The Island. Ancient ruins plateau. Wild wind whipped smoke and embers between the shattered stone pillars. Krauser prowled the ruins like a caged beast, his heavy breathing echoing off the broken walls.
His fully mutated blade-arm hung at his side. His right hand was locked around the Amber, its faint glow pulsing in his grip.
"Saddler... Wesker..." Krauser ground his teeth, veins standing out on his forehead. Every channel on the base comms was nothing but screaming and static. The "new order" he'd taken such pride in had collapsed into a joke overnight. He couldn't find Saddler, and Wesker, who should have been issuing commands, had gone silent too.
The fury of being abandoned and played with almost crushed the Amber in his fist.
"Looks like your god has turned his back on you, Jake."
A cold, steady voice carried out of the shadows at the plateau entrance.
Leon walked into the firelight, boots crunching across the rubble. His eyes were calm as ice water. No wasted movement. His hands just hung naturally at his sides.
Behind him, Sherry and Becky had their electromagnetic rifles up, about to move in and establish suppressing fire.
"Stand down." Leon lifted his left hand without turning, stopping both of them. "Hold the perimeter. Don't let anyone get close."
Sherry paused, looking at the narrow but unshakable line of Leon's back. She didn't argue. She pulled Ashley and Luis back to a safe distance, muzzle trained outward. She knew that look. It was the kind that belonged only between warriors.
"This is between him and me." Leon drew his tactical combat knife in a reverse grip, the edge catching the firelight with a glacial sheen. His eyes were locked on Krauser. "Time I taught you a lesson!"
Krauser raised his head. Those bloodshot eyes bored into Leon, and the corners of his mouth peeled back into a savage, crazed grin.
"Still as naive as ever, rookie!" Krauser shoved the Amber into a pouch at his hip and swung his mutated left arm, dragging a wave of putrid air through the ruins. "Operation Javier showed me the real face of this world! Justice, governments, it's all bullshit! The only thing that keeps you alive is absolute power!"
"So you turned yourself into a monster that's neither man nor demon?" Leon gripped the knife two-handed and lowered his stance. "You threw away your humanity for power, Krauser. You're just running away!"
"Enough talk! Prove your point with your life!"
Krauser roared, his massive body exploding into motion with horrifying force. The solid stone slab under him cracked beneath one stomp. He came in like a runaway tank, the huge mutated bone blade slicing the air with a shriek as it dropped toward Leon's skull.
CLANG...!!!
Sparks fountained.
Leon didn't try to take the blow head-on. A force like that could split a man in two. He sidestepped in a fluid slide, the tactical knife in his hand scraping off the edge of the bone blade at a brutal angle, throwing a trail of sparks, using Krauser's own momentum against him, the tip driving straight for Krauser's throat.
"Too slow!" Krauser snarled and swept his right leg low.
Leon was forced back on defense. They locked together in a heartbeat.
It turned into pure, hand-to-hand butchery, fist meeting flesh.
Combat knife and mutated bone blade hammered at each other, the metallic clash ringing over the ruins. Every one of Leon's moves was precision incarnate. Evade, parry, riposte. Krauser had abandoned defense entirely, leaning on the nightmare durability and raw strength of his mutated body, throwing wide, savage strikes to crush Leon down.
"What are you afraid of, Leon?!" Krauser's bone blade slammed onto Leon's knife, driving him onto one knee. "Admit it! Your pathetic little combat skills are worthless in front of my perfect evolution!"
"Is that right?"
Leon clenched his jaw and whipped his head aside, dodging a lethal swipe at his neck. Then, instead of falling back, he surged forward into Krauser's massive frame.
Thud!
A heavy knee drove up into the right side of Krauser's gut, the side that hadn't mutated. In the fraction of a second his motion stalled, the knife spun between Leon's fingers into a reverse grip, and the blade flickered out like a striking viper, finding the seam in the joint of Krauser's mutated left arm and driving deep.
SHK...!
Green fluid sprayed. Krauser let out a thick grunt of pain and staggered back.
"The power you're so proud of is full of holes." Leon straightened slowly, the knife tip angled at the ground, blood tracing down the blood groove and dripping. "You're too dependent on it, Jake. You've forgotten a warrior's instincts."
"Shut up!!"
The hit landed where it hurt, and Krauser came completely unhinged. He threw his head back and howled. His right arm swelled and tore with a wet ripping sound, reshaping into a massive bone claw, spurs jutting from the knuckles, vicious barbs curling along the edges. He abandoned every last scrap of tactics and came at Leon like a feral animal, a blur tearing across the stone.
"Die, rookie!"
The bone blade dropped with the weight of a mountain, cutting off every line of retreat.
This one couldn't be dodged.
Back at the perimeter, Becky couldn't help raising her electromagnetic rifle, but Sherry's hand came down on the barrel, pressing it gently back down. She gave a small shake of her head. "Trust him."
At the center of the plateau, Leon watched the killing edge balloon in his pupils and drew in a long breath.
The world seemed to slow.
In the instant the bone blade was about to touch his hairline, Leon didn't dodge. He locked both hands on his knife and met that monstrous force, wedging the edge with surgical precision into the weakest point of the blade's swing.
CRACK...!
The knife let out a groan of pure overload, and half the blade shattered on the spot. Leon rode the recoil, twisting his body through an impossible turn in midair. He flipped the broken half into a dagger grip, poured every ounce of explosive power he had into the motion, and drove the jagged steel, without mercy, straight into the beating heart in the center of Krauser's chest.
SHNK...!!!
The whole plateau fell into dead silence.
The bone blade Krauser had raised overhead froze midair. He stared down at the broken half of a knife buried in his chest, green pus spilling down the grip in torrents.
His huge, malformed body began to tremble beyond his control. The mutated left arm drooped, all its strength gone.
"Nice work... Leon..."
Black blood leaked from the corner of Krauser's mouth. In those bloodshot eyes, the madness and violence were draining fast, replaced by something an old special forces operator could recognize. Acceptance of defeat.
His massive body crashed to its knees in front of Leon, hitting the rubble hard.
"Heh... I lost..." Krauser's breath came ragged. He fumbled into his hip pouch, pulled out the Amber he'd killed to take, and held it out toward Leon with a shaking hand. "Guess... the power I was chasing... came to nothing in the end..."
Leon reached out in silence and took the Amber. Watching the man who'd once been his brother in arms finally stop breathing in front of him, something complicated and sorrowful moved through his eyes.
"Rest easy, Jake."
Leon was about to put away the Amber that had caused so much blood and horror.
Luis, standing off to the side, suddenly looked like he'd seen something. He ran over heedless of the rocks, practically scrambling on hands and knees to get in front of Leon, grabbed the Amber out of his grip, and held it up to the firelight, staring at it hard.
"Wait! This... this is wrong!"
The color dropped out of Luis's face. He scrubbed at the surface of the "Amber" with his thumb, then curled a finger and flicked it twice. Tink, tink.
The dull little knocks rang out absurdly loud in the night wind.
"This isn't goddamn Amber at all!" Luis's voice cracked from sheer disbelief. He stared at Leon and the two girls jogging over, the corner of his eye twitching wildly. "This... this is a hyper-realistic resin piece of art! There's a freaking LED inside it!!!"
"What?!" Leon froze.
Sherry and Becky glanced at each other.
No need to guess. The only person who could, in the middle of a life-or-death battle on the Island, run circles around a top-tier agent and a bioweapon monster using a piece of novelty art with an LED light in it...
"Uncle Ryan..." Sherry pressed a hand to her forehead and groaned. "Is he here to sabotage them or to do comedy?"
Leon looked at the fake Amber in his palm, still stubbornly blinking its little light, then over at Krauser lying on the ground, eyes refusing to close in death.
It struck him, all at once, that Krauser had really died a terrible, undeserved death.