Beyond the carved second-floor gallery, the sharp mixture of formaldehyde and blood in the air grew steadily stronger.
Leon led the way, heavy boots thudding dully into the carpet.
He carried the Doorstop one-handed in his left and pushed open a half-closed pair of teak doors with his right.
A spacious abandoned laboratory lay beyond.
Stainless-steel workbenches lined the walls.
Dusty test tubes and shattered centrifuges were scattered over them, while several old CRT monitors sat dark, whispering with faint static charge.
A ventilation grille in the corner had been bent badly, as though something had forced its way through.
Rebecca stayed close behind Leon and swept her gaze across the cluttered work surfaces.
Near the entrance she noticed several bloodstained folders scattered across the floor.
Her S.T.A.R.S.
training took over.
The instinct to gather intelligence temporarily pushed back her fear, and she crouched to sort through the torn papers.
“Umbrella Corporation…
B.O.W.
interim test report?” By flashlight, Rebecca struggled through writing blurred by water stains.
Her frown deepened.
“Any financial records for the terrorists?” Leon stood several steps away, one thick steel boot crushing a piece of broken glass.
“Look for train schedules or a list of senior personnel.” Rebecca was about to answer when metal shrieked overhead.
The large ventilation duct in the ceiling twisted violently.
Then, with a heavy BANG, the reinforced grille and surrounding plaster burst apart.
Dust and chunks of ceiling rained down.
A mutant centipede five meters long shot out of the duct like a derailed train.
Hundreds of sickle-shaped legs thrashed through the air as its dark-red segmented shell rasped against itself.
It ignored Leon farther away and plunged its huge front half directly toward Rebecca crouching on the floor.
“Ah—!” Rebecca had time for only a short scream.
Two enormous black venomous mandibles, like hydraulic cutters, opened and clamped around both sides of her green S.T.A.R.S.
ballistic vest.
The force ripped Rebecca from the floor like a doll and lifted her into the air.
“LEON!
IT’S GOT ME!” She hung three meters above the ground, legs kicking wildly.
The jaws had not pierced the composite armor in her vest, but their crushing pressure dug painfully into her ribs and made breathing difficult.
The shotgun had fallen from her hands during the struggle and lay several meters away.
The centipede’s long flattened tail thrashed through the air.
It struck a nearby workbench with a crash, denting the heavy metal top and sweeping an entire row of beakers and reagent bottles onto the floor to shatter.
Colored chemicals spread through broken glass.
Leon reacted immediately.
He snatched up the Remington and raised the dark muzzle.
But the moment he sighted through the helmet slit, his finger stopped on the trigger.
The creature had Rebecca wrapped too tightly.
At this distance the shotgun pattern would spread; even if it shattered the shell, ricochets and fragments would turn Rebecca into a pincushion.
Leon’s brow tightened.
He did not hesitate for even a second.
He threw the loaded shotgun behind himself and planted the heavy black greatsword upright beside it.
Then he advanced, iron boots hammering BOOM—BOOM against the floor like a heavy road roller accelerating to full speed.
The centipede sensed the threat below.
It shrieked hoarsely and whipped its thick tail sideways like an enormous steel cable, smashing it across Leon’s chest plate.
CLANG—!
Sparks burst.
The blow could have pulverized an ordinary person, but the high-carbon-steel plate did not even show a clear dent.
Leon did not evade.
He planted both legs into the metal floor and absorbed the full impact head-on.
Then he looked up and extended both steel-gauntleted hands.
“Get down here!” A muffled roar forced its way through the iron helmet as Leon’s hands dug into the two giant black mandibles at the creature’s head.
The giant centipede convulsed violently.
Its five-meter body thrashed overhead while hundreds of legs clawed across Leon’s armor with teeth-grating scrapes.
It tried to crush the suicidal tin man between its jaws.
It could not.
In a contest of raw bodies, the mutant arthropod had met the least reasonable opponent of its short existence.
One hundred and fifty kilograms of steel bomb armor combined with the monstrous musculature Leon had forged through countless inhumanly heavy squats.
His arms swelled beneath the black plates.
His lats contracted violently and the shoulder armor screamed as steel scraped steel.
With nothing but his hands, Leon forced the five-meter monster into a deadlocked tug-of-war.
Creeeak…
crack-crack…
The breaking sounds echoing through the laboratory did not come from Leon’s armor.
Fine fractures were spreading through the centipede’s proud carapace under the pressure of his grip and back strength.
Leon inhaled deeply, gauntlets locked around the roots of the jaws, and ripped both arms outward.
CRACK!!!
With a sharp explosive break, the giant mandibles were forced apart to an impossible angle.
Their bases shattered and yellow-green fluid sprayed out.
Pain made the centipede release its grip involuntarily.
Rebecca dropped from the air and hit the glass-covered floor with a thud, clutching her chest and coughing violently.
The jawless creature screamed and reared half its body high, exposing the soft pale underside that had not fully hardened, preparing one final desperate attack.
Leon did not give it the chance.
He released the broken mandibles, stepped forward with his right foot, and twisted his waist to drive his arm.
His high-carbon-steel fist rose like a black cannon shell, carrying a heavy rush of air straight into the centipede’s soft abdomen.
SPLORCH—!
Flesh tore wetly.
The punch drove completely through the soft underside, and thick green fluid mixed with shredded organs erupted from the creature’s back like a fountain, splashing across most of Leon’s helmet.
The five-meter body convulsed several times, then collapsed across the workbench like sludge and went still.
Broken legs continued scratching unconsciously under residual nerve reflex.
Silence returned to the laboratory.
Only spilled reagents dripped onto the floor: drip, drip.
Rebecca lay there drawing huge breaths.
She looked across green fluid and pieces of meat at the black armored figure standing in slime.
The impossible contest she had just witnessed shattered every piece of biological common sense she had ever learned.
“You…” She pushed herself into a sitting position, voice unsteady.
“You…
you’re definitely not human, are you?” Leon pulled a relatively clean white cloth from the workbench with one hand and started wiping yellow-green mucus from his steel gauntlet.
He turned the heavy helmet toward Rebecca and released a long, helpless sigh behind the visor.
“I explained this at the entrance, rookie.
I just squat a little more than most people.” He tossed the filthy cloth aside.
“Story of my damn life.
Every time I defend myself, people mistake me for the monster who came to wreck the place.” Rebecca opened her mouth to argue, then looked at the centipede remains that would need a bulldozer to clean up and swallowed the words.
Discussing common sense with a man who could tear a giant beast apart bare-handed was clearly pointless.
At that moment, every old CRT monitor along the laboratory wall suddenly lit up.
Kzzzt…
kzzzt…
Static crawled violently across the screens, the harsh electrical noise breaking the brief calm.
Rebecca snatched up the shotgun and moved closer behind Leon’s armored back.
At the same time, deep beneath the facility, the surveillance room came into focus.
Wesker and William had been staring at the terrifying feed of Leon punching through the centipede with his bare hand.
William was still hammering at the keyboard, trying to calculate the instantaneous force behind the uppercut.
Then the main display jumped.
The feed was forcibly cut off and replaced by broad bands of black-and-white static.
“What happened?
Video interference?” Wesker frowned and changed channels rapidly on the console.
“Not external interference.
Something inside the facility is forcing an override on the frequency…” William stopped typing and stared.
Several seconds later, static faded from every monitor—both underground and in the laboratory where Leon stood.
A clear image emerged.
The screen showed a close view of a man’s upper body.
He was a strikingly young white man in a dark, old-fashioned high-collared robe.
His face was pale, his eyes filled with a chilling mixture of fanaticism and madness.
In the laboratory—Rebecca stared at the face, eyes widening.
She tore out the water-damaged folder she had found earlier.
“That’s impossible…” She compared the image to a photograph in disbelief.
“That’s Dr.
Marcus…
but the man in this picture is over seventy!” In the surveillance room— “James Marcus…” Even behind Wesker’s sunglasses, the shock was impossible to hide.
Both hands tightened against the edge of the console.
William sucked in a breath and stepped backward.
“N-no!
Impossible!
Ten years ago we watched him get shot to pieces!
How can he be alive—looking like that?!” The young man onscreen had no idea how many eyes were watching him.
A sinister smile curved his mouth.
He slowly spread both arms toward the camera as though embracing some magnificent destruction.
“No need to be surprised, ladies and gentlemen.” The younger Marcus spoke through the facility speakers in a sickly, theatrical cadence.
“I released the T-Virus.
I controlled the leeches that attacked the Ecliptic Express…
and even all the adorable little creatures wandering this facility now are my work.” Hatred boiled in his eyes.
“This is my revenge against Umbrella!
Against those who betrayed me—Spencer, and all of you…” The grand declaration struck Wesker and William in the surveillance room like a hammer.
They could finally accept it: one of Umbrella’s former founders had somehow returned from the dead, and he now commanded something more frightening than either of them expected.
But just as Marcus prepared to continue his fate-laden villain’s monologue, a brutal impact sounded through the feed.
CLANG—CRASH!!!
In the laboratory, Leon stepped forward with a cold expression, held the Doorstop backward in one hand, and used its broad black hilt to smash the babbling center monitor as casually as cracking a walnut.
The CRT exploded.
Glass and sparks sprayed everywhere.
The smoking wreck went black, cutting Marcus’s dramatic revenge speech off in mid-cadence.
The other linked monitors flickered from the violent circuit damage and turned to static together.
Rebecca covered her mouth, still shaken by Leon’s sudden violence.
“What are you doing?
He might have revealed important intelligence!” “Don’t listen to terrorists making threats over a loudspeaker.” Leon rested the enormous steel slab on his solid shoulder plate and brushed glass from his glove.
He sounded completely unconcerned.
“Long brainwashing speeches slow down the draw.
Too much rambling, and they’re loud enough to give me a headache.” He turned and pointed the greatsword toward a heavy airtight door leading deeper into the laboratory.
“He volunteered a confession to the train attack.
That makes this simple.” Leon started forward.
“Come on, rookie.
We find the ringleader named Marcus and stuff him into the trunk of a patrol car.” The laboratory door slammed open.
Far below, in the surveillance room— Wesker and William stood in a long, impotently furious silence before a wall of black monitors and dead audio.