Chapter 60 - 61: A Great Haul

Chapter 60: Chapter 61: A Great Haul

The deafening drone of industrial water turbines vibrated straight through my claws as we navigated the rusted catwalks of the lower treatment facility. Below us, thousands of gallons of murky, chemical-slicked wastewater churned in massive concrete reservoirs, smelling distinctly like rotten eggs and broken dreams.

I was still having a severe existential crisis over the absolute masterclass in gaslighting I had been subjected to twenty minutes prior.

When Rebecca finally woke up back in that butchered maintenance corridor, her death-grip on my manhood had miraculously slipped loose, but her memory had apparently taken a complete vacation. She had rubbed her eyes, looked around at the Jackson Pollock painting of shredded Tyrant meat coating the walls, and immediately started whining about how messy I was.

I’m sorry, what?

According to her, she had conveniently blacked out the exact second I got skewered on the bone spike.

She held zero recollection of the glowing crimson eyes, the pulsing black veins spider-webbing across her jaw, or the deeply unhinged hostage negotiation where she used my own balls as collateral to secure future child support.

She had actually looked me in the eyes, wiped a chunk of gray Tyrant spleen off her leather cowgirl vest, and scolded me for getting viscera on her denim shorts.

The sheer audacity of this woman. She terrorizes my soul, leaves actual teeth marks on my family heirloom, and then blames me for the interior decorating choices of an industrial blender.

And what in the unholy name of viral bullshit was that supercharged state anyway?

Was that the Viral Breeding Panacea overdosing on pure adrenaline? Did my super-nut mutate her into some kind of dormant doom-slayer?

Because by all known laws of gaming canon, an eighteen-year-old rookie medic with a shotgun should have ended up as a red smear against the bulkhead. Instead, the Proto-Tyrant got turned into a five-star tartare spread, and I woke up fully regenerated with my dick in her mouth.

I guess that was peak main character aurafarming. The sidekick gets folded like a cheap lawn chair, and the heroine casually enters an ancient demon state to blender the boss off-screen.

A sharp, playful slap to the side of my armored skull snapped me right out of my internal monologue.

"Are you daydreaming again, Ghosty?" Rebecca teased, walking alongside me with an infuriating spring in her step. "You definitely have that vacant, perverted look in your eyes. Now really isn’t the time to be planning your next grope session, you know."

I glanced over, and was left feeling awestruck again.

She was casually strolling through a biohazard nightmare zone dual-wielding heavy ordnance like a seasoned cartel enforcer. In her right hand, she loosely held the tactical shotgun by the grip. In her left, she had the six-chambered rotary grenade launcher casually propped over her shoulder like a designer purse, looking so effortlessly lethal in her low-rise denim hot pants and leather cowgirl vest that it made no logical sense.

Goddammit, Becca... You have no business looking this hot while carrying forty pounds of explosive murder gear.

I let out a low, deeply disgruntled chuff.

Grr.

"Good boy," she giggled.

She reached out and gave the side of my scaly head a vigorous set of scritches right behind the eye crest. Her blood-stained fingers lingered, trailing smoothly down the chitin ridges of my neck and tracing a light, deliberate line across my chest plates before pulling away.

The casual contact sent an electric, full-body shiver straight down my tailbone.

"Let’s keep moving before another one of those disgusting giant frogs jumps out of the sludge," Rebecca said, adjusting the strap of her ammo pouch and scanning the catwalk ahead with sharp, analytical focus. "I’m getting the feeling we’re finally getting to the root of this entire facility."

I trotted behind her, watching the hypnotic sway of those ridiculous denim shorts.

Whatever had possessed her back in that hallway, she seemed mostly back to normal now. Well, normal if you ignored the fact that she had transitioned from a squeamish, panicky rookie into a stone-cold, trigger-happy commando who didn’t even flinch at the sight of industrial carnage. She had completely bypassed her initial tsundere defensiveness and shifted into full-blown deredere territory, treating me like a mix between an attack dog and a lethal boy toy.

She hadn’t even mentioned Enrico getting minced back there. Not a single tear or a single eulogy.

Was that deeply suspicious? Absolutely. Was it a massive red flag waving over a field of landmines? Without a doubt.

Was I going to completely ignore it and sweep it under the psychological rug until it inevitably exploded in my face later? You bet your ass I was. That was a problem for Future Alex.

Right now, Present Alex had a massive lottery payout to celebrate.

I opened up the system market.

[New Genetic Blueprint Registered: Prototype Tyrant / T-001 (Epic)]

[Description: The original, flawed progenitor of the Tyrant line. Created through the direct synthesis of the t-Virus into a compatible human host. While suffering from degraded cellular cohesion and an exposed cardiac organ, the T-001 possesses astronomical physical strength, rapid combat-adaptive reflexes, and a devastating bone-spike mutation capable of piercing military-grade armor.]

[Price: 10,000 EP]

Looking at that ten-thousand price tag when it first popped up in the shop had almost made me file a formal complaint with the Interdimensional Better Business Bureau.

The System was running a straight-up highway robbery racket. I had to get skewered on a massive bone spike, crushed against a reinforced bulkhead, and barely scraped together 3,500 points for turning the bastard into fertilizer, but buying the base chassis myself cost ten grand?

That was more points than every single exam score from my high school and college days combined, including the ones the professors curved out of sheer pity.

Then again, looking at it objectively, we were talking about an iconic, Epic-tier monster from the Resident Evil hall of fame.

Even if the T-001 was the janky, unpolished prototype model held together by exposed muscle tissue and pure spite, the raw destructive capability was legendary. High-tier bio-weaponry clearly came with some severe post-apocalyptic inflation.

Since the base form was currently sitting way outside my tax bracket, I turned my attention down to the individual traits and mutations on offer.

I had gotten not 2, not 3, but 4 mutation traits! Talk about a great haul.

[Trait: Heart of the Tyrant — 1,200 EP]

[Description: An active evolutionary trait. When triggered, the host’s cardiovascular engine rapidly mutates into an enlarged, hyper-dense cardiac core that visibly surfaces on the chest. Grants a massive surge to physical parameters, rapid stamina recovery, and accelerated cellular regeneration.

Drawback: The enlarged organ functions as a critical structural weak point. Direct lethal damage to the exposed core will cause severe neurological feedback, temporarily incapacitating the host for a brief duration.]

Now that was a massive buff, even if it came with an equally massive target painted on my ribcage.

I hadn’t taken it for a test drive yet, but the trait screamed pure boss battle energy. It gave me literal second-phase mechanics on command.

Having an oversized, basketball-sized heart bulging out of my sternum sounded like a terrible idea during a shootout, but the saving grace was the active toggle. It wasn’t permanently stuck to my chest twenty-four hours a day.

I could treat it like a rapid-mutation burst cooldown, popping the organ out whenever I needed to overpower a heavy target and snapping it back into my ribcage once the dust settled.

Next up was the offensive tool that had almost ended my entire run.

[Trait: Calcified Bone Spikes — 800 EP]

[Description: Rapidly erupts massive, razor-sharp osteo-blades from the wrists and knuckles. Possesses immense armor-piercing capabilities, capable of tearing through reinforced titanium. Density scales directly with the host’s current Form.]

It was a simple, practical melee upgrade. On paper, growing bone spikes out of your arms didn’t sound as flashy as firing bio-lasers, but having personally experienced the joy of being turned into an hors d’oeuvre on one of those skewers, I wasn’t about to talk shit.

At the very least, it provided a zero-maintenance, armor-shredding blade right at my fingertips whenever I needed to turn a problem into cold cuts.

Then my eyes moved down to the third skill, and my brain completely short-circuited.

[Trait: Undying Resilience — 2,000 EP]

[Description: A foundational survival mechanism inherent to high-tier Tyrant models. When the host sustains lethal damage that would otherwise cause instant biological death, cellular integrity is artificially locked at 1% for thirty seconds, preventing expiration. Cooldown Condition: Once triggered, this trait remains inactive until the host restores their Biological Integrity above 80%.]

This was without a doubt the single greatest purchase in the entire store. Fuck saving for a rainy day; this perk was getting glued to my soul permanently.

If I had this active during our little corridor brawl, that prototype bastard wouldn’t have flatlined me in the dark.

Gone would be the days of worrying about some stray sniper round or a cheap one-shot boss mechanic taking me out before I could react.

The cooldown condition was the wildest part of the entire package. There was no twenty-four-hour timer and no daily limit. As long as I managed to kill and vacuum up some biomass to drag my integrity back over eighty percent, the trait reset immediately.

Surviving lethal damage just meant I had thirty seconds to murder the nearest moving object and have a quick snack to become practically immortal all over again.

These perks alone had already made the lingering trauma of nearly getting pegged by Daniela and her obsidian monster-strap worth the trouble, but the final entry in the catalog was something I had never even dreamed of seeing this early.

[Trait: Super Tyrant (Epic) — 2,500 EP]

[Requirement: Tyrant Form Exclusive]

[Description: Replicates the catastrophic secondary mutation process of the Tyrant project. When sustaining critical structural damage, the host can consciously trigger a violent biological surge, dramatically expanding muscle density, increasing durability, generating superheated osteo-claws, and entering an apex combat state. Duration: 5 minutes. Cooldown: 6 Hours. Note: Proto-Tyrant form is unstable and cannot sustain the state for longer than 2 minutes. Can be further evolved by consuming other Super Tyrants in their transformed state.]

Going Super Tyrant was an insane buff, but honestly, I would have preferred to never trigger it before seeing how the System packaged it. In canon, that transformation was an irreversible one-way ticket to ugly town.

A standard Tyrant model was about as humanoid as one could get in the Umbrella catalog, and I had zero interest in permanently melting my face into a heap of pulsating tumors just for a temporary stat boost.

This trait solved the biggest goddamn problem by turning the mutation into a temporary, reversible five-minute overdrive.

On top of that, it could actually be evolved. Epic-tier skills really were on a whole different playing field compared to the common scrap.

The specific footnote regarding the Proto-Tyrant was what really caught my attention.

Technically speaking, the T-001 was already stuck in its mutated state around the clock, albeit with none of the refined stability of later models.

That was why it looked like an overgrown gray monstrosity with its heart exposed and grotesque claws dragging against the floor from the moment it stepped out of the incubation tube.

A finished production unit like the T-103 Mr. X looked like a relatively normal, trenchcoat-wearing bouncer until someone blew off his power limiter coat, which then triggered the chest explosion, rapid mass expansion, and fiery claw growth.

The T-001 simply never had a limiter to begin with; it was built in permanent maximum overdrive.

Yet according to the System, even this defective prototype chassis had enough room in its genetic code to push into a secondary Super state.

I let out a quiet, raspy chuckle, imagining the look on Umbrella’s lead virologists if they ever witnessed a broken prototype suddenly overclocking its own degraded biology. The sheer scientific blasphemy would probably give someone like Annette Birkin a fatal brain aneurysm on the spot.

Honestly, the mental image almost made me want to track her down in Raccoon City just to drag her into a lab, trigger a bunch of theoretically impossible mutations right in front of her clipboard, and watch her entire worldview crumble into dust.

A sudden, wet splash from the dark chemical reservoir below dragged my focus back to reality.

The surface of the black wastewater rippled violently as something massive shifted beneath the scum-covered foam.

Rebecca stopped dead in her tracks, her thumb casually clicking the safety off her grenade launcher with practiced ease. "Ghosty. Look alive. We’ve got company in the soup."

Well, it was time to go deal with the Dr James Marcus. I was getting tired of these Leeches...

---

A/N: Getting big gaps in update I know. I had been trying to build up stock over at patreon this week.

Next update’s tomorrow when rankings resets, don’t forget to donate stones!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can support the author and read advanced Chapter at patreon:

www.patreon.com/HornyShitler

boosty.co/hornyshitler (for those who can’t use patreon)

You can check out the story at my website:

cornyshitler.pages.dev

Discord Invite Link:

discord.gg/7fCsqsFecD