[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 748 - Injecting the Perfected G-Virus (Patreon)

The floodlights on the helipad swept across the crowd.

Ashley walked briskly toward them, surrounded by a cluster of guards.

Her belly had grown visibly round. The child was developing fast, the pregnancy impossible to hide now.

"Ashley!" Arthur spotted her silhouette and his voice trembled.

This was the first time he had seen his daughter since the apocalypse began.

"Dad!" Ashley's eyes went red. She quickened her pace.

Arthur opened his arms and held her tight.

This man who had once stood at the pinnacle of America wept openly. The President of the United States, old tears running down his face.

He touched his daughter's hair, then looked down at her swollen belly, laughing and crying at the same time.

"Good... good, you're safe. That's all that matters." Arthur wiped his face. "Leon's been taking good care of you."

Ashley barely heard it. Her face was tight with anxiety. She had already seen the gurney being rushed through the corridor moments ago.

"What happened to Leon? Why did he end up like that?" She gripped Arthur's sleeve with both hands.

She had stayed out of the base's operations entirely these days, her one job was to rest and carry the pregnancy to term. Truthfully, even if she'd wanted to work, no one would have dared let her.

They all knew Leon's temper too well.

If anything happened to Ashley, Leon would lose his mind. So for the sake of keeping her calm, no one had breathed a word about the trouble he'd run into outside.

But now Leon was back. There was no hiding it. She had already seen.

Arthur's expression went stiff. A flash of lingering fear crossed his eyes.

"He... he got hurt a little. But don't worry — Ada said the specialists here will definitely be able to treat him."

Arthur turned sharply toward the scientists who had just stepped off the helicopter. He drew a slow breath, and the authority of a president settled back over him like a coat.

"Hanson!" He pointed at the agricultural specialist. "Take your people to the fields right now. Hands-on guidance, starting immediately. I don't care how you do it — I want food production here doubled."

Hanson nodded. "Yes, Mr. President."

"The rest of you — biologists, virologists — move!" Arthur's voice cracked like a whip. "Everyone down to the underground lab. Full support for William and Dr. Marcus. Leon cannot afford any complications!"

The scientists fell in behind their escorts and broke into a run toward the underground corridor.

"Come on." Arthur took Ashley by the arm. "We'll wait outside the lab."

They headed toward the underground core facility together.

---

Outside the core lab, several women stood in the corridor.

Lee Mi-joo was leaning against the wall with both hands over her face, tears running down without stop.

"Why... he's so strong, how could he end up like that..." Her voice was soaked in fear. She was crying hard, the kind of crying that wouldn't quit.

She had caught a brief glimpse of Leon on the gurney just moments ago.

Half his body covered in horrifying dark-red muscle tissue. A massive eyeball. A monstrous claw.

That was not the invincible man she knew.

A hand came to rest on her shoulder.

Maggie.

"Stop crying, Mi-joo."

"He's going to be fine. He's Leon. He never lets people down."

Maggie was wearing a clean tactical suit, pistol at her hip, eyes carrying a resolve that was almost frightening.

During the days Leon had been gone, Ashley was resting for the pregnancy, and the full weight of the base had come down entirely on Maggie's shoulders.

Maggie had matured.

Or more accurately, she had been forced to grow up.

Not long ago, a few newly arrived survivors had been spreading rumors through the base, claiming Leon had died out there, trying to stir up a riot and seize supplies.

Maggie didn't bother with interrogations.

She handed the list of names directly to Shawn.

That same night, those people vanished without a trace.

The Maggie standing here now was the real thing, a hard woman who understood that in this world, softness and retreat bought you nothing but a grave.

"But..." Lee Mi-joo was still sobbing.

"No buts." Maggie cut her off. Her gaze moved to Beth and Dawn standing nearby. "What we do right now is stay here."

Beth gave a single, firm nod.

---

At the outer gate of the base.

An off-road vehicle caked in zombie blood came roaring in, engine growling, and screeched to a stop in the open lot.

The door was kicked open with one boot.

Shawn and Merle jumped out at a run.

They had just come back from a scouting mission outside and heard from the guards the moment they returned, Leon was in trouble.

Shawn grabbed Rick by the arm. Rick had been in the middle of organizing the defensive deployment. Shawn's eyes were bloodshot.

"Rick! Where's Leon? What the hell happened? Who the hell put him in that state!" He was bellowing.

Rick put a hand on his shoulder. "Take it easy. Panicking won't help. Leon's in the underground lab, William's working on him. It's complicated. Not something I can explain in a sentence."

Merle slung his crossbow onto his back and spat on the ground.

"I don't give a damn how complicated it is. Just tell me who did it. I'll go crush his balls right now."

At that moment, Merle's eyes drifted to the far edge of the helipad.

A woman in a tattered long dress was wandering through the camp with no clear direction.

Blood smeared across her skin. Her dress torn all the way up to the top of her thighs, exposing a long stretch of pale skin. But the way she moved carried something that didn't fit, an inexplicable, unsettling elegance.

Alexia Ashford.

Merle's eyes lit up. Every ounce of his better judgment went offline.

He let out a long, filthy whistle.

"Well, well. Where'd this one come from? Wandering around camp dressed like that, sweetheart, you lost? Want big brother to give you a personal tour of his bunk?" He grinned, showing a mouthful of yellowed teeth.

Alexia stopped.

She turned her head, and those blood-red eyes swept across him with cold detachment.

The way you'd glance at a dead worm on the pavement.

Just the one look. Then she turned back around and kept walking toward the other side of the camp.

That single glance hit Merle like a bucket of ice water. The grin locked on his face and stopped moving.

For 1 full second, he felt as though Death had wrapped a hand around his throat. He couldn't breathe.

Rick's soul nearly left his body. He grabbed Merle by the collar and physically dragged him behind the armored vehicle.

"Merle, are you out of your goddamn mind? You want to die, fine, don't drag the whole camp down with you!" He was hissing, low and frantic.

Looking at the naked panic on Rick's face, Merle understood that he had probably just done something spectacularly stupid. His throat worked through a difficult swallow.

"She... who is she?"

"She's the one who put Leon in that state." Rick's voice was flat and deliberate, each word bitten off clean. "Ada just told me. That thing is a living monster. One that can tear a squad of fully armed soldiers to pieces in under a second."

Merle's knees buckled. He nearly went down.

He looked back once in the direction Alexia had disappeared, then slapped himself hard across the face.

"Shit... this mouth of mine is going to get me killed."

---

The underground core lab.

The surgical lamp cast its pale, merciless light down onto the operating table.

Leon lay on it. The dark-red tissue covering his right half still held in its grim dormant state, but the lines on the cardiac monitor were spiking and jumping with savage irregularity.

William Birkin was soaked in sweat, his hands flying across the control panel. James Marcus had his eyes locked to the microscope, unblinking, staring at the cell slide beneath the lens.

"It's not working! The G-virus cell activity is reawakening! Once the dormancy period ends completely, he could jump straight into G-2 form, and by then his rational mind will be completely gone!" Marcus shouted.

"I know! Obviously I know, I'm working on it! Can you stop talking for one second?" William's eyes were bloodshot, the look of a gambler who had shoved everything to the center of the table and refused to walk away.

In a chair beside the operating table sat Lisa Trevor.

She had extended her arm obediently, the one covered in suture scars.

A thick needle was buried in her vein, pulling dark-red blood in a steady flow into a collection bag.

Lisa possessed a unique constitution: she could absorb and fuse multiple viruses into her own biology. Her blood was currently the only perfect solvent capable of neutralizing and guiding the G-virus.

"Enough!" William yanked the needle out.

He snatched up the bag and spun toward the sterile workstation.

3 days ago, 3 days without sleep, he had already formulated a perfect, complete-version G-virus sample. This version had the defect of uncontrolled mutation stripped out, while preserving the purest evolutionary force intact.

But Leon had still been in Washington at the time, and a clean opportunity to inject it had never come. And beyond that, William hadn't known for certain what injecting it into a human body would actually do.

He should have tested it on a specimen first.

But time was gone. They had no choice left.

William combined Lisa's blood with the complete G-virus sample.

The centrifuge screamed into full speed.

2 minutes.

A syringe of serum appeared in William's hand.

"The only way is to use a more perfect G-virus to devour the defective half-formed genetic remnants still inside him!"

He clenched his teeth, picked up the syringe, and walked to the operating table.

Marcus drew a sharp breath and pressed both hands down onto Leon's mutated right arm.

"Do it."

William didn't hesitate. He drove the thick needle directly into Leon's arm.

Thumb down. Hard.

The pale-blue serum flooded into Leon's body.

Beep, beep, beep,

The cardiac monitor screamed.

The massive, sealed eye on Leon's body snapped open.

In its pupils, blood-red and deep blue twisting around each other, the blinding surgical lights reflected back like stars caught in something that should not be alive.

His right arm erupted into violent convulsions. The grey-dark muscle tissue looked as though molten rock had been injected straight into it, writhing and tearing and restructuring at a speed that was nothing like before, faster, more savage, more wrong.

William kept his eyes locked on Leon's face.

That left eye, the one that still belonged to a human, was spinning wildly.

Rational thought and raw animal instinct were tearing each other apart inside that body, fighting for whatever was left.

The restraining straps groaned under the load.

One snapped.

Then the second.

Leon's massive claw, new bone spines freshly grown along its length, slammed down and seized the edge of the operating table.

The surgical steel surface crumpled like soft clay.

Five deep finger-holes gouged into solid steel.

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