[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 521 - Even T-102 is here? Wesker, you're really desperate

Spencer Mansion, top floor. Core monitoring room.

Every screen on the wall fed the same image: the hall below, high definition, zero blind spots, the carnage on full display.

The only sound in the room was the hum of instruments. No one was breathing loud enough to hear.

The technician sat at the console with the back of his uniform soaked through with cold sweat, staring at the skeleton on the screen. His Adam's apple worked up and down like he was trying to swallow a stone.

Wesker stood behind him, hands clasped at the small of his back, black trench coat perfectly straight.

The sunglasses gave away nothing.

But his jawline was rigid, the muscle along it pulled tight, and that told the whole story. Whatever composure Wesker had walked in with was taking a hit it had never taken before.

Marcus's Leeches. The higher-ups had always written them off as failed products, defective trash not worth the containment cost.

In that man Leon's hands, those same bugs had just become a plague that ate everything in its path.

No weapons. No tactics. A few buckets of worms, and a T-01 was gone.

That level of control. That level of destruction.

It was making things very difficult for him.

"Director." The technician's voice cracked. His fingers hovered over the keyboard without landing. "T-01 is completely destroyed. Target threat assessment... incalculable."

A pause.

"Initiate self-destruct protocol?"

"Self-destruct?" Wesker's cold snort cut the air. He stepped forward and pressed one finger onto the red button on the console. "Blow the most valuable experimental data in this facility to ash? Did you finally grow a brain?"

"T-01 couldn't handle him, so we switch."

"Open every isolation door in Block B, sublevel two. Release the remaining five T-02 Subjects."

The technician spun around, face white.

"Sir! Those five Subjects haven't completed final neural restraint surgery! They can't distinguish friend from foe — once they're out, no one in this building survives!"

"Then let them tear the building down."

No warmth. No hesitation. No room to negotiate.

"I need to know where his limit is. Five new-model Tyrants." Wesker's voice dropped to something almost quiet. "Let's see what he eats them with."

Click.

The red button went down.

The command shot through the fiber-optic network and hit sublevel two in an instant.

Deep in the hall.

The shrieking alarm cut out.

What replaced it was low and mechanical, the heavy, deliberate grinding of gear teeth engaging. Five reinforced blast doors at the far end of the corridor all lit up green at the same moment. Hydraulic rods engaged. The metal panels began to rise.

Dense white cryogenic vapor poured out along the floor, and the temperature dropped fast.

Heavy footsteps, layered on top of each other. The marble groaned.

Five massive gray-white shapes squeezed through the passages.

Five T-02 Tyrants, each one wrong in its own way. One's right arm had mutated into twin-bladed claws. Another was armored in thick bony growths across its entire surface. A third had its heart sitting exposed on the outside of its chest, bare and pulsing.

They lined up and stared. Murky eyes, dead and fixed, locked onto the single figure standing at the center of the hall.

Leon stood his ground and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the floor.

In his mind, the invisible sensory web was still live. Ada's light point had moved far out, deep into the mountain forest beyond the Spencer Mansion's outer perimeter. Completely clear of the core danger zone.

Good. He'd had his fun.

The objective was done.

Time to leave.

He had pulled every lethal security asset this place had straight toward himself. Ada and Rebecca's exit route was wide open, nothing in the way.

Now there were five of these things in front of him.

Fight them head-on?

He wasn't that bored.

Wesker, that old fox, was definitely crouched behind some camera right now watching every move. Leon had zero interest in being Umbrella's unpaid combat stress-tester.

At the same time, just killing all five outright was a waste he couldn't stomach.

Birkin, Umbrella's top researcher, had already been wrapped up and carried off by Ada. But these five — five top-grade heavy hitters — if they could be conscripted and brought back to the prison, stationed as moat security, the picture that made in his head was genuinely satisfying.

Conscripting Tyrants wasn't something conventional methods could do. It required an assimilation medium at extreme concentration.

Leon raised his left arm. His right hand straightened, fingers pressed tight together, and without hesitating he drew them across his left forearm like a blade.

Blood welled up and ran.

He focused, a brief inward pull, and quietly called five Leeches up from the swarm massed at his feet, the five largest, the ones with dark red markings across their backs.

They crawled up his calf and along his arm fast, settling precisely over the open wound.

The barbs went in. They fed, pulling deep on Leon's blood, blood carrying a saturated concentration of the T-Virus and Murphy's mutation factor.

A few seconds. That was all it took.

Their bodies, black before, swelled to twice the size. A faint crimson light leaked through the skin, strange and deep.

That was Leon's blood in them now. And with it, the absolute master-servant bond.

"Go."

"Stay hidden."

He snapped his left arm out.

All five detached at once. They dropped to the marble floor and moved, flat and silent, toward the five Tyrants hammering across the hall in their direction.

They didn't need to devour. They only needed to parasitize.

One injection of that blood into a Tyrant's system, and five of Umbrella's ultimate weapons would change hands completely.

Up in the monitoring room, Wesker narrowed his eyes at the screen. Leon hadn't moved. Hadn't even flinched. Something was wrong, Wesker could feel it, but he couldn't put his finger on what.

It was already too late.

➤ Next: Controlling T-102! — Clash