The guards who entered the room didn’t move fast enough.

Sera hit the first line before their safeties had finished clicking off. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Bullets slammed into her shoulder, her ribs, and tore through the muscle of her thigh. But no matter how many bullets entered her, she didn’t stop. Didn’t even flinch.

The first man fell with his throat gone before the second finished firing.

The third didn’t last that long.

The fourth and fifth didn’t even get their guns up before she was one them.

The corridor on the other side of the door was beginning to fill with gunfire and smoke. She could hear men shouting orders that were being drowned out by the screaming alarms going off around them.

The floor started to turn slick as bodies went down faster than the next squad could step over them. Puddles of blood started to turn into rivers, limbs that were separated from their bodies littered the sides and the middle of the corridors.

Wherever you looked, there was nothing but carnage.

And Sera couldn’t stop smiling. She moved through it all like a shadow wearing flesh.

The men in the next hallway tried to form ranks. They tried to box her in, shouting orders that were completely disregarded.

Shields locked together as the men stood shoulder to shoulder. Their rifles were held steady despite the chaos.

A wall of military precision in the middle of a blood-slick lab corridor.

It bought them three seconds.

Sera tore through the center shield first, ripped the rifle out of the man behind it and used him like a battering ram into the soldiers on his left.

The line collapsed before the right side even started shooting. Bullets tore through the men behind her as their own line of fire caught them in the back.

When she was the only one left standing, she continued forward, and never looked back.

Another squad surged in from the east wing, their boots hammering over the once white tiles, their rifles ready.

They didn’t reach the first intersection before she hit them.

One man went into the ceiling hard enough to leave a smear when he came down with a sickening thud. Another lost his arm at the elbow before he even saw her face. The last tried to run.

He didn’t make it far.

None of them did.

--------

The alarms shrieked from every corner now. Metal shutters began dropping over windows, the entire facility locking down sector by sector.

It was absolute perfection.

Sera wanted them trapped.

She hit the nearest wall hard enough to split steel paneling.

Sparks spat from the exposed conduit before she tore it open and yanked out everything that looked important.

The hallway lights stuttered, flickered, then died in a shower of sparks.

The emergency lights clicked on, red bars glowing overhead. But nothing could be done to bring the alarms back.

Now, instead of the white lights that were there originally, everything was bathed in red.

Sera ripped those wires too.

Then, the building plunged into pure darkness.

------

The men cursed, voices sharp and panicked in the dark.

"Flashlights! Get the—"

The first beam came on just in time to catch a glimpse of Sera before she hit them.

The light spun across the floor.

The man holding it didn’t get the chance to scream.

------

Darkness turned the battle into slaughter.

Gunfire lit the halls in brief flashes—her face, her hands, the spray of blood on the walls—and then nothing but dark again until the next burst.

They shot blind, unable to see in the darkness.

But Sera didn’t need the light to see. In fact, her creature preferred it that way.

One by one, their flashlights hit the floor, beams spinning wildly before landing on walls painted red.

The strobing gunfire showed only glimpses: men dragged into doorways, rifles bending in half, bodies hitting tile too fast to scream properly.

Boots slipped in blood.

Orders collapsed into panic.

The smell of copper and cordite drowned everything.

---------

She cleared the first floor in minutes.

The second floor fell even faster.

Doctors in white coats tried to run when the power went. Technicians scrambled for radios that no longer worked. A few tried to beg for their lives.

None of them made it far.

The dark belonged to her now.

Every hallway ended the same way: screams first, then silence.

--------

By the time she reached the west wing, soldiers were stacking furniture into barricades, setting tripods for heavy machine guns, anything to slow her down.

It didn’t matter.

The first gunner fired too soon, tracers chewing through doorframes before she even reached the barricade.

When she did, the barrel twisted sideways under her grip, the man behind it pulled forward into his own line of fire before she snapped his neck against the stock.

The rest broke before she reached them.

Some fired as they fell back, rounds sparking off walls and ceilings, blind and shaking.

It didn’t save them.

Nothing did.

--------

The building tried to help them.

Steel shutters slammed down over exits. Bulkhead doors locked between sectors. Automated systems screamed evacuation orders no one could follow because the power stayed dead.

Everyone was trapped inside with her.

Just like she wanted.

---------

One hallway at a time, she erased everything with a beating heart.

The barracks fell silent first, cots and lockers were overturned in the chaos.

The labs went next, shattered glass and blood spreading together across the tiles.

She found three more barricades on the third floor. None of them lasted longer than the first.

The men in the stairwell tried grenades.

The grenades went off behind her, tearing through their own line when she sent them back the way they came.

-------

Smoke rolled through the ventilation shafts, sedatives quickly followed.

The emergency lights never came back on.

By the time she reached the top floor, the only sounds left were the alarms and the drip of water from burst pipes running pink down the walls.

The last squad emptied everything they had into her before she reached them.

She stepped over them on her way to the control center, the floor slick enough that her boots left tracks through red water as she went.

--------

The building was dead.

Everyone in it, too.

She didn’t know where Davis or Orhan were.

But they were here somewhere.

And she was coming for them.