[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 743 - Alexia's Confusion
The bottom of the crater.
Among the rubble and dust, Alexia's body was writhing in a posture that defied all physiology.
The brittle crack of shattering bone. The wet, adhesive sound of flesh being torn apart and forcibly rebuilt.
Chris knelt on the ground. This man who had never shed a single tear in mountains of corpses and seas of blood, he was watching helplessly as his sister convulsed in agony on the floor.
It was all over.
Alexia braced herself against a broken section of pillar and staggered upright.
That face of hers, once flawlessly perfect, was now half-masked in blood and filth, the other half consumed by dark-red vines proliferating wildly across her skin.
She looked down at the two unconscious "masterpieces" on the ground. The mockery that had lived in her blood-red eyes was gone. What replaced it was something rawer: the fanatic hunger of a scientist staring at a specimen she had never seen before.
Leon appeared to have lost all capacity to resist.
Good. One was a creature fused with an unknown virus, carrying unlimited evolutionary potential. The other was a perfect host, larvae already seeded inside her, on the verge of completing the "propagation."
She would take them.
Take them back to her laboratory. Slice them open piece by piece. Study them inch by inch.
She would carve out every secret locked inside Leon's virus, then fuse it with her Veronica. Perfectly. Completely.
When that day came, she would no longer merely be a god.
She would transcend godhood.
Alexia dragged her still-reconstructing broken leg and limped forward, each step leaving a bloody footprint pressed into the marble floor.
But just then.
A slender silhouette in a black form-fitting tactical suit stepped soundlessly into her path.
Ada.
She stood there, silent and still, like a wall that could not be moved.
"Step aside." Alexia's voice rang out. "Don't force my hand. You will die."
Ada didn't answer.
Her gaze passed over Alexia and came to rest on the two figures lying in the blood. She looked at them for a long moment, her expression carrying something that was difficult to name.
Finally, she pulled her eyes back to the thing standing in front of her, this "Queen" who no longer looked like anything human.
"Look at what you've done."
"A cowardly girl fell in love with a powerful man." Ada's voice was even. Unhurried. "She kept that feeling buried in her heart — too afraid to say it, too afraid to draw near. She told herself she wasn't worthy of him. She feared rejection. She even convinced herself that watching him from a distance was enough."
"And that man?" A brief pause. "He was as oblivious as a block of wood. He could cut his way in and out of a Walker Horde seven times over and never once read the simplest feeling a girl had for him."
Those words cut straight through the unspoken thing between Claire and Leon, the paper-thin wall that had never been named out loud.
Chris snapped his head up and stared at Ada.
He had known his sister's feelings. He had known her hesitation. But he had never imagined it would be Ada, here, now, in a place like this, who laid it bare.
"They were like two parallel lines drawn on the same page," Ada continued. "They were never going to intersect."
"They would have gone on like that. The girl keeping her feelings to herself. The man staying oblivious."
"Until one day, maybe one of them would die first in this world, and the other would live on carrying that regret. Or maybe they would have finally taken that one step."
"That was supposed to be their story."
Ada moved forward one pace and met Alexia's blood-red gaze directly.
"But then you appeared."
"You cornered them."
"You pushed that girl — the one who couldn't even speak her own heart — to find the greatest courage she had ever summoned in her life. Just to protect him. She threw her body in front of your spear."
"And you pushed that oblivious man to abandon his own humanity just to bring her back. He became a monster he cannot even control."
"You twisted them together in the most brutal way possible."
"Look at them." Ada raised her hand and pointed at the two on the ground. "One is a monster already turning into something worse. The other is carrying another monster, inside a monster's body."
"They're finished."
"Soon, they won't even remember who they are."
"And every single bit of it is because of you."
Ada lowered her hand. She looked at Alexia, and slowly, deliberately, settled into a fighting stance.
"Come on, then. Show me what you can do."
Not one profanity in the entire speech, and yet it landed harder than any curse could.
Alexia stood where she was. She looked at Ada. Then she looked at the two on the ground, at whatever was happening to them, the unknown transformations already underway.
For the first time in her life, she found herself sinking into something she had no word for.
Confusion.
She didn't understand.
She didn't understand the "affection" Ada spoke of, the "regret," the "courage." These were human emotions, complex, irrational, built from weakness. In her view, they were defects. Things to be cut away.
And yet.
It was precisely these defects that had produced results she could not have predicted. That reckless self-destruction. That laughable self-sacrifice. Neither followed any logic she could model. Neither followed any path she could have mapped.
She was lost.
Why?
➤ Next: I Surrender — Tell Me Why