[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 744 - I Surrender — Tell Me Why (Patreon)

Alexia's grandfather, Edward Ashford, founding father of the Progenitor Virus research and one of the co-founders of Umbrella Corporation, died too soon.

His early death gave Spencer room to grow. The other co-founder steadily expanded his voice and influence within Umbrella Corporation, year by year, until no one could challenge him.

The Ashford family, meanwhile, had nothing to show for itself. No breakthroughs in the Progenitor Virus research. No achievements worth citing. Its standing inside Umbrella quietly eroded, and the family slid into decline.

Edward's son Alexander knew his own limits. He couldn't carry the Progenitor Virus research forward, he simply wasn't built for it. So he stopped trying and started looking for another way to restore the Ashford name.

His thinking went like this: his father's genius had been enough to lay the groundwork for the Progenitor Virus. So what if someone even more gifted than his father — a brilliant ancestor from generations past — could be brought into that research? What then?

That question gave him his answer.

He couldn't advance the research himself. But he could create someone who could. A family member. Someone born to carry that burden.

And if he could do that, wouldn't the Ashford family have its chance at revival?

Alexander, who had no small talent in genetic engineering, settled on that idea and got to work.

He started in the family tomb. He extracted the genes of Veronica Ashford, the first-generation matriarch of the line, a woman said to be unmatched in both beauty and intellect.

Then he went to Spencer with a proposal: build a research base in Antarctica.

The remoteness was the point. Antarctica would bury his plans under thousands of miles of ice and silence. And Spencer, for his part, had apparently stopped worrying about a man he no longer considered a threat, someone who couldn't shake his position even if he tried.

Spencer agreed, with something close to the attitude of a man sending a nuisance into exile. That was exactly what Alexander had wanted.

Not long after, Alexia's "father" built an enormous research base at the bottom of the world. He even had the Ashford family manor shipped from England and reconstructed there, stone by stone, exactly as it had stood.

With the Antarctic base complete, Alexander gave his project a name: Veronica. He cultivated his ancestor's genes into an artificial fertilized egg, and the work began.

During the cultivation process, he used genetic engineering to locate what he called a "key" buried inside the human genome, the thing that governed intelligence. He found a way to modify it. With the right adjustments, the individual who developed from the egg would possess an intellect far beyond anything ordinary.

He applied it.

That was where Alexia came from.

A year later, after artificial insemination and gestation, the egg was successfully delivered, and to everyone's surprise, it produced fraternal twins.

Alexander measured their brainwave patterns and nearly wept with relief. Both the boy and the girl had already surpassed normal human benchmarks by a clear margin.

The girl, especially. Her intelligence was beyond all imagination.

He named the boy Alfred. The girl he named using the root of his own name — Alexia — and onto her he loaded every hope he had for the family's future.

Alexia, born with the revival of the Ashford family as her entire reason for existing, did indeed surpass the normal range of human intelligence. That part worked exactly as intended.

But there is a cost to engineering a mind that far beyond its years. Push the intellect too high, too fast, and something in the personality warps during formation.

When a child is buried under knowledge she should never have had to carry, when the people around her stack their expectations so high they block out the sky, the development that should happen simply doesn't. It produces arrogance in character. Obsession in behavior.

That was Alexia.

Burdened too early with an intellect that was never meant to be hers. Crushed too early beneath the weight of her family's desperate hopes. She began to feel a profound distance from everything around her, a coldness, spreading outward.

She decided this world was one where only the strong survived.

Family. Love. These things were nothing more than stepping stones for those strong enough to use them.

So even as a child, she looked at life with contempt. People were instruments. Nothing more.

Later, she used her own father as the Subject and set the insane evolution of Veronica in motion with her own hands.

---

Ada's words landed like a key.

Inserted into Alexia's heart, that heart locked in ice for far too long, and then twisted. Hard.

An unprecedented chaos bloomed inside her, and for the first time in memory, she didn't know where she stood.

She. Alexia Ashford. Who had killed her father with her own hands. Who had merged herself with Veronica. Who had slept for 15 years and woken up and crowned herself a god.

She had always believed she held absolute immunity from these emotions. The ones that belonged to mortals.

They were compensatory mechanisms. Evolved by inferior creatures to offset their own deficiencies, the same reason apes needed to huddle in groups to avoid being eaten.

Laughable. Utterly without meaning.

Yet today, right here, she had watched with her own eyes what these so-called "deficiencies" could do.

That foolish thing called love had driven a frail woman to throw her body in front of a spear.

That reckless thing called rage had driven a man to abandon his human form entirely, to become a monster that even she had found unsettling, and do it all for revenge.

And then that instinct called reproduction, tangled with whatever remained of his reason, had caused that same monster to abandon the evolutionary shortcut of killing and consuming her. Instead it had chosen some incomprehensible method of harm, just to keep that woman alive.

Every piece of that logic traced back to the same source. Those laughable emotions she had always despised.

Why?

Ada moved.

She said nothing. Her body was the only language she had left.

She was furious.

A clean side kick. The stiletto heel found the side of Alexia's knee, still in the slow process of knitting itself back together, with surgical precision.

CRACK!

The bone that had barely rejoined tore apart again.

Alexia's body swayed. She did not fall. She didn't even counter.

She just looked at Ada. Unmoved.

Ada pressed in.

Her combat techniques were killing arts. Every move designed to end things, built for efficiency above all else.

But right now, she stripped all of that away.

One punch.

Bone and flesh. The sound of impact.

The blow caught Alexia across the face, that face, half stunning beauty and half overtaken by creeping vines, and snapped it hard to one side.

Alexia didn't dodge.

She didn't even call on the Veronica Virus to repair the wound. She simply let the force press its mark into her skin, clear and complete.

The dull pain spreading through her nerve endings made her think more clearly, not less.

She thought of her "father." The man who had created her and then feared what he'd made. Alexander Ashford.

She had turned him into a monster. Because she had judged him a failure.

Had she been right?

Another punch.

Ada's knee drove into her stomach.

The force was immense. Nausea surged through her.

She thought of herself as a girl.

Herself and her brother Alfred, two artificially produced geniuses, living in the cold of an Antarctic base, shouldering the weight of a family they hadn't chosen and a mission they'd been born into.

She had looked down on everyone around her. Seen them all as nothing but stepping stones.

Had she been right?

Ada's assault came like a storm. Elbow strikes. Whip kicks. Each one carrying the raw heat of someone spending their fury.

Alexia stood and took it. A sandbag. Silent.

The Veronica Virus inside her roared and screamed, clawing at her to fight back, to tear this reckless human apart.

She didn't.

For the first time, she defied Veronica.

She was thinking.

If, from the very beginning, she had been given love instead. Warmth. Family. All those things she had spent her life sneering at.

If her father had never seen her as a tool for reviving the Ashford name. If instead he had been a real father, one who taught her how to love, or who had simply loved her himself.

What would she be now?

Would she still be a god?

Or, was the "god" she had been chasing all this time even the right thing to be?

A self-mocking smile pulled at the corner of Alexia's lips.

A woman who fancied herself a god, contemplating philosophy while someone beat her bloody.

Ada's final strike was a full-force knife-hand chop, delivered hard across her neck.

Alexia's body gave out. She went limp and dropped to her knees.

She lifted her head. Her face was mottled purple and dark with bruises, smeared with blood, but her crimson eyes were unusually clear.

She looked at Ada. She looked at Chris not far away, weeping with his head in his hands. She looked at the unconscious man on the ground, and at the woman whose body was being rebuilt by something neither of them understood.

She found, suddenly, that this world, this world built entirely out of "deficiencies", seemed to be... interesting, actually.

"I lost."

Alexia said it, and her voice was perfectly calm.

Ada went still.

Chris stopped weeping. He stared at her, unable to believe what he was hearing.

"I surrender."

Alexia leaned back against a shattered column. Blood ran from her wounds and spread through the white fabric of her gown, blooming like something alive.

She looked at Ada. Those crimson eyes had shed every trace of arrogance. What remained was something else entirely, a hunger for understanding, raw and almost obsessive.

"Tell me."

"What does it feel like?"

"To love someone. And then die for them."

"Or to hate someone. And then become a monster for her sake."

"Tell me."

➤ Next: Release of Control