Raccoon City. 11:30 pm
The metallic echo of Ada's grappling hook impact was still bouncing off the dirty tiled walls of the station when the sound changed. There was no final death scream, no silence of a fall. What followed was a wet, obscene gurgle, like raw meat being stirred in a boiling cauldron.
John Wick, chest heaving and the Benelli M4 in his hands, watched with a mix of tactical fascination and pure horror. The Nemesis, which had dropped to its knees, began to convulse. The open wound on its neck from Ada's kinetic impact did not bleed red blood; it oozed a viscous, black liquid that seemed to have a life of its own.
"It won't stop," John muttered, his voice a metallic rasp.
The NE-Alpha parasite inside the tyrant reacted to the critical damage not with weakness, but with an uncontrolled evolutionary fury. The black tissues bubbled, intertwining and closing the hole in seconds. The monster raised its head. Its single eye, which seconds before had shown tactical surprise, was now a pit of bright, red madness. There was no longer the coldness of a machine. There was no longer a mission. There was only pure hatred.
Nemesis let out a sound that was neither human nor animal; it was the noise of a boiler about to burst.
"Back!" John yelled, shoving Ada towards a pillar.
It was just in time. Nemesis didn't get up; it burst forward, propelled by inhuman musculature that defied physics.
The first attack was a blind charge, devoid of any martial technique. Nemesis slammed into the concrete bench where Ada had been sitting a second before, pulverizing it as if it were Styrofoam. Debris flew like shrapnel. A chunk of concrete hit John in the shoulder, making him stumble, a physical reminder that here, brute force was against him.
John stabilized, his mind pushing past the pain to focus on the target.
BOOM!
The Benelli's buckshot load impacted the monster's shoulder. The force of the shot would have ripped a normal man's arm off, but it only tore a chunk of leather coat and superficial flesh from Nemesis. The beast didn't even pause.
Nemesis spun, delivering a backhand with its right arm. John didn't attempt an elegant dodge; he dropped to the floor, rolling awkwardly onto his injured side, feeling the wind of the blow rush over him. The monster's fist impacted a steel column, bending it with a deafening metallic shriek that made teeth grind.
John got up, gasping. The pain in his side was sharp, a burning nail. He knew he couldn't win a fight of attrition. He needed distance.
"OVER HERE!" John shouted, firing again, this time at the creature's knee, seeking to nullify its mobility.
BOOM!
Nemesis's knee bent slightly, but the monster's immense mass and inertia kept it standing. The beast, frustrated by the mosquito that was biting it, lashed out its tentacles in a chaotic sweep, tearing the air apart.
John covered his head and dove behind a ticket booth. The tentacles demolished the wooden and glass structure above his head, covering him in a shower of shards.
"It's useless..." John thought, wiping blood from a cut on his forehead. His weapons were insufficient. His tactical skill was hitting a wall of unstoppable flesh.
It was too late for tactics. Nemesis didn't move like a man; it exploded into motion like a cornered beast. It ignored Ada. It ignored John. Its tactical programming had fractured, replaced by a frenzy of indiscriminate destruction.
Hell broke loose on the platform.
Two UBCS mercenaries, who had been firing suppression from the right flank, were the first to fall. Nemesis moved with a blurry speed, closing the distance in a blink.
With a backhand, it struck the first soldier. The impact was so brutal that the man's helmet crushed into his skull with a sickening crunch, sending his lifeless body slamming against the opposite wall, where it stuck for a second before sliding down, leaving a red trail.
The second terrified soldier emptied his magazine into the monster's chest. Nemesis didn't even flinch. It extended its tentacles, not with precision, but like a whip of blades. The appendages pierced the man's torso, lifting him into the air and tearing him in half in a single visceral ripping motion. Vitals spilled onto the hot floor as Nemesis roared, bathed in blood.
Panic erupted among the civilians. The human mass, seeing their protectors torn to shreds like paper, ran blindly toward the only exit they thought was safe: the train stopped on the tracks.
"Close the doors! Start the train!" hysterical voices screamed.
Dozens of people crowded the carriage doors, pushing, trampling each other in animal terror. They managed to pry open the sliding doors and began filling the carriage like desperate sardines.
Nemesis turned its head. It saw the movement. It saw life concentrated in that metal box.
With a roar that shook the vaulted ceiling, the monster charged. It did not run like a soldier; it ran like a runaway bull, lowering its shoulder, turning its armored mass into a battering ram of flesh and metal.
"NO!" John shouted, understanding what was about to happen.
John lunged forward, firing the Benelli M4.
"OVER HERE! LOOK AT ME, BASTARD!" John bellowed, his voice tearing. He fired once, twice, three times at the monster's back. The buckshot hit, tearing pieces from its leather coat, but Nemesis didn't even slow down.
The monster impacted the side of the train.
The sound was deafening. The metal of the carriage folded inward as if it were cheap aluminum. The window glass exploded in a shower of deadly diamonds. Nemesis didn't stop at the impact; it tore through the metallic structure of the carriage, entering the compartment full of people.
What followed inside that carriage was an acoustic and visual nightmare. Screams of hope instantly turned into wails of agony. The carriage shook violently on the rails. From the broken windows, John saw flashes of brutal movement: massive fists rising and falling, tentacles thrashing in the confined space.
Blood began to splatter the windows from the inside, painting the glass opaque red. Bodies were thrown against the train walls, broken limbs, people crushed by the sheer kinetic force of the beast in a closed space. It was a human flesh blender.
Nemesis exited the other side of the carriage, tearing through the closed doors with the body of a dead man in its hand, which it tossed onto the tracks like trash.
The monster was covered in the blood of others. It breathed heavily, searching for more.
John ran, jumping over the debris, desperate to divert the attention.
"DAMN YOU!" John shouted, reloading with hands trembling from rage. "I AM YOUR TARGET!"
But Nemesis was blind with fury. Its red eyes swept the platform and found the stragglers, those who hadn't managed to get on the death train.
A family. The woman who had screamed earlier, the one who accused John. She was huddled against a concrete pillar, trying to cover her young son with her own body, a child no older than six who was crying in terror, clinging to his mother's leg.
John felt an icy cold in his stomach. He was too far away.
"RUN!" John yelled, firing into the air, firing at the ground, firing at the monster. Anything to make noise.
Nemesis ignored the noise. It only saw easy prey. It walked toward them, heavy, relentless, inevitable death.
The mother looked up, her eyes filled with tears, and for a second, she looked at John. There was no hatred in her gaze now, only a silent plea, a desperate request for salvation.
John ran. His legs pumped, his lungs burned. "I won't make it. I won't make it."
Nemesis raised its right arm. From its forearm, a thick, barbed tentacle slowly extended, like the tongue of a viper.
The child sobbed, hiding his face in his mother's stomach.
"HEY!" John screamed, firing his last shotgun shell directly at the monster's head from twenty meters away.
The shell ricocheted off the armored skull. Nemesis didn't even blink.
The tentacle shot out.
There was no ceremony. It was a fast, efficient, and brutal move. The appendage pierced the mother's torso and continued, impaling the child behind her in the same strike. It lifted them off the ground, united in death by the same biological spike.
The woman choked on a scream, spitting blood. The child instantly stopped crying.
With a dry flick of its wrist, Nemesis whipped the tentacle sideways. The bodies of the mother and child were thrown with tremendous force against the tiled wall. The impact was wet and final. They fell to the floor like a single bundle of clothing and broken flesh, unrecognizable.
John stopped dead. He slid a few feet from inertia, almost falling to his knees.
The silence that followed in his mind was absolute, even though the platform was still full of screams.
John lowered the shotgun. His hands trembled violently. He looked at the red smear on the wall. He looked at the child's small shoe that had come off and lay alone on the concrete.
The air left his lungs and didn't return.
"I did this..." the thought was a hammer in his brain.
The tactical logic crumbled. It didn't matter that Umbrella had created the monster. It didn't matter that it was a war zone.
If John hadn't come down to that station... Nemesis wouldn't have come down. If John hadn't come to Raccoon City... Umbrella wouldn't have intervened.
Those people... that mother, that child... they would be hiding, terrified, but alive. They died because he was there. They died because he was a magnet for death. He was the plague. Where he walked, innocence died.
John went into shock. The world became blurry. Sounds were distorted. He saw the Nemesis turning to look for more victims, he saw Carlos desperately firing from afar, he saw Ada screaming something he couldn't hear.
But John could only see the child's shoe.
He was paralyzed. A legendary warrior reduced to a statue of guilt and horror, watching his own nature destroy everything he touched.
But he had no bullets. He had no plan. He only had the absolute certainty that his presence in Raccoon City had been the true fatal error.
KABOOOM!
A thunderous explosion shook the foundations of the station, tearing the stale air and shocking John out of his stupor with the violence of a physical slap. The shockwave hit his face, hot and laden with dust.
John blinked, his combat instincts reactivated by pure reflex.
What he saw defied the physics of the previous nightmare. The immense bulk of Nemesis was flying through the air, thrown sideways like a ragdoll. The creature slammed with demolishing force into a reinforced concrete wall ten meters away. The impact was so great that the wall cracked in a spiderweb pattern, and a shower of debris and cement dust fell onto the monster, momentarily burying it.
But Nemesis was still moving, growling under the rubble, trying to get up.
John turned his head toward the source of the shot.
There, standing on a supply crate, with the smoking barrel of an MGL grenade launcher resting on her shoulder and an expression of fierce determination, was Jill Valentine.
She said nothing. There was no time for speeches. Jill glanced at John, an eye contact that lasted a fraction of a second but transmitted a clear message: "Move."
Jill twisted her torso and aimed the grenade launcher toward the roll-up metal gate that Nicholai had sealed, the only viable exit to the main lobby.
THUMP! KABOOOM!
The high-explosive grenade impacted the gate's locking mechanism. The detonation was surgical and devastating. The metal screeched, warped, and was ripped from its rails. The security door flew outward, opening a smoking gap toward freedom.
Through the smoke, John distinguished silhouettes behind Jill.
They were survivors. A compact group of five terrified but living civilians. Next to them were Carlos Oliveira, with his rifle raised covering the rear, and Mikhail Victor. The Russian captain was pale, leaning heavily on an improvised crutch and with a blood-soaked bandage on his side, but he was still standing, gripping a Magnum with a trembling hand.
Jill made an abrupt gesture with her head, calling him.
"Let's go!" she shouted, her voice barely audible over the ringing in John's ears.
Jill's group started running toward the newly opened exit.
John remained static for a microsecond, his feet cemented to the child's blood-stained floor.
He felt a slender but firm hand grab his arm and pull him hard.
"We have to get out of here, John! Now!"
It was Ada. She had run toward him, her face smeared with soot, but her eyes focused on survival. There was no mockery or game in her voice, just pragmatic urgency.
The physical shake and Ada's voice finally broke the trance. John snapped back. He nodded once, curtly, readjusting his grip on his empty Benelli.
As he started to run, pushed by Ada, John glanced back, toward the far end of the platform.
What he saw chilled his blood in a different way than the previous guilt.
There was another group of people. Civilians who hadn't managed to reach Jill. In absolute panic, upon seeing the main route blocked by Nemesis's fall, they had taken the only other option: fleeing into the darkness of the train tunnels, moving deeper into the tracks.
They were about ten people, running blindly into the blackness.
Nemesis got up from the wall rubble. It shook its head, roaring. Its red eye searched for targets. It saw John's group escaping through the blown-out door... but then it saw the frantic movement in the tunnels. Easy prey. Flesh running without defense.
The monster ignored John, Jill, and Ada. It turned and, with a heavy, predatory trot, lunged toward the darkness of the tunnels, chasing the civilians fleeing down the tracks.
John knew immediately.
Those people were the bait. Their desperation, their disorganized flight, had become the perfect distraction. Nemesis, in its state of animal frenzy, had opted for the easy kill rather than the difficult hunt. They were going to die so John and the others could live.
John felt a bitter taste in his mouth. He couldn't save them. If he tried to intervene, Nemesis would turn back and kill everyone, including Jill and the civilians she had rescued.
It was a brutal exchange of lives, a mathematics of war that John knew too well but had never hated so much.
He grimaced, clenching his jaw until his teeth hurt. An expression of disgust toward fate and toward himself.
"Let's go," John growled, turning his head forward.
He didn't look back as the first screams began to echo from the tunnel's darkness. He followed Ada, moving out through the smoke and twisted metal of the door, joining Jill's group to escape the slaughterhouse they were leaving behind.