[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 484 - Large-Scale Domestic Violence Scene
Everyone's breath stopped.
Ada braced against the Hummer's hood and hauled herself upright, swaying.
She wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth. That flawless face, for the first time anyone had ever seen, showed fury with nothing held back.
Merle watched her lips move, a few words hissed under her breath.
He couldn't make out a syllable, couldn't understand the language, Chinese, maybe, but the viciousness coming off her bones sent a chill straight through him.
Leon's punch had nearly broken her in half.
It hurt like hell.
The next second, Ada moved.
No wasted motion. She shot straight at him.
And Leon, as if something had tripped a wire inside him, locked those dark-gold spiderweb pupils onto her.
BANG!
Fists and feet met. The impact landed like a sledgehammer on leather, dense and brutal.
Every strike Ada threw was fast, precise, merciless, every one of them aimed at a joint, a nerve cluster, a vital point.
Leon reacted like he'd already seen it.
Ada's whip kick was halfway through its arc. Leon's forearm was already there, not a millimeter off.
Leon's straight punch started to launch. Ada's body had already slipped aside half a second early.
Two mirror images. Every movement eerily, unnervingly in sync.
He advanced a step. She gave a step back.
She pressed a fraction. He covered a fraction.
This wasn't a fight.
It was a rehearsed dance.
"What the hell is going on?"
Merle stared, eyes glassy.
"Did they plan this?"
Nobody answered him.
Rick and Shawn Greene looked like they were about to be sick.
They'd figured it out now.
Every last bit of Leon's killing craft had been drilled into him by the woman standing right in front of them. They knew each other's habits, every subtle tell, every micro-movement, down cold. Even with his reason burned away, Leon's body remembered. Pure reflex. Pure instinct. Fighting from the bones out.
Neither could touch the other.
But that was only the surface.
Fine beads of sweat had already broken across Ada's forehead. Her breathing was starting to go ragged.
Every block she threw, Leon's force rattled up her arms and left them numb. She was fighting a beast that didn't get tired, and she still had to pull every punch, still had to hold back, because she couldn't actually hurt him.
She couldn't go for the kill.
Leon had no such problem. Every punch, every kick was aimed at taking her completely apart.
BANG!
An opening.
One breath. That was all.
Leon's knee drove viciously into Ada's lower abdomen, the exact same spot he'd already hit once before.
"Ugh—"
Ada's body folded. The pain whited out her vision, and her movements went half a beat slow.
That half-beat was everything.
Leon's hand closed around her throat. He lifted her clean off the ground and slammed her into the bed of the nearby pickup.
CLANG!
Ada felt like every bone in her body had just come loose.
She lay there and couldn't even cough.
It was over.
Every heart in that yard dropped.
Even Ada, with every trick she had, couldn't handle Leon. So what the hell were the rest of them supposed to do? Walk up and get knocked out one at a time?
The walker perimeter had squeezed to under ten meters. The stench of rot rolled over them in a thick, suffocating wave.
"Boss!"
At that exact moment, Merle's busted-gravel voice tore across the battlefield.
"Look! Ashley's here!"
It hit like a thunderclap.
Leon's hand, the one around Ada's throat, locked up.
He turned his head slowly, looking toward where Merle was pointing.
Nothing there.
But that one second of hesitation was enough.
Light exploded in Ada's eyes.
She reached back into the truck bed with the last scrap of strength she had left, grabbed a loose wooden club, and swung it hard into the back of Leon's skull.
SMACK!
Leon's body shuddered. The brutality in those hollow eyes drained away fast, replaced by nothing. Just blank emptiness.
Then he went straight down.
The world went quiet.
The walkers that had been snarling and closing in from every direction stopped as if someone had cut the power. They lost their target all at once, drifting in place, wandering in slow, aimless circles.
Across the yard, Candace, still gripping Maggie's throat, shuddered too. Clarity snapped back into her eyes.
She looked at Maggie hunched over beside her, coughing, barely alive. Then she looked at Leon on the ground.
She stood there, completely blank.
Ada clawed her way out of the truck bed on unsteady legs. She walked over to Leon's unconscious body, planted one foot on his chest, and stood heaving for air.
She looked down at that face. The face she loved and hated in equal measure. Her chest rose and fell hard with something that wasn't quite rage.
But underneath it, deep in her eyes, past all of it, was something softer. Helplessness. And something that hurt.
"I pulled all the clinical T-Virus application data from the mansion." Ada was still catching her breath. She turned to look at Candace, who had only just steadied herself. "Everything. I took it all."
Then, under everyone's eyes, she crouched down and reached into the innermost pocket of Leon's tactical vest. Her fingers closed around it and pulled it free.
A spiral-shaped blue injector.
She didn't look at it. She just tossed it to Candace.
"Shit,!"
Merle and Glenn both flinched like she'd thrown a live grenade, scrambling to catch the thing before it hit the ground.
Candace caught it.
"Get back to the prison and inject him." Ada's voice left no room for discussion. "Every precaution is in the data. It's all written down."
Candace stared at the injector cradled in her palms.
"This... this is too risky..."
"If we don't risk it, he stays a beast until the day one of us has to put him down." Ada's tone was flat and cold as a blade. "Only the T-Virus — a perfect derivative of the Progenitor itself — can build a new equilibrium inside his body."
She looked at Rick. At the rest of them.
"We have to gamble."
"Either we let him become a beast and walk away from him, or we inject him." Her voice didn't waver. "There is no third option."
➤ Next: Injecting the T-Virus