The underground of the Island. The sanctum laboratory.
Ten-odd minutes after Ryan vanished at the end of the corridor, the only sounds left in the empty lab were the low-frequency hum of life-support machinery and the heavy breathing of Saddler, sprawled face-down on the cold alloy floor with a swollen lump on the back of his head.
In the shadows deep inside the ventilation duct above the console, in the structural seams of the toppled Dominant Species Plaga cryo-capsule, even in a gap between floor plates not far from where Saddler had fallen... several extremely well-concealed micro cameras, disguised as ordinary screws, were quietly running.
They were tiny, and their signal frequencies were perfectly masked in background noise. Even someone with senses as sharp as Ryan's, busy and brazen as he looted the place, had failed to notice these cold compound eyes.
They had recorded the whole thing. Ryan entering the lab, knocking Saddler unconscious, strolling off with the Dominant Species Plaga.
No footsteps. Not even a stir in the air. A slender figure in a custom jet-black combat suit was standing, at some point, in the center of the lab.
His skin was pale to the point of lifelessness, his features too refined to seem real. Those deep-set eyes swept calmly across the empty cryo-capsule, then came to rest on Saddler, splayed on the ground like a dead dog.
There was no surprise in the boy's eyes at the wreckage, no anger at Ryan for taking the Dominant Species Plaga. Instead, the corner of his mouth lifted a fraction, and something almost unprecedented surfaced there. Pure curiosity. For the first time in his life, he had developed this kind of deep interest in a piece of prey. Not because the target stood in his way, but because of a power that threw out every rulebook, that refused to follow any logic at all.
He thought of what Spencer had told him before he set out. Go take a look at this "Star Fire" that's giving Umbrella a headache. And while you're there... spice Saddler up a little. I want to see which one is stronger. Las Plagas, or the G-Virus.
"How fun." The boy's murmur was barely audible. Like a child anticipating a new toy.
Since he'd woken from his stasis pod, he'd seen plenty of mutants and agents who considered themselves strong. To him, they were all uninteresting defective goods. Until he'd seen that man.
The man who'd picked up a red brick off the ground and swatted a self-appointed high priest down like a fly.
He crouched slowly, and long, pale fingers drew a fully sealed syringe from a hidden pocket at his waist. The liquid inside gave off a faint green glow. The highest purity G-virus raw serum.
Saddler remained in deep unconsciousness, oblivious.
No wasted movement. The boy pressed down with his wrist, and the cold needle punched cleanly and brutally through the skin at the back of Saddler's neck, driving deep toward the spine.
Hsss...
Every drop of the ghostly green fluid emptied in.
Saddler's massive frame jerked like it had been hit by a current, and a thick grunt of pain leaked out of his throat.
The boy pulled the empty syringe free and tossed it aside. He straightened slowly and looked down at the twitching body.
"Don't die too fast."
His voice was clear and pleasant, and without an ounce of warmth.
"I want to see what you become."
He turned and moved, and his whole body melted like ink dropped into water, sinking soundlessly into the lab's shadows. In the instant he angled into the dark, the cold light grazed the edge of his collar and caught a tiny silver embroidered code.
G-001.
...
Time passed.
"Gah..."
Saddler's eyes snapped open, and he let out a ragged breath like a dying animal. He shoved himself up off the floor, and pain slammed into him, a dull, splitting agony at the back of his skull that felt like it was trying to tear his soul apart.
"Hss..."
He sucked in a sharp breath and reached up with a trembling hand. His fingers met swollen scabs of blood and a coating of coarse, scratchy cement dust.
The high priest who held the lives of countless followers in his palm remembered, in a flash, the humiliating image of being cold-cocked from behind. Pure shame sent tremors through his whole body, and his eyes filled with blood, going a livid red.
"Damned... heretic! Vermin!!!"
The roar came through his teeth, but the next second the sound caught in his throat.
His gaze landed on the cryo-capsule in front of him.
Empty.
The Queen Plaga that had carried every last shred of his ambition and his plan was gone.
"No... my Dominant Species Plaga!" Saddler's scream was ear-splitting. He staggered forward and threw himself at the capsule, withered fingers clawing at the armored glass, fingernails scraping across it with a piercing shriek.
The trump card he had cultivated with endless scheming had been lifted away by some demon with a brick, as easily as anyone else might pocket a cheap souvenir.
Blinding fury burned what was left of Saddler's reason to ash.
He threw his head back to roar, and his body locked up.
Something foreign, violent, and burning hot was spreading out of the depths of his spine, rushing toward every limb. His heart began to hammer at a rate no human body could sustain. His blood felt like it was boiling, thundering through his vessels like muffled peals of thunder.
Saddler looked down and stared hard at his own hands.
Under the once-withered skin, thick black-green veins were twisting and swelling like living things. Muscle fibers bulged in ways that shouldn't have been possible.
"This is..." Saddler gulped down huge mouthfuls of air, and a crazed ecstasy flashed through the ash-gray depths of his eyes.
He could feel it. An unprecedented, world-ending violence of a force was waking inside him. In his arrogance he was certain it was his body's own master Plaga parasite, rising into furious evolution at the loss of its mother specimen.
"Hahahaha... hahahaha!"
Feeling the power surging inside him, almost enough to rupture him from within, Saddler broke into mad laughter.
He slowly closed his eyes, forcing down the aftershock of pain in the back of his skull that was still threatening to tear his mind in two. He dug his withered fingers into his palms and tried to reconnect to the Plagas neural network that blanketed the whole Island. The resonance had always felt like plucking a string through cold lake water, elegant and precise. This time, as his consciousness dropped into the deep, it felt different.
He could feel her.
Somewhere kilometers away, amid the mountain paths and ruins, Ashley Graham's presence had never been so vivid. The "sacred blood" in her veins was no longer a weak flicker. It was a red sun burning in the dark of night, giving off seductive, mouth-watering pulses of life.
This coordinate feedback wasn't just visual or auditory. It was an instinct branded directly into his spinal cord, every cell of him screaming to close the distance, to rip that point apart and devour it.
But within that perfect clarity, there was noise that sent a chill through him. Around Ashley's red light, distorted green afterimages flickered without stopping. Those afterimages were like some kind of greedy parasite, trying to interfere with his dominion, turning what should have been a sacred resonance into something chaotic and ravenous.
Saddler didn't look too closely at where the noise came from. He was too entranced by the enormity of the power being amplified through him.
"This feeling... this intoxication of total control..."
"Found you... I've got you."
"Ashley Graham..."
Saddler's eyes snapped open, and nothing was left in those crimson pupils but pure slaughter and greed, fixed on the passage leading to the surface.
With the skin-crawling sound of bones twisting out of joint, his huge frame lunged into the dark, a beast fully off the leash, tearing toward its target.
He never noticed. Down in the depths of his spine, those ghostly green G-virus cells were silently, hungrily biting, devouring, and fusing with the Plagas parasites he was so proud of.
A monstrous transformation, one that would overturn every law of biology, was quietly taking shape inside the hate-filled shell of his body.
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