He had one option. The mod’s ultimate failsafe: the Reality Anchor . A device he’d stolen from the same lab—a briefcase-sized EMP that, when triggered, would delete every non-player entity within a two-kilometer radius. Including the zombies. Including the Hive. Including, potentially, himself.
He smiled. Not the smile of a hero. Not the smile of a madman.
His HUD flickered. A new message appeared, written in the same darknet font as the Lazarus Vector.
Rico laughed—a hollow, desperate sound. He’d turned Medici into a playground, then a warzone, then a tomb. Now, he’d turn it into a ghost town. just cause 3 zombie mod
The Hive . It was forming where the cathedral’s fountain used to be. A pulsating mound of fused bodies and scrap metal, with a single, titanic eye made of a helicopter’s searchlight. Tendrils of tether-flesh lashed out, snatching Rico’s ankle mid-grapple.
The mod had twisted Rico’s own signature weapon against him. These special infected could fire organic grapples from their ribcages, snagging jets from the sky or pulling rebel vehicles into crowds of the living. Rico had watched a friend—a grizzled rebel named Mario—get yanked out of a helicopter’s cockpit by a strand of pulsating, vein-like rope. Mario hadn’t died. He’d converted in under ten seconds, his eyes melting into amber light before he turned and fired his own tether at Rico.
“I am the storm that is approaching,” Rico muttered, a grim parody of his old bravado. He pulled the pin on a cluster of Bavarium Power Cores strapped to his chest—modded explosives that created localized gravity voids. He tossed them down. He had one option
Rico fell.
Rico had one grapple charge left, a single parachute, and a Rebel Drop beacon that was sparking and spitting nonsense signals. The horde below was climbing the cathedral’s walls, using each other as ladders, their tethered grapples sinking into the stone.
Rico’s grapple shot out, sinking into the fuselage of a derelict cargo plane wedged into the cathedral’s bell tower. He yanked, propelling himself across the smoky chasm. Below, the streets were a moving carpet of the wretched. Farmers with pitchforks, their skin sloughing off like wet clay. Soldiers with half their faces missing, still clutching rifles that fired ghost bullets. And worst of all—the tether zombies . Including the zombies
The smile of a man who had just found a new game.
The first infected had no eyes—just two pits of molten orange code where irises should have been. It shambled out of the lab’s loading bay, still wearing the tattered uniform of a Medici general. When Rico grappled past it, his retractor pulling him skyward, the thing didn't scream. It whispered his name in Di Ravello’s digitized voice.