[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 417 - Another Discovery

For the next two days, Leon and Rebekah practically locked themselves in the lab.

The test subject was Leon himself.

Rebekah was a competent note-taker. She was also a qualified victim.

After two days, her notebook was packed cover to cover with data. She'd burned through three pen refills alone.

Her eyes had dark circles deep enough to look like she'd caught a pair of fists.

"Seventeenth test."

Rebekah leaned back in her chair, holding the clipboard.

"Subject is the test participant herself. Me. Maximum distance three meters, visual contact maintained for four seconds."

"Results consistent with the previous sixteen trials."

"My consciousness experiences a brief, uncontrollable loosening. Duration depends on the intensity and length of your concentration."

She flipped back through the earlier pages. Her bloodshot eyes swept fast across the lines.

"Summary, as of now: your ability has two layers."

"The first layer you already know. Mental interrogation."

"You look directly into someone's eyes. You bypass the brain's logical defenses. They say what they actually think."

"Effect varies by person. Weaker mental defenses, easier to break — a kid like Lizzie, for example. Or..." She paused. "Someone like me."

Her face went red. Then, just as fast, it didn't.

"Someone with strong willpower, like that Rick you mentioned, can sense the anomaly and actively resist."

"But that's all they can do. They won't hold out long. Stare at them long enough and they'll crack too."

Leon leaned against the windowsill with a cigarette, listening.

"The second layer is what we found today."

Rebekah set the clipboard down. Her expression shifted into something more careful.

"When you focus and stare at someone, if you don't ask questions, don't dig into their memories, just push your mental force onto them without a target, their consciousness starts to scatter."

"It's like..." She thought about it.

"It's like being in an exam and your brain suddenly turns to cotton. You can't remember anything. You can't focus on anything. You're holding a pen and you've forgotten what you're supposed to be writing."

"Duration scales directly with how much mental force you put in."

"The longest I lasted just now was about 6 seconds. Then I blanked completely. No idea what I did during those 6 seconds."

Leon breathed out a slow mouthful of smoke.

6 seconds.

In a fight, 6 seconds was enough to kill a man three times.

Limited to close quarters, though.

The effective range was 3 meters. Past that, the effect dropped off sharply.

"There's one hard condition," Rebekah said, raising a finger.

"The other person has to be looking at you."

"You looking at them isn't enough. They have to look back. Mutual eye contact is the trigger."

"If they close their eyes or deliberately look away, the ability does nothing."

"So it's not some invincible skill. The limitations are real."

Leon nodded.

He'd already figured that part out himself.

Last time, when he'd stared at Rick outside the cafeteria, Rick felt something wrong and immediately looked away.

Beth, on the other hand, didn't have that kind of wariness. He'd cracked her open without a problem.

"One more question." Rebekah looked at him. "When you use it, what do you feel?"

"Headache."

Leon pressed two fingers against his temple.

Not a lie. Two days of heavy use, and his skull felt like someone had gone at it with a wrench.

"Right. Figured as much."

Rebekah noted it down on the clipboard.

"The ability isn't free. Overuse causes backlash, same principle as the drain from controlling walkers."

"My recommendation: don't abuse it."

Leon smiled.

He straightened up, stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill, and walked over to her.

"Alright. Research stops here for now."

"Go sleep."

Rebekah pulled off her goggles and rubbed her eyes.

"What about you?"

"I have other things to deal with."

Leon crossed to the door. His hand settled on the handle, then stopped.

"Rebekah."

"Hmm?"

"What you said before. About manual mining."

The color drained from Rebekah's face.

Then flooded back twice as hard.

She snatched a pen off the desk and launched it at him.

"Get out!"

Leon laughed, ducked the pen, pushed the door open, and left.

The corridor was quiet.

The smile dropped from his face.

Two days.

He had a solid read on his new ability now. Both layers, both limits.

Mental interrogation. Mental suppression. Both useful.

But there were more pressing things to think about.

Terminus.

The name had been sitting in the back of his mind for a while.

Terminus was not a good place.

It was a base run by cannibals.

They used radio broadcasts and hand-painted signs along the railway to draw in exhausted, desperate survivors.

All who arrive at Terminus shall find sanctuary.

That was their slogan.

The people who actually showed up quickly learned the difference between survivor and livestock.

They hadn't always been monsters.

At the start, Terminus was exactly what it claimed to be. A real shelter. Decent people trying to do right by each other.

Then a roving gang hit them. The men were killed. The women were violated. Everything they'd built, every scrap of kindness and trust, ground to dust.

The people who survived it came out the other side completely broken.

They killed every last one of the attackers. Then they kept going, and became something worse than the attackers had ever been.

They started hunting.

The welcoming signs along the railway. The warm voice on the radio. All of it, bait.

Leon was walking out of the hospital building when he nearly ran into T-Dog, heading back from patrol.

T-Dog's face was red from the cold, a bead of snot hanging off the tip of his nose.

He saw Leon and cracked a wide grin.

"Boss! You're finally out! You've been locked in that lab with the little doc for two days straight — Merle's been telling people you two were studying human anatomy."

Leon swatted him on the back of the head.

"Go get Merle and Daryl. My office."

T-Dog rubbed his head, eyes lighting up.

"We starting something?"

"Stop talking and go."

T-Dog laughed and jogged off.

Twenty minutes later, Leon's office was full.

Merle, Daryl, Rick, Abraham, Glenn, and the others.

His inner circle.

Everyone in this room was someone he'd built trust with from the ground up, one crisis at a time, since the world ended.

Leon pinned a wrinkled map of Georgia to the wall.

"Terminus."

He tapped a location circled in red marker.

"Close to us. On the railway line."

"They use broadcasts and signs to pull in lone survivors. Once they have them, they lock them up and work through them one by one."

➤ Next: Scouting Terminus