[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 522 - Controlling T-102! — Clash

Five T-02s?

Wesker really went all out.

Watching the five Tyrants walk toward him, Leon felt a genuine twinge of apprehension.

But he wasn't afraid.

Because this was exactly the moment he'd been waiting for.

Leon hadn't even steadied his breathing when they moved.

Blindingly fast. None of the T-01's lumbering weight.

The one on the far left had mutated its right arm into two half-meter bone blades. It charged straight at him, blades crossing in a scissor strike, the air screaming where they cut.

No room to dodge.

Leon turned sideways and ate it.

The blades sheared past his shoulder and carved open a wide swath of black Leeches.

He was already cocking his arm to hit back when something else arrived at his flank. This one had a fleshy tumor bulging from its chest. Its thick left leg swung like a battering ram and drove straight into his ribs.

The force was obscene.

Leon crossed both arms over his chest. Didn't matter.

His feet left the ground. He flew backward several meters and his back hit a load-bearing pillar with a crack that shook the whole column.

Lime dust rained down.

The Leech armor shattered across a huge area. Dead bugs slid off his back and spread across the floor like wet sludge.

Leon slumped down the pillar and hit the ground. His organs felt like they'd been wrung out. A sweet taste flooded his throat and he coughed up a full mouthful of bright red blood.

Yeah. These things hit on a completely different level than that T-01.

One-on-one, straight fight, he might have had a shot.

Five?

No. Not a chance.

Leon knew exactly where his limits were.

The five T-02s didn't even pause. They spread into a semicircle and closed in around him. Smarter than the first generation — they understood how to use their size, how to seal every exit before their prey could find one. Massive feet crunched down on shattered floor tiles, step by deliberate step.

In the monitoring room, Wesker stood in front of the screens. His sunglasses threw back cold light.

It's over.

This is what a bioweapon is supposed to look like. A complete and total crushing.

That man's bugs aren't infinite. Once those annoying little parasites are ground down to nothing, all that's left for him is death.

No second option.

None.

Back in the main hall.

Leon wiped the blood off his chin with the back of his hand.

He looked at the five enormous shapes closing in on him, and then, slowly, he smiled.

His teeth were soaked red. His face was caked in dust and grime. The smile it produced was more unhinged than anything standing in front of him.

"Strong enough."

"Brains still leave something to be desired, though."

The lead T-02 didn't bother responding. It raised its mutated right claw, ready to cave this insignificant creature's skull in with one shot.

Too late.

The moment its arm went up, five dark-red mutated Leeches were already on their chests. Silent. Unnoticed.

The chaos of the fight had been the perfect cover.

Hundreds of dead black Leeches blanketed the floor, hiding five assassins with a very specific job.

They had been drinking Leon's blood. Then they'd climbed the Tyrants' thick legs, patient and unhurried, and found exactly what they were looking for.

The T-02's weak point.

The massive heart. Completely exposed on the front of the body.

Powerful cardiac muscle pumping in steady rhythm, driving enormous volumes of blood through those thick vessels.

The five dark-red Leeches opened their circular mouths. Every barb extended. They bit down hard on that thin outer membrane.

The T-02s stopped moving. All five of them, at once.

They looked down, trying to understand what was on their chests.

Their claws hung frozen in midair.

Leon's blood, carrying the highest concentration of T-Virus and Murphy's mutation factor, was being forced directly into the Tyrants' hearts. It hit their bloodstreams and tore through the vessels toward their brains in under half a second.

Leon's cerebral cortex took a hit unlike anything it had experienced before.

The invisible sensory web stretched across his mind was ripped at from five directions simultaneously.

Five massive, thrashing, violently resistant nodes slammed into the network at once. The pain behind his eyes was blinding.

These things hit hard even through a neural link.

Controlling one ordinary walker: 1 point of mental load.

One mutant hound: roughly 5.

Just bridging a single T-02 felt like someone had crammed his neural circuits with over 2,000 walkers' worth of resistance.

Their genetic locks were dense and layered. The pushback was enormous.

Five of them. 10,000 points of load, all at once.

Ever since he'd merged with the T-Virus and gained that massive reserve of mental bandwidth, he'd felt strangely hollow. Too much capacity. Nowhere to put it. That restless excess energy with no outlet, day after day.

Now it was full.

The control ceiling that had always felt wide open instantly bottomed out, landing at a perfect saturation point.

The wire inside his skull pulled taut. It bent.

It held.

At the center of the hall, the five T-02s clawed at their own chests in agony, thick fingers scrabbling to tear out the red Leech burrowed against their hearts. Their cloudy eyes rolled and darted. Muscles seized and twitched. Low, furious growls scraped out of their throats.

They didn't want to bend the knee to a man half their size.

Leon straightened up and brushed the dust off his shoulders.

The remaining Leeches crawled back to him and resettled across his body as best they could.

He stopped smiling. His eyes settled on the five hulking shapes with flat, steady focus.

The command went out through the network. Highest authority. No room for interpretation.

"Kneel."

The resistance lasted less than 2 seconds.

This was never a test of willpower. This was the top of the biological chain pressing down on everything below it.

THUD!

The first T-02 went down. Its massive kneecaps punched craters into the floor tiles.

Then the second. The third.

Heavy impacts, one after another.

Five of Umbrella Corporation's most advanced bioweapons, the cutting edge of what the company had ever produced, knelt in a line before Leon and lowered their vein-mapped bald heads.

Done.

Leon rolled his stiff neck. The joints popped loud enough to hear.

High-level security for the outer perimeter. Acquired.

This whole run hadn't cost him a thing. He'd walked out ahead.

With these five brutes on patrol around the prison, even if Fort Benning rolled up with a full armored column, they'd stop and do the math first.

Tyrants aren't something you brush off.

If they felt like it, they could flip an armored vehicle. Just because.

He walked up to the lead T-02 and reached out and patted its rock-hard bald skull.

Heh. Solid.

Monitoring room.

The technician stared at the screen with his fingers hovering over the keyboard, his whole body shaking.

Wesker's face, that mask of cold, perpetual nothing, finally broke.

He drove his fist into the control console.

"Cut the feed." The words came out through his teeth.

This man is a monster. A complete and total monster.

Can't contain him. Can't kill him. He can even turn the newest Tyrant models against you.

Keep fighting, and everything Umbrella owns becomes his personal inventory.

On the other end of the building, Leon was already heading for the door.

Wesker, that old fox, was probably done playing.

Leon had no interest in sticking around to find out.

He turned and walked toward the door the Tyrant had smashed off its hinges.

"Follow."

The five T-02s rose. They fell into step behind him on their thick legs, steady and heavy as five loyal armored vehicles rolling in convoy.

He had Ada to pick up.

And somewhere out in the dirt beyond these walls, a Scorpion King was still lying flat, playing dead.

Time to introduce it to the new team.

➤ Next: Turning Against Each Other