[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 753 - Forced Ripening

Atlanta Prison. Underground research center.

Leon stood outside the door, watching Claire Redfield through the glass window as she finished her final checkup. He'd dealt with Alexia Ashford. Now he was waiting.

William Birkin came out carrying a printed report.

"Relax, Leon. The G-Embryo showed no rejection response." William flipped to the next page. "More than that — the embryo's genetic sequence completed a perfect recombination inside her body."

"The fatal chest wound has healed completely. What's more remarkable is her muscle density, bone strength, and neural reaction speed. All of it now surpasses the T-Virus's upper limits across the board."

"She shed the G-Virus's greatest flaw, the chaotic, uncontrolled mutation. And she kept the power."

William pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"Right now, she is a perfect G-Creature with zero mutation risk."

"And just like you, she retained the ability to evolve in a positive direction when faced with an overwhelming threat."

Leon let out a slow breath. The weight he'd been carrying finally settled back where it belonged.

As long as Claire was alright. That was all that mattered.

"You've worked hard." Leon patted William on the shoulder.

"There are still side effects, however." William's tone shifted.

Leon's stomach clenched right back up.

"What side effects?"

"A massive increase in appetite, her basal metabolic rate is five times that of a normal person. I know, that's not the main issue..." William dry-coughed twice, his eyes sliding somewhere off to the side.

"As a being who has perfectly fused with the G-Virus, she will have an instinctive... sense of closeness toward the source."

He finished the sentence, tucked the report neatly under his arm, and got out of there at an impressive pace.

Leon stood where he was.

His expression was something to behold.

A sense of closeness.

What a wonderfully tactful way to put it.

But the thing had already happened. Avoiding it wasn't going to solve anything.

He took a deep breath, pushed the door open, and walked in.

The ward was quiet. Just the steady, unhurried beeping of the monitors.

Claire was leaning against the pillow, wearing an oversized patient's gown. The color had come back to her face, more than come back. She looked healthier than he'd ever seen her, her skin carrying a luminous glow that hadn't been there before.

She turned her head at the sound of the door.

Their eyes met.

The air pressure in the room dropped for no reason Leon could explain. The atmosphere went thick.

He pulled a chair over and sat down beside the bed.

He could stare down a horde of tens of thousands of walkers without blinking. Right now, he had absolutely no idea what to do with his hands.

"How are you feeling?" It came out dry as dust.

"Better than I ever have." The corner of her mouth curved. "I'm pretty sure I could kill a Tyrant with one punch right now."

Leon laughed. It didn't sound convincing.

Nothing more to say.

Silence.

The genuinely deadly kind.

Images from the helicopter's rear cabin pushed into his mind whether he wanted them or not. Howling wind. The dim, swinging light. The G-Virus's breeding instinct wrapped around his brain and squeezing out everything else.

It had been a savage, mindless ravaging. No room for reason. No room for anything.

Fabric torn apart. Scorching skin. Claire's cries she couldn't hold back.

In that state, he hadn't known what gentleness was. Only the most primal possession.

And the worst part.

Chris. That obsessive, overprotective brother. Right on the other side of a thin cabin door the entire time.

Just thinking about it made Leon's scalp lift off his skull.

Chris pounding on the door from outside. Him on the inside, furiously,

Even picturing it was enough to make him want to dig himself a hole and pull the dirt in after him.

Running into Chris back at the camp after this. He couldn't even begin to think about that.

"About that..." Leon rubbed his nose. His eyes found somewhere else to be. "What happened in the cabin... I'm sorry."

Claire's cheeks went faintly pink.

"My mind wasn't clear. The G-Virus's instincts overrode my reason." Leon gritted his teeth and said it plainly. "I acted like an animal."

"Whatever the circumstances — that wasn't fair to you."

Claire looked at him. This man with awkwardness written across every inch of his face.

She laughed.

She reached out and took his hand where it rested on the edge of the bed.

"Leon."

Her voice was soft.

"You didn't force me."

"I was the one who took off my own clothes and climbed on top of you."

"That was my choice. Neither of us had any other option at the time." Her fingers laced through his and locked. "If it happened again, I would do the same thing."

"To save you."

"And for... myself."

She laid it all out. No hedging, no pulling back.

The things she'd kept buried, too afraid to say out loud, after going through death and transformation together, they were finally in the open. All of it. No overwrought hesitation, no drawn-out circling around. Just the most direct thing she could say.

Leon closed his hand around hers and felt the warmth of her palm.

"As for Chris..." Claire blinked. A glint of mischief surfaced. "You'd better keep your distance for a while. He spent all of last night sharpening his combat knife in the hallway."

Leon's mouth twitched.

Yeah. Getting through Chris was not going to be easy.

"Let him sharpen it." Leon exhaled slowly, and with his free hand pulled her into his arms. "Worst case, I'll let him stab me a couple times. Work it out of his system."

......

Half an hour later.

Leon walked out of the underground medical center feeling lighter than he had in days.

Claire's situation was resolved. Now it was time to deal with the other top-priority problem back at camp.

Food.

Which was also the real reason he'd been so insistent on going to Washington.

He followed the corridor to D-Block, at the far rear of the camp. The area had originally been the forest zone in the prison's northern section. It had since been converted into a massive agricultural zone right along the outer wall, and the centerpiece was several enormous temperature-controlled glass greenhouses.

This was also where the agricultural experts had set up shop.

The moment he stepped inside, a thick, rich wave of greenery hit him in the face. High temperature. Heavy humidity.

James Marcus was standing in front of a row of cultivation tanks in a filthy white lab coat, clipboard in hand, arguing with Hanson so hard both their faces had gone red.

Hanson, the top-tier agricultural scientist Leon had brought back from the Washington bunker.

Right now he was flushed and wild-eyed, a fistful of soil clenched in one hand, swinging it around as he yelled.

"This violates the laws of biology! Marcus! You are absolutely insane!"

"Could you please show some basic respect for natural science!"

"At this rate of cell division, the plant's genetic chain will collapse!"

Marcus didn't bother with ceremony. He spat directly in Hanson's face.

"Laws? Leon can blow up an armored vehicle with one punch, and you want to talk to me about laws? Isn't common knowledge exactly there to be broken?"

"I was studying the Progenitor Virus when you were still memorizing passages out of a textbook in elementary school!"

He jabbed the clipboard hard.

"Use the concentration ratio I specified. Now."

Leon stepped forward and cleared his throat.

Both men turned at the same time.

The moment Marcus saw who it was, he dropped the clipboard and came rushing over with the expression of a man who had just received divine revelation.

"Leon! Perfect timing!"

He grabbed Leon's arm and hauled him over to one of the cultivation tanks.

"From my observations, the defining property of the T-Veronica Virus is exactly this, it shatters the growth ceiling of plant life. Neutralize the violent toxicity, preserve the high-speed cellular proliferation, and it becomes the most perfect plant catalyst that has ever existed."

"You need to bring Alexia Ashford here. Have her use her abilities to accelerate ripening."

Leon shook his head. "No need. I can do it."

Marcus blinked, then let it go. Whoever held the ability was the same to him. Getting hung up on that wasn't the point right now.

"Fine. Try accelerating this one."

Leon looked where Marcus was pointing.

Rich, dark soil in the cultivation tank. They'd already used the virus to modify mutant fruit trees before, that work had produced mountains of raw data on plant mutation, and more than a few super-soldiers in the process. Now they had Hanson's contribution on top of it: the finest pre-catastrophe agricultural genetic modification technology the old world had produced.

Two separate groups of madmen, thrown together.

The result was something that made Leon's skin prickle.

Hanson might have been cursing Marcus with his mouth, but his hands told a different story. He picked up a dropper with careful precision and let a single drop of pale green nutrient solution fall onto a patch of soil where a seed had just been buried.

Then he straightened and gestured. Leon could begin.

Leon fixed his eyes on the soil.

He reached out with his senses toward the seed buried underneath.

Grow.

One second.

Two seconds.

CRACK!

A sliver of vivid green forced itself up through the dark soil and broke into open air.

Then the plant hit fast-forward.

Dozens of times normal speed, visible to the naked eye. The stalk shot upward and thickened. Leaf after leaf unfurled and spread. The whole structure climbing, filling out, reaching toward the greenhouse ceiling like it had somewhere urgent to be.

Under 3 minutes.

A corn stalk standing a full 2 meters tall. Fully mature. Right in front of them.

6 ears of corn clung to the stalk, each one as thick as an adult's forearm. The husks split open on their own, revealing the kernels inside: golden, luminous, dense and heavy with grain.

Leon pulled in a sharp breath.

Holy shit.

3 minutes. Just 3 minutes from a bare seed to a fully loaded mature plant, with his ripening ability layered on top of the virus modification.

"You see this!"

Marcus was shaking. His whole body. He jabbed a finger at the corn stalk.

"Super-plant trial cultivation — successful!"

He slapped Hanson on the back hard enough that Hanson nearly went face-first into the cultivation tank.

"Sufficient water and nutrient solution, combined with Leon's ripening acceleration —"

"The growth cycle compresses from several months to 3 minutes!"

Hanson had completely forgotten he was supposed to be arguing. He stared at the corn stalk the way some men look at a masterpiece painting, reverent, lost, unable to look away.

Then he dropped to his knees and started digging. Clawing the soil back with his bare hands until he'd opened up a pit wide enough to see the root structure clearly.

He finally sat back.

"Yield doubled..."

"The root system reaches 10 meters underground. It pulls in every nutrient available to it."

He looked up. His voice had gone quiet, which was more alarming than the shouting.

"It's not just corn. Wheat. Potatoes. Soybeans. Every crop we have can be modified with this system."

Leon listened to the two of them, and a flash of raw exhilaration ran through his chest.

The food crisis was finished. Shattered completely.

Roll this technology out at scale, add his own periodic ripening acceleration to the cycle, and their camp would never worry about food again. Not ever.

They'd have enough surplus to feed livestock.

➤ Next: Ashley Agrees to the Modified G-Virus Injection