"That damn bastard!" Gryphon roared, slamming a fist into the nearest tree. The rough bark scraped his knuckles, but he didn't feel the pain. Rage and a cold sense of helplessness had drowned out everything else.
On his wrist-mounted tablet, the green dot representing Kael—representing Spectre—had turned gray and static, then vanished completely. He'd gone dark. A final, undeniable act of defiance.
"Oracle, do you have any other way to track him?" Gryphon asked, his voice urgent.
"No," Anya's voice came back, cold as ice, but Gryphon could hear the suppressed fury beneath it. "He's disabled his bio-tracker. He knows our protocols. He knows how to become a true ghost. To us, right now, he doesn't exist."
Rook, who was helping support Viper, shook his head. "He's committing suicide. Going back in there alone? After what we just saw?"
Gryphon didn't answer. He stared toward the brightly lit complex in the distance. He'd seen that kind of recklessness before, in the best and worst soldiers. A dangerous mix of courage and self-destruction. Kael wasn't just hunting. He was searching for something, a redemption he would probably never find.
Inside the Nest, hovering in the stratosphere, Anya Petrova stood motionless before the main screen. Spectre's grayed-out dot was a stain on her perfect tactical map.
She had calculated every variable. The MLF's response. The jungle creature's tactics. The exfiltration routes. Everything, except for one thing: the wounded stubbornness of a soldier who had lost everything.
She had chosen him because he was a sharp instrument. She hadn't expected the instrument to have a will of its own.
A technician turned to her. "Oracle, Gryphon's team is in a holding pattern. The evac drone will be at point Zulu in fifteen minutes. Your orders?"
Anya closed her eyes for a second. All logic, all tactical doctrine, told her to leave Kael behind. He had made his own choice. The mission was more important than one man. Viper needed evacuation.
But the image of her brother flashed in her mind. A faded face in an old photograph. Someone left behind in a forgotten city.
"Gryphon," she said, her voice returning to its cool professionalism. "Proceed with the evacuation mission. That is top priority. But leave Jotun behind. Find a safe overwatch position near the rendezvous point. If Spectre makes it back, I want someone covering his ass."
"Roger, Oracle," Gryphon replied, a hint of relief in his voice.
It was a compromise. A minor breach of protocol. An admission that even in her ruthless chess game, there was still room for a flicker of illogical hope.
Anya turned back to the screen. The map now looked empty.
"Spectre," she whispered to herself. "You'd better survive this, you idiot."
Kael moved like smoke.
The chaos from the Hummingbird team's attack had created the perfect cover. The MLF patrols were still combing the jungle on the opposite side, the barking of the Scaly-hounds echoing in the distance. The northern fence line, closest to the warehouse, was more sparsely guarded.
He lay pressed into a thick bush, fifty meters from the fence. He'd been there for nearly twenty minutes, motionless, just observing. He was part of the darkness, part of the environment.
Two guards walked past, their rifles held lazily. They were talking in French, complaining about the false alarm and the monsters in the jungle. They weren't looking into the shadows. They just wanted to finish their shift.
Kael waited for them to pass. He pulled a pair of specialized cutters from his pouch. The blades were made of a ceramic alloy that didn't reflect light and made no sound.
He flowed across the open ground, each footstep placed precisely to avoid dry twigs. He reached the fence, knelt, and went to work.
Click. Click. Click.
Three small, almost inaudible sounds. A hole just big enough for a man to squeeze through was created. He slipped through, then carefully bent the razor wire back into place. From a distance, no one would notice the difference.
He was inside.
The warehouse was a massive, rusted metal structure, a relic from the colonial era. Most of the windows were broken or boarded up. A single side door looked like the most viable entry point. It was secured with a heavy industrial padlock.
Kael didn't use the cutters. The noise would be too loud. Instead, he pulled out a small lock-picking set. His fingers danced over the pins with a dexterity honed over hundreds of missions. He listened for the faintest clicks, felt the change in the tumblers' resistance.
While he worked, he noticed something strange.
Next to the door, on the ground, was a small puddle. But it wasn't water. It was dark and had a strong chemical smell, like disinfectant. Around the puddle, the grass was dead and brown.
They're decontaminating something before going in, Kael realized. Or decontaminating something on the way out.
The lock gave a soft thunk.
It was open.
Kael cautiously pushed the door, just enough to peer through a crack.
It was dark and silent inside. The smell of disinfectant was stronger, mixed with the scent of dust and something else he couldn't place. A sickly-sweet smell, like old meat.
He slipped inside, Kestrel raised. The door swung shut behind him without a sound.
He was in the lion's den.
The warehouse interior was a vast space, filled with old, dust-covered mining machinery. The only light came from a few industrial bulbs hanging high above, creating pools of light and deep, profound darkness.
Kael moved from shadow to shadow, his steps feather-light. He followed the faint red dot from his memory, heading towards the far corner of the warehouse.
As he got closer, he saw an area that had been cleared. A large plastic tarp was spread across the floor. On it, illuminated by a portable surgical lamp, was a sight that made him hold his breath.
It wasn't a lurking monster.
It was a laboratory.
A long metal table was set up in the middle of the tarp. On the table was the body of the Yakuza bodyguard who had been attacked at the auction, his face purple and swollen. His chest had been opened, his organs methodically exposed.
And lying next to the corpse, pinned to a tray with metal clips, was the Chimaera.
It was still alive.
Its wings twitched faintly. Its small legs convulsed weakly. The Hummingbird micro-transmitter, small as a speck of dust, was still stuck to its carapace.
Surrounding the table was medical and scientific equipment. Electron microscopes, centrifuges, racks of test tubes filled with colored liquids.
This wasn't an attack. This was a dissection. A study.
They're not just using B.O.W.s, Kael realized with a cold horror. They're analyzing them. They're trying to understand how they work. Or... how to replicate them.
This truth was more terrifying than a lurking monster. It meant his enemies weren't just soldiers. They had scientists.
But who? The MLF couldn't have this level of technology.
And then he heard a noise.
The hum of an industrial freezer in the corner of the room.
Kael approached silently, hiding behind an old rock crusher. He peered through a gap.
The freezer didn't contain food. Through the frosted glass door, he could make out vague shapes. Large bio-bags, like the ones he'd seen in Umbrella's labs.
And inside those bags were human forms. Fetuses. Suspended in an amber-colored fluid.
A nursery, he thought, his stomach churning. They're cloning something.
A figure moved on the other side of the makeshift lab.
Kael instantly pressed himself into the shadows, his heart pounding against his ribs. He held his breath, raising the Kestrel, his finger hovering over the trigger.
The person was wearing a head-to-toe white hazmat suit, the kind used in Level 4 bio-labs. The hood obscured their face. They were standing in front of a computer monitor, reviewing a complex DNA sequence.
A scientist.
The person seemed unaware of Kael's presence. They muttered something to themselves, the voice muffled by the suit. Then they turned back to the table, picked up a pair of forceps, and carefully took a tissue sample from the bodyguard's corpse, placing it in a petri dish.
They worked with the focus and proficiency of an expert. This was no amateur.
Kael had to know who this was. He needed a face to put to this conspiracy.
He waited patiently. Minutes passed like centuries.
Finally, the scientist seemed to be done for the moment. They put down their instruments and stepped off the tarped area. They walked towards a small decontamination station in the corner.
When they removed the heavy hood, revealing the face within, Kael felt a jolt of electricity shoot down his spine.
No. It can't be.
The short, neatly cut brown hair. The horn-rimmed glasses. And the sharp, intellectually curious eyes that he would never forget. Eyes that had once watched him through reinforced glass in an underground laboratory years ago.
It was Dr. Annette Birkin.
One of the creators of the G-Virus. The wife of William Birkin. One of Umbrella's most brilliant and amoral minds.
A woman who Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield had confirmed was dead in the collapse of the NEST lab beneath Raccoon City.
But she was here. In the flesh. Looking like she hadn't aged a day.
Annette Birkin, a ghost from Umbrella's past, was standing less than thirty meters away from him, in a rusty warehouse in the middle of the Congolese jungle.
And she was continuing her work.
This conspiracy wasn't just about The Broker. It wasn't just about corrupt BSAA agents.
It was about the remnants of Umbrella itself. Ghosts that were supposed to be buried, now rising from their graves.
And Kael had just walked straight into the tomb.