it.