“I’ll keep this short.
The Raccoon City wastewater treatment plant is already infected.
Based on my assessment, it won’t be long before the virus spreads into the city itself.
I need a vaccine.” Huo Xiu obviously could not reveal everything he knew.
Even though he needed Daylight, he could not simply walk in and call the vaccine by name before its creators had finished it.
He had not personally inspected the treatment plant yet, but there was little doubt the situation matched what he had described.
Most of the workers had already been infected amid attacks by mutated fleas, Drain Deimos, and Brain Suckers.
Thomas, a new employee, had been luckier than most and had avoided becoming a zombie—but even he would not escape death in the original course of events.
“All right.
I’m not going to ask why a B.O.W.
needs a vaccine, because it clearly isn’t for you.
Peter and I are still working on one.
We’ve hit a bottleneck, but the theory is sound and the materials can be requisitioned here at the university.
We only need one last set of data: blood from a T-Virus-infected host.
The virus I brought with me is only a laboratory sample.
Without infected blood, the vaccine we designed cannot be completed.” Mueller spread his hands.
Huo Xiu nearly wanted to laugh.
So that’s the play?
You barely even finished drawing the map before showing me the dagger.
There was no chance he would give Mueller his own blood.
It carried the Hypnos gene, and the T-Virus inside him might already have been altered by it.
Worse, if this old bastard discovered the Hypnos gene, who could say he would not incorporate it into Thanatos?
Huo Xiu had no intention of making life even harder for the survivors who would later flee here.
One Thanatos was already more than enough.
It was time to stop Mueller from playing dumb.
“Blood from a T-Virus-infected host?
You’ve already got some.” Huo Xiu pointed at Thanatos inside the tank.
Thanatos’s skin was not exceptionally difficult to penetrate, so a proper extraction device should be able to draw blood with relative ease.
Then again, some credit probably belonged to Umbrella’s technology; for all its crimes, the corporation remained far ahead of the rest of the world in several fields.
Mueller immediately objected.
“No.
If it were that easy, I would have done it already.
I haven’t issued him any active commands, so at present he reacts on instinct.
Stimulating him before assigning an order could produce consequences I can’t predict.” No one understood Thanatos better than his creator.
The Tyrant could execute Mueller’s commands with extraordinary precision—a perfect fusion of violence, science, and aesthetics, and the work of art Mueller prized above everything else.
But perfect obedience required an order to obey.
If Thanatos was disturbed while idle, there was a significant chance he would become agitated.
That was one of the reasons collecting a sample had proven so difficult.
Unlike most Tyrants, Thanatos responded to external stimulation by releasing a surge of testosterone that heightened neural activity and strengthened the body.
Once provoked, his physical performance rose dramatically and his temperament became far more violent.
Without a command, calming him again was extremely difficult.
Even after receiving one, he might rampage for some time before settling down, and the collateral damage could be enormous.
“It’s fine.
Go ahead.
I don’t think he’ll cause trouble.
If he does, I’ll handle it.” Huo Xiu spoke calmly.
Compared with the Nemesis-T Type he had briefly fought at the French facility yesterday, Thanatos felt weaker.
The exposed transplanted mammalian heart only reinforced that impression.
The metal plate protecting it looked almost decorative to Huo Xiu.
If a fight broke out, he was confident he could rip out and crush the second heart in a single exchange, forcing Thanatos into a Super Tyrant mutation immediately.
Thanatos was a Tyrant built entirely around close-quarters combat.
And in close combat, Huo Xiu did not believe he would lose to anyone.
Tyrants were intelligent creatures too.
Even without explicit orders, Huo Xiu was confident Thanatos would remain still once he sensed that his own life was genuinely at risk.
And if he did choose to rampage, Huo Xiu did not mind teaching him some manners.
“All right.
I’ll begin.” With Huo Xiu taking responsibility, Mueller had no reason to refuse.
As a scientist, he was also intensely curious.
Could this self-aware B.O.W.
truly perform the miracle he claimed and restrain Thanatos?
If Huo Xiu suppressed him without a fight, Mueller would gain valuable data on Thanatos’s cognition.
If they fought, he would obtain combat data from both his own creation and this mysterious Tyrant, which could then be used to refine Thanatos further.
Either outcome benefited him.
Mueller fed the extraction unit into the culture tank.
The device drove a needle into Thanatos’s neck, drew a sample of blood, then ejected itself back out of the chamber.
It was hardly severe stimulation.
Against skin capable of stopping bullets, the extraction needle was no worse than the bite of a small insect—not even truly painful.
The offense itself, however, irritated Thanatos.
His body registered outside stimulation and began releasing testosterone.
Despite the soothing conditions inside the culture fluid, his eyes opened.
Mueller had expected this much.
Since the visitor was so confident, he intended to watch how Huo Xiu responded.
“If you feel like making trouble, go ahead and try.” Huo Xiu said only that.
To Thanatos, it was a challenge.
The Tyrant possessed intelligence beyond that of a Hunter and roughly comparable to a T-103.
He therefore understood both the literal meaning and the contempt behind those words immediately.
This seemingly fragile creature in front of him did not regard him as a threat at all.
Rage flooded Thanatos.
He nearly smashed through the culture tank then and there to punish the arrogant creature in front of him.
Yet an instinct deeper than anger forced him to stop.
The warning came from his genes—the most primitive instinct of all: survival.
Every signal in his body told him the same thing.
If he started this fight, he would die.
Then the seemingly frail figure before him changed.
Huo Xiu’s height surged from roughly six feet to nearly six-foot-eleven, leaving him only somewhat shorter than Thanatos, while muscle swelled across his frame.
Thanatos’s mind could barely process what it was seeing.
One conclusion, however, was perfectly clear: even if he entered a Super Tyrant state, Huo Xiu could probably kill him almost instantly.
The “human” who had looked weak only seconds ago truly possessed the power to end his life.
In that case, the warning had not been a taunt.
It had been a statement of fact.
Relieved that he had not recklessly shattered the tank, Thanatos closed his eyes again and returned to dormancy.
Mueller stared in disbelief.
He could not read Thanatos’s thoughts, but one fact was unmistakable: Thanatos had avoided fighting Huo Xiu.
And the reason was fear.
This was the first living creature Mueller had ever seen inspire fear in his masterpiece.
Well…
of course it is.
Mueller had never encountered a self-aware Tyrant capable of freely shifting between a human-disguise configuration and a dedicated combat form.
A B.O.W.
like this was simply…
perfect.
“Professor, you have the infected blood now.
Please make the vaccine.” Huo Xiu was a little surprised himself.
He had not even entered his full combat form.
He had merely transformed partway so Thanatos could evaluate their relative strength more objectively; his claws had not even emerged.
Still, if that had been enough to intimidate the Tyrant into backing down, then the objective was accomplished.
Fighting in a laboratory this cramped would have been annoying anyway.
“Ah…
right.” Mueller understood the situation clearly.
His only real trump card, Thanatos, was useless against the visitor.
The only sensible move was to fulfill Huo Xiu’s request.
Besides, Huo Xiu plainly did not belong to Umbrella.
The corporation would never willingly allow a vaccine like this to exist; if one appeared, it would sooner destroy it.
Huo Xiu, by contrast, was actively trying to bring the vaccine into existence.
Mueller was more than happy to help him screw Umbrella over.
He loaded the T-Blood, V-Poison, and P-Base into the vaccine synthesizer and started the machine.
The raw materials drained from their tubes into the apparatus.
After processing, a white vial capped with metal rose from the center of the unit.
Mueller removed it and handed it to Huo Xiu.
“This is the vaccine you wanted.
Peter and I named it Daylight.”