What they didn’t know was that Billy’s veins were already standing out on his neck, and every nerve in him wanted to draw and fire.
Only the memory of those leeches saving Ivan held him back, and all he could do was grind out through his teeth, “What did you say?
Do you have any idea what you’ve done?
What it means?” “It means every last resident of Raccoon City could be dragged down with you because of one idiotic notion!” James Marcus gave a contemptuous little smile.
“They are the necessary sacrifice for wiping out an evil.” “You—” Billy’s finger was already resting on the trigger.
The problem was that James Marcus was the savior of the one who had saved his life.
He couldn’t shoot.
He simply couldn’t.
“You!
Don’t push me!” Seeing that, James Marcus went on.
“Heh.
Go ahead, then.
Shoot.
I forgot to mention — the Eliminators were mine.
So was the Tyrant.” The words cut straight through Rebecca’s daze.
Her pale face lifted, and there was a deep, baffled hurt written across it.
“Why?
Why would you do that?” Strangely, the aged James Marcus said nothing at all.
It was the white-robed man — silent ever since he had emerged from James Marcus — who finally spoke.
“Why?
To test you, of course.
To see whether you were strong enough to walk beside me.” Rebecca pushed herself to her feet, tightened her grip on the M4, and leveled the muzzle at him.
“That’s your reason?
That’s all of it?” The white-robed man nodded without a trace of guilt.
Billy felt his patience scraping the bottom of the barrel.
His face had gone red, and the hand on the rifle butt trembled.
“What did Ivan ever do wrong?
What did the people of Raccoon City ever do?
You—” Rage swallowed the rest of it.
He felt like something inside him was burning down to ash.
Then the white-robed man’s face twisted.
His right arm boiled into a black fist of writhing, interwoven leeches and slammed into the ground with a dull, heavy thud.
“And what did I do wrong?
I am only a leech!” “You humans made me.
Not one of you ever taught me what right and wrong were.
And now you stand there and demand an account of my crimes?” “I avenged my creator.
Is that not the most natural thing in the world?” “And, Billy — you’re really going to lecture a leech about the value of human life?
Ha.
Ha ha.” The white-robed man pressed five fingers against his forehead and shook his head slowly.
Then his tone shifted.
He raised his head, and his eyes held the cool weight of appraisal.
“Besides.
If I hadn’t held back on that train, do you think any of you would be standing in front of me now?” Billy had no answer for that.
The logic was crooked, he was sure of it, and yet from where the creature stood it wasn’t wrong either.
And what it said was true.
If it had thrown everything at the three of them aboard the Ecliptic Express instead of pulling its punches, they’d have drowned under a tide of leeches long before now.
Rebecca’s head ached too.
One thing the white-robed man had said struck home: humans had created it, and no human had ever pointed it toward anything better.
Then disaster had fallen on James Marcus, and after resurrecting him, it had inherited his hatred of Umbrella along with everything else.
Which was how all of this madness had begun.
Follow the thread back far enough, and the source of it was the other founder of Umbrella.
Spencer.
Rebecca thought it over, and her clear voice broke the quiet.
“So what is it you actually want?
For us to stand with you against Umbrella?” “Or is there something deeper than that?” The white-robed man stayed silent.
There was something deeper — but resurrecting James Marcus had left its personality colored by his, proud and jealous of its own dignity.
So saying that deeper want aloud, in its own voice, was beyond it.
Not now.
That was the real reason it stood here talking to Rebecca and Billy at all.
Some part of it hoped one of them would understand, would reach in and name the thing it truly wanted.
The silence told Rebecca she’d guessed right.
But she was carrying too much.
Ivan’s condition, Wesker’s scheme, the state of her teammates, what came next for Raccoon City — all of it stacked one on top of another.
Her thoughts were a tangle, and she couldn’t quite pull the white-robed man’s demand free of it.
“Ngh—” A low groan rose from the ground between Rebecca and Billy, and the silence shattered.
Neither of them spared another thought for the white-robed man.
They shot toward Ivan like two loosed arrows.
“Ivan, you’re awake — thank God!” Rebecca looked down at his open eyes and seized his hand, her voice shaking.
Ivan saw those wide, bright eyes of hers fixed on him, misted over.
He rubbed the back of his head and gave her a clean, guileless smile.
“Sorry, Rebecca…” He felt another gaze on him and turned his head to the left.
“Billy.
Sorry I worried you.” Billy looked away without a word.
Too much dust in the air, that was all.
“Forget it.
You’re awake.
That’s what matters.” Ivan smiled and nodded.
Remembering the conversation he’d heard while unconscious, he braced an arm against the ground to sit up.
Rebecca and Billy each caught an elbow at once, one on either side.
They hauled him upright.
Ivan didn’t need the help in the slightest anymore, but he wasn’t about to refuse it.
On his feet, he looked at the white-robed man.
For a moment his mind swam.
The Leech Queen from the original story — and here it was, doing things he genuinely couldn’t read.
Through the whole stretch of unconsciousness, his mind had never gone dark.
The t-Virus had simply been fusing with the deepest layers of his brain, and he’d had no control over his body.
Which meant that if the Leech Queen hadn’t taken a liking to him, there was no telling how any of it would have ended.
The Leech Queen had started all of this, true.
But two people walking different roads make poor companions.
Each served their own master.
And under those circumstances it had still saved him.
Ivan would remember that debt.
The t-Virus had now fused with him perfectly, and somewhere in the process, the memories he’d lost had come back whole.
Ivan finally understood where he’d come from.
He was a transmigrator.
Not the mainstream kind, though — not what the transmigration world called the Great Fortune School.
He belonged to one of the niche transmigration methods.
He’d gone to sleep, and woken up in Raccoon City.
And found himself employed as a researcher at Umbrella, with the seat barely warm under him.
He’d crossed over at noon; by that evening he had orders to report to the Umbrella Executive Training School the following day.
Right on cue, the System woke up.
It issued a novice quest: get the Ecliptic Express as far as the Arklay Mountains, and he’d receive a dose of t-Virus capable of fusing flawlessly with his body.
Ivan knew exactly what kind of age he’d landed in.
Faced with a chance to rewrite his own fate like that, he didn’t have the luxury of saying no.
When the train reached the Arklay Mountains the next day, the quest-complete notification came through.
He injected the t-Virus on the spot.
What he hadn’t counted on was how pure the stuff was — ninety-nine point nine percent — and it knocked him straight into unconsciousness.
The next time he opened his eyes, Rebecca was pulling him out of the fire.
And as Ivan looked at the Leech Queen, the Leech Queen was looking back at him, something burning hot in the depths of those eyes.
“Thank you for saving me.” Walnut-chan🔥👻 🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: Rewriting Fate in New Eridu — read it on The_Mikudayo 📚 Forty chapters of advanced reading at Walnut-chan, and it goes straight into keeping the translations on schedule Let’s achieve our community goals: