The air in the training school’s main hall was stale and heavy.
Only the eerie announcement continued repeating.
Leon ignored the infuriating brainwashing slogan.
With the black Doorstop over one shoulder, heavy boots from his full plate suit crushing pieces of the broken door, he started toward the employee passage.
“This place has terrible soundproofing.” He spoke while holding the black-steel greatsword low in his right hand, one heavy boot grinding lightly against the tile.
Then the enormous crystal chandelier in the center of the hall began to sway violently.
A faint skittering hiss came from the darkness high along the ceiling.
“Something’s crawling up there.” Rebecca immediately raised the shotgun.
The powerful light mounted under the barrel swept across the ceiling more than ten meters overhead before fixing above the dust-covered chandelier.
“Oh, God…” she breathed.
Three mutant spiders more than a meter long hung upside down from the ceiling beams.
Thick jointed legs covered in black-and-yellow bristles locked into cracks in the masonry.
Several crimson eyes reflected the flashlight.
Without making a sound, the huge shadows descended from columns and chandelier on strands of sticky silver web.
Rebecca screamed and tightened both hands around the shotgun.
“They’re venomous!
Watch above you!” she shouted at Leon’s back, scrambling sideways in search of a firing lane around the huge black armor.
The spider directly overhead contracted its abdomen.
Barbed mouthparts opened, and a rope of thick yellow-green webbing as wide as a baby’s arm shot straight at Leon’s visor.
Rebecca squeezed her eyes shut and jerked the muzzle upward.
Leon did not retreat.
His heels never shifted.
His left hand, covered in high-carbon steel, shot out with fingers spread and seized the thick strand in midair.
Yellow-green fluid ran down the black gauntlet.
The spider hung overhead and tightened several powerful legs.
The web went taut like a cable.
Leon tipped the heavy iron helmet slightly.
“You have to shoot the abdomen!
That’s the weak point!” Rebecca opened her eyes and stared upward, boots splashing through water on the tile.
“The shotgun won’t reach cleanly from here.
Let go and get back!” Leon took the rough tape-wrapped hilt of the Doorstop in his right hand and leveled the wide black blade.
“That’s what they teach at your academy?
See a bug, use a shotgun?” He turned his head.
Rebecca stared.
“What else am I supposed to do?” “With an unsanitary exotic pet like this, shooting the abdomen just splashes disgusting sludge all over you.” Leon’s left fingers locked completely around the slippery strand.
He planted his stance, flexed his arm, and yanked violently down and back.
The force traveled up the elastic web.
The giant spider did not even have time to reel itself in before it was torn off the beam and accelerated toward the stone floor.
The spider dropped straight at him.
The moment its massive body reached the height of Leon’s chest plate, he released the web.
Both hands closed around the greatsword.
His waist twisted the other direction, black plates scraping harshly against one another as one steel boot cracked a marble tile.
Leon loaded the thick blunt slab against his hip and swung with everything he had into the falling carapace.
CLANG—BOOM!
The impact echoed from every wall of the hall.
The rough black spine did not slow to cut.
It simply buried itself in the swollen side of the spider as the enormous steel slab swept through with terrifying inertia.
The mutant spider came apart in midair before it ever touched the ground.
Yellow-green fluid, bristled legs, and shapeless chunks of organs sprayed outward in a broad fan.
Stinking pulp and meat slapped across the three-meter portrait of Marcus ahead, coating the old man’s painted face before streaming downward.
The other two giant spiders froze on the beam, legs rapidly changing position against the wall before retreating deeper into the darkness of the ceiling.
Rebecca stood open-mouthed, staring at the wall covered in entrails.
The Remington slowly drooped from her shoulder toward the floor.
“See that, rookie?” Leon planted the heavy sword spine against the tile with one hand and flicked two drops of green fluid from his gauntlet.
He turned slightly and tapped the black chest plate with the white lettering.
“For crawling pests, flattening them with a slipper is always the most thorough form of sterilization.” He pulled a rag from his belt and gave the steel a couple careless wipes.
“I just upgraded to a heavier slipper.
Save your buckshot for the extremists who might actually have guns.” Rebecca swallowed, eyes moving between Leon’s steel-wrapped arm and the meat on the floor.
She said nothing and quietly tightened her grip on the stock.
At the same time, deep below in the surveillance room— Static crawled over several monitors as William Birkin leaned over the edge of the metal console.
Eyes wide, he hammered both hands over a yellowed keyboard while streams of green data rolled across the terminal at the far right.
“These numbers are wrong…” William shouted.
With one sweep of his arm he knocked half a cup of cold coffee onto the metal floor, brown liquid splashing everywhere.
“The impact data from that strike!
The pressure wave recorded by the surveillance sensor…” He stared at the peaks on the screen.
“Those values are almost at the physical-test ceiling of the T-001 Proto Tyrant!” He spun around, lab coat flaring, and shouted at Wesker in the rear of the room.
“That black slab weighs over a hundred kilograms!
A normal man swinging it would have his wrists and spine torn apart by centrifugal force!
Where was his body modified?!” Albert Wesker stood outside the reach of the lights, head lowered, ignoring the coffee splashed near his boots.
His sunglasses concealed his expression.
He simply watched the central display without moving.
Onscreen, the figure in black plate dragged the slab one-handed toward the staircase.
“I personally screened his history,” Wesker said.
“Standard police-academy trainee.
Other than repeatedly violating training limits with excessive resistance loads, he is an ordinary human being.
He has never set foot in a laboratory.” “Ordinary?!” William clawed both hands into his already disordered hair.
“An ordinary human turns a mutated arthropod into paste through an iron shell?
He’s redefining the upper limit of the species!
I want living tissue.
I want a cross-sectional muscle biopsy immediately!” The corner of Wesker’s mouth moved.
He stepped out of the shadows and leaned over the pale-lit console, both hands resting on its metal edge.
“Don’t be impatient, William.
If he walked into the test field himself, perhaps fate has handed us an unexpected prize.” Wesker extended one black-gloved finger and pressed the tip against the CRT glass directly over Leon’s enormous iron helmet.
“His ridiculous sense of police honor has convinced him this is merely a base for armed drug traffickers.” Wesker withdrew the finger.
“Let him keep checking the utilities.” He glanced toward the keyboard.
“Release every internal isolation lock in the Executive Training School.
Open the biological specimen rooms upstairs and the water-treatment area on Basement Level One.” William looked up, pulled his fingers from his hair, and tugged at his loosened tie.
“You want to exhaust him with wave after wave, then release the cleanup unit and capture him alive?” Wesker turned and crossed the wet metal floor toward the heavy pneumatic door.
“No.” Without looking back, he opened the air valve.
“I want to know where the physical threshold of my new recruit actually lies.
Release every specimen, William.
Find out for me which is harder—your viral weapons, or the slab of iron in his hands.”