Others in the group were a little too slow to act.  Possibly because of seeing this new strangeness in the other half of the room, perhaps due to other reasons.  It didn't matter, for now.  The situation unfolded as it did, with Kaze sending a large shot of acid at the huge eyeball, right after his chucking the security gate at it.  The result was some clear damage to the creature's surface.  No, it clearly did NOT have any particular defense against acid.  There was some kinda' screech, and then Cass jumped on top of the dragon to fire into the bodies of the 'humans'.  these were not zombies.  These were X-replicated human forms.  Not very sturdy in comparison to some of the other creatures they've taken the form of before, and that's why Cass' weapon blew them apart, and that the globs of X soon flew free as the remains melted.

Now, Kathrine was having trouble getting past Kaze, especially since Cassius was on his back, so that climbing was also out of the question.  Cass had elected to climb so that the dragon couldn't crush him.  Zen did not really care.  He launched himself into a slide between Kaze's legs and under his bulk, emerging out the other side and focus-firing his three eye-beams at the eyeball until its structure gave up for ghost and melted away into another hovering blob of X Parasite.  That appeared to be that, EXCEPT...now, the [i]actual[/i] armor door was pounded into - once, twice, thrice - before a few missles hit it and it just blasted open!  There was a MASS of zombie flesh molded together, crawling on many disfigured limbs and pointing the business end of several weapons, missle launchers and blaster rifles!, straight ahead at them.

Zen immediately acted, leaping up to take a slash at it with one of his blades to disable one of the three missle launchers as it harmed its discolored flesh, then firing at it with lasers from one side of the room.  This was to divert it from everyone else so they could get in and concentrate fire.  And given that this creature was not use to any sort of human-level intelligence or tactics such as a [i]distraction[/i], it immediately unloaded on him.  Zen avoided most fire by dropping prone, but he was taking a few hits at this point.  The room was not large for maneuvers and he was acting as a decoy.