[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 752 - New Abilities — Inner Fire (Patreon)

"From today onward, you cooperate with William and Marcus's research team."

"Everything you know about the T-Veronica Virus — every secret inside that head of yours — you tell them. Not a single word left out."

Alexia Ashford leaned weakly against the headboard.

Those blood-red eyes watched Leon in silence.

She understood the situation better than anyone.

The drop of blood Leon had just fed her was potent. She'd give him that. It carried the G-Virus inside it, along with something else, an unknown pathogen with the ability to assimilate genetic material.

But it was a single drop.

One drop against fifteen years.

She had submerged herself in the T-Veronica Virus for fifteen years before completing the slow fusion into her ultimate form. Every cell in her body, every drop of her blood, was pure T-Veronica. If she chose to, she could mobilize that power and purge his foreign contamination entirely, scrub it out of her system until not a trace remained.

She'd seen through his plan the moment he made his move.

He wanted her virus.

The second she handed over its secrets — the second Leon truly mastered T-Veronica's power and it fused with whatever was already inside him, she would lose her last card. Her final leverage. The one thing that gave her any chance of turning this around.

After that, she would be nothing but a plaything in his hands. Something to be used and discarded. Forever.

She could resist. She could sever the hold that drop of blood had on her right now, before it took root.

But if she wasn't willing to pay even that price, then what exactly had her surrender meant?

Alexia closed her eyes.

She let go.

The resistance bled out of her, all at once, and she allowed that single drop of foreign blood to take root inside her, to spread, to grow, to lock her will to fight away somewhere she could no longer reach it.

"Fine." The word came out soft.

"I'll cooperate with them. I'll give you everything you want."

Leon nodded.

He didn't say another word. He turned and walked out of the room.

The door clicked shut behind him.

And in that moment, Leon felt it, something new, settling into place inside him. Something that hadn't been there before.

The gift of Genetic Assimilation.

The same way Alice's Telekinesis had come to him, Alexia Ashford's abilities were now his.

He walked straight to the open clearing behind the camp.

Raised his right hand. Looked at his palm.

Let's see what we're working with.

Without hesitation, he dragged the nail of his left hand across his skin. A clean slice. Blood welled up to the surface.

The instant it touched the air,

BOOM!

It ignited.

No accelerant. No heat source. The blood simply reacted with the air and caught, blooming into a ball of searing orange-red flame.

Leon's mind moved.

The fire crawled up his fingers and swallowed his entire right fist whole. The heat radiating off it was intense enough to warp the air around him into visible ripples.

He felt nothing. No pain. No burning.

Spontaneous human combustion. One of Alexia Ashford's signature tricks.

Leon threw a punch.

A fireball the size of a washbasin shrieked across the clearing and slammed into a steel plate 20 meters out.

BANG!

Sparks exploded in every direction. The heavy plate was punched through instantly, a gaping, ragged hole burned clean through the metal, its edges glowing molten red, liquid iron dripping steadily to the ground.

Not bad.

Leon shook his hand. The flames died.

Second ability.

He walked to the towering perimeter wall and stopped in front of it. Dark-red vines covered every inch of the surface, dense, interlocking, hard as biological armor. He pressed his palm flat against them and closed his eyes.

His consciousness spread outward from the point of contact.

The T-Veronica ecosystem.

He could feel it all at once: the path of every individual vine, the slow pull of moisture being drawn from the surrounding air, the faint rhythm of something that was almost like breathing.

He pushed a thought at them.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The vines peeled back like a living curtain, parting to either side and exposing the bare wall surface underneath.

Another thought.

They surged back together, interweaving tighter than before, and a thicker layer of hardened chitin condensed across their surface.

Like moving his own fingers.

Every vine covering this camp was now an extension of his body.

Last one.

Leon drew a slow breath.

This was what he actually wanted to know, the most fundamental change in himself after the T-Veronica genes had been absorbed.

His heart rate climbed.

The muscles on the right side of his body began to swell.

That grotesque, oversized eyeball forced its way through the flesh. His arm, once ordinary, once human, expanded, distorted, and became something else entirely: a massive claw of malignant, tumor-like tissue, enormous and wrong in every proportion.

On his left side, dark-red biological armor surfaced from beneath the skin. The hard exoskeleton of an insect. Dense chitin plating layered across his right arm as well. Five fingers reshaped into razor-edged chitinous blades. Jagged spines erupted from his shoulders. His chest sealed itself under a layer of ant-form armor that looked like it could stop a tank round.

The G-Virus's mutations had always been chaotic. Disordered. Unpredictable. But under T-Veronica's influence, forcibly guided and restructured, they had become something with shape, something traceable.

Leon swung his right arm.

SLASH!

The chitinous blades tore through the air and left a sharp sonic crack in their wake, the kind that meant the swing had broken the sound barrier clean.

Speed. Agility. Defense. All of it had jumped by more than one tier.

Leon let the mutation recede. The dark-red exoskeleton withdrew back into his body, and he was ordinary again, a man standing alone in a clearing, looking down at his own hands.

The abilities were real. He had all of them.

His brow creased anyway.

He wasn't satisfied.

He could feel it clearly, everything he'd just done was the bare minimum. The most basic expression of what these abilities could be. The flames hadn't burned hot enough. The vine control barely reached this one wall. The armor could only cover half his body.

The reason was straightforward.

Alexia Ashford's T-Veronica was pure, yes. But she hadn't reached her ultimate form yet. What she'd given him through Genetic Assimilation was a foundation, not the ceiling.

To truly unlock what the T-Veronica Virus could do. To reach, and surpass, Alexia Ashford's level, where a single person was an army, where a single person was an entire ecosystem unto herself.

That required something more.

He needed to inject the raw serum of the T-Veronica Virus directly and fuse it completely with the G-Virus already living inside him.

➤ Next: Forced Ripening