July 24, 1998, 00:30.
Raccoon City, Arklay Mountains.
Lincoln leaped from the helicopter.
Beneath him lay the pitch-black mountain forest, shrouded in complete darkness.
Adjusting his orientation mid-air, he glided toward a gap in the canopy.
The moment his boots sank into the damp mud, he bent his knees to absorb the impact.
Seeing him land safely, the helicopter above didn’t linger.
It pitched up and quickly flew away, vanishing into the night as though eager to escape this airspace.
A fine, light rain fell over the mountains tonight, pricking his face with a chilling mist.
Lincoln stood up, stowed his parachute, and flexed his ankles.
He had been in Umbrella’s system for a very long time.
For as long as he could remember, he had grown up in the company’s specialized training facilities.
The regimen had taught him everything in a rigorous, systematic fashion—from hand-to-hand combat to mid- and long-range marksmanship, from wilderness survival to urban infiltration.
There had been over a dozen children in his batch.
In the end, only four remained.
Where the others had gone, no one ever told him, and he had learned long ago not to ask.
Upon reaching adulthood, he was assigned to a special operations unit under the Security Management Department.
It had no official designation and was kept off the books, created specifically to handle matters that couldn’t be resolved through standard channels.
In that unit, he wasn’t the strongest, but he had always been the one who survived the longest.
Of the four from his batch, he was the only one still alive and taking assignments this year.
His current station was Raccoon City, where the company had provided him with an apartment and a legitimate identity as a security consultant.
But whenever the phone rang, he had to move.
Tonight’s call had come an hour ago.
The caller was the duty supervisor from the Security Management Department.
His voice sounded tense, stating that something had happened in the Arklay Mountains and that Lincoln needed to handle it immediately.
The call contained no specific details, only stating that the mission brief would be sent once he reached the designated location.
He had seen this protocol before.
It meant the mission involved high-level classified information that couldn’t be transmitted over unencrypted comms.
Within forty minutes, Umbrella had dispatched a helicopter to pick him up.
The efficiency was unnerving, suggesting they had prepared for this well in advance.
Now, standing in the dense woods of the Arklay Mountains, Lincoln pulled out the encrypted communicator provided by Umbrella.
The screen lit up with a new message:
[S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team was dispatched to the Arklay Mountains on the night of July 23 to investigate a series of missing persons cases. Following an emergency landing caused by engine failure, all contact with the team has been lost. No signals have been received.]
[Mission: Enter the target area, investigate the cause of lost contact, gather intelligence related to the disappearances, and assess the threat level.]
[Note: Multiple civilian disappearances and suspected animal attacks have occurred in this region over the past two months. Causes are unknown. Priority is given to evacuation in the event of an uncontrollable situation.]
[Mission Rank: A]
Lincoln read it twice, his brow furrowing slightly.
Rank A.
The company’s internal mission structure ran from D to S across five ranks.
Rank A was the second highest.
In his more than ten years of service, the vast majority of his assignments had been C or B-rank.
He could count the A-rank missions on one hand.
Furthermore, the objective was to locate a team of missing police officers.
Raccoon City was a mid-sized city.
If a police tactical team went silent for four hours, the normal response would be to notify the State Police or contact the National Guard, not send a covert company operative into the mountains in the middle of the night.
Unless conventional channels couldn’t be used, and the company didn’t want any more official law enforcement entering the area.
Besides, the wording in the brief specified “investigate the cause” and “gather intelligence,” not “rescue personnel.”
The phrasing implicitly assumed those officers were likely already dead.
The company didn’t care about the survival of a few cops; it cared about what was actually happening in this sector.
Lincoln remained silent for a few seconds, his lips curving into a faint, unreadable expression.
After considering it for a moment, he stowed the communicator.
He would head in and take a look first.
However, he mentally raised his guard.
The danger level of this assignment was very likely far beyond what those few lines on the brief suggested.
Before setting off, Lincoln checked his gear.
Holstered on his right thigh was a modified Colt M1911, .45 caliber, fitted with an extended ten-round magazine.
He carried four spare magazines plus the one in the chamber, giving him fifty rounds in total.
Slung over his left shoulder was a Remington M870 shotgun, loaded with seven shells in the tube and fifteen extra buckshot rounds on his belt.
A KA-BAR tactical knife rested at the small of his back, while his utility pouch held a first-aid kit, a flashlight, two flashbangs, and a flare gun.
Fully geared, Lincoln began advancing toward the coordinates.
After trekking for about fifteen minutes, he spotted a downed UH-1 Huey helicopter sitting lopsided on a mid-mountain slope.
From a distance, two of its main rotor blades were snapped off, the cabin doors stood wide open, and the letters *S.T.A.R.S.* were stenciled on the side of the fuselage.
This had to be the Bravo Team helicopter from a few hours ago.
Lincoln didn’t rush in, choosing instead to observe from the perimeter first.
The muddy ground around the cabin door was covered in numerous footprints representing at least four or five distinct boot tread patterns, scattering off in several directions.
The depth and spacing of the footprints were consistent and normal, with no drag marks, indicating the occupants had evacuated under their own power with their mobility intact.
There were bloodstains on the seats and floor, but the volume was minimal—likely just minor scrapes and cuts from the forced landing.
Up to this point, everything looked relatively normal.
Then he noticed a detail that was decidedly abnormal.
Deep, bloody claw marks were gouged into the side of the aluminum fuselage, the spacing between the claws unnaturally wide.
Lincoln stared at the gouges for several seconds, his frown deepening.
The outer skin of a UH-1 was aluminum alloy.
To leave claw marks of that depth required either a massive predator like a grizzly bear or something he had never encountered before.
However, at this altitude and latitude, brown bears shouldn’t exist, and the spacing didn’t match the claw marks of a black bear either.
More importantly, if it were a bear, there should be animal prints in the mud.
Yet he had just checked: the area was covered exclusively in human boot prints.
There was not a single animal track.
Whatever had left those marks had either already departed or didn’t travel on the ground at all.
After a brief moment of thought, Lincoln raised his alertness and began following the densest set of boot prints down the slope.
After advancing about two hundred meters, the forest grew increasingly dense, and visibility plummeted.
The boot prints vanished at the edge of a steep incline, suggesting someone had slid down from there.
Lincoln picked his way down to the bottom of the slope and relocated the tracks, but the signs had grown chaotic.
The mud was now littered with large animal paw prints and dragged trails of blood.
He squatted down to inspect the paw prints.
They were four-toed with sharp claw indentations at the front, clearly canine in structure.
However, the palm width was nearly ten centimeters—far exceeding the typical six to eight centimeters of standard large dog breeds.
Lincoln’s brow creased.
He sensed that something was deeply wrong with these mountains, and there was more than one of whatever it was.
He drew his M1911, holding the gun in his right hand and his flashlight in his left using a Harris grip, and resumed his advance.
Before long, the trees ahead thinned out, revealing a set of railway tracks in the distance.
Parked on the tracks was a train consisting of five or six cars, its exterior paint heavily faded.
However, painted on the side of the engine was a logo he recognized instantly: an umbrella emblem split into red and white segments—Umbrella Pharmaceuticals.
Lincoln paused in his tracks.
The company’s logo had appeared on a train right in the middle of his mission zone, yet the briefing hadn’t mentioned a single word about it.
Furthermore, this wasn’t a public line.
There were no railway signs, signal lights, or crossing facilities anywhere along the track; it was a private rail.
Having worked in the company’s system for so many years, he had visited numerous internal facilities, yet no one had ever mentioned Umbrella owning a private railway in the Arklay Mountains.
What were they transporting on this track that required bypassing all public transit networks?
Lincoln stood in place for a few seconds, a subtle expression crossing his face.
Regardless of whether this train was directly tied to his mission, it was the most obvious lead he had right now.
Heightening his vigilance, he continued toward the train.