[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 610 - Surprisingly Useful

Leon looked at Alice pressed against his side, his fingertips tracing idle lines down her pale spine.

"Any regrets?" he asked, breaking the quiet.

Alice lifted her head. Those blue eyes with their gold-rimmed edges found his.

She shook her head.

"No regrets." Her tone was even. "On this wasteland, nobody can fully trust a stranger. You didn't dare trust me. I couldn't trust you either." She paused. "When you think about it, this way is actually the fastest foundation there is for building real trust."

Alice's clarity caught Leon off guard.

He'd assumed that even if she accepted the deal, she'd carry some resentment underneath. He hadn't expected her to process it this fast.

"I'm sorry for using that method." He looked her in the eyes. "But given where we are, I had no other choice."

He didn't hide anything. Alice was now the most central node in his network, there was no point dancing around it.

"You just injected pure T-Virus serum. You gained telekinesis."

Leon extended a hand and gestured at the shattered glass scattered across the floor.

"And I — as the source of your conversion — have a somewhat unique physical structure. Whatever mutation ability any of you develop, the moment you become part of my control network, that ability gets fully replicated onto me."

Alice stiffened.

She looked at Leon. Then down at her own hands.

Only then did she understand: in the "deal" Leon had described, he'd walked away with something enormous too.

But she showed no anger at being used.

"That's a good thing."

She pressed her cheek back against his abdomen.

"We share the same hidden cards. You getting stronger is protection for me too. Everyone grows together — no matter how I run the numbers, I'm not losing." Her voice carried a bone-deep, rational calm. "Don't worry about me holding a grudge over this. We're all just trying to survive. Not having an emotional foundation doesn't matter — that was never a survival necessity to begin with. And if we don't have it now, we can build it over time. I'm already yours. I have this power. I have no desire to throw that away."

She looked up at him.

"You're a capable leader. And a strong man."

Leon listened, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

Not just an exceptional woman. A genuinely smart one. Dealing with smart people was always the least effort, no wasted words, no guessing at hidden thoughts. Aligned interests. Aligned goals.

"Good." He ran his hand through her hair.

With everything laid out plainly, his attention shifted to the newly acquired ability. He'd been feeling it for the past few minutes, that distinctly foreign psychic fluctuation moving through his mind. A sensation that operated on an entirely different logic from anything physical.

Leon stood, walked to the center of the room, and fixed his gaze on the empty wine glass sitting on the low table.

He didn't reach for it.

He simply focused.

The invisible psychic force spread instantly from his cerebral cortex and pressed against the physical surface of the glass.

Click.

The glass gave a small wobble on the tabletop.

Then it rose, slowly, steadily, and hung in midair. No raised hand. Pure thought.

The glass spun several nimble rotations, drifted toward him, and came to a stop 2 inches above his open palm.

"Not bad." Leon closed his hand around it.

The ability to move objects without touching them. Physics, casually broken.

He looked toward the pile of shattered wine bottle debris on the floor, Alice's work, from when she'd just awakened and her control was still raw enough to blow out the entire cabinet.

Now it was his turn.

Leon's eyes narrowed. Gold patterns flickered deep in his pupils. Enormous psychic force swept the room in an instant.

The fine glass fragments on the floor, mixed through with dark red wine, began to twitch in an eerie, irregular dance.

SWISH!

Every shard lifted off the ground at once.

They converged in midair, fast and purposeful. Accompanied by a grating shriek of friction, the fragments compressed under Leon's mental pressure, squeezed, forced together, shaped, until they formed a dense, viciously sharp glass sphere. The air around it shifted with a low, dull rush, displaced by the invisible force bearing down on it.

Alice sat on the sofa and stopped breathing.

She owned this ability herself, which meant her sensitivity to psychic force was acute. She could feel it precisely: the telekinetic intensity Leon was putting out right now was several times greater than her own at first awakening. Not just stronger. It was a different category entirely.

Was this the master-node advantage?

Leon raised his right hand. Five fingers snapped shut.

The glass sphere, compressed to its absolute limit,

BOOM!

It detonated in midair into an extraordinarily fine white powder that drifted down and settled softly across the carpet.

No physical contact. Pure thought. That was the destruction it caused.

Leon's gaze moved on without pausing.

He turned to the solid-wood bed in the corner of the room. That thing, mattress and all, had to weigh 200 or 300 pounds at minimum.

He tucked both hands casually into his trouser pockets.

Psychic force spread outward like countless invisible tendrils, wrapping tight around the entire bed.

Rise.

The command formed in his mind.

The bed groaned, wood creaking and deforming under stress, four thick legs trembling.

But it didn't leave the floor.

Early days, probably. Still in first contact with the ability.

Leon felt no frustration. This thing could grow. It might need additional viral fusion to develop further. But in the future, even a nuclear warhead was a manageable problem, redirect the point of impact with a thought. With enough control, wiping out an entire city wasn't entirely out of reach either.

"Fascinating."

He released the psychic force.

THUD!

The heavy bed went still.

Leon exhaled slowly. He could feel a faint fatigue pressing out from deep inside his skull, not significant, but real. The ability wasn't free. It ran on psychic force, and the stronger the psychic force, the heavier the objects, the greater the destruction. An ordinary person attempting large-scale manipulation at this level would blow their cerebral blood vessels on the spot.

But he wasn't ordinary.

Triple compound mutation, mutant factor, T-Virus, Progenitor Virus. His tolerance had long since left carbon-based biological limits behind. This mild fatigue was the equivalent of a warm-up.

Alice had watched every move he made. Her blue eyes were full of something between shock and envy.

"Your control..." She stood and walked to his side. "It's frighteningly skilled. Your mental intensity is far beyond mine."

"That's normal." Leon turned his head. "My genetic sequence has already evolved to a degree that's difficult to measure. Any external ability loaded onto my body only gets amplified."

He turned and pulled an unopened bottle of bourbon from the undamaged side of the wine cabinet. He didn't bother using his hand on the cap, psychic force gathered precisely around the metal seal.

CLICK!

The cap unscrewed itself and dropped to the floor.

The bottle tilted in midair. Amber liquid traced a clean, unhurried arc and poured steadily into 2 glasses below. Not a single drop spilled.

Precision micro-control at its finest.

The same ability that could compress glass into a weapon could also pour a drink without wasting a drop. Useful for destroying things. Surprisingly useful for living, too.

Leon picked up both glasses and handed one to Alice.

"Try it."

She took it and drank.

She could feel it plainly: following this man was the most rational decision available in this world.

"Keep practicing," Leon said, finishing his glass, "and you'll reach this level too. This ability isn't fixed. Push your limits, use it constantly, your psychic force will grow with it."

He tossed his empty glass with a casual flick of the wrist.

It sailed in a smooth arc across several meters and landed squarely in the center of the coffee table.

A genuinely audacious tactical framework was assembling itself in his mind.

Against massive Walker hordes. Against mutated monsters. No heavy weapons required. No close-quarters brawling. Just thought, a clean mental cut through a spine, or a dozen large-caliber rifles floating in midair and firing in unison. One person becoming an entire fire position, layered on top of his already absurd regeneration and combat instincts.

There was nothing left in this world that could threaten him in any meaningful way. Even if Umbrella Corporation sent their finest new bio-weapons, they'd end up as practice dummies for telekinesis drills.

"Things will be safe here in the days ahead." Leon moved to the window and looked out at the sky beginning to pale.

The searchlights across the camp looked wan against the retreating dark. A few patrolling guards were rotating out at their posts.

"You can stay and get comfortable with the new ability. I'll have Shawn Greene set up some targets for you, start with small objects. Throwing knives, that kind of thing."

Alice walked to his side. They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the wasteland together. Far across the barren plain, a gust of wind lifted a curtain of dust and carried it away.

This was the world they lived in now.

Scarred to the bone.

But the desolation and fear that had sat in Alice's chest, it was gone. Replaced by something quieter and more certain.

Power was everything. She understood that now.

"What about you?" She turned to look at him. "You wiped out that entire task force. You took Umbrella's most important artificial intelligence. Their executives won't let that go. They'll come for you eventually."

Leon's expression didn't move.

Come for me?

Let them.

He'd be more than happy for Umbrella to keep delivering supplies and research data to his doorstep. The anti-human experiments those people were running underground, every last one of them was going to end. It was only a matter of time.

"If they don't come looking for me," Leon said, his voice flat, "I'll go looking for them."

"This has only just begun."

From outside the door came the faint sound of footsteps, then 3 measured knocks.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

"Boss." Chris Redfield's rough voice came through the door. "Something's come up on Simon's end. He says the data decryption on the Red Queen motherboard has hit an extremely tricky problem. Kid says you need to come see it yourself."

➤ Next: The Red Queen's True Worth