[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 629 - You've Grown Up, Ashley

Smith's gaze moved past Leon's shoulder and locked onto Ashley.

He recognized that face. Knew it immediately.

Back when the world hadn't yet completely devolved into a Walker playground, he'd been this young lady's most personal head of security.

"Miss Ashley!"

Old acquaintances reunited, this iron-blooded special forces commander who had survived more life-and-death battles than he could count, and Smith's eyes went red at the rims, just like that.

Nothing in this world hit harder than seeing someone you knew still breathing at the end of it.

Ashley looked over the special operations commander standing before her, wearing nothing but a thin gray newcomer's uniform.

She didn't have the tearful, sobbing reunion she might once have imagined.

She wasn't that pampered White House girl anymore, the one who only knew how to attend socialite parties and could do nothing but scream when danger showed up.

These past few months of wasteland life, combined with the physical conditioning Leon had put her through, had pushed her psychological fortitude so far past ordinary that there was no going back.

"Long time no see, Uncle Smith."

Her tone was perfectly calm.

Smith went still.

That composed, unhurried bearing completely overturned everything he thought he knew about this girl. She hadn't thrown herself at him begging to be rescued. There wasn't even a flicker of that desperate, flood-of-relief expression a person wore after surviving something terrible.

Instead she radiated authority. The kind that settled over a room without announcing itself. The presence of someone who ran this place.

She had changed. A great deal.

Leon tilted his head slightly.

Glenn, waiting just outside the door, immediately carried in a heavy military-grade hard case.

THUD!

It landed on the iron table in the center of the room.

"Your communications equipment."

Leon pulled over a chair and sat.

"Your people already drove the vehicle into the outer district. Glenn pulled this out of the passenger seat of your Mine-Resistant Armored Vehicle." He paused. "Rest assured — I haven't done anything to your people. They've all been properly taken care of."

Smith glanced at Leon. Then at Ashley.

Then he nodded, stepped forward with practiced ease, opened the case, unfolded the collapsible satellite antenna, and pressed the power button.

The screen lit up.

A complex military encryption sequence ran at speed.

2 minutes later, the video call connected.

President Graham's face appeared on screen, the same exhausted face, etched a little deeper this time.

"Smith, what's the situation?" Urgency bled through every word.

Smith stepped half a pace to the side and moved Ashley directly in front of the camera.

"Dad." Ashley looked down at the screen.

President Graham froze.

The old man who nominally held the highest power over the entire United States, his eye rims turned red, visibly, in real time.

He even, in a moment of complete loss of composure, reached out and touched the edge of the screen with his fingers.

"Ashley." His voice was trembling.

"Thank God — you've actually put on some weight? Your color is even better than it was in Washington!"

That was the plain truth.

Down in that underground bunker buried beneath the earth, even the President ate nothing but those nearly inedible military rations every day.

But Ashley here had fresh vegetables and meat at every meal, and even her between-meal snacks were quality food. She was radiant. Her skin was smoother than it had been before the outbreak.

There was no need to go out and take risks constantly here. Actually gaining weight during the apocalypse, that was probably something only Leon's operation could pull off.

"You've suffered." The President wiped his face. "Have Smith bring you back. Helicopters can meet you along the route whenever you're ready."

The evacuation order. Immediate and certain.

Suffered?

She hadn't suffered at all.

Ashley shook her head, clean and decisive.

"I'm not going back." No hesitation. None.

The President froze.

He thought he'd heard wrong.

Ashley, always sensible, always obedient, was refusing his arrangements for the very first time in her life.

"You're being ridiculous." His tone dropped. "The outside world has already fallen apart. You're staying in a camp that could be overrun by a Walker Horde at any moment. You're gambling with your life."

"Could be overrun at any moment?"

Ashley raised an eyebrow.

Thinking about how her own father had sent her to prison, anger flared in her chest, he had no idea what she'd actually been through. But thinking that he'd done it for her sake, she let out a helpless sigh.

What could she even say?

Besides, if the President hadn't personally had his own daughter thrown behind bars, she never would have met Leon. A disaster that turned into a blessing.

She reached out and rotated the heavy communications terminal, pointing the camera toward the window.

Through the glass, you could see the super liquid-cooled server matrix running in the inner city plaza, the Red Queen's projection standing in the center of the square. People who needed help would approach it, asking whether the AI could offer any real, substantive guidance.

A little further out: fully armed Mutant Patrol Squads moving in formation. And beyond them, city walls that soared into the clouds.

"Dad." Ashley's voice was easy. Almost amused. "Do you think those Rotters could gnaw their way through a fortress like this?"

President Graham had nothing to say to that.

He'd already seen this prison's defenses through Smith's camera. He knew.

Walkers were mindless. Even if you gave them ten thousand years, as long as you didn't get besieged and cut off from supplies, this place was untouchable.

But he still couldn't feel at ease leaving his daughter in the hands of a warlord he knew nothing about.

"I know it's safe here." He took a deep breath. "But I don't know these people. You have no status here. No guarantee of any kind."

He didn't soften it. That was his biggest fear, spoken plainly.

"How do you know I have no status?"

Ashley cut him off.

She turned and walked to Leon's side, perfectly natural, no hesitation, and reached out and wrapped her arm around his. Then she leaned the better part of her body weight against him.

"Let me make a formal introduction." She looked at her father's dumbfounded face on the screen.

"This is Leon. The supreme leader of this prison — the person in charge of this entire territory."

The corner of her mouth curved into something slow and proud.

"He's my man."

The moment those words hit the air, the entire isolation room went silent.

Smith, standing to one side, nearly bit through his own tongue.

His eyes went wide as saucers. His gaze swept back and forth between Leon and Ashley, back and forth, like he was trying to make the image compute.

The President's daughter.

Claimed by a wildcard warlord.

And from the looks of it, Ashley had thrown herself at him of her own accord.

President Graham's brain crashed entirely.

He'd assumed his daughter was being coerced. That she was making the best of a bad situation just to stay alive.

But the adoration in Ashley's eyes, raw and completely undisguised, threaded through with a possessiveness that left no room for misreading, that wasn't performance. That wasn't survival.

That was a woman who had made up her mind.

The President leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers hard against his aching temple.

What could he even say?

He barely had real military authority left. He couldn't get the Fort Benning garrison to follow a direct order. And this young man had built a dominion this size out of nothing but wasteland and wreckage. His methods and sheer capability put every so-called regular military commander to shame.

And most critically, by every sign, his daughter wasn't being coerced. She was living well. Better than well.

In this godforsaken world, surviving was the only truth that mattered. Surviving well even more so. Everything else was secondary.

Forcing Ashley to come back would be the real harm.

The President stared at Leon on the screen for a full half minute.

That young face radiated absolute dominance and composure. Not a trace of the awkwardness most people couldn't hide when facing a sitting president. If anything, he had the relaxed ease of a man watching a neighbor wander into his backyard.

This was going to be a very difficult man to deal with.

"You've grown up, Ashley." The President let out a long sigh. The resignation in his voice was real. "Since you've decided on him, I have no right to interfere with your choice from thousands of kilometers away."

He'd always been a pragmatic politician. Now that the situation was clear, the calculation ran itself.

Leaving his daughter here guaranteed her absolute safety. And this relationship, this connection, could forge a real, durable alliance with the most formidable fortress he'd seen since the world ended.

Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.

➤ Next: The President's Support