[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 581 - The Critical Balance

The heavy pneumatic door slid open.

Leon walked into the lab and pulled out a folding chair.

William followed him in.

His white coat hadn't been changed — still smeared with dirt from the yard, but the man wearing it was unrecognizable. The terrified, wound-tight researcher from before was gone. In his place stood a mad scientist who'd finally put down every weight he'd been carrying.

He crossed to the control console in quick strides and pressed his finger to the print lock.

The silver pendant went onto the tray beside the microscope. Carefully. Both hands.

"Boss."

William turned and braced both palms against the edge of the table.

"Too many people up there. I couldn't go into the details."

He stared at the tiny glass vial sitting in the tray.

"In our internal documents, we call it the Golgotha Virus."

"The G-Virus."

William raised his head. His eyes were still threaded with red from the adrenaline.

"But I prefer to call it the God Virus."

"The God Virus?"

Leon leaned back in his chair and let out a short laugh.

"Not exactly a low-key name."

William straightened up.

He grabbed a black marker and sketched a spiral gene-chain diagram on the whiteboard behind him, fast and loose.

"Because this thing genuinely trespassed into God's domain."

"It is the apex of every extreme biological force known to exist."

He pressed the marker tip hard against the whiteboard. The tapping sound it made was sharp, insistent.

"Its creation was entirely accidental. No one planned it."

"Several years ago, at the Arklay Research Institute, we conducted tests on a female subject named Lisa Trevor."

"She was a pitiful subject."

William's eye twitched.

"To address the intelligence degradation in T-Virus infectees, the European division sent over a newly cultivated parasite strain."

"We called it Nemesis."

"The Nemesis Parasite."

"We injected it into Lisa. The expectation was that she'd go into shock and die like every other subject before her."

William turned around. He swallowed.

"The result?"

"She absorbed the Nemesis Parasite. Completely."

"Right in front of us, her cells went through a mutation unlike anything ever recorded."

"Only after we extracted her cellular material were we finally able to cultivate the G-Virus prototype."

Leon listened without a word.

He already knew the rough shape of it, the broad strokes of this backstory weren't new to him. But hearing the full account directly from the man who built it, he still felt something stir. A deep, instinctive awe toward something that shouldn't exist.

"So what can it actually do?"

He flicked his cigarette ash.

William held up one finger.

"First. Ultra-accelerated evolution."

"Darwin's theory is a scrap of waste paper in front of this thing."

"It can drive a host through hundreds of millions of years' worth of genetic evolution in a matter of hours."

A second finger.

"Second. Forced genetic rewrite."

"Once it enters a host, it rewrites their DNA with extreme brutality."

"And this mutation isn't a one-time event."

"It passes to offspring."

William took a slow breath. A third finger.

"Third. Revival of near-dead organisms."

"As long as the host has even one intact surviving cell left."

"Inject the G-Virus, and something on the brink of death comes back."

"And the last point."

He folded his fingers down and dropped the marker on the table.

"Also the most terrifying thing that separates it from the T-Virus."

"In theory, its mutation potential is unlimited."

"Every time it sustains damage. Every time it faces an external threat."

"It mutates new skeletal structures, new muscle groups, new organs — whatever it needs to counter that threat."

"The direction is completely random. No one can predict what it becomes next."

Leon finished listening and tugged at the corner of his mouth.

This wasn't evolution.

This was cancer cells with no off switch.

His mind flashed through what he knew, William, in the original story, injecting himself with the G-Virus. The result. The slow, grinding horror of what came after.

That mutation process was nauseating to think about, and he'd only seen it on a screen.

Stage one. G1.

The right arm's muscles would bloat into grotesque, distorted masses, tearing through flesh and shoulder until a massive eyeball erupted from the wreckage, rolling wildly, pointing in every direction at once. The left half of the body might still hold some vague human outline. The right half? Gone. Pure monster.

G2 would push it further.

That swollen right arm would develop enormous bone-claws, each one like a blade. The skull, warped by the shifting skeleton beneath, would be forced down and swallowed into the left chest cavity. A second eyeball, obscenely large, would burst open at the center of the chest.

G3 abandoned the human shape entirely.

All four limbs thickening, expanding. A second pair of upper limbs tearing out through the back. The ribcage flipping outward, every rib reshaping into a massive, jagged fang to tear apart prey.

By G4, even walking upright was gone. The legs atrophied. The body ballooned to the size of a small hill, a four-legged predator covered in eyes, rotting and enormous, hunting by instinct alone.

And the final stage. G5.

Not even that remained.

Just a massive lump of flesh, completely uncontrolled, heaving across the ground. The entire front end nothing but a gaping, fang-lined mouth, mindless, ravenous, consuming everything it touched.

That was supposed to be a biological weapon?

That was a suicide note written in meat.

If he injected something like that into himself, or into any of the Mutants under his command, forget dominating the world. This entire region would be eaten alive by mindless, writhing chunks of flesh before the year was out.

"No."

Leon said it without hesitation.

"Random, uncontrollable mutation is worthless. All of it."

He stood and walked to the control console, looking down at William from above.

"What I need are soldiers who obey completely. Power I can hold in my hands."

"I need this thing stabilized."

"I will not accept Rotters that have lost all reason and only know how to bite."

William adjusted his glasses. He wasn't angry at the blunt refusal.

His instincts as a scientist told him Leon was right.

"I agree, Boss."

He opened the safe beneath the console and pulled out a black hard-shell document case, worn at the edges, clearly old.

"Lack of control is the G-Virus's greatest flaw. No question."

"Even with your T-Virus fusion, I don't think you could withstand the G-Virus as it is."

"You'd need to take the Solar Stairway first — push the fusion further. And beyond that, if we're going to refine this into a true enhancement agent, a perfect one, we have to recover the critical balance it's missing."

William flipped the case open and took out a photograph. Slightly yellowed at the edges.

He handed it to Leon.

"The NE-Alpha Parasite."

➤ Next: Lisa Trevor