[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 597 - Damn, What Is He Doing?

The moment James finished speaking, the air inside the sealed hall went solid.

The whole room reeked of gunpowder tension — the kind that detonates without warning.

In the rear ranks of the task force, a young operator named JD was drenched in sweat.

The suffocating standoff was tearing him apart from the inside. The armed man across the room, those eyes weren't human. They were a predator's eyes, and they were hungry.

JD's breathing went rapid and shallow. Both hands clenched the rifle frame in a white-knuckled death grip. Sweat slid down his forehead and smeared across his eyelids.

On instinct, he moved to wipe it away.

What he forgot was that in his extreme panic, his index finger was already pressed tight inside the trigger guard.

His wrist gave the faintest tremor. That finger jerked inward, sudden and uncontrolled.

In that razor-thin instant,

Leon's vision snapped onto the anomaly across the room.

No reasoning. No processing. Pure reflex, born from a dynamic-capture ability that was nothing short of terrifying.

He saw JD's panic spike wide open.

He saw the faint contraction of the man's right-arm muscle.

He saw the almost imperceptible tilt of the muzzle swinging off-line.

Something detonated deep in his mind. A danger alarm, absolute and all-consuming.

Every muscle in his body locked to its limit in a single microsecond. His bones gave off a sharp, crisp grinding sound.

No conscious thought required.

His brain plotted the incoming bullet's trajectory from the angle of JD's muzzle alone.

Precognitive evasion.

He snapped his head to the side. His upper body shifted right by the smallest of angles.

BANG!

The barrel belched a blinding tongue of flame. The sharp crack shattered the fragile balance of the standoff like glass.

The nine-millimeter Parabellum round flew past Leon's cheek with barely a hair to spare. The bullet hammered into the metal container shell far behind him, throwing a shower of sparks off the surface.

A clean miss.

The shot was so abrupt that no one had time to react. Including JD, the one who had pulled the trigger. He stared at his own smoking muzzle in horror, completely unable to understand how the gun had just gone off.

James's eyes went wide.

He was a battle-hardened veteran. His nerves were thick enough to absorb most shocks. But he had seen it. He had seen it with his own eyes.

The man leading the other side had not dodged by luck.

In the instant before the muzzle flashed, the man had already moved. A perfectly precise evasive motion, executed before the bullet even left the barrel.

Dodging a bullet.

That impossible image unfolded right in front of James's face and blew apart everything he thought he knew about the world.

But there was no time to process any of it.

Every nerve on the battlefield was stretched to breaking point. Once that atmosphere cracked,

Nobody cared if it was an accident. Nobody cared if it was intentional.

The gun had fired.

And the only thought burning in every mind was to put the other side down for good.

"Open fire!" James bellowed, voice tearing raw.

He wrenched the trigger of his MP5 Submachine Gun and the muzzle erupted, spitting fire in a frenzy. The assault team behind him went red-eyed all at once. A dense wall of rounds poured toward the position where Leon and his group stood.

Chris's reaction was textbook.

The instant the first shot rang out, he threw himself into a hard roll to the right. His body slammed against the grated floor. No hesitation, his M4 Rifle with the red-dot sight came up and answered back immediately.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Three controlled shots. The large-caliber rounds cracked an unknown task force operator's ballistic helmet wide open. The man toppled backward behind cover, finished.

Jill didn't waste a word.

She grabbed Alice by the back of her collar and shoved her hard behind the thick concrete load-bearing pillar beside them, then thrust half her body out from cover. The Remington Shotgun in her hands let out a ferociously savage blast toward the front. The deafening roar swallowed the submachine gun fire entirely. A wide spread of steel pellets chewed the wall surface into a dense field of craters.

Ada slipped behind another metal crate with fluid ease. The Glock at her hip was already in her hand — when she drew it was anyone's guess — her eyes moving cold and steady, hunting for exposed firing positions.

But across the entire battlefield, the one drawing the most fire was Leon.

He'd been standing in the center of it all. He'd been far too arrogant just now, and the task force operators on the other side could not swallow that. His position was also badly exposed.

Rayne bit down hard and fixed her muzzle on his chest.

"Die, you bastard!" She fired in a wild, unrelenting burst.

James and JD trained their muzzles on him too. An interlocking crossfire web of at least 3 automatic weapons and one semi-automatic sealed off every inch of space Leon occupied.

In the eyes of these elite operators, this was a one-sided execution. No outcome left in doubt.

At this range, no carbon-based organism survives.

But what happened next took everything these people believed in and ground it into the floor, over and over again.

Leon made no move toward cover.

The extreme hyper-activation of his mind made everything around him slow to a crawl. Every muzzle direction across from him was crystal clear.

James's trajectory was pulling left. Rayne's rounds were chewing at his lower body and chest. JD's aim was an absolute mess. The fire web they were weaving looked impossibly dense on the surface, but it was full of gaps.

Leon moved.

His left shoulder rolled back, almost casual. He slipped past 2 incoming bursts that had been aimed straight at his face. Then his upper body leaned back in a grotesque, impossible arc. Three rounds flew directly over his chest, effortlessly shredding through the outer nylon of his Tactical Vest.

His core fired. His whole body snapped back upright like a roly-poly toy that can't be knocked down. His feet glided 2 feet to the right with exquisite precision. The half-magazine James raked across tracked straight past him and buried itself in the row of culture tanks behind him.

Leon was strolling through the gunfire. Using the bullets as wallpaper.

Rayne kept the trigger pinned, her eyes stretched wide, flooded with terror.

Until the click.

Slide lock. Magazine empty.

James's MP5 Submachine Gun went silent at the same moment, firing pin snapping against nothing.

Every member of the assault team who had just emptied their weapons froze behind their cover. They were heaving for breath in great ragged gasps. Eyes stretched as wide as they could go.

The man across from them stood unharmed in the center of the hall.

A few slashes cut through his clothing.

Not even a scratch on his skin.

This was a flat-out insult to the tactical marksmanship training they had spent their careers building.

JD gripped the empty gun, his legs shaking beyond his control. He swallowed hard. His mind was entirely consumed by the image of that man weaving through the storm of bullets just moments ago, casually, like it was nothing.

Was this real?

That wasn't human.

Leon tugged up one corner of his mouth and gave his shoulder a casual brush, knocking loose a bit of dust.

So this was why Wesker could dodge bullets.

Though Wesker always liked to wind up before striking, that was the reason bullets could still connect with him. Against ordinary people, no wind-up was needed. A graze was enough to drop them dead on the spot.

Leon raised his M4 Rifle slowly, holding it one-handed.

The muzzle swung toward the task force's cover without hesitation.

"You've finished delivering your welcome gift." His tone was completely flat.

"Now it's my turn."

➤ Next: Turning Them Into Our Own