At the deepest end of the cellar, the sour smell of old wine had been completely overwhelmed by heavy rust and dried blood.
Leon stood before the mottled hidden door without showing the slightest interest in finding a handle.
He raised his right leg beneath the heavy black armor and drove the iron sole of his boot squarely into the center of the rusted panel.
CLANG.
The already weakened hinges snapped and the entire door fell inward onto the stone stairs, throwing up choking dust.
A cramped corridor lay beyond, barely wide enough for one person.
A damaged exhaust fan squealed overhead while dim red lights cast jumping shadows along the walls.
Rebecca pressed the classified file more securely into her tactical pocket, drew a breath, and followed the broad black back ahead with her shotgun raised.
They had barely rounded the first corner when the ventilation duct overhead tore open without warning.
The sheet-metal grille burst outward as though kicked by something inside and bounced from Leon’s shoulder plate.
Three dark-red shapes launched from the broken duct like cannonballs with piercing shrieks.
They were mutant baboons completely stripped of hair, raw pink musculature exposed directly to the air.
Their teeth protruded outward, while the nails on all four limbs had mutated into sharp black hooks.
The creatures were astonishingly agile.
One twisted its body in midair as it fell, cleared Leon in front, and opened a foul mouth directly at Rebecca’s face.
“Fire!” Rebecca shouted, but before the muzzle had fully risen a violent gust tore past her ear.
The corridor was too narrow for Leon to swing the Doorstop.
Without even looking up, he shot out his heavily plated left hand and caught the leaping baboon by the throat in midair like a vise.
Its downward momentum sent the creature’s claws raking wildly over Leon’s chest plate, producing a piercing scrape and showers of sparks.
Muscles snapped tight beneath Leon’s black armor.
His fingers closed.
Crack.
The spine broke.
Leon never paused.
He yanked his wrist outward, and with a wet tearing sound, ripped the mutant’s head from its torso together with half a blood-strung length of cervical spine.
The headless body dropped twitching to the floor and sprayed dark blood.
Leon tossed the grotesque head into a corner and shook blood from his glove.
“The hygiene in this bioweapons base is criminal.” His voice remained calm beneath the helmet.
“Even the monkeys are shedding until they look like this.” BOOM!
BOOM!
Rebecca seized the opening and fired twice at close range.
Buckshot drove the other two baboons backward and ripped large patches of flesh from their chests.
They screamed and scrambled along the wall piping into the darkness ahead.
“Don’t chase.
Could be a trap.” Leon shouldered the greatsword, stepped over the corpse, and continued forward.
The corridor ended at a wider abandoned room.
Rusted chains hung from the ceiling.
Several inclined metal chairs fitted with restraints were piled in one corner.
It had once been an underground interrogation chamber Umbrella used to deal quietly with traitors.
The wooden flooring had spent years in damp darkness, its edges rotten and black.
After the repeated impacts of recent fighting, the structure had reached its limit.
Rebecca had barely stepped inside when the boards under her feet began breaking in rapid succession.
CRACK—BOOM!
A broad section of floor centered beneath her collapsed together with its support beams.
“Ah—!” Rebecca managed one short scream before her body dropped out from under her.
A square pit five or six meters deep yawned below.
Emergency instinct made her fling both arms blindly during the fall, and the shotgun slipped from her grasp into the dark.
At the last possible instant, both hands locked around a rough length of rusted rebar jutting from the pit wall.
She hung there precariously, feet kicking in empty air.
That was not the worst part.
The falling wood and noise had awakened the “guards” hiding below.
Less than three meters beneath Rebecca, pairs of red eyes opened in the darkness.
Heavy breathing and claws scraping the wall sounded everywhere at once.
A large pack of released mutant baboons raced up the remnants of wire mesh along the pit walls, heading straight for the helpless woman hanging overhead.
The lead animal opened a mouth dripping foul saliva, exposing dirty fangs.
“Leon!
Help!” All color drained from Rebecca’s face.
Her arms shook uncontrollably from fear and fatigue.
Leon leaned the iron helmet over the edge and looked down at the dense crowd of red-eyed monkeys climbing toward her.
He showed no panic.
He casually dropped the enormously heavy Doorstop from his shoulder onto the solid corridor floor.
CLANG.
The slab struck hard enough to throw up a ring of dust.
Then Leon stepped half a pace forward, boot toe resting on the unstable broken edge.
“Let go!” he shouted down.
Rebecca looked up.
Common sense told her that if she released the rebar and fell into a pit packed with monsters, she would be torn apart in less than two seconds.
But her common sense had only just been glued back together by a man doing one-arm push-ups in full plate.
Somehow, the words of the black-armored lunatic carried more weight.
She clenched her teeth, shut her eyes, released her fingers, and dropped straight into the dark.
At the exact same instant, Leon bent both knees and jumped.
A full suit of high-carbon-steel plate plus the force of his launch gave him absurd downward acceleration.
The massive black shape fell like a meteor, gaining on Rebecca rapidly.
Before they had dropped three meters, Leon passed her in midair.
One thick arm wrapped securely around her narrow waist and pulled her tight against his chest plate.
Leon adjusted his position so his broad, heavy steel back faced the bottom of the pit.
BOOOOM—!!!
The impact detonated through the enclosed underground chamber.
Several unlucky baboons waiting below with mouths open never had time to scream.
Hundreds of kilograms of steel and momentum flattened them outright.
Bones burst in a dense chain of cracks, and dark blood sprayed from beneath Leon’s back armor in every direction.
Leon planted one hand in the meat-smeared floor and rose immediately, pulling the stunned Rebecca behind himself for cover.
Seven or eight remaining baboons went berserk at the sight of their crushed packmates.
They shrieked, kicked off the walls, and became red blurs attacking the black tower from every direction.
Leon opened both arms and did not reach for a weapon.
A baboon leapt at him head-on.
His right hand shot forward and brutally caught its rear leg.
His left hand repeated the movement, seizing the ankle of another attacking from the side.
Each mutant weighed at least a hundred kilograms, yet in Leon’s hands they felt like two broken pieces of lumber.
He planted a wide stance and violently twisted his waist and abdomen beneath the armor.
The two living baboons became dual-wielded flails, whipped in circles through the cramped bottom of the pit.
BANG!
THUD!
CRACK!
A black whirlwind swept through the space.
Every creature trying to leap in collided with the high-speed bodies of its own packmates.
Meat struck meat with heavy thuds while bones broke in broad clusters, forming a grotesque meat-grinder rhythm in the pit.
After only a few rotations, the baboons being used as weapons had their abdominal cavities smashed open.
Intestines and organs sprayed across the walls in a revolting red mural.
Rebecca pressed into a corner behind Leon’s broad back, which stood like an immovable iron wall.
The unnatural screams rapidly weakened and vanished.
Pieces of meat she could not identify landed beside her boots, and she trembled from head to toe.
The B.O.W.s described in the files as agile and savage were no different from fragile dolls in this man’s hands.
Leon released both ruined animals, now little more than half-empty hides, into the blood.
He turned his helmet.
A scrap of flesh clung to the viewing slit.
“Don’t be scared, medic.” He bent and wiped his soles against a relatively clean part of the wall.
“Little things that crawl everywhere spread viruses most easily.
This is called total isolation of the infection source.” At the same time, in the central surveillance room of the underground facility— Rows of screens glowed dim blue.
William Birkin gripped the alloy edge of the console with both hands, bloodshot eyes fixed on the black-armored monster standing amid a floor of meat.
His lips trembled.
“Impossible…
this violates the limits of biomechanics…” he muttered neurotically, fascination and complete confusion mingling in his stare.
“Those baboons’ agility…
he caught them with his hands…
is he really human?” Wesker said nothing beside him.
He lifted his chin slightly and adjusted the dark glasses he never removed.
From the moment the long-dead Marcus appeared on the monitors to declare war, the situation had already escaped Wesker’s calculations.
Now the rookie who was supposed to be expendable was crushing every test specimen in the base.
Wesker’s gaze left the display and lowered slowly.
His finger hovered over a red button beneath a transparent cover at the far right of the console—the final command for the Arklay underground facility’s self-destruct system.
His fingertip remained above the thin glass for a long time without pressing down.