Dylan had never experienced despair at such close range.
As a contractor working for a private military company, he’d completed his share of dangerous assignments and been paid generously for them.
All his life he had believed the world was fundamentally fair: work hard enough and effort would eventually be rewarded.
His own life seemed to prove it.
Dylan genuinely believed things would keep getting better—right up until he watched his teammates die.
He knew some of the truth behind their current assignment.
His unit had been hired to evacuate senior Umbrella personnel.
Apparently the corporation intended to conduct some kind of experiment inside Raccoon City once civilian evacuation was complete.
Umbrella executives obviously couldn’t remain in the city during those tests; even they could become collateral damage.
Even the relatively controllable T-103 became impossible to command after mutating into a Super Tyrant.
Infiltration and covert deployment were major purposes of the Tyrant line, but the Super Tyrant state had never been a deliberately engineered design goal.
Umbrella simply chose to preserve the possibility because, once sustained firepower destroyed a Tyrant’s limiter coat and triggered that mutation, subtlety was no longer relevant.
At that point, brute force was all that mattered.
On the way toward Umbrella’s Raccoon City headquarters, Dylan’s squad encountered something at the shopping district that none of them had ever seen.
Calling it an infected person felt dishonest.
It was a monster.
They were experienced combatants and immediately fired at the heart, a fatal target on any ordinary organism.
The thing didn’t fall.
It bit one of Dylan’s teammates and kept moving until the squad finally destroyed its head.
At first, they treated the encounter as an ugly anomaly.
Maybe the rumored epidemic really existed.
Maybe the disease drove people into a drug-fueled state where pain no longer registered and even heart wounds weren’t immediately fatal.
Whatever the explanation, destroying the brain apparently stopped them.
That comforting theory collapsed almost immediately.
The teammate who had been bitten began losing control not long afterward—and transformed into the same kind of creature.
Everything happened too fast.
Caught completely unprepared, Dylan’s squad disintegrated.
Before long, Dylan was the only man who hadn’t been bitten.
He and the final surviving teammate barricaded themselves inside a store in Raccoon City’s shopping complex, waiting for rescue…
or death.
Dylan’s gun was empty.
Umbrella hadn’t vaccinated their unit in advance; they weren’t company employees, so apparently no one considered it necessary.
His remaining teammate had been bitten and might transform at any moment.
Before receiving the wound, that same man had already been forced to shoot another infected member of their squad.
Fear spread through Dylan until he could barely think.
He didn’t want to die.
He didn’t want to become one of those things.
Driven by sheer terror, he grabbed the nearest object that could serve as a weapon and struck his wounded teammate in the head again and again until the man stopped moving.
In that moment, the belief Dylan had built his entire life around collapsed.
Is there actually such a thing as fairness?
If the world is fair, why did this happen to us?
Regret followed fear and consumed him just as completely.
Why am I the one who survived?
What’s the point?
Then another thought emerged.
If the world isn’t fair, maybe I should make it fair myself.
Why should other people be spared suffering that he had been forced to endure?
People always said no one could truly understand pain they had never experienced.
Fine.
Then he could make them understand.
First, of course, he needed the luck to escape alive.
Against all expectation, hope actually arrived.
Huo Xiu happened to pass through the area.
He saw zombies, cleared them almost as an afterthought, and found Dylan.
Huo Xiu still carried a dose of Daylight, and the remaining mercenary had only been lightly infected.
If necessary, Huo Xiu could use the vaccine here and return to the hospital for another sample.
With production running at full capacity, Bard could spare one dose.
Unfortunately, Dylan had already killed the teammate who might otherwise have been saved.
“You know…
fate has never been fair.” There was something even crueler than having your beliefs shattered: watching hope arrive afterward and realizing that your own fear had helped make the tragedy irreversible.
If Dylan had hesitated a little longer, his teammate might still have been alive when the vaccine arrived.
All that talk about survival, all that talk about killing before the other man mutated—now that a vaccine existed, reality slapped Dylan hard across the face.
Everything he had told himself was nothing but self-deception, an excuse to run from what he had done.
I’m just a coward who’s terrified of dying.
To save his own life, he had taken the life of a comrade who had fought beside him time and again.
How did he have the nerve to keep living?
Dylan looked at the single bullet he had left.
Let’s see whether this last one can take my life.
…No.
Apparently it couldn’t.
Maybe it isn’t my time to die yet.
“Sitting here drowning in self-pity won’t accomplish anything.
If you think fate is unfair, fight it.
Even if you fail, even if you can’t make everything perfect, you can at least reach the end knowing you did what you could.” “But deciding that everyone else should suffer because you suffered isn’t fairness.
It might feel fair from your side, but to the people you’re hurting, it’s just another injustice.
Isn’t that just being an antisocial asshole?
The moment you use pain as an excuse to inflict the same pain on strangers, you’re trampling the very fairness you claim to believe in.
‘Fairness’ becomes nothing more than a convenient excuse that lets you feel righteous while doing something evil.” Only then did Huo Xiu recognize the survivor.
Dylan Blake—the future antagonist from Resident Evil: Death Island.
Yes, that Dylan Blake: the unlucky sap who would one day try to take on the entire protagonist group by himself and get beaten senseless when they all teamed up on him.
At least most villains in stories had some coherent motive—exposing a conspiracy, revenge, national interest, something.
Dylan’s eventual goal boiled down to making the entire world suffer, and the path that pushed him there was twisted enough to begin with.
Huo Xiu could only hope the man actually thought about what he’d just heard.
If he didn’t, sooner or later he’d still walk down the same road.
Offering one warning was already more than Huo Xiu owed him.
Dylan fell silent.
He was the only member of his squad left, so their original assignment was impossible anyway.
He needed time to process Huo Xiu’s words.
For now, abandoning the mission and evacuating seemed like the only sensible option.
Maybe the stranger was right.
Maybe Dylan had been searching for an ideology grand enough to disguise his own fear.
“…I’m getting out of the city.” Dylan left.
In truth, Umbrella had never expected his unit to successfully evacuate its executives.
The company already had dedicated helicopters prepared for senior personnel.
The mercenaries had mainly been deployed as a cheap field evaluation: test their potential, see whether they were worth recruiting, and determine whether Umbrella could use them as a long-term contractor to reduce costs.
The U.S.S.
and U.B.C.S.
were both expensive to operate.
A competent budget mercenary force would have been useful.
The results, however, were deeply disappointing.
Dylan’s team couldn’t compare with the U.S.S.—and hadn’t even performed as well as the U.B.C.S.
Fortunately, Huo Xiu’s speed got him to the outskirts quickly.
Ahead, military checkpoints and heavily armed troops sealed the approaches into the quarantine zone.
“Stop!
Identify yourself!” Searchlights caught Huo Xiu and the soldiers immediately raised their rifles.
Huo Xiu lifted his hands slightly to show he wasn’t looking for a fight.
Not because he couldn’t handle them, but because he had come to deliver a vaccine, not start a firefight with the United States military.
A corporation and a nation existed on completely different scales.
Even Umbrella would abandon Huo Xiu without hesitation if the alternative was open confrontation with the U.S.
government.
So he simply stated his purpose.
“Dr.
Bard sent me with a vaccine!” The statement alone wasn’t enough.
Only after a spotlight illuminated the Umbrella insignia on his hat did the soldiers lower their weapons slightly.
“Umbrella?
Come with us.
You can explain it to our captain.” They motioned for Huo Xiu to follow.
A man in a suit waited farther inside the checkpoint.
Huo Xiu didn’t recognize him, yet something about his face felt oddly familiar.
He was middle-aged and had the kind of approachable expression that made people instinctively lower their guard.
“Hello.
Fred Graham.
Just call me Fred.” The first name meant nothing to Huo Xiu.
The surname did.
Graham.
The president in Resident Evil 4 had been a Graham.
Suddenly Huo Xiu understood why the man’s features seemed familiar.
He must belong to the same family—even if this Fred Graham wasn’t necessarily Ashley’s father, the man who would be president in 2004.
“Mr.
Graham.
Pleasure to meet you.” Huo Xiu’s surprise faded quickly.
He’d already encountered enough impossible coincidences today that one more hardly registered.
Perhaps the president of the Resident Evil 4 era became so committed to fighting bioterrorism because of the Raccoon City disaster.
Maybe Fred himself would become one of the people lost here.
When the outbreak in Raccoon City became uncontrollable in the original course of events, military forces had attempted to protect and evacuate civilians too, only for many of those operations to disappear into the disaster without result.
Huo Xiu handed Fred the Daylight sample.
“Spencer Memorial Hospital developed this vaccine for the epidemic.
They can manufacture it reliably now, but the hospital is overloaded with patients and can’t reach infected people across the rest of the city.
They asked me to deliver this sample and request support from your superiors.
If unmanned aircraft disperse the vaccine as an aerosol over Raccoon City, we may be able to treat people across the entire urban area.” Fred accepted the container and gave Huo Xiu a formal salute.
“Thank you for bringing this to us.
I’ll report the true severity of the biohazard to the government and request the necessary aircraft for wide-area treatment.
We should have an official response within five days.” The delivery was complete.
To avoid creating more complications, Huo Xiu declined requests to remain at the checkpoint and immediately returned toward Raccoon City.
There were still survivors to rescue.
Only after he left did one of the nearby soldiers speak.
“Sir, that man is extremely suspicious.
You really trust him?” Fred looked down at the vaccine in his hands, then toward the road where Huo Xiu had disappeared.
“I don’t need to understand who he is.
I only need to know where he stands.
He opposes bioterrorism.
He wants civilians saved.
And he genuinely wants this disaster stopped.
For now, that’s enough.”