[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 775 - Look at What Your Dear Son Has Done
BANG!
The muzzle spat a burst of orange flame.
The nine-millimeter round tore through the air, straight for Leon's back.
Time seemed to slow.
Negan, kneeling on the ground, felt the fawning smile freeze on his face, then shatter into pure horror.
"What the fuck!"
He was screaming inside his own skull.
This idiot who came out of nowhere actually pulled the trigger!
Negan could have eaten Ron alive right then.
That man could drop from hundreds of meters in the sky and walk away.
And you're going at him with a piece-of-shit handgun?
Even if you somehow killed him, did you think the blond woman standing next to him would just let us go?
That's everybody dead. Every single one of us.
Simon froze too. He'd just thrown his gun down, and now both hands hung in midair, locked there like a statue.
Everyone was staring at the same thing.
The bullet hit Leon in the back.
The impact sound it made was extraordinarily dull.
Like a hammer dropped onto a thick slab of steel.
No blood sprayed.
No scream. No collapse.
Leon didn't even sway.
He just paused. Half a second.
Then he slowly turned around.
No pain on his face. Only a calm that made your skin crawl.
He looked coldly at Ron Anderson, standing in the drainage ditch.
Ron had gone completely still.
Both hands still gripping the gun. Still locked in his shooting stance. A thin curl of smoke still rising from the barrel.
"This... that's impossible..." Ron whispered.
He had aimed dead center on the heart. He had hit it.
So why was this man completely fine?
Ron's sanity broke.
He clenched his teeth and curled his fingers back toward the trigger, trying to empty the magazine.
He never got the second shot.
Alice, standing behind Leon, went ice-cold in an instant.
Someone dared to shoot her man. Right in front of her.
Death wish.
She didn't even move a finger.
A violent, invisible wave of Telekinesis detonated from her body.
Like an unseen mountain dropping from the sky, it slammed straight down onto Ron.
BOOM!
Ron didn't even have time to scream.
He was crushed flat into the mud of the drainage ditch in an instant, pinned there by something he couldn't see and couldn't fight.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
The sound of bones grinding was clearly audible from the road.
The gun ripped free of his hands and flew.
His limbs twisted at angles that made no sense, his whole body mashed tight against the ground like a toad caught under a giant boot. His mouth gaped open but not a breath of air would go in. The pressure forced his eyeballs to bulge outward. His face went purple-red.
If Alice added just a fraction more force, Ron's organs and bones would be pulped in an instant.
"No!"
Jessie Anderson finally snapped back.
She let out a shriek that tore right through you.
But she didn't throw herself toward her son in the ditch.
She scrambled and tumbled straight toward Leon.
Jessie wasn't stupid.
Her son had just shot someone she absolutely could not afford to offend.
She had to beg.
She reached Leon's side, hands shooting out toward him, then pulling back, too afraid to make contact.
"I'm sorry — I'm so sorry!"
Her face was soaked. Her voice was shaking.
"Please let me see, please, let me see your wound—"
Leon glanced at her. Said nothing. Didn't stop her.
Jessie reached out with trembling hands and felt for the spot on his back where the bullet had struck.
Her heart was in her throat.
She was terrified of feeling warm blood.
But.
Her fingers found the fabric.
A scorched hole, coin-sized, edges blackened.
She slipped her fingers through it and touched Leon's skin directly.
No blood.
No wound.
Not even a broken layer of skin.
The muscle underneath was solid as pig iron.
Jessie's mind went blank.
Then her gaze dropped to the ground near Leon's feet.
Something lay there glinting yellow in the dirt.
A bullet.
Completely deformed. What had been a sharp-tipped projectile now looked like something a hydraulic press had gone to work on, a flat, squashed disc of metal.
The moment it hit Leon's body, his flesh had simply crushed it.
Jessie's eyes went wide, nearly popping from their sockets.
She stared at the deformed slug. Then at Leon's completely unharmed back.
"What... what is..."
She dropped straight down onto the ground, and forgot to breathe entirely.
The people around her had all seen it.
The whole scene went dead silent.
Just the wind moving across the road.
Negan was still on his knees. If his jaw came detached, it would have been on the ground by now. He was staring at that flattened slug, and cold sweat was pouring down his forehead in streams.
"Good God..." he screamed inside his head. "A bullet can't even pierce him? Is this thing a goddamn Terminator?"
He was deeply, profoundly grateful that he'd dropped to his knees fast enough.
If he had given the order to open fire,
The hundred-odd people standing behind him would probably be scattered chunks of meat by now.
Simon had gone completely stupid with shock. He swallowed, and found he couldn't get it down. He finally understood why that man had looked at all of them the way you look at a colony of ants.
Because in that man's eyes, that's exactly what they were. Less than that, even.
Not far off, Carlos was lying flat on the edge of an iron sheet, having watched the whole thing from start to finish.
Leon looked like a perfectly normal human build.
And yet he had stopped a nine-millimeter round with pure muscle and turned it into a metal disc.
"This bastard is an absolute monster," Carlos muttered under his breath, and immediately slapped a hand over his own mouth.
Leon paid no attention to the stares.
A weapon like that couldn't break his skin, let alone draw blood. It hadn't left so much as a red mark. After the G-Virus had fully fused with his body, his physical defense had long since moved past anything conventional firearms could touch. Taking a hit from an RPG wouldn't be particularly difficult either.
An ordinary bullet hitting him was no different from a mosquito bite. Honestly, probably less damaging than a mosquito.
But his expression right now was turning ugly.
He reached up and undid the buttons on his coat, methodically shrugging the black tactical trench coat off his shoulders.
His best piece of clothing.
Windproof. Warm. And it looked damn good on him.
Now the back had a coin-sized hole burnt through it, edges black and scorched.
In an apocalypse where every decent piece of kit was irreplaceable, high-quality clothing like this was gone the moment it was gone.
Leon's eyes got colder.
He held the ruined coat in one hand, gaze dropping down to Jessie Anderson, still slumped on the ground.
She shuddered the moment his eyes landed on her.
"Le... Leon..." She stumbled over the word, voice thick with tears.
Leon held the coat out toward her.
"Take a look."
"Look at what your dear son has done."
Jessie stared at the scorched hole and the tears wouldn't stop.
She knew. Leon didn't care about the bullet. What he cared about was that someone had dared to challenge his authority.
"I'm sorry! I'm truly sorry!"
"He's lost his mind, he's insane — please, I'm begging you, don't hold it against him!"
She was weeping hard enough to break something.
"I'll do anything. Anything. Just please spare his life!"
Leon let out a cold laugh and dropped the ruined coat onto the ground.
"Spare his life?"
He turned and looked at Ron Anderson, pinned flat in the mud by Alice's Telekinesis.
Ron no longer had the strength to roll his eyes back. Blood was seeping from all seven orifices.
Another half minute of this pressure and he would suffocate.
"He dared to shoot at me," Leon said quietly. "Do you think he still has the right to go on living?"
Jessie went rigid.
She looked at Leon in despair. Then at her son, on the verge of his last breath.
She couldn't find a single word to say.
And really, she should be counting herself lucky that Leon wasn't an ordinary man.
If he were, that shot would have already killed him.
And then what grounds would she have to beg for anything at all?
➤ Next: You Always Have to Pay a Price for Your Own Actions