Lincoln glanced at it.
It wasn’t an incoming call, but a text message.
Lincoln pulled out the communicator.
A new message was displayed on the screen.
The sender’s ID was blank, with no signature.
“ES-047, additional instruction, maximum security classification.”
“Our assessment indicates that the original strain of the T-Leech Virus researched by Dr. Marcus holds irreplaceable strategic value. Existing intelligence shows that all frozen samples within the facility have been reclaimed by an unknown force, making acquisition through conventional means impossible.”
“Alternative plan: The sole living vector of this virus is the mutant leeches within the facility.
“Only the leeches carry the fully active genome of the T-Leech Virus.”
“You are required to harvest a sufficient amount of live tissue samples (no less than 50 grams) from individual leeches or their amalgamated forms, seal them, and carry them with you during evacuation.”
“Note: Other B.O.W.s modified by the T-Virus only contain the downgraded mass-production T-Virus genome, which does not meet the harvesting requirements.”
“In the event of encountering individual leeches, amalgams, or a higher-level leech control core within the facility, prioritize extraction.”
“The collection container has been pre-positioned in the compartment of your first-aid kit—a silver sealed tube, ready for immediate use.”
“This instruction must not be disclosed to any non-Company personnel. It will self-destruct upon receipt.”
After Lincoln finished reading the message, the text on the screen began to vanish line by line.
Five seconds later, the communicator returned to its standby interface.
He slipped the communicator back into his waist pack, his face expressionless.
He was all too familiar with Umbrella’s way of doing things.
First, they would give you an official mission, and once you arrived on the scene and gathered enough information, they would slide in their true objective.
In the earlier radio call, they had said “collect research data and biological samples”—a very broad phrasing.
This message pointed directly to what they really wanted.
The T-Leech Virus—the culmination of Dr.
Marcus’s life’s work, the direct progenitor of the T-Virus, and the source of all of Umbrella’s viral weapons.
Since the frozen samples were unobtainable, he would have to scrape it off the leeches themselves.
Lincoln thought for a moment, reached into his first-aid kit, and indeed felt something in the hidden compartment.
It was a silver metal sealed tube, about the thickness of a thumb and fifteen centimeters long, with screw-on caps at both ends and no markings on its surface.
Umbrella had hidden this in his gear from the very beginning, proving that this “additional instruction” was not an afterthought but had been planned all along.
They had known long ago that the facility contained living vectors of the T-Leech Virus; they just needed someone to go in and harvest them.
And he was the one chosen to go in and do it.
Lincoln weighed the sealed tube in his hand, thinking for a couple of seconds.
The instruction was very clear: only the leeches themselves carried the complete T-Leech Virus genome; other B.O.W.s did not count.
This meant that no matter how many Eliminators, zombies, or mutant dogs he killed, it was useless.
He had to find the leeches.
He had previously shattered a Leech Amalgam on the train, scattering leech carcasses and core remnants all over the floor, but he hadn’t received this instruction back then, so he hadn’t harvested any.
Furthermore, the instruction had specifically mentioned a “higher-level leech control core.”
Combining this with the contents of the memo in the archives, some highly intelligent entity had reclaimed all the samples and taken control of the entire B1 level.
If that thing was Dr.
Marcus, or Dr.
Marcus’s leech composite, then it was the purest living mother strain of the T-Leech Virus.
But the prerequisite was that he had to be capable of killing that thing, or at least cutting off a piece of it.
As to how he would pull that off, he had no answer for the time being.
He slipped the sealed tube into the inner pocket of his tactical vest and zipped it up.
This pocket pressed tight against his chest; from the outside, no one could tell anything extra was in there.
When he stood up, his expression was completely unchanged from before.
“Did you find something?” Rebecca walked over and asked.
“Some old archives, research records left behind from Dr. Marcus’s era. Most of it is outdated experimental data.”
Lincoln’s tone was flat.
“An internal memo mentions that the cold storage room on B1 was emptied five weeks ago. Everything inside was taken.”
“Taken by whom?” Rebecca asked.
“The memo doesn’t say. It just says an ‘unknown force.'”
Lincoln didn’t explain further.
“In any case, B1 is far more dangerous than we thought. We should try to avoid heading that way.”
Rebecca nodded.
She was holding a document and handed it over for Lincoln to see.
“I found a complete schematic of the facility over here. It’s more detailed than your previous one. B1 is marked. Look here.”
Lincoln took it and scanned it.
Indeed, it was much more detailed than the last one.
The entire layout of B1 was marked out, including the cultivation rooms, cold storage rooms, experimental labs, and an emergency evacuation passage leading straight from B1 to the surface.
This map would be useful.
He folded it up and put it in his waist pack.
“Let’s go.”
“We’ve gathered enough. Let’s head to the skywalk passage.”
The three of them stepped out of the archives.
Lincoln led the way, pulling out the ring of brass keys and walking to the third door.
He inserted the key and turned it.
The lock cylinder turned smoothly, and the door opened.
Behind the door was a very short transitional hallway, about five or six meters long, ending at a glass door that read: “Skywalk Passage – East Wing Annex.”
The hallway lights were motion-activated, turning on only when someone walked by.
When Lincoln stepped in, the overhead light flickered twice before lighting up completely.
He took two steps forward, then suddenly froze.
On the wall on the left side of the hallway, there was a large patch of fresh claw marks.
They were the same kind of marks he had seen in the second-floor corridor earlier—three to four parallel scratches, narrowly spaced, with varying depths.
But these were much fresher than the ones on the second floor.
The plaster debris along the edges of the scratches hadn’t even finished falling, and a damp, scraped sheen could still be seen inside a few of the grooves.
They were freshly made.
Lincoln’s right hand was already resting on the holster of his M1911.
He looked up at the ceiling.
The ceiling of this transitional hallway was much lower than that of the main building, about two and a half meters high, with ventilation ducts and several exposed cables running across it.
At one of the ventilation duct joints, the cover panel was crooked.
Only one screw remained hanging, while the other three were missing.
Something had crawled out of the ventilation duct.
Billy spotted the crooked cover panel, and the muzzle of his P226 silently angled upward.
Rebecca noticed the claw marks on the wall too.
Her expression shifted, but she made no sound as she raised her Beretta.
The three of them slowed their pace, closing in on the glass door.
Lincoln reached out and pushed the glass door.
The door was unlocked.
Beyond it lay the skywalk.
The structure of the skywalk was similar to the previous corridor—enclosed, with floor-to-ceiling glass on both sides, measuring about twenty meters long.
However, the lights on this skywalk weren’t fully lit; only two lamps near the entrance and two near the exit were on, leaving a stretch of over ten meters in the middle completely dark.
Lincoln shone his flashlight ahead.
When the beam of light swept across the middle section of the bridge, he saw various items scattered on the ground.
Shattered glass, scattered metal fragments, and a few dark, irregularly shaped lumps that were hard to make out clearly.
Along with bloodstains.
It wasn’t the dragging trail of human blood, but a dotted spattering of drops extending from the middle of the skywalk all the way to the door of the opposite exit.
Lincoln turned off his flashlight.
Darkness swallowed the middle of the skywalk once more, but using the light from both ends, he could see that the exit door on the other side was open, with light spilling out from behind it.
“Pass through quickly,” Lincoln whispered.
“Light footsteps. Don’t step on the broken glass.”
The three of them began to cross the bridge.
Lincoln walked at the very front.
His M1911 was already drawn, held in his right hand.
His left hand kept the flashlight off, relying on the light from both ends to barely discern the path ahead.
As he reached the middle of the skywalk, the sole of his boot stepped on something wet and slippery.
Looking down, he saw a hand.
It was a human forearm torn off at the elbow, fingers still frozen in a clutching posture, with dark debris wedged under the fingernails.
Jagged bone splinters and torn tendons were exposed at the stump, and the edges of the wound bore dense teeth marks.
It hadn’t been bitten off; something had ripped it away with sheer brute force, and then gnawed on it.
Lincoln shifted his foot away and kept moving.
Right then, a sound came from the ventilation duct above the skywalk.
It wasn’t the humming.
It was a sharp, brief screech with a nasal resonance, like the threatening cry of an agitated ape.
It was dense and rapid.
There was more than one source—at least three or four.
The sound moved through the ventilation duct, the metal walls screeching under the scraping of claws.
They were heading this way from the opposite side of the skywalk.
Lincoln stopped in his tracks.
He listened for two seconds.
The noises drew closer, moving fast—much faster than a person could walk.
Whatever those things were, they were rushing through the ventilation ducts right toward the ceiling of the skywalk.