After dropping Alyssa off at her vehicle, Daniel made his way back toward Raccoon City. The drive down from the mountains felt longer than the trip up, not because the road had changed, but because his body had. He had run on adrenaline for too long, and now that there was nothing left to fight and nowhere left to run, the exhaustion set its hooks in. He kept himself moving with a rotation of energy drinks and coffee he had grabbed at a small rest stop at the edge of the range, the kind of place that sold everything from cigarettes to jerky to barely-brewed cups of hot bean juice laughingly called coffee. He hadn't cared what it tasted like. He only cared that it kept his eyes open.

  He had given her his number before they separated, and she'd promised to call him if and when she got more settled back home. The promise hadn't sounded confident. He hadn't expected it to. The night had been rough on him in every way a night could be rough, but what she had learned had cut deeper than bruises or a bullet wound. Her life had been crushed by a man who had used her like a disposable cup, and the maddening part was the lack of any functional reason behind it. Daniel could accept evil that chased profit or power. He could understand a corporation that treated people like inventory, because he had already seen enough to know what Umbrella considered normal. What he struggled to process was the sheer pointlessness of Lester’s work as it applied to her. It had been senseless, self indulgent, and delusional in a way that made the whole thing feel dirtier.

  That, more than anything, was what stayed with him as the miles went by. Umbrella had created the environment that allowed people like that to exist. Umbrella had built the systems, filled the gaps, and paid the right people. Lester had been a bastard, maybe even a psychopath at the end, but he hadn't been unique. He had been a symptom that had been given a laboratory and the authority to use it. Alyssa had gotten a front row seat to the truth of it, and Daniel had watched her try to swallow it without choking.

  He tried to think through what he could actually do about it. That question had been circling him for weeks, maybe longer, but it had gained weight now that he had been forced to watch the cost land on someone innocent. Stopping Umbrella sounded like a mission statement. It didn't sound like a plan. He had found these places stocked with equipment, stocked with chemicals, stocked with the kind of apparatus that made it obvious this had been built with serious money. The information, though, had been in startlingly light supply. He had taken what he could, he had copied what he could, and he had still left with the feeling that he had been sifting through a hoarder’s house searching for one specific receipt.

  It wasn't a net loss in supplies. He had managed to find a decent collection of gems and jewelry, the kind of portable wealth that would matter later whether he wanted it to or not. That wasn't what he had needed, though. He had needed documents that couldn't be waved away. He had needed names, dates, and chains of custody that could survive scrutiny. He had needed proof that would corner someone. Instead he had a copy of the operating system and a hope that the reception hard drives might still be readable. After what he had seen on Sundaram’s computer, he didn't have much faith that the front desk systems contained anything better. If the hospital had been capable of destroying its own data, then anything of value would either already be gone or more likely, lost when the admin comp decided to shit itself to death.

  Lester’s machine had tried to destroy itself the moment Daniel pushed too hard. It had succeeded enough that Daniel had been forced to pull back, watching in real time as a system began to tear its own contents apart. He had shoved what he could onto his laptop, but he didn't know how much of it had been corrupted on the way over. He didn't know what had been incomplete and what had been fake. That uncertainty sat in the back of his mind like a splinter. He'd have to check it later. He'd have to parse it, verify it, and salvage it. Later.

  That word had been his only coping mechanism for the last hour of driving. Later for the files. Later for the cleanup. Later for the damage to his kit. Later for the phone calls he couldn't afford to make. Later for sleep, even though the need for it was pressing against his skull.

  The third thing that stayed on his mind, stubborn and physical, was his own body. Herbs and first aid spray had done a lot of work on getting him back on his feet, but he knew he had pushed it. He had dosed heavier on herbs than he liked, chasing function over caution, and the spray hadn't been the miracle worker that rumors had painted it to be. It helped. It didn't erase the reality of the situation.

  The gunshot in his side had dulled into a throbbing ache. The bleeding had slowed to a stubborn seep, and he could feel it every time he shifted in the driver’s seat. The hole was there. There would be no hiding it, and even if he could have hidden the wound itself, the rest of him looked like a disaster. His body was a map of bruises and cuts. The Axeman had beaten on him like he owed the giant bastard money, and even with armor and extra padding absorbing the worst of it, the shock of each hit had left him feeling like someone had used his chest as a training dummy.

  At least he was fairly certain he wouldn't spend the better part of a week sick this time.

  That thought circled back to the chemical exposure. Alyssa had only used some of the T RXR he had shoved on her, and there had been a decent amount left afterward. The vials had come with emergency dosing instructions right on the label. Both of them had taken a full dose before they set out. In his case, it was mostly reassurance. His exposure had been minimal. He had been in the thick of the hospital, but he hadn't been breathing the same concentrated air she had been breathing. She, on the other hand, had been trapped in that building for hours. If her recollection was correct, it had been long enough for the contamination to soak into her clothes and her hair and settle into her lungs.

  It bothered him, but there was little he could do except watch and wait. It felt like a responsibility he couldn't shrug off. She had given him her apartment’s location and the location of her spare key, and she had made him promise to check up on her if she didn't message him in a couple of days. The promise had been practical, spoken like someone who didn't want to acknowledge the fear out loud but couldn't ignore it either. She was understandably wary about going to any hospital about it, given who ran them all and what she had lived through. Daniel couldn't blame her for that, even if the alternative was worse.

  Another thing for later, though. Hopefully a thing for never. It would be crushing for her to have made it out, only to turn into a baby shambler after the fact.

  He hit the outskirts of town and felt relief hit him hard enough that he almost laughed. It wasn't happiness. It wasn't comfort. It was the simple easing of tension that came with familiar streets and familiar turns. He kept to back routes, avoiding the kind of roads that made him feel watched. He had learned, over the course of this mess, that anonymity was key, and avoiding the watching eyes of Raccoon's corporate masters was a priority. The city wasn't safe. The city was only known.

  He took the long way, threading through side streets and industrial cut throughs until he reached the alley that led to the derelict factory. The building sat like a dead thing, abandoned and overlooked, exactly what he needed. Pulling in, he shut the engine off and sat there for a moment with both hands on the wheel, listening to the quiet in his own head. He could feel his heartbeat in his ribs. He could feel the drag of fatigue in his eyes. But that was the nature of the job, and getting down the stairs to the basement almost felt like coming home.

  Getting his gear down into the hideout was a pain. He did it anyway, because leaving it in the vehicle wasn't an option. The weight that had been manageable during the adrenaline rush became punishing as soon as he started moving boxes and cases. He took it one trip at a time, forcing himself to keep his grip steady even when his hands threatened to shake. The bruises in his torso flared with each lift. The wound in his side pulled. He kept his mouth shut and kept moving.

  He dropped his weapon cases where he always did, then forced himself to deal with the armor. The plates and straps were stiff with grime and sweat. The whole system felt heavier now than it had in the field. He unfastened what he could, working through the practiced order even as his mind threatened to drift. He didn't allow himself to skip the process. That was how mistakes happened.

  The guns would need maintenance. He could see that at a glance. Dust and residue, moisture, and the faint smear of blood on one of the grips. They had been fired hard and handled harder. The armor would need to be patched, and that meant a trip to the Survivalist later as well, but he wanted to go over the data he had first before making that trip. No doubt the jaundiced man had his own bill to hand him.

  He moved through the rest of the unloading without ceremony. He set things down, took stock in a loose, tired way, and forced himself to put the most dangerous items where they belonged. When he finally had the last bag in place, he stood there for a moment and realized how filthy he felt. It wasn't just the blood and sweat. It was the sensation of having spent the night in places that wanted him dead.

  As he turned toward the small side room where the cot sat, he made a note to himself that he needed a cleaning setup. A sink, at the very least. A way to rinse off without having to pretend his apartment bathroom could handle what he dragged home. A shower would be better, but he didn't have one here. He had a cot and a room with concrete walls and a door that locked.

  That was enough for the moment.

  He stumbled into the side room, pulled the door shut behind him out of habit, and sat down on the edge of the cot. The movement made his side throb. He breathed through it and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. His mind tried to run through the checklist again, all the things he still had to do, all the things he was pushing into the future. It tried to drag him back, keep him awake.

  He didn't let it.

  He stripped off what he could without turning it into a project, boots first, then the worst of the outer layers. He didn't bother with careful folding. He let them fall where they fell. He eased himself down onto the cot with more caution than he wanted to admit, shifting until he found a position that didn't make the wound scream.

  His eyes closed. His thoughts tried to snag on Alyssa again, on the set of her jaw when she had promised to call, on the way she had looked like she might crack and had refused to. He tried to hold onto the intention of checking on her. Two days, he told himself. If she didn't message him, he'd go. He wouldn't rationalize it away.

  Then the exhaustion finally won.

  He slept into the late hours of the day, body heavy and mind blank, the hideout quiet around him.

  000

  Rebecca had been nervous all day. Not stressed, not yet, but the feeling sat under her skin and refused to leave. She had not stopped thinking about Danny, about the weekend, about what she was going to ask him when he got back, and whether he was actually okay. The thoughts stacked on top of each other until they blurred together, looping back on themselves every time she tried to focus on something else. She had thrown herself into her training to keep them at bay, pushing harder than usual, staying longer than scheduled, drilling until her muscles burned. Everyone had noticed. Nobody had commented. For that, she was grateful.

  Barry had still shot her worried looks when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. Jill had been quieter about it, waiting for a moment when they were alone before telling her that if she needed to talk, she was there. Rebecca appreciated that more than she could say. She just wasn’t ready to explain what was really bothering her, mostly because she didn’t fully understand it herself.

  Danny had called her on Monday. He had told her everything was fine, that things were handled, and that he would be home in a few days. She had smiled through the call, laughed at the right places, and told him to be safe. The problem was that it hadn’t felt right. He had sounded strained, like he was holding himself together by force of habit. There had been something else there too, a distraction, a pressure she could hear under his words. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew him well enough now to recognize when he was choosing his phrasing carefully.

  He had been gone for almost three days at that point. When she asked how things were going, he had deflected, gentle but evasive. She could hear him struggling to find words that wouldn’t raise questions, and instead of pressing, she had let the silence sit between them. She hated herself for that. It felt cowardly, but she had told herself she would ask more directly when he came back.

  If he came back.

  She shut that thought down as soon as it surfaced, cutting it off before it could take root. She couldn’t think like that, couldn’t let her mind spiral into worst?case scenarios she had no proof for and no way to stop. Danny hadn't given her a reason not to have faith in him, and clinging to that mattered more than indulging the fear gnawing at the edges of her thoughts. Even so, the trust she leaned on felt thinner than she wanted to admit, stretched tight by distance and unanswered questions she kept telling herself she would ask later.

  That was how she found herself sitting in her apartment on Wednesday afternoon, across the small table from Jill. A hot cup of cocoa was cradled in her hands, more for the excuse of holding onto something than because she needed the warmth. Outside, the first snowfall of November drifted down, late enough in the month that it felt like winter had been hesitating before committing. Thanksgiving was close. Her plans had been full of food, of inviting everyone she could think of over, even Captain Wesker if she could convince him. Normally that kind of planning excited her.

  Right now, it all felt distant. The room, the season, even the plans she’d been clinging to as something normal to look forward to all seemed slightly out of focus, like she was watching her own life through a pane of glass. She knew she should be present, should be enjoying the quiet and the company, but her mind kept drifting back to the same unanswered questions, circling them until they dulled into a constant ache.

  “Still mulling, huh?” Jill asked.

  Rebecca blinked, the sound of Jill’s voice pulling her back into the room. She shifted slightly in her chair, shoulders tensing as she realized how far she’d drifted. “Sorry.”

  Jill waved it off without hesitation. “It’s fine. He’s really got you tangled up, huh? You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

  The question wasn’t unkind. That almost made it harder. Rebecca hesitated, the words catching in her throat. She had reservations about saying what was really on her mind. Deep down, she was afraid there was something going on with him that crossed a line she didn’t want to name.

  So she deflected. It was easier to reach for something harmless than to admit how tightly wound the worry had become, easier to frame it as something small and ordinary instead of the knot it had turned into in her chest.

  “I’m just lonely,” she said, forcing a small laugh that didn’t quite convince even her.

  Jill gave her a look, one eyebrow lifting. “It’s nothing big. I just… I spend a lot of time at his place.”

  Jill snorted softly. “You’ve been dating, what, a month and change? That would be a little more worrying if he didn’t live ten feet from you, yanno?” The teasing was obvious, but the concern underneath it was real enough that Rebecca felt it anyway.

  “I know, I know. I’m pretty terrible like that.” Rebecca waved a hand, trying to make light of it. “He’s just… really nice. Really warm. Being around him feels easy, like I can breathe. And it’s just… I just…”

  The words slipped away from her, the feeling too big and too personal to pin down neatly. She fell quiet instead, staring at the surface of her cocoa.

  Jill smiled at her, softer this time. “You really got it bad, don’t you?”

  Rebecca could only nod.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Jill said. “Just be careful. Going too hard and too deep too soon isn’t a great look.”

  The words landed harder than Rebecca expected. “I promise it’s not like that, Jill. I’ve been careful.” She paused, realizing how flimsy that sounded. “He’s been really patient with me. Especially when it comes to… that stuff. And I’ve been trying too, not to get too clingy.”

  She sighed, staring down into her mug. “It’s just hard. Things are complicated and…”

  “And?” Jill prompted.

  Rebecca hesitated, then leaned forward slightly, as if lowering her voice might keep the words contained. “He’s got his own stuff going on. Stuff he won’t tell me. He keeps calling it family issues, but… Jill, you can’t tell anyone I said this, okay?”

  Jill straightened immediately, the easy posture she’d been holding snapping into something sharper. Her expression hardened with focus. “What is it, Rebecca? Is he doing something to you?”

  “What? No. God, no.” Rebecca shut that down instantly, the answer coming too fast to be anything but certain. “He’s been amazing. He’s never hurt me, never even come close.”

  Jill eased back a fraction, but the concern didn’t leave her face. “But?”

  Rebecca went quiet, the silence stretching until it felt heavy between them. She stared down at her mug, watching the surface ripple as her fingers tightened around it. Then she spoke, carefully. “Danny went off on family business before. I think I told you about it.”

  Jill nodded, waiting.

  “What I didn’t tell you,” Rebecca continued, “is that he came home beat to hell and barely coherent. Cut up. Sick as a dog. He could barely stand on his own. That’s why I was so off that week. I wasn’t just tired. I was taking care of him, trying to keep him upright and functional.”

  Understanding crossed Jill’s face, followed quickly by a deeper concern. “And you’re worried he’s going to come home like that again.” She paused, choosing her words. “Did he tell you why?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “He was really closed off about it. I asked Barry to talk to him, since they’re friends, but that didn’t go anywhere either. Danny said everything was sorted, but…”

  “But he’s out there dealing with something again and won’t tell you what.”

  Rebecca didn’t argue. She just sipped at her cocoa, letting the silence stretch while Jill thought.

  “There’s a lot you aren’t telling me,” Jill said finally.

  Rebecca opened her mouth, but Jill raised a hand, stopping her before she could rush in with an apology or a half?formed defense. “I get why,” she said instead. “You care about him. You want this to work. Anyone who knows you can see that.” Her gaze stayed steady on Rebecca’s face. “But whatever this is, it’s concerning.”

  Jill leaned back in her chair, fingers settling around her coffee mug as if grounding herself. The casual tone she’d been using earlier was gone now, replaced by something more deliberate. “If someone’s hurting him, or using him, you can’t just let it slide. I know you don’t want to jump to conclusions, but ignoring it won’t make it disappear.” She took a breath. “STARS might not be an investigation unit, but that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. You can look into things. Wesker won’t stop you, and what Irons doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  Her tone shifted again, colder now, stripped of warmth. This wasn’t a friend talking. This was her mentor, and the words made her spine straighten just a bit. “You need to recognize when a pattern is forming. One incident is an anomaly. Two is coincidence. But two dots are all it takes to draw a line. Do you understand?”

  Rebecca nodded slowly. She didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking, didn’t like what it implied, but she understood the logic behind it.

  “I do.”

  “I know you don’t like it,” Jill said, the edge easing out of her voice as she leaned forward again. She reached across the table and took Rebecca’s hand, giving it a firm, reassuring squeeze. “But whatever’s going on, you’re not alone in it. If someone’s messing with your boyfriend, then they’re going to find out just how bad of an idea that was.”

  Rebecca squeezed her hand back, drawing a small measure of comfort from the contact. “Okay.”

  000

  Jacob MacKinnon growled low in his throat as the doctor dug in again, metal scraping faintly against bone before another jagged fragment of shrapnel was pulled free. The sound alone made his jaw clench, his fingers curling against the edge of the table as he forced himself not to react. This was the third time in as many days that he’d been laid out under harsh lights, stripped down and patched together like damaged equipment instead of a man. Every pass of the doctor’s hands dragged him back to the moment it had gone wrong.

  The rifle grenade had detonated barely five feet from his position. Close enough that the blast had destroyed his hearing and knocked the breath out of his lungs in one concussive clap. He remembered the pressure more than the sound, the way it had slammed into him like a wall, folding the world inward for a split second before spitting him back out into chaos. When his vision had cleared, everything had been smoke, screaming radios, and bodies on the ground.

  If he hadn’t pushed for the upgraded armor, if he’d accepted the standard issue plate the office had wanted to hand him, he knew exactly where he’d be right now. Dead, just like Alicia. The realization settled in his chest with a sickening weight. He could still picture her where she’d fallen, unmoving, her body torn apart by forces no one had properly expected, from a man who they thought they were ready for. The armor had saved his life, and that fact made the survival taste bitter.

  It wasn’t just Alicia. Johna was finished, reassigned to a desk for the foreseeable future, his field career effectively over even if he technically survived. Jacob remembered seeing him dragged out, eyes unfocused, hands shaking, blood soaking through his sleeve. Mickols hadn’t even made it that far. He’d bled out after the fight, wounds too severe for even rapid evac to save him, slipping away while the perimeter was still hot.

  Three dead in total, carved out in seconds by that armored bastard, and nothing to show for it. Less than nothing. Jacob could still see the moment someone finally got a clean shot, watched rounds strike center mass and spark away like they’d hit the side of a tank. The image replayed unbidden, bullets ricocheting off that dark metal as if the man wearing it hadn’t even noticed, as if they hadn’t mattered at all.

  That was what stuck with him the most in the aftermath. Not just that they’d lost people, but how completely outmatched they’d been. The engagement hadn’t been a fight. It had been a slaughter, fast and brutal, and Jacob knew he’d be carrying the memory of it long after the shrapnel was gone.

  They still hadn’t received the P90s the office had promised. He’d been assured they were on the way, tied up in paperwork, delayed by logistics, the usual excuses that always seemed to materialize when someone else was expected to bleed for the delay. Requests vanished into administrative limbo. Requisitions came back stamped and rejected. Every time he’d pushed, he’d been told to make do, to adapt, to trust the process. Sitting there now with his arm torn open, Jacob could feel the anger simmering hot and constant, directed squarely at an office that had treated his team like an expendable line item.

  Instead, they’d gone in with 9mm and 5.56, calibers that looked fine on a report but meant nothing when faced with armor that shrugged them off like rain. He remembered the helplessness of it in sharp, ugly flashes. The bark of the guns. Magazines running dry. His squad firing because it was all they could do, not because it was accomplishing anything. The local branch hadn’t even had the green-tip ammunition he’d requested, leaving his people to chew through their magazines, and that might as well have been throwing rocks. He’d watched rounds strike and fail, watched the realization spread through the team as it became clear they were outmatched, and then the retaliation that had felt closer to an execution.

  And these weren’t just troops on a roster. They were people he’d spent years with. Friends he’d trained beside, eaten with, bled with. Men and women whose families he knew by name, whose kids’ birthdays he could remember being invited to. Now two more of them were dead because of equipment that never arrived and decisions made far above his head. The thought settled heavy in his chest, not as rage this time, but as the grim certainty that he’d be the one writing the letters, putting words to losses that would never make sense to the people receiving them.

  The anger sat heavy and constant, made worse by Albert Wesker. The smug bastard hadn’t even bothered to hide it when he’d dressed them down in his report, every line polished and cold, framed in a way that pushed responsibility anywhere but upward. That was its own mess entirely. Umbrella America in all but name, stonewalling his unit simply because they were USS Europe. Different branch. Different politics. Different priorities.

  Jacob knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Backbiting was the corporate culture, plain and simple, but that didn’t make Wesker any easier to stomach. The man strutted around in sunglasses indoors like it was some kind of statement, and Jacob hated him on principle for that alone. He’d known from the start that Umbrella America would be a problem, but this was piling insult on top of a growing body count.

  The pressure from his own superiors only made it worse. Messages from USS Command kept coming in, stacked one on top of another, each one carrying the same thinly veiled demand beneath different phrasing. Status updates. Requests for justification. Clarification on this or that. All of them circling the same question, asked as if repetition might somehow make things fit their pretty little worldview.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Why hadn’t he been able to neutralize a lone man and a woman in a tracksuit. Why had the situation escalated? Why had casualties mounted? The wording varied, but the implication never did. As if context mattered to them at all. As if the after-action report hadn’t already spelled it out in brutal detail. As if they hadn’t read about the armor that turned rifle fire into sparks, or the way the man carrying that weapon moved through the fight like he knew exactly how untouchable he was.

  Never mind that the man had been wearing functionally impregnable armor. Never mind that he’d been wielding what looked suspiciously like a grenade-launching shotgun and treating their return fire as an inconvenience at best. Small-arms fire had barely slowed him down, and Jacob could still see it every time the messages came in. The disconnect between what his people had faced and what his superiors seemed willing to acknowledge only sharpened the frustration, turning it from anger into something heavier and more corrosive.

  The whole thing bordered on absurd. Looking back on it in pieces, stripped of the gunfire and the screaming, there was a surreal quality to the way events had stacked on top of each other. It might have been laughable under different circumstances, something he would have dismissed as exaggeration if he’d read it in someone else’s report.

  Instead, it had ended the way it did, capped off by their backup chopper getting taken out by what could only be described as a giant tentacled plant monster erupting out of the terrain like a bad hallucination. Jacob remembered the radio traffic cutting off mid-sentence, remembered the sudden silence where support was supposed to be, and the sinking realization that even their fallback had been taken away.

  He still hadn’t fully processed that part. It sat apart from the rest of the memory, too bizarre and too final to fit cleanly with the rest of the massacre. Some part of him wasn’t sure he ever wanted to pick at it too closely, afraid of what it said about the kind of battlefield they’d been sent into blind.

  Given the scale of the disaster, it was no surprise he’d ended up holding the bag. A botched cleanup job that had been ignored. Middle managers skimming funds that should have gone toward containment at the Arklay site. An underarmed, underprepared strike team sent in half-blind because nobody had bothered to do proper intelligence work. Now that team was reduced to barely a third of its original strength.

  And somehow, despite all of that, it was his fault.

  Lowest man on the totem pole. Shit rolling downhill. Jacob clenched his teeth as another sharp twinge flared in his arm, the doctor working methodically, uncaring about his mood. None of this had been his call, not the loadout, not the intel, not the political games. But he was the one getting squeezed for answers.

  Fuck them. Fuck Wesker. And fuck that armored bastard.

  He still had Hawkins, Sneed, and Copely operational. That mattered more than anything else right now. They were battered, shaken, but alive, and they were still his people. As long as he had that, the unit wasn’t finished yet.

  Reinforcements were coming from head office by the end of the week, or so he’d been told. He didn’t trust the promise the way he once might have, but he held onto it anyway, because it was the only leverage he had left. This time, he’d get the gear he’d asked for. This time, he wouldn’t accept excuses or delays dressed up as procedure.

  This time, he’d get what he needed, and he’d make damn sure that when he put his people back in the field, they wouldn’t be sent in blind and underarmed again.

  There would be a next time. He was certain of that.

  And when it came, the mystery soldier wouldn’t be walking away.

  Jacob made himself that promise as another piece of metal was pulled free, clattering onto the surgical tray beside him. He stared at the ceiling, jaw set, and let the anger harden into something colder.

  000

  Albert Wesker leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together, fingers steepled loosely as the footage played across the monitor in front of him. He watched without blinking, posture relaxed, eyes hidden behind dark lenses even though he was alone. On the screen, his favorite operative moved through the corridors of the Arklay Hospital with a smooth, lethal purpose, a controlled storm of violence and precision.

  The man was everything Wesker valued. Efficient. Adaptive. Ruthless when required, restrained when it served him. He didn’t waste motion, didn’t hesitate when a decision needed to be made. Every engagement was resolved decisively, either through superior positioning or overwhelming force. Watching him was like watching a well-written program execute flawlessly, terminating itself with the smooth perfection of a well oiled machine.

  An ideal candidate.

  If Wesker could find him. If he could strip away the anonymity of the armor and identify the man beneath it, learn where he slept, how he resupplied, who he trusted, and what lines he refused to cross. Habits, resources, needs. Every man had them, no matter how disciplined or careful he believed himself to be.

  If he could approach him at the right moment, when exhaustion and isolation had worn thin the comfort of self?reliance, with the right offer framed in exactly the right terms, everything would fall neatly into place. Wesker was confident of that. He understood leverage, understood timing, and he understood ambition when he saw it.

  Talent like this didn’t surface often. When it did, it was never accidental. Such individuals were shaped by pressure and circumstance, forged into something sharper than their peers. They needed direction, purpose, and a stage worthy of their capabilities. To let an asset like this go to waste would be unforgivable.

  There had been one unexpected variable. The hanger-on.

  Wesker’s mouth twitched faintly as the footage showed the armored man pulling the woman clear of danger, positioning himself between her and a charging Tyrant without hesitation. Protection implied a number of things. A use, a need, an attachment perhaps? More than that, it implied leverage. It also implied limits, lines the man would not cross lightly. That was information in its own right, perhaps more valuable than any tactical analysis.

  He rewound the clip slightly, watching the decision again. There was no panic in it. No reluctance. The man had weighed the situation instantly and committed.

  Interesting.

  Wesker had to admit he’d been genuinely surprised when the dormant taps in the Arklay facility had come back to life after more than two years of silence. He had assumed them lost, a sunk cost folded into the endless web of half-forgotten contingencies he'd accumulated over time. Their reactivation had been entirely unexpected, and deeply gratifying.

  He allowed himself a small measure of satisfaction at that.

  The arrangement with the mercenaries had been simple enough. Sundaram had needed an accommodating intermediary, something Wesker was happy to provide. The man was desperate, foolish, smart, to be certain, but not wise. And if Wesker paid them a bit extra, asking for a few discreet additions to the old building’s internal security network, all the better. It was nothing overt, nothing that would trip any routine checks or sweeps or security functions while the old place was being monitored. A thread here. A splice there. Just enough to phone home if something ever stirred in that graveyard of a facility.

  Without it, this entire performance would have been lost to him.

  The footage wasn’t perfect. Far from it. Whole sections of the camera grid had gone dark during the intervening years, leaving blind spots that frustrated the analyst in him even as they amused him. Emergency power fluctuations. Physical damage. Deliberate sabotage. It hardly mattered. What remained was more than sufficient.

  Wesker watched highlights spool past his eyes. The desperate, grinding fights against plant-based B.O.W.s that flooded corridors with writhing biomass. The frantic flight through collapsing wings as containment failed in cascading stages. The brief but brutal encounters with the Tyrant-class BOW, its eventual destruction captured from three different angles before the feed cut.

  And then the USS.

  That part he replayed twice.

  The engagement with Viperstrike was a masterclass in asymmetrical violence. The way the armored man carved through their formation, soaking fire that should have shredded him. The moment their confidence cracked, when they realized their weapons were ineffective. Wesker could practically taste the shift in momentum through the screen.

  All of it had been transferred to his personal server in real time, copied cleanly before the hospital mainframe was destroyed and the operative vanished once again into the noise. The timing had been exquisite.

  An excellent use of a few thousand dollars. A bargain at twice the price.

  Low risk. High return.

  The bonus had been watching Jacob MacKinnon take the blow yet again. Wesker felt no particular hatred for the man. Contempt, perhaps. Mild irritation. Viperstrike had been positioned as a counterweight, a foreign intelligence asset embedded just deeply enough to be inconvenient. Their failure here had been comprehensive. Something he would be inclined to reward his mystery operative for, if he got the chance.

  Watching the unit come apart had been deeply satisfying.

  He had no illusions that the disaster would be enough to send MacKinnon packing back to Europe. USS didn’t discard officers that easily, not when doing so would raise uncomfortable questions. Still, the damage was done. Viperstrike was bloodied, diminished, and discredited.

  More importantly, they were vulnerable.

  That alone provided Wesker with ample justification to tighten the noose. Reduced access. Delayed requests. Strategic reassignments. He could bleed them slowly, strangle their operational capacity without ever lifting a finger himself. Perhaps he could even maneuver them toward Spencer’s mining project, burying them in irrelevance far from Raccoon City.

  That problem could wait.

  For now, Wesker’s attention turned inward. Away from Umbrella. Away from the boardrooms and the endless layers of oversight. He had been plotting his eventual severance from the company for years, laying groundwork with the same patience he applied to everything else. What he had seen over the past week only accelerated the timetable.

  Two major incidents within figurative spitting distance of Raccoon proper. That was no coincidence. Patterns were forming, and Wesker was very good at recognizing them. And this pattern formed an arrow, right to where he knew it would.

  The armored man was based in the city. That much was clear. Whether by necessity or design, his operations radiated outward from Raccoon like ripples. The question was where he rested his head when he wasn't setting fire to Umbrella's dirty little secrets?

  The company’s surveillance network covered a respectable portion of the city center and its immediate surroundings. Nearly sixty percent, by conservative estimates. Financial districts. Transit hubs. Residential arteries. All mapped, indexed, and monitored.

  The gaps told a more interesting story.

  Industrial zones. Aging factory blocks. Suburban sprawl where infrastructure lagged behind their expansion. Places where cameras were sparse, maintenance inconsistent, and data unreliable. Places Umbrella considered low priority.

  If the man possessed even a modicum of common sense, that was where he would operate from.

  Wesker had no reason to believe otherwise.

  Which meant the hunt would require a more personal touch. Less reliance on automated systems. More direct probing. He would need to seed inquiries, apply pressure in the right places, watch for reactions. It was a game he knew well.

  And he had time.

  The lab release wasn’t scheduled until May of the following year. Birkin, for all his many flaws, was meticulous about timelines. That window gave Wesker room to maneuver, to observe, to position himself perfectly.

  Everything was aligning.

  As the footage looped once more, showing the armored man shredding his way through the remnants of Viperstrike with cold efficiency, Wesker allowed himself a thin smile. Not of triumph, not yet, but of anticipation.

  Everything was going according to plan.

  000

  The sounds of stone fracturing and metal clanging echoed faintly through the reinforced glass, carried up from the quarry far below. Oswell E. Spencer sat motionless in his wheelchair, positioned precisely where the view was best, his gaze fixed on the vast wound carved into the earth. The office around him was a monument to excess. Carpet thick enough to swallow footsteps. Leather furniture imported and tailored to taste. Walls paneled in dark mahogany and adorned with paintings and photographs whose combined value would have beggared nations.

  None of it held his interest.

  Wealth had long since lost its flavor. Opulence was merely a byproduct, an unavoidable accumulation that followed ambition the way heat followed fire. Trinkets. Baubles. Markers that impressed small men and distracted them from asking the wrong questions. Spencer had stopped seeing them decades ago. The office was not a sanctuary or a trophy. It was simply a vantage point.

  What mattered was the work.

  It had always been the work. The grand vision. The pursuit of something higher, purer, inevitable. Long before Umbrella had a name, before laboratories and subsidiaries and legal shields, Spencer had believed that humanity was a failed draft. Not irredeemable, but unfinished. A species that had stumbled into intelligence without the discipline to wield it, clinging to tradition and superstition while mistaking stagnation for stability.

  If Spencer had ever believed in divinity in the traditional sense, that belief had died young. Gods were abstractions, crutches invented to soothe the fear of meaninglessness. What replaced them, for him, was far more concrete. Potential. Ascension. The cold certainty that humanity, left to its own devices, would plateau forever, content to repeat the same cycles of war, decadence, and decay. Evolution would not save them. It was too slow, too blind. Progress had to be guided.

  Below him, the quarry pulsed with activity. Thousands of men rotated through three shifts, day bleeding into night and back again, their labor relentless and methodical. Excavators tore at ancient stone. Drills screamed as they bit into bedrock. Teams catalogued, scanned, sifted, and discarded. Each fragment was logged, each anomaly flagged. The process was exhaustive by necessity. One missed detail could set the entire effort back years.

  Spencer watched them with a distant, proprietary calm. He did not see laborers or engineers. He saw instruments, each fulfilling a narrow function in service of a design too vast for them to comprehend. They dug because they were told to dig. They logged because they were told to log. None of them knew what they were truly searching for, and that ignorance was a mercy.

  He remembered when he had been among them.

  In his youth, before time had begun its slow, inexorable betrayal, he had worked with his hands in the dirt. A brush in one hand. A shovel in the other. Carefully uncovering relics and remnants that whispered of forgotten perfection. Ancient ruins. Unnatural structures. Fossils that did not fit accepted timelines. Those days had been intoxicating. Each discovery reinforced the same terrible, beautiful truth. Humanity had once brushed against greatness, and then recoiled from it in fear.

  Civilizations had risen, touched something profound, and then collapsed under the weight of their own smallness. They had lacked vision. Lacked resolve. They had found the door to ascension and slammed it shut, choosing comfort over transcendence. Spencer had sworn, even then, that he would not repeat their mistake.

  His hands twitched slightly in his lap, gnarled and veined, fingers stiff with age. He despised them. Despised what time had done to him. Two wars had failed to kill him. Assassins had failed. Illness had failed. And yet time, patient and cruel, had succeeded where everything else had not. It had bent his spine. Crippled his legs. Reduced him to observation rather than participation.

  There was still so much to do.

  So much left unfinished.

  Time had forced his hand. It had robbed him of patience and replaced it with urgency. Risks once taken only after decades of consideration were now unavoidable. Foolish risks. Brilliant risks. The line between them blurred more with every passing year. He no longer had the luxury of waiting for the world to be ready.

  The world would have to keep up.

  It was a tragedy, really. For decades he had perfected the art of invisibility. He had learned how to move unseen through the halls of power, how to cloak ambition in bureaucracy and progress. Umbrella had been his masterpiece in that regard, a shell company grown into a monolith, its public face benign and necessary. Pharmaceuticals. Medical advancement. Relief. Healing.

  Behind it all, the real work continued.

  He had always known that the truth of his vision would terrify those whose minds were shackled by politics and tradition. They would cry out, clutching their authority as it slipped through their fingers. No, you must not. They are too stupid. They need us. As if those who called themselves leaders were anything more than sheep themselves, bleating at the illusion of control.

  They bowed and scraped for scraps of influence while true power loomed over them, unseen and unacknowledged. They were fools, easily manipulated. Coin. Flesh. Prestige. All it took to buy their loyalty. They mistook Spencer for one of their own, another relic enthralled by wealth and legacy, blind to the truth that money was merely a tool.

  That illusion had served him well.

  But that era was ending.

  Marcus. Ashford.

  Two names that still drew a curl of disgust from his lips, not merely for what they had done, but for what they had been allowed to become.

  They had not begun as disappointments. That was the cruelty of it. Spencer remembered them as they were in the early years, bright-eyed and sharp, minds that grasped the shape of his vision more quickly than most. Marcus had possessed a raw brilliance that bordered on obsession, an intuitive grasp of biological systems that made even Spencer pause. Ashford had been different, methodical and disciplined, capable of translating abstract theory into a structured, repeatable process. Together, they should have been pillars.

  He had treated them as such.

  He remembered the times they would talk and debate, those great minds mingling with his as they pondered the deeper mysteries of the world, seeking out the hidden truths behind myth and legend. He recalled the passion they all had, in the shadow of that great war, the driving need to find the answer before their species annihilated itself under nuclear fire. He longed for the days when they were of one singular mind and one singular purpose, believing that gratitude and the drive for perfection would be enough to bind them to the Great Work.

  It had been a mistake.

  Marcus had been the first to sour. Praise became expectation. Expectation became entitlement. Each success only fed his hunger for recognition, for ownership. He had begun to speak of his work as if it were his alone, as if Umbrella existed to serve him rather than the other way around. When Spencer denied him the adulation he craved, reminded him that discovery did not confer dominion, Marcus’s brilliance curdled into resentment.

  Ashford had watched all of this with quiet calculation.

  Where Marcus raged, Ashford adapted. He smiled. He agreed. He presented himself as the reasonable counterweight, the loyal lieutenant who understood Spencer’s concerns. All the while, he maneuvered. Funding streams were quietly redirected. Committees were stacked. Projects were slowed not through incompetence, but through deliberate obstruction, each delay justified by procedure and caution.

  Spencer had seen it too late.

  Instead of collaboration, there was rivalry. Instead of progress, there was attrition. They turned their intellects inward, weaponizing them against one another and against the structure that sustained them. Laboratories became fiefdoms. Data was hoarded. Information that should have advanced the core research was withheld or duplicated purely to deny the other an advantage.

  What should have been the crucible of ascension became a battleground of egos.

  Worse still, their behavior taught others how to survive within Umbrella. Younger researchers learned quickly that advancement did not come from contribution, but from alignment. From choosing sides. From flattering the right superiors and starving rivals of support. The rot spread quietly, disguised as ambition.

  Spencer had watched it happen.

  He told himself it was temporary. That once the critical thresholds were crossed, once undeniable results were achieved, their petty struggles would be rendered irrelevant. He believed he could correct course at any time, that his authority was absolute.

  That arrogance had cost him years.

  Even now, he could trace entire branches of failure back to those decisions. Projects delayed at moments where momentum mattered most. Resources squandered on redundant efforts. Focus diluted as scientists chased promotions instead of purpose. Umbrella’s internal cohesion fractured long before the outside world ever noticed.

  What angered him most was not their betrayal, but their smallness. Marcus and Ashford had stood at the edge of something transcendent and had chosen instead to fight over titles and legacy. They had been offered a place in the shaping of humanity’s future and had settled for petty dominion within a corporate hierarchy.

  He should have excised them the moment their ambitions turned inward.

  That failure was his.

  And it disgusted him.

  Having them murdered was an ugly business. It was a tragic loss, even he could admit that. Both Marcus and Ashford were geniuses in their own way, masters of their chosen sciences, and capable men in all the ways that Oswell cherished in himself. Their decisions had led them down a path he couldn’t follow, and that was the truest tragedy of it all. Spencer wasn’t a man prone to regret, he couldn’t be. There was too much of his Great Work left to accomplish, too many variables to narrow down, too many paths left untrodden, to have the time to look back and reflect on the fall of his once-closest friends. But it left him feeling old, feeling worn, all the same. The foibles of age, he knew, and he cursed it, that thief, time. He cursed it with all his breath and all his will, stealing from him the precious remaining seconds that he needed.

  If there was an afterlife, he wished to greet it successfully, a life fulfilled, a legacy made whole, and a species raised from the much and the filth and made anew into a perfect, beautiful creation, as gods, striding the Earth and beyond on the shoulders of giants. On his shoulders, on those of his bitterly slain friends, for the good of all. But that was a far and away thing. Far, and growing farther, it felt, with every tick of the clock. Because for all his wealth, all his riches and opulent trinkets, none of it could buy him one more second, and even now he felt the cold claws of the reaper reaching for him. All he could do, all he had to do, was look forward. And to do that, he would be forced to make some hard, hard decisions. Because he could do no less. Because he must. Because the future was coming, and he was ready to greet it.

  Umbrella was failing, but that no longer concerned him. In truth, it had ceased to concern him years ago. The corporation had served its purpose, nothing more. A vessel. A scaffold erected around the Great Work to provide funding, manpower, and plausible deniability while the real advances took shape beneath the surface.

  He had insulated himself thoroughly. Legal buffers, shell entities, redundant chains of ownership, all layered with the same meticulous care he applied to his research. When Umbrella inevitably collapsed under the weight of its own rot, brought down by scandal, exposure, or internal implosion, it would do so without touching him. He would step aside at precisely the right moment and allow it to burn, then step forward again with the next iteration.

  Cleaner. Purged. Refined.

  This incarnation of Umbrella was no longer an end in itself. It was a testbed. A proving ground where flawed ideas could be stress-tested, where personnel could be evaluated, and where useful failures could be harvested for data. Every breach, every catastrophe, every death refined his understanding of what worked and what did not. The company’s mistakes were not setbacks. They were inputs.

  Until its final collapse, he would extract every ounce of value from it. Intellectual property. Research data. Behavioral metrics. Survivors worth salvaging. Umbrella would continue to function as a disposable instrument, wrung dry of utility before being discarded without sentiment. The next iteration would rise not from nostalgia or loyalty, but from ruthless selection.

  Sentiment had no place in the work. Only results mattered.

  Time was the enemy now. It always had been.

  A faint clink of glass drew his attention back to the room.

  The man standing beside him swirled a glass of brandy, the amber liquid catching the light. The drink was worth more than the lives laboring in the pit below. The man drank it without ceremony, without reverence. That, Spencer supposed, was simply his nature.

  Despite the ragged, almost sickly appearance of his guest, Spencer knew better than to underestimate him. In truth, he was no longer certain the being who called himself the Survivalist was a man at all. Reports filtered up from the periphery hinted at something stranger. Something older.

  Whatever he was, he was useful.

  “Awful nice setup you got here, partner,” the Survivalist drawled, eyes never leaving the quarry. “Real carpet. Air conditioning. The works. Far sight away from my humble little camp.”

  He chuckled softly and took another sip of brandy, unbothered by the value of it. “Makes a man wonder what you might need, seein’ as you already got everything.”

  Spencer didn't answer immediately. He let the remark hang, measuring the man beside him, not for the first time, but with renewed interest. The Survivalist spoke casually, but nothing about him was casual. Every word was placed just loosely enough to disguise its intent.

  “What I want,” Spencer said at last, voice dry, “I already know you will never give me.” He leaned back slightly in his chair. “That is old business, though. I am far more curious about how my little pet project is progressing.”

  The Survivalist smiled, showing nothing. “He’s doin’ downright impressive, if I do say so myself. Twisted up somethin’ fierce, but he’s got grit. Not the sharpest tool in the shed, mind you. Keeps gettin’ himself into trouble.” There was a pause, deliberate. “But nobody can say he ain’t got heart.”

  Spencer rolled a platinum coin between his fingers, the soft scrape of metal against skin a quiet counterpoint. “Heart is overrated. Only results matter.” His gaze drifted back to the quarry. “He never was the cleverest of his siblings. Even so, he was always the most cunning. Low cunning, perhaps, but that was useful in its own way. It's never enough, but perhaps it will guide him when that Heart of his fails.”

  The Survivalist tilted his head slightly, as if listening for something beneath the words. “That sorta thing tends to shorten a man’s lifespan, long-term.”

  “Only if he is allowed to choose his battles,” Spencer replied. “Which is why I asked how he fared with the cleanup.”

  “Better’n the first time around,” the Survivalist said. “Even with the gear, it was a hell of a mess to swallow. Took damage. Took risks. Picked up a little friend along the way. Reporter girl. Don’t know her name, but I can find out, if'n you care.”

  “No,” Spencer said without hesitation. “I don't.” The sharpness of it was instructive. “Whoever she is, whatever she might do, she's just a small piece. That is all. Umbrella’s collapse is inevitable. She merely hastens the timetable." His eyes met the Survivalist's in the reflection of the window. "She is irrelevant.”

  He exhaled slowly. “Only he matters. Between him and his siblings, one of them is bound to succeed. Attrition favors persistence.”

  The Survivalist’s eyes flicked to the coin. “And you’re willin’ to keep feedin’ that attrition?”

  Spencer allowed himself a thin smile. “Of course. I did not place him in your care expecting success. I placed him there to see if the runt of the litter might show some promise. At this point there's little use in wasting a viable resource and as it seems one that was a diamond in the rough. I am… pleasantly surprised by the results.”

  The Survivalist shrugged. “If you say so. Doubt he salvaged much from that hole, though. You still wanna pay him double, like last time?”

  Spencer laughed softly, without humor. “What are a few pennies on the dollar?”

  He flicked the coin toward the Survivalist. “Give him that as well. A bonus. Reinforce the behavior. Buy whatever data he offers. Whatever curiosities he brings. I will cover the surcharge.”

  “And th’ other thing?” the Survivalist asked. “He’s been gettin’ restless. Askin’ questions.”

  “Then open the books,” Spencer said. “But selectively. Guide him toward assets that can be expended without consequence. He is not ready to face a true adversary yet.” His smile thinned further. “Cleanup duty suits him. It teaches resilience without granting him the agency to grow beyond the framework I've lain for him.”

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Enter.”

  The aide hesitated upon seeing only one occupant. “Sir. The helicopter is ready for you and your… guest?”

  He cleared his throat, color rising faintly in his cheeks. “My apologies, sir. The staff reported another presence in the office. I must have misunderstood.”

  Spencer smiled, the grandfatherly lilt at odds with the vicious gleam in his eye. “Merely an old man thinking aloud. Come. We have places to be.”

  As he was wheeled away, the office fell silent once more. The quarry continued its endless labor below, indifferent to who watched and who departed. For a moment, the room appeared entirely empty. Then, without sound or ceremony, the glass the Survivalist had been holding was set back onto the tray beside the bottle. It rested there perfectly, the amber liquid undisturbed, the surface smooth as if it had never been touched at all.

  Nothing else in the room suggested he had ever been present.