Chapter 43: The Heavy Caliber

Sub-Level 1 descended into absolute, deafening chaos.

The Coalition officer’s terrified scream shattered the tense silence of the barricade, his tactical flashlight illuminating the towering, gore-soaked nightmare standing directly inside their defensive perimeter. The thirty-eight remaining soldiers scrambled violently, their heavy combat boots slipping against the polished white marble as they desperately tried to pivot their M4 carbines away from the sealed freight elevator and toward their own rear flank.

Ren did not give them the microsecond they needed to pull their triggers.

He stood perfectly balanced, his combat boots planted wide on the pristine stone. In his massive, calloused hands, he held the entire M2 Browning heavy machine gun. The weapon was a massive, unwieldy block of cold steel, weighing nearly a hundred pounds without its heavy tripod. A thick, linked belt of .50 BMG armor-piercing incendiary ammunition dragged heavily across the marble floor, feeding directly into the receiver.

To a human, firing the weapon from the hip was a physical impossibility. The sheer, explosive recoil of a .50 caliber round would instantly shatter a man’s collarbones and dislocate both shoulders.

Ren was a Level 16 anomaly.

He braced the heavy spade grips against his thick, iron-hardened hips. He wrapped his thumbs over the heavy butterfly trigger and pressed down hard.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

The heavy machine gun roared. The sound in the enclosed, cavernous logistics depot was catastrophic, a concussive, chest-crushing thunder that instantly ruptured the eardrums of every soldier within a thirty-yard radius. A massive, blinding jet of orange muzzle flash strobed wildly in the pitch-black depot, illuminating the flying brass casings and the expanding cloud of acrid grey cordite.

The catastrophic recoil slammed backward into Ren’s torso with the force of a swinging wrecking ball. His dense, heavily mutated muscle fibers absorbed the massive kinetic shockwave flawlessly, channeling the violent vibration directly down his spine and into the solid marble floor. He didn’t yield a single inch.

The heavy, half-inch-thick slugs tore into the clustered, panicked Coalition soldiers.

The results were viscerally horrific. The .50 caliber rounds were designed to disable armored transports and shred concrete bunkers. Against fragile human biology, they were instruments of total erasure.

The Level IV ceramic trauma plates worn by the Warlord’s veterans offered absolutely zero resistance. The heavy rounds punched straight through the armor, detonating the incendiary payload inside their chest cavities. Torsos exploded into massive, spraying clouds of dark crimson mist and jagged bone shrapnel. A single round struck a soldier in the hip, entirely severing his right leg and sending his upper body spinning violently across the polished marble. Another round clipped the top of a ballistic helmet, decapitating the man so cleanly that his headless neck simply geysered blood into the dark air.

He’s holding the Browning, the Coalition officer thought, dropping to his knees behind the sandbags, his hands clamped desperately over his bleeding ears. He’s holding the entire gun. Why isn’t he falling down? Why won’t he stop?

Ren swept the heavy, smoking barrel in a tight, horizontal arc, mowing down the center of the Coalition formation. The heavy canvas sandbags they had stacked for defense were violently shredded, filling the air with a thick, blinding cloud of fine dirt and airborne fabric.

Several veterans on the extreme flanks managed to return fire. Muzzle flashes erupted from the darkness, sending a desperate hail of 5.56mm rounds toward Ren’s towering silhouette.

The small-caliber bullets struck Ren’s broad chest and face. They flattened instantly against his pale Iron Skin, sparking brightly before dropping harmlessly to the floor. The blunt-force trauma barely registered against the dense, underlying fortification of his Chitin Shell. He ignored the incoming fire entirely, continuing his relentless, deafening sweep with the heavy gun.

CLACK.

The heavy brass ammo belt ran dry. The bolt locked to the rear, the massive barrel smoking heavily, radiating an intense, blistering heat.

The barrage had lasted exactly six seconds. Eighteen soldiers lay butchered across the ruined marble, the white stone completely painted in thick, pooling red. The remaining twenty men were completely broken, their strict military discipline shattered into sheer, primitive panic. Tactical flashlights spun wildly across the ceiling and walls as men scrambled to crawl away from the slaughter.

Ren did not drop the empty weapon. He gripped the searing hot, perforated barrel with his bare left hand, his Iron Skin completely ignoring the extreme thermal burn.

He utilized his Dash skill.

The air cracked violently. Ren fractured the spatial distance, instantly closing the fifteen yards between himself and the right flank of the scattering survivors. He materialized directly in front of three terrified soldiers attempting to reload their carbines.

Ren swung the hundred-pound block of heavy steel like a massive, blunt-force club.

The heavy receiver of the M2 Browning slammed directly into the chest of the closest soldier. The raw, Level 16 kinetic torque completely caved in the man’s ribcage, driving his sternum directly through his heart and lungs. The sheer momentum of the swing carried the massive steel weapon through the first man and directly into the skull of the second, shattering his ballistic helmet and his cranium with a sickening, wet crunch.

Ren tossed the ruined, blood-soaked heavy machine gun aside. The massive block of steel hit the marble with a deafening metallic clang.

He extended both hands. The ten-inch, pitch-black Rending Claws erupted from his knuckles with a sharp snick.

He waded directly into the remaining infantry. It was no longer a gunfight; it was a localized, biological culling.

He moved with terrifying, fluid speed, entirely indifferent to the frantic, point-blank rifle fire sparking off his hardened epidermis. He drove his left hand completely through the Kevlar vest of a retreating sergeant, his talons piercing the man’s spine from the front. He ripped his arm backward, tearing a massive, gaping hole in the soldier’s chest. He ducked beneath the swinging buttstock of an empty rifle, driving his right claws in a brutal upward uppercut, severing the attacker’s jaw and slicing cleanly through his frontal lobe.

From the absolute darkness of the ruined maintenance stairwell, Chloe stepped out onto the marble.

She kept her back pressed tightly against the cold concrete frame of the doorway. The dual-tube night-vision goggles cast the horrific slaughter in a sharp, grainy green hue. She could smell the overwhelming, suffocating stench of spilled bowels, vaporized blood, and burning cordite.

The noise is making me deaf, Chloe thought, her hands shaking as she raised the compact FN P90 to her shoulder. I can’t even see him through the gun smoke. Just watch the perimeter. If a flashlight beam turns toward me, shoot the light.

A wounded Coalition corporal was desperately crawling away from the melee, dragging his shattered legs across the slick marble. He raised his M4 carbine, his flashlight beam sweeping blindly toward the stairwell, trying to find an avenue of escape.

Chloe didn’t hesitate. The man was human, but he was wearing the uniform of the Warlord who had tried to execute them.

BRRRRRRRT.

She squeezed the trigger. A tight, three-round burst of 5.7x28mm armor-piercing rounds struck the crawling soldier directly in the center of his back. The high-velocity bullets punched through his armor, dropping him instantly to the stone.

She shifted her aim, meticulously scanning the dark periphery of the depot, executing two more stragglers attempting to flank Ren’s position from behind the ruined sandbags. Her breathing was fast, her pulse hammering violently against her neck, but her trigger discipline remained completely intact.

Within exactly ninety seconds of breaching the stairwell, the frantic gunfire and the screaming entirely ceased.

The cavernous Sub-Level 1 logistics depot was quiet, save for the wet, heavy sounds of arterial blood steadily dripping onto the pristine white marble. The air was incredibly thick, choking the lungs with the sharp scent of death. Dozens of tactical flashlights lay discarded on the floor, casting long, chaotic shadows across the dismembered, butchered remains of forty heavily armed men.

[Targets Dead: Coalition Veterans x40 (Lvl 4 – Lvl 6)]

[Experience Gained: 4800]

[Level Up!]

[You are now Level 17.]

The systemic rush of raw mana flooded Ren’s vascular system, settling heavily into his dense bone marrow. His glowing violet eyes burned fiercely in the dark, cutting through the thick, settling gun smoke.

The Coalition officer, the man who had ordered the initial volley, was the only human left breathing.

He was pinned beneath the heavy, bloody canvas of a shredded sandbag, his right arm severely fractured by a ricochet. He was staring up at the towering, gore-soaked anomaly standing over him. The officer had lost his helmet, his perfectly trimmed hair matted with the blood of his own men. He was weeping silently, his mind completely and irreversibly broken by the absolute, one-sided slaughter he had just witnessed.

“The Warlord said…” the officer choked out, coughing violently, a thin stream of blood running down his chin. “He said the perimeter was secure. He said nothing could breach Sector One.”

“Sterling is dead,” Ren stated, his voice a flat, emotionless rumble that offered absolutely zero pity. “His safe is empty. The anomaly in Sub-Level 5 has been consumed. Your entire hierarchy was built on an illusion of safety, and the illusion has expired.”

Ren did not bother using his talons to execute the broken man. He simply raised his heavy, blood-caked combat boot and drove his thick rubber heel directly downward.

The raw, Level 17 kinetic force instantly crushed the officer’s skull against the polished marble, silencing his weeping permanently.

Ren steps carefully over the pulverized remains of the Coalition command structure, his heavy boots leaving dark, wet footprints across the pristine white floor, as he walks deliberately toward the massive, heavy steel doors of the ground-level access ramp, preparing to push entirely out of the subterranean darkness and back into the freezing mud of the Red Line surface.

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