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A cold broadcast looped over and over throughout the entire village.
"I smell 'death'."
Jack Krauser's voice suddenly became low and raspy.
His sharp eyes scrutinized every shadow and every open doorway, inch by inch.
As a veteran who had crawled out of countless life-and-death missions, he possessed a nearly animalistic intuition.
This intuition told him that this place was already dead.
It wasn't just silence or desolation; it was a total, rotting death.
"Stay sharp."
Krauser spat out those two words, his right hand drawing his custom pistol from the holster on his outer thigh in one fluid motion.
His initials were engraved on the gun's body.
There wasn't a single wasted movement; the muscles in his shooting arm tensed, forming a stable stance.
Leon and Noah reacted almost simultaneously.
Leon's blue eyes, which usually held a hint of weariness, had now become as cold as ice.
He drew his gun with a reverse grip, his body sinking slightly as he lowered his center of gravity.
Noah calmly drew that heavy desert eagle from the quick-draw holster under his arm.
He didn't even look at the weapon, relying on muscle memory to chamber a round; the crisp metallic click sounded particularly jarring in the dead silence.
"Zzzzt..."
The static from the broadcast speaker hissed again, as if mocking them.
Almost instinctively, the three of them moved back-to-back, forming a perfect triangular defensive formation.
Leon took the front, facing the village's main road.
Krauser took the left, where several wooden houses stood close together, cast in deep shadows.
Noah guarded the right, facing a dried-up stone well and a cluttered clearing.
They deliberately slowed their breathing, falling into an eerie synchronization with the annoying chirping of the surrounding insects.
Time seemed to stretch thin at that moment.
The sweltering air was so oppressive it was hard to breathe.
Sweat slid from Leon's temple and dripped into his eye, causing a slight sting, but he didn't even blink.
Just then, in the direction Krauser was watching, a silhouette slowly emerged from the thickest shadows between those two low-slung houses.
It was the figure of a man.
He walked very slowly, stumbling along with legs that seemed filled with lead, dragging his feet with every step.
His head hung low, almost touching his chest, making it impossible to see his face.
He swayed unsteadily, like a drunkard who had become completely wasted in the middle of the day.
"Hey."
Krauser's voice rang out as he lowered his muzzle slightly, pointing it toward the ground.
This was the standard posture for contacting a civilian—maintaining vigilance without being overly provocative.
"What happened here?"
He asked while moving forward slowly, attempting to approach the man.
In his view, this might be the village's only survivor, a poor soul driven mad by fear or disease.
"Krauser, wait!"
Leon's voice suddenly became urgent and sharp.
There was a note of extreme tension and warning in his voice that Krauser had never heard before.
The countless scars left by that hellish night in Raccoon City were now throbbing wildly at the ends of Leon's nerves.
That gait, that dull lack of reaction to the outside world—he knew it all too well.
"What's wrong?"
Krauser was a bit puzzled, turning back to look at Leon in confusion.
It was just a panicked civilian; was such a big reaction necessary?
At the very moment he turned his head,
Noah moved.
He gave no omen, not even shouting a single word of warning.
His body was like a fully drawn B.O.W. suddenly released.
He kicked a shallow pit into the dirt ground, shooting forward like an arrow from a string, crossing the several-meter distance to the stumbling man in an instant with a gust of wind that tore through the air.
His right hand was balled into a fist, elbow slightly dropped, body twisting as a refined power surged from the soles of his feet, up his spine, and straight into his knuckles.
With precision and ruthlessness, he slammed his fist into the left side of the middle-aged man's ribs.
"Crack!"
The clear, sickening sound of bones shattering exploded in the sweltering air.
The man's body was hit as if by an invisible giant hammer, his entire left chest cavity visibly caving in.
His stumbling frame flew sideways at an angle that completely defied the laws of physics.
"Thud!"
With a dull thud, the man slammed hard against the wall of a wooden house, sending splinters flying from the already rotting boards.
"Hey! What the Hell are you doing!" (At this point, Krauser still maintained his professional soldier's ethics.)
Krauser was thoroughly enraged.
He whirled around to glare at Noah.
The muscles on his face contorted with anger.
In his long military career, using lethal force against unarmed civilians was strictly forbidden, and for all he knew, this person was the only survivor.
And that punch Noah just threw wasn't a move to subdue; it was a pure killing B.O.W.!
Was this Asian kid from some BSAA group insane?
However, Noah's expression remained as calm as a pool of deep water.
He didn't even give Krauser a glance, his gaze pinned firmly on the "man" who had been knocked away and now lay slumped in the corner.
"Dammit, you—"
Krauser's roar got stuck in his throat.
Because he saw that the man, who should have died from shattered ribs and ruptured organs, was actually... moving.
Using an extremely bizarre and contorted posture, he slowly pushed himself off the ground, trying to crawl up.
His neck turned at an impossible angle, clicking around notch by notch.
Then, he lifted his head.
In that instant, Krauser felt as if his heart had been dropped into an ice cellar.
What kind of face was that?
If half the face still bore the silhouette of what was once human, the other half was entirely composed of nauseatingly rotted flesh.
The eye was cloudy and dull, like a broken glass bead.
The nose and lip areas had rotted away, revealing the pale gums and the black void of the nasal cavity beneath.
Several unidentified maggots were crawling leisurely across his decaying cheek.
Krauser had seen bodies torn apart by bombs and remains charred by fire; he believed he had seen the worst of everything on the battlefield.
But he had never seen a moving corpse that still wanted to get up and kill!
The walking corpse scrambled up, seemingly unable to feel any pain. Its hollow eyes, devoid of any spark of life, locked onto Krauser, who was closest to it.
It opened its mouth, letting out a roar squeezed from deep within its throat, and stepped forward on its still-stumbling legs, reaching out with withered, rotting hands toward Krauser, who stood frozen in place.
Time seemed to slow down for Krauser at that moment.
He could clearly see the black grime under the creature's fingernails and smell the thick, foul stench—a mix of rotting meat and soil.
His brain worked frantically to process this scene that transcended all his previous knowledge.
"Bang!"
A crisp gunshot shattered the deadly stagnation.
Leon had fired.
The bullet followed a precise trajectory, whistling as it drilled into the walking corpse's forehead.
A dark red blood-flower, mixed with yellow-white brain matter, suddenly burst open.
The corpse's forward momentum came to a dead stop; its body jerked backward and then collapsed onto the ground like a limp sack of bones.
The loud gunshot made Krauser flinch, snapping him out of his state of cognitive collapse.
He gasped for air, his forehead drenched in cold sweat.
"What... what the Hell is this thing?"
His voice was slightly distorted by shock.
"Is this... the virus you were talking about?"
He looked at Leon, his eyes filled with disbelief.
"No time to explain."
Noah's voice was cold and urgent.
He whirled his head around to scan their surroundings.
"Kill our way out first!"
"Roar..."
A low growl, sounding as if it came from Hell, drifted out from a wooden house to their left.
Then, as if a fuse had been lit,
"Heh heh..."
"Ah..."
One after another, sounds that didn't belong to the living began to ring out from all directions.
In those open doorways, behind broken windows, and in the deep shadows of the alleys, more stumbling figures began to appear.
They had once been the Villager of this place—men, women, and even some who looked like underage youths.
But now, they had all turned into monsters just like the man from before.
Rotting skin, hollow eyes, and bodies emitting a sickening stench of decay.
The gunshot was like a bugle call summoning them.
They had only one goal—the three living people before them who radiated a thick aura of life.
From all directions, they slowly but steadily began to close in.
The circle was constantly shrinking.
"Aim for the head!"
Leon roared, his gun spitting fire again as he precisely blew the head off a female Zombie rushing at the front.
Krauser finally fully reacted.
He no longer hesitated; the instincts of a top-tier warrior had completely taken over his body.
He let out a roar as his large-caliber pistol bellowed, every bullet carrying his unvented shock and ferocity, smashing the heads of the approaching Zombies into mushy watermelons one by one.
Every boom from Noah's desert eagle meant a Zombie's head was pulverized by the terrifying.50 AE rounds.
The three stood back-to-back, their weapons forming a barrier of death.
Shell casings continuously ejected from the chambers, tracing golden arcs in the air before clattering onto the ground.
Soon, they used their bullets to force an opening in a relatively weak part of the Zombie horde.
"Go!"
Noah barked.
"Find the guide first! He's in danger!"
The three stopped lingering and immediately rushed through the gap toward the depths of the village.
Leon led at the front, his marksmanship precise and calm as he continuously fired, clearing the Zombies blocking the path ahead.
Noah followed closely in the middle; the massive power of his desert eagle allowed him to handle any sudden threats from side buildings or corners, protecting the team's flanks.
Krauser was responsible for the rear.
After the initial shock, he had completely adapted to the rhythm of the battle.
His steps were steady and his shooting ruthless; every time he turned to fire, it was crisp and efficient, knocking down the Zombies attempting to approach from behind.
As a battle-hardened soldier, combat was his language.
Though the enemies were eerie, their movements were slow and their attack patterns simple, so they didn't put too much pressure on a warrior of his caliber.
He even had the leisure to speak.
A slightly mocking voice came from the rear of the group.
"Leon, if these are the BOWs you were talking about, then I feel like... there's nothing much to fear."
As he spoke, he cleanly emptied a magazine and then, with a movement almost too fast to see, swapped in a new one, headshotting another lunging Zombie.
"They're just some walking pieces of rotten meat."
"You're celebrating too early."
Noah's voice came calmly from the front, cutting through the noisy gunfire and growls.
"These don't even count as an appetizer."
Krauser grinned and licked his dry lips, the fire of a warrior's excitement dancing in his sharp eyes.
"Oh? Then I'm really looking forward to it."