[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 754 - Ashley Agrees to the Modified G-Virus Injection

A month passed in the blink of an eye.

D-Block at Atlanta Prison had become a vast sea of green.

Hanson led the agricultural experts he'd pulled out of the Washington bunker, and the whole crew worked like a colony of ants that didn't know how to stop. For an entire month, the lights in the underground lab and the greenhouses never once went dark. They buried themselves in soil and cultivation tanks day and night, frantically extracting gene sequences from the super-plants, running endless cross-breeding trials, grinding out improved seeds batch by batch.

Once the seed stock hit scale, the subsequent planting wouldn't need Leon going row by row to accelerate the crops by hand.

Hanson had beaten his chest and sworn it: these improved seeds could be thrown into the wasteland outside, given a splash of water, and they'd tear through the earth on their own. The gene sequences were that savage.

But right now, with the camp's food stores completely bottomed out, that long-term solution was useless. Far water couldn't quench a nearby fire.

Leon and Alexia still had to take the field themselves.

The open ground of D-Block sat under a hard, glaring sun.

Alexia wore a set of slightly oversized work clothes, her gold hair tied loosely behind her head. She crouched at the edge of a furrow with both hands pressed flat into the damp earth.

The divine hauteur was gone. So was the annihilating fury that had once seemed ready to burn the world to the ground. What remained looked like nothing so much as a gardener who had found something worth paying attention to.

Beneath the surface, dark-red T-Veronica vines spread in silence, drawing moisture and nutrients up from deep in the soil and routing them, with quiet precision, to the root of every single seed.

Leon stood beside her. His mind moved.

The ability he'd gained through Genetic Assimilation detonated outward.

Green shoots punched through the soil in vast, spreading waves. They shot upward at a speed the naked eye could track, stalks thickening, ears forming, fruit swelling and setting in the space of minutes.

Working together, the two of them were terrifyingly efficient.

In under half a day, dozens of acres of super-corn and giant potatoes stood fully ripened.

"Harvest!"

Rick was on the ridge between the fields, trembling from head to foot, bellowing until his voice cracked.

The heavy combines they'd scrounged from the countryside rumbled in. Tons of corn cobs cascaded across the open ground and piled into small mountains. The potatoes came out of the earth one by one, each the size of a small watermelon, skin stretched drum-tight, swollen with starch.

Every survivor in the camp came running.

They looked at the mountains of food, and a lot of them went straight to their knees. They covered their faces and sobbed.

In the weeks before, with the warehouse empty, there had been people in the camp who couldn't sleep every single night. Just lying there, eaten alive by panic in the dark.

No food was a death sentence. Everyone knew it.

But now.

The panic was gone. Buried under sheer, crushing abundance.

Shane grabbed a potato that had to weigh three pounds.

"Damn." He turned it over in his hands. "I've never seen a harvest this insane in my life."

"This thing's practically a watermelon."

He was grinning like an idiot, and he didn't care.

With this stockpile as a foundation, Atlanta Prison was finally, completely stable.

But the man who had made it happen couldn't smile.

Underground Medical Center.

Ashley lay in the hospital bed.

One month. That was all it had been. But her belly had already swollen to the size of a woman days away from delivery. The skin stretched tight and high across her abdomen, and you could see the bluish-purple veins beneath it, restless, pulsing, wrong.

That wasn't even the worst of it.

The worst of it was Ashley herself.

She had become unrecognizable.

The full cheeks were deeply sunken. Her golden hair had gone dry and brittle, and every morning the pillow was covered in broken clumps of it. Her skin was paper-white, bloodless, and it had started to sag, the slow, creeping deterioration of something being depleted faster than it could replenish.

She looked like a tree being drained dry.

She ate enormous quantities of high-calorie food every day. It was completely digested in under half an hour. And she was still so weak she couldn't get out of bed on her own.

Ashley had been strengthened by the virus. That was the baseline. And she was still being reduced to this.

The reason was simple: the life Leon had planted in her was too dominant. Too hungry. Too strong.

Leon sat at the bedside, both hands locked around Ashley's skeletal fingers.

William Birkin and James Marcus stood at the foot of the bed, a thick stack of examination reports between them, faces grave.

"The situation is worse than we anticipated," Marcus said.

He pushed his glasses up.

"The fetus is developing far too quickly. It has inherited the special viruses present in your body, the Solar Stairway, the mutant recessive genes, the T-Virus." He paused. "And the fetus appears to have developed an extremely powerful instinctive response to the apocalypse as an external threat. A survival drive. To live, it must develop fast. It must reach maturity as quickly as possible."

He turned a page and pointed to the data.

"But that rate of development requires a massive, continuous energy supply. Ashley has been strengthened by the virus, but her body still cannot produce energy at that level."

William picked up from beside him.

"So the fetus is drawing directly on the mother's life force. That is what is causing Ashley's physical decline." He said it flatly, like a clinical fact. "At this rate of consumption, her internal organs will completely fail within a week. Mother and child both die before the birth."

Leon would have torn the life force out of his own body and poured it into hers if he knew how.

He could crush a Tyrant with his bare hands. He'd done it. But faced with the small life inside Ashley's belly, the one quietly draining her dry, all of that was worthless. Useless strength with nowhere to go.

This couldn't be delayed any further.

Marcus drew a slow breath.

"The only solution is to make the mother strong enough to sustain this. Strong enough that a drain with no bottom still can't kill her." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver case. "And as we've discussed before, the most effective way to address the accelerated aging caused by the fetus's rapid growth is to supplement with the G-Virus."

He opened the case.

Inside, resting quietly, was a single syringe. The serum inside it was a deep, luminous blue.

"A complete G-Virus sample."

Marcus's gaze moved to Ashley on the bed.

"Ashley. You need to be injected with this."

"Like Claire Redfield, use the G-Virus's genetic recombination and unlimited evolution to completely rebuild your body. And through your body, the child's as well." His voice was steady. "Only then will you survive. Only then will the child be born safely."

Ashley turned her head toward the syringe.

She knew what the G-Virus was.

The old version of her had looked at the G-Virus like a miracle cure, with no real grasp of what it meant. But she had seen Leon transform. She had watched what he became. The memory sat in her chest like a stone.

She hesitated.

"Will I become a monster?" The fear in her voice was quiet but real. "Will the baby?"

Two successful cases. She knew that. She was still afraid.

"No." William's tone left no room for doubt. "This is the complete version. The defect causing disordered mutation has been eliminated. Leon and Claire Redfield verified that ahead of you." He held her gaze. "And you won't be the only one who benefits. The fetus's own genes will undergo positive evolution as a result."

Marcus walked to the head of the bed and stood over her.

"Listen, girl."

"This is a brutal world."

"The child in your belly is not going to be an ordinary person. That was never on the table."

He didn't soften it. He didn't frame it gently or dress it up. He tore the reality open and showed it to her raw.

Leon's child was destined to be the camp's future. The successor. The only one this place would ever truly accept. Put any other person's child in that position, from anywhere in the camp, and no one would follow. Not one person.

So this child's survival wasn't just important. It was critical.

And for that matter: even if another woman carried Leon's child someday, she would face the exact same problem. The accelerated growth wasn't going away. It was in the genes.

Ashley tightened her grip on Leon's hand.

"I'll take it."

The fear in her eyes didn't vanish all at once. It faded, slowly, like a light being turned down. What replaced it was something quieter and harder.

"I want our child to grow up healthy."

She let go of Leon's hand. Lay flat on the bed. Let her eyes close.

"Go ahead."

Marcus didn't waste another word.

He lifted the syringe, pressed the plunger gently to expel the air, and checked the needle. Leon stepped back half a pace to give him room, his fist clenched so tight his knuckles ached.

Marcus moved to the bedside. He wiped Ashley's slender arm with an alcohol swab, two slow passes, and set the needle against her vein.

The deep-blue G-Virus serum began to move.

Slowly. Steadily. Into her.

➤ Next: A Trip to Antarctica