[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 762 - I've Been Waiting Here for You for a Long Time

Leon turned his head toward Alexia Ashford, standing not far away.

She was frozen.

Shock and disbelief filled her eyes as she stared blankly at the giant tree in the center of the hall, its tentacles thrashing wildly. She couldn't process it. Couldn't move.

She genuinely had no idea.

Fifteen years ago, when she pressed the button for the cryogenic protocol, that plant — her test subject — had flatlined. Every sign of life, gone. In an Antarctic environment that dropped dozens of degrees below zero, survival was simply impossible.

And yet here it was. Not just alive. Evolved into something with a terrifying predatory instinct.

She had confirmed it herself before leaving. It was dead. A dead plant.

Leon watched her, his eyes going flat and cold.

His psychic probing could only pull vague impressions from Alexia, T-Veronica was, at its core, not inferior to his own G-Virus, which made deep reads nearly impossible. And now that she'd potentially slipped beyond his full control, she might have found a way to block him entirely.

He didn't have time to work out whether she was acting or genuinely clueless.

Simple rule: whoever cleared the op takes the blame when it goes wrong. Alexia was the only person who'd had prior knowledge. That made her the prime suspect.

Better to kill a wrong than let a threat walk.

The hall had become a war zone.

More vines cascaded from the dome above.

"Open fire! Try to cut those tentacles!"

Shawn held his assault rifle and hammered the trigger in long sweeping bursts. Shell casings rained onto the metal floor with sharp, rhythmic clinks. Rick and Merle were already in it, their combined fire temporarily holding back the vines reaching for them.

But ordinary bullets just chipped bark. Surface splinters. No real damage.

More screaming from somewhere deeper in the hall.

Alexia could wait.

Leon pulled in a slow breath.

The blood in his veins ignited.

The muscles along his right side swelled at a visible, grotesque pace, dark red tissue tearing straight through the sleeve of his cold-weather suit.

CRACK!

Bones shifted. A massive eyeball erupted from his right shoulder, bursting free of flesh.

Dark red chitinous plating surged across his right arm and chest, hardening into insectoid armor that looked like it could stop a tank round. His fingers twisted, elongated, curved into razor-edged claws.

G1 Form.

His perfect killing shape. Completely under his control.

Leon lunged. The monstrous claw seized the nearest vine and ripped downward with everything he had.

BOOM!

A chunk of concrete tore free from the dome. The vine, root and all, crashed to the floor.

The tree felt it.

A low, resonant groan rolled up through its trunk. Then every one of its thickest vines abandoned the others. Dozens of them swung around at once, closing in on Leon like a storm of giant pythons.

Leon gave a cold snort.

He didn't retreat. His legs fired, launching him forward like a round out of a cannon, straight into them.

Mid-air, he snapped his left hand.

Orange-red fire exploded in his palm.

Alexia's pyrokinesis ability.

He wrapped the flames up his arm and swung.

BOOM!

A massive fireball screamed into the oncoming mass of vines and hit like a battering ram. The dried bark caught instantly. The vines writhed and thrashed in the air, burning.

The trunk began secreting something viscous, a dark sap oozing from its surface in a desperate attempt to smother the flames.

Leon landed. 10 meters from the trunk. Less.

He raised his head. The giant eyeball on his shoulder locked onto the center of the trunk with absolute focus.

An invisible shockwave detonated from his mind.

Telekinesis.

Not a push. Not a pull. He'd compressed it into a sledgehammer and he brought it down on the trunk with everything it had.

BANG!

Wood fragments sprayed outward. The bark — hard as iron, caved in, a massive crater punched clean through it, the fibrous interior fully exposed.

"Die."

His claw drove into the crater.

The fire ability inside him surged down his arm and poured into the tree without restraint.

RUMBLE. RUMBLE. RUMBLE.

Thunder-deep explosions chained through the tree's body one after another. Flames jetted from every crack in the trunk, from every gap in the bark, a dozen vents all erupting at once.

15 years under the ice. 15 years of surviving what should have killed it.

It was over now.

The massive trunk carbonized and buckled. The vines still flailing in the air went slack all at once, dropping dead to the floor, shattering into heaps of scorched black.

Leon stood in front of the ashes and let the G1 Form recede.

The dark red armor retracted. The eyeball pulled back into his shoulder. The claws shortened into fingers. He looked human again.

He looked down.

At the center of the ash pile sat a seed the size of a fist. Dark green. Strange patterns covering its surface. Emitting a faint, cold glow.

Leon crouched, picked it up, and dropped it in his pocket.

He stood and turned around.

The tree was dead. Around the hall, everyone had shifted to treating the wounded. Leon didn't spare them a glance. He walked straight toward Alexia Ashford.

His footsteps were steady. Each one landed with a dull, hollow echo.

She watched him come. Her face had gone white.

"Give me an explanation."

He stopped in front of her. His voice was completely flat. But the killing intent beneath it made the air feel thick, like the room itself had gotten heavier.

Alexia drew a slow breath and held his gaze.

"I don't know."

"I swear on my character," she said, and there was no performance in it, her tone was dead serious. "I swear on the honor of the Ashford family. I have hidden nothing from you. About this plant being alive — I had no knowledge of it. None."

"When I left this place 15 years ago, it had no signs of life. I don't know why it became what it is."

Leon looked at her.

A cold smile touched his mouth.

Character. Honor.

In the apocalypse, those words weren't worth the air it took to say them.

He believed in one thing: absolute control.

"Is that so," he said.

He held her eyes. Inside the Mental Network in his mind, he issued a single, simple command.

"Suicide."

His voice reached her ears.

More precisely, it detonated in the depths of her consciousness.

Alexia's body locked up.

Her eyes flooded with struggle and pain.

The drop of Leon's blood living inside her screamed for obedience, loud and frantic, overriding everything.

Her arm began to rise.

She hadn't told it to.

But just as her hand moved toward her own throat, it stopped.

Her arm shook violently. Sweat broke out across her forehead in large, cold drops.

The T-Veronica Virus inside her was fighting back. Tearing at the foreign command, refusing to let it through. 15 years of complete fusion had given her a self-awareness and a mental barrier that almost nothing could break.

She didn't want to die.

She had worked so hard to put down that brittle, hollow sense of divinity. She had actually tried, tried to belong to something, to live like a person instead of a god.

She was not dying here. Not like this. Not for nothing.

Alexia clenched her teeth until her lip split. Blood ran down the corner of her mouth.

In the end, T-Veronica won.

She refused to execute the command.

Leon stood behind her and watched her body shaking. His expression went very still, and very dark.

He understood now.

The blood had worked. She did carry a compulsion to submit. But submission wasn't the same as absolute control. As long as her survival instinct stayed strong, as long as her sense of self remained intact, she could resist him whenever she chose.

That was a live grenade with no pin.

If the day came when they faced something worse, something bigger, and she decided to bury a blade in his back at the wrong moment, there would be no recovering from it.

Alexia finally pushed through the last of it. She collapsed to the ground, completely wrung out, pulling in ragged, desperate breaths.

She turned her head and looked up at Leon.

Grievance. Despair. Both of them there, plain and unguarded.

She had given everything. She had burned her own life force to build walls for Atlanta. And this man had never trusted her. Not once. Not from the bottom of it.

"You still don't believe me." Her voice came out bitter.

Leon looked down at her from where he stood.

"How am I supposed to?"

"You almost killed Claire Redfield. You poisoned hundreds of people to death in this ice pit. Whatever humanity means, you don't have it."

"And now you can resist my commands."

By his old standard, an uncontrollable element was a bullet to the skull. No hesitation.

But he thought about the vine wall wrapped around Atlanta's perimeter. Solid and dense and impenetrable. He thought about the image of Alexia at the prison, working quietly to accelerate the crops.

Contributions don't lie.

"You know I can kill you right now."

"Because of the dome you built for the camp, I'm letting you walk today. But I'm not interested in having you as an enemy down the road."

"And I'll say this plainly — if you decide you can't live with that and come at me anyway, I will make sure you spend the rest of your life in pain. I can do that. Don't test it."

He turned away.

"Get out."

"Leave. Leave my sight and don't come back."

"If you show up in front of me again, I will personally twist your head off. That's a promise."

Alexia sat with his words and felt the sting of them settle somewhere deep.

She hadn't known anything. She hadn't done anything. And he was doing this to her anyway, on suspicion alone.

The hall had quieted. The wounded were being looked after. The only sounds left were Simon and the logistics team shifting equipment, metal knocking against metal.

No one spoke up for her.

Merle and Shawn were watching her the way you watch something that might snap without warning.

Alexia pushed herself slowly up off the ground.

She looked at Leon's broad back. Her eyes burned, just slightly.

"I'm truly sorry. I'm leaving." Her voice was quiet. "All the T-Veronica data is in Laboratory Three on sublevel two. The password is 762456anqG547y."

Leon heard her. He turned back to the others and kept moving supplies. He didn't say a word.

Alexia finally lost the fight with her tears.

No matter what she did. No matter how much she gave. In this man's eyes she would always be exactly that, a broken, damned thing that shouldn't exist.

He would always remember what had happened to Claire Redfield.

He was never going to accept her.

She stopped arguing with herself about it.

There was nothing left to say. She knew that now.

If you won't have me, then let us each find our own way.

She didn't want revenge. She just wanted somewhere quiet, somewhere empty, where she could be alone.

Alexia turned and walked toward the elevator without a word.

The doors closed behind her.

The noise and the warmth of the group disappeared on the other side of that sealed metal wall.

......

The Antarctic ice sheet. The blizzard hadn't let up.

Alexia drove a snow-track vehicle she'd taken from the listening station, moving through the white expanse with no destination in mind. The cabin heater was cranked to maximum. She couldn't feel it.

She didn't know where she was going.

The world stretched out in every direction, vast and empty, and there was nowhere in it for her.

The T-Veronica Virus, the thing she had spent her entire life perfecting, the source of everything she'd ever been proud of, was her curse now. That was all it was.

A monster. Abandoned by everyone. Unwanted.

Tears fell down her pale cheeks.

She felt tired in a way that had no bottom to it.

Maybe this laughable life should have ended in that cryogenic chamber 15 years ago.

She lifted her foot off the accelerator.

The tracked vehicle coasted and then stopped, sitting silent in the blizzard.

She pushed the door open. The cold hit her instantly, a savage, bone-deep cold that flooded the cabin in seconds.

She stepped out onto the ice. Minus 50 degrees. She closed her eyes.

All she had to do was sever the T-Veronica Virus inside her. In a few minutes she would become an ice sculpture that would never rot. Maybe that was where she'd always been heading.

She was almost ready.

Then a shape appeared in the blizzard.

A figure. Walking toward her through the wind and the deep snow, each step deliberate, steady, unhurried.

Alexia's eyes snapped open.

There was no one else on this continent. There couldn't be.

The figure kept coming. Closer and closer, until it stopped less than 5 meters away.

A woman. Black tactical trench coat, fitted to the body. Short blonde hair whipping in the wind. A face that was almost beautiful, wearing a smile that was cold and proud and completely at ease.

Alex Wesker.

Alex looked at her, at the state of her, ragged and hollowed out, and that smile deepened at the corners.

"Alexia Ashford."

Her voice cut clean through the wind.

"I've been waiting for you for quite some time."

➤ Next: Anything Beyond Control Is a Ticking Time Bomb