[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 783 - Completely Over

The third floor.

A ten-meter drop.

Concrete below.

Fifty-fifty odds of dying. And even if she survived, she'd be shattered.

"Sherry!"

Amber and Tania screamed, faces draining white with terror.

Dwight stood frozen.

His first instinct wasn't to lunge forward and grab her.

Because deep down, he'd always known Sherry as a woman who could swallow her pride and endure anything to stay alive. How could she actually do it?

And yet.

Not a flicker of hesitation in her body.

She went straight over the sill and dropped, no looking back, no reaching out, nothing.

Dwight's mind went completely blank.

He watched Sherry hurl herself toward death without a second thought.

Sherry closed her eyes.

The terror of weightlessness hit her, but underneath it, a release she had never felt before.

Finally. It can all end.

No more staring at Negan's disgusting face. No more watching Dwight wear that spineless, pathetic expression.

But.

The bone-shattering agony she'd been bracing for never came.

She had barely fallen half a meter past the window's edge when an invisible force exploded from every direction at once, wrapping around her entire body and locking her in place.

Sherry's fall jerked to a dead stop.

She hung suspended in midair.

The screaming in the corridor cut off like a switch had been thrown.

Sherry slowly opened her eyes.

The ground was 10 meters below her feet. She could feel the night wind sliding cool across her cheeks.

But her body didn't move an inch, held steady, as though cradled in the palm of some enormous invisible hand.

Click.

A door opened nearby.

Leon strolled out with one hand tucked in his pocket, completely unhurried.

He raised a finger. A single, lazy flick.

Sherry's suspended body drifted backward, drawn by something she couldn't see, and floated straight back in through the window.

The force vanished. Her legs buckled, and she dropped hard onto the corridor floor.

She sat there gulping air in great heaving breaths, head tilted up, staring blankly at Leon standing a few meters away.

Before all this, Tania and Amber had told her: this man could take bullets. Could ride a steel plate down from hundreds of meters in the sky.

Sherry hadn't really believed it.

That was Negan's version of events, after all. Probably something he'd made up to protect his ego.

Taking bullets? Flying?

Pure fantasy.

But now, having lived through what just happened with her own body, she believed every single word.

That defiance of physics. That crushing force with no seam to push against. It had been real. It had acted on her.

So everything Amber and the others said was true.

So cozying up to this man actually worked.

As long as she could hold on to this tree, what was Negan?

What were the Saviors?

In this hellish place, for the first time, she could see a thread of hope, hope of surviving, and surviving like a human being.

Across the corridor, Dwight still stood planted in place like a post.

He hadn't taken a single step. Not from the beginning. Not once.

He hadn't said a word to stop her. Hadn't said a word of concern.

He had watched Sherry jump. Watched her get pulled back. And on that half-ruined face of his, the resentment born from Sherry's "betrayal" was still sitting right there.

Leon glanced at him.

The way this man's brain worked was something else entirely.

To keep himself alive, he'd willingly handed his own woman to that old sleaze Negan. Watched her get harassed every single day and took it without a word.

And now look.

Leon hadn't done a damn thing — just had these women give him a massage — and suddenly Dwight couldn't stomach it? Suddenly his pride was wounded? Suddenly he felt cuckolded?

He could stomach handing his wife to Negan. But not this?

Leon didn't bother trying to explain himself.

In this world, the type he had the least patience for was exactly this, the kind who only threw their weight around at home. No spine when it came to protecting his own woman, but plenty of impotent fury to take out on her.

Don't give him that line about Sherry being in Negan's hands. About being afraid to act for fear of hurting her.

If Dwight actually had any guts, he was a lieutenant. He had men who trusted him. One bullet into Negan, and he could've made himself the boss. What could a dead Negan do to Sherry then?

Strip it down to what it was: a coward too afraid to die.

Dressing up his own weakness as sacrifice for love. Enough to make anyone sick.

Sherry sat on the floor and slowly turned her head toward Dwight.

She had thought, when she went over that sill, that he would at least rush forward and grab her. At least show a flicker of panic.

Nothing.

He just stood there and watched her go to her death.

And even after she was pulled back, he hadn't moved. Hadn't come to her.

Sherry looked at his face, and the very last trace of something, the last ember, went out inside her.

In truth, it had been over since the day she was forced to sign her name on Negan's wife roster. Dwight had told her so himself. By any honest measure, they had nothing left between them.

It was only Dwight who kept lying to himself, telling himself everything he did was for her, using it to paper over the cowardice and selfishness underneath.

If he'd stopped caring, then fine.

"Dwight."

She got up from the floor and straightened her rumpled white shirt.

Her voice had nothing in it.

"It's completely over between us."

"From now on, you're you and I'm me."

"You don't have to compromise yourself for me anymore. And I don't have to carry guilt over you anymore."

"We're done."

Dwight's whole body shuddered.

He stared hard at her, wanting to open his mouth, to call her a whore, to accuse her of betrayal, and found he had no voice at all.

Because of what he saw in her eyes.

Not hatred. Something worse than hatred.

Total indifference. The kind that meant he no longer existed enough to despise.

The corridor went ice cold.

Then rapid footsteps hammered up from the stairwell.

Negan jogged onto the third floor.

One look told him everything. Dwight standing there like an idiot. Sherry's face blank and cold. Amber and the other women nearby. And Leon standing a short distance off, watching all of it with calm, level eyes.

Negan was no fool. He only needed a second to piece it together.

Dwight, that cuckold, making a scene with Sherry.

Negan's eyes shifted. He switched on a smile soaked in servility and jogged straight over to Leon.

"Sir!"

He bent at the waist in a deep, careful bow, his tone thick with bootlicking.

"The matter you instructed me to handle has been taken care of."

"The leaders of the nearby large survivor camps, Ezekiel from the Kingdom, Gregory from the Hilltop, and the others — they've all been brought down to the large conference room on the ground floor."

"Everyone's waiting for you."

Leon nodded.

"Let's go."

He set off toward the stairwell. Negan hurried ahead to lead the way.

Passing Dwight, Negan deliberately slowed his pace.

He glanced at Dwight's ashen face. Then he glanced at Sherry, whose eyes had already followed Leon down the hall.

Inside his head, he was laughing his ass off.

You useless piece of trash. Can't even hold onto your own woman.

Before, you handed your wife to me to stay alive. Now she's gone and climbed into someone else's bed herself, and dumped you right to your face.

Half your face got ruined for absolutely nothing.

A deep, spreading satisfaction settled through Negan's chest.

The humiliation of being ground into the pavement under Leon's boot out on the road today, gone. Just like that.

Sure, he was playing lapdog in front of Leon. But seeing Dwight reduced to something even more pathetic, even more worthless than him?

That twisted sense of equilibrium came flooding right back.

Negan held his head high and followed Leon down the stairs.

The corridor emptied out.

Amber let out a short, cold laugh, walked over, and hooked her arm through Sherry's. She pulled her straight back toward their room without sparing Dwight so much as a glance. She was still holding a grudge over how he'd treated her. Obviously.

Dwight stood alone in the empty corridor.

He looked down at his hands. Calloused. Rough.

Cold wind kept pouring in through the window at the far end of the hall.

He raised his hand and cracked himself hard across the face.

What the hell had he done?

➤ Next: Gregory's Total Confusion