Night wind rolled the thick stench of decay through the dark canopy of the Arklay Mountains.
At the forest edge outside the mansion, what had been intended as a search-and-rescue landing zone had become a slaughterhouse.
After Bravo Team went missing, Alpha Team had deployed to find them and landed in the forest.
Minutes earlier, Alpha had discovered the wreckage of a crashed helicopter.
Its smoking fuselage lay like an enormous gravestone over everyone’s thoughts.
Barry Burton moved at the front with his weapon raised.
The team spread into a standard tactical fan, flashlight beams sweeping between tangled trunks.
Twenty-seven-year-old vehicle specialist Joseph Frost covered one flank.
He stopped beside a patch of brush and aimed his flashlight at the muddy grass.
A severed hand lay there, the pale flesh torn ragged at the wrist.
Its stiff fingers still clutched a custom S.T.A.R.S.
Beretta.
Joseph bent to inspect it.
The instant his fingertips touched the cold barrel, a low, wet growl erupted from the waist-high grass beside him.
Three dark shapes burst out on a wave of stench like cannon shells.
They were mutated zombie dogs, rotten muscle exposed to the air and their eye sockets clouded white.
They knocked Joseph to the ground in an instant.
Chris Redfield reacted immediately, swinging his pistol and firing.
Muzzle flashes strobed.
The lead dog took a bullet through the skull and collapsed twitching.
But the other two already had Joseph by the throat.
Their fangs tore open his carotid artery, spraying blood across a nearby tree like a fountain.
The young officer never even managed a scream.
Only a wet, leaking rattle came from his throat before he convulsed twice and stopped moving.
“Joseph!” Chris’s eyes went bloodshot.
Roaring, he emptied the rest of his magazine into the feeding monsters and tore them apart.
But the gunfire might as well have been a dinner bell.
Growls began answering one another deep in the forest.
Wet snarls came from every direction.
Brush shook violently as an unknown number of creatures closed in around them.
The stench of rot became almost suffocating.
“Fall back!
Get back to the helicopter!” Captain Albert Wesker stood at the rear of the formation, his voice cutting through the chaos of gunfire.
They turned and ran desperately toward the way they’d come.
Chris fired blindly behind him as he ran.
Barry’s Magnum thundered, forcing the nearest shadows back for a few precious seconds.
They could hear claws ripping through soil and the beasts’ heavy breathing right behind them.
But when they finally stumbled through the trees and saw the landing zone, despair was waiting for them.
The helicopter was already lifting off, its rotors roaring louder by the second.
The team’s timid pilot, Brad Vickers, had been completely unnerved by the sounds in the forest.
He didn’t wait for his teammates.
He pulled up, abandoned everyone, and fled in the helicopter.
“No!
Brad!
Come back!” Chris reached the edge of the clearing and screamed himself hoarse at the night sky.
The helicopter’s tail light quickly shrank to a red point and vanished into the darkness.
Rotor wash threw dead leaves into their faces.
They had been abandoned completely—and behind them, more than a dozen pairs of red-reflecting eyes had appeared at the edge of the brush.
Jill Valentine backed away firing, her blue S.T.A.R.S.
uniform streaked with mud.
A large zombie dog lunged from the side.
She twisted away and fired backhanded into its abdomen.
But the terrain was too cluttered.
As she retreated, her heel caught a thick root protruding from the ground.
She lost her balance and crashed into mud and dead leaves, her pistol flying a meter away.
“Jill!” Chris saw her fall and swung his weapon around, but his magazine was empty.
The firing pin snapped against an empty chamber.
Barry was tied up by three creatures farther away and couldn’t break free.
A rotting zombie dog seized the opening.
Its hind legs exploded off the ground.
It leapt with a roar, gore-hung fangs aimed straight at Jill’s throat.
Jill’s pupils shrank.
Instinctively, she raised an arm to shield herself.
At that exact instant, the thick brush beside her exploded.
Not from wind—from something smashing through with savage force, spraying snapped branches and clods of earth in every direction like buckshot.
A huge black figure charged onto the battlefield like a heavy armored vehicle.
Leon took one long stride and rammed the zombie dog in midair with the high-carbon-steel plate covering his shoulder.
THUD.
The mutant dog, nearly waist-high, hit him like a solid wall.
The crack of breaking bones was unmistakable.
The impact hurled it five or six meters away.
It landed, twitched twice, and went still.
Leon planted himself in front of Jill.
Dark-red blood from zombies and the giant snake still coated his full black plate armor, giving the metal a brutal sheen under the flashlights.
Another zombie dog attacked from the side and bit down on his shin armor.
Fangs scraped against thick steel and produced only a few fleeting sparks.
Looks like these mutts don’t have much of a bite either.
Leon looked down coldly at the thing hanging from his leg.
He didn’t even bother kicking it.
His right hand shot down, steel bracer and all, and closed around the dog’s skull.
His muscles tightened.
One-handed, Leon crushed the head and let the ruined thing drop like mud.
The rest of the pack seemed enraged.
Seven or eight dogs abandoned Chris and Barry and swarmed the newly arrived tin can, leaping from every direction in an attempt to bury him under numbers.
Leon lowered his center of gravity and set his stance.
His hand reached back for the sharpened black-steel greatsword and ripped it free.
He gripped the hilt in both hands, unleashed his core, and swung the enormously heavy broad blade through a savage full-circle sweep.
“WHOOOM—” Wind howled.
The black edge traced a lethal crescent through the night.
The first three dogs had no time to react before the sharpened steel and colossal mass cut them in half in midair.
Filthy blood and organs sprayed fanwise across the trees.
The remaining animals were knocked from their feet by the violence of the swing.
The survivors retained either some biological instinct—or perhaps a quirk of Umbrella’s design.
Tails tucked, they turned and fled into the black forest without looking back.
The battlefield fell silent at once, leaving only mutilated remains twitching on the ground.
Chris reloaded and ran over.
Barry approached quickly with his weapon raised.
Everyone stared at the beasts cut apart by a cold weapon, then at the black-armored swordsman still standing among them, stunned speechless.
Leon casually planted the greatsword’s point in the mud, driving a deep hole into the ground.
He turned and extended one thickly armored hand to Jill, who was still sitting in the mud.
Jill looked up.
In the spill of flashlight beams, she finally saw his face: young but sharply defined beneath short blond hair, with a hard set around the eyes that didn’t belong to someone his age.
She hesitated, then reached out and took the cold iron glove.
An irresistible force pulled her up.
Leon brought her effortlessly from the mud to her feet.
“Who…
who are you?” Jill brushed dirt from her uniform, gratitude mixed with shock in her eyes.
Leon flicked his fringe back and answered with a calm complaint.
“Leon Scott Kennedy.
Rookie.
Looks like I’m late on my first day, and the welcome party got a little too enthusiastic.” Barry approached with his signature Magnum in hand.
He looked Leon’s crude black plate armor up and down, then at the absurd greatsword planted in the ground, and swallowed.
“Good Lord,” Barry said in his rough voice.
“What are you, some kind of medieval knight?
The department issue this stuff now?” Chris said nothing.
He kept scanning the surroundings warily.
The self-proclaimed rookie had saved Jill, but the equipment and inhuman combat ability made it difficult to lower his guard completely.
At the rear of the group stood Captain Albert Wesker, perfectly still.
He wore a black tactical vest, blond hair slicked flawlessly back.
The sunglasses he never removed hid his eyes beneath the moving flashlight beams.
On the surface, he looked like a competent captain calmly monitoring the situation.
Behind the lenses, however, his stare was razor-sharp.
Only hours earlier, Wesker had activated the self-destruct system beneath the Executive Training School and escaped the doomed complex.
He had returned to the Raccoon Police Department and methodically organized this “rescue operation” for Bravo Team.
Everything had been part of his plan.
Bringing Alpha Team into the forest was supposed to use these elite officers as bait and gather combat data on Umbrella’s B.O.W.s inside the mansion.
There was only one thing he had failed to calculate.
He never imagined the “heavy-armored anomaly” would survive the explosion, fight all the way to the mansion, and walk straight into the middle of his script.
Leon spotted Wesker at the back of the formation, and a flash of excitement crossed his hard expression.
He strode over and knocked a fist against his chest plate.
“Captain Wesker, Special Recruit Leon reporting in.
The terrorist base underground has been cleared out.” There was a trace of pride in Leon’s voice.
He had been waiting for Wesker to fulfill his promise and make his place in S.T.A.R.S.
official.
Wesker looked at the blood-soaked man in black armor, his pupils contracting slightly behind the sunglasses.
He felt no anger at the disruption to his plan.
Instead, a cruel smile touched his mouth.
“Good work, Leon.” Wesker’s voice was low and level, revealing nothing.
“You’ve proven your value.
Effective immediately, you’re a member of Alpha Team.” He paused, his gaze passing over the greatsword in Leon’s hand.
Perfect.
An ideal variable.
Now let’s see whether that tin shell can stop a Hunter’s claws.
Then a dense wave of sounds rose again from deeper in the forest.
This time it wasn’t merely a handful of mutant dogs.
Shuffling zombie footsteps, branches snapping, and howls surged toward them from every direction like a tide.
Countless eyes locked onto the clearing from the darkness.
“There are too many!
We can’t hold this position!” Chris shouted, already chambering a fresh round.
Wesker spun and pointed toward the enormous Western mansion hidden in the night behind them.
“Fall back!
Everyone into that mansion!” There was no time to debate.
The team moved immediately.
Leon shouldered the greatsword and took the rear, a black barrier covering everyone’s retreat.
Several faster zombie dogs tried to pursue.
One backhand cut from Leon split dogs and trees alike in two.
The group stumbled up the stone steps.
Leon shoved the heavy carved doors open, Chris and Barry helped Jill inside, and Wesker followed close behind.
“Close it!” Leon crossed the threshold last, seized the handle behind him, and hauled inward.
The heavy wooden door slammed shut, cutting off the nightmare howls outside.
He threw the bolt firmly into place.
The hall fell deathly still.
Rebecca and Richard stood by the staircase with their guns raised, staring in surprise at the teammates who had suddenly burst inside.
Their retreat was completely sealed.
Inside a mansion filled with death traps, Leon, Rebecca, and Alpha Team had finally joined forces—and somewhere deep along the second-floor corridor, the wet chewing sound seemed to begin again.