I know this 1.5 volume is slow, and the last 15 chapters don't have much progress, but don't worry. It's just for this setup volume, which I already mentioned. I am doing this because there is actual geography in this story. What I mean by that is you can see where it starts with a really clear path—essentially the path to an objective. You can see where it goes, and you could probably almost draw a map of how this worked out if you wanted to.
Get those stones going boys and femboys, we need to get those numbers up!
If you want to discuss the story or just meme about join my discord server:
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[The Zoological Sector]
Bravo Team reached the high-security animal testing wing. This was where Umbrella kept the nightmares they didn't put on the brochures.
The heavy blast doors had been forced open—bent outward from the inside.
"Something strong did that," Griggs noted, raising his weapon.
They entered the containment area.
It was a scene of carnage.
The cages for the MA-39 Cerberus were empty. The wire mesh had been chewed through.
"Dogs are gone," the Point Man reported.
"Tracks lead to the ventilation shafts."
They moved deeper.
"CONTACT! CEILING!"
Two massive shapes dropped from the darkness above.
HISSSSSSS.
They weren't zombies. They were Adders—viral-enhanced vipers that had grown to the size of pythons. Their scales were slick with slime, their fangs dripping with neurotoxin.
"Flame him! Flame him!"
A stream of liquid fire erupted from the heavy weapons specialist's flamethrower. The lead snake shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—as it thrashed in the fire. The smell of burning reptile meat filled the corridor.
The second snake lunged, striking a soldier's chest plate. The impact knocked him backward into the water, but the fangs skidded off the ceramic armor.
"Die, you freak!"
Three rifles opened up on the snake's head, turning it into pulp.
"Sector Secure," the Leader panted. "Check the insect labs."
They moved to the next room. The glass tanks labeled "WEB SPINNER - JUVENILE" were shattered.
"Spiders with other animal subjects are loose," Griggs said, shining his light into a dark corner. He saw a massive, hairy leg retreat into a cracked air duct. "And they're in the vents."
"Leave them," the Leader ordered. "They'll eat the rats. We need to check the perimeter fence."
They reached the edge of the Zoological Sector, where the Hive's sewage outflow connected to the city's main infrastructure.
There was a heavy steel mesh gate designed to separate the lab from Sewers.
It was gone.
Not open. Gone.
The mesh had been ripped from the concrete walls. Jagged metal teeth bent outward. On the floor, leading into the dark, wet tunnel of the city sewers, were tracks.
Dog prints. Slime trails. And something that looked like massive, clawed footprints.
"Command," the Bravo Leader whispered, realizing the gravity of what he was looking at. "We have a total containment failure. All the cages are empty… The mesh is breached. The subjects... they aren't in the Hive anymore."
"Say again, Bravo?"
"The animals," he repeated. "They're in Sewers of the Hive."
[Dining Room B – Level -6]
While Bravo dealt with the animals, Alpha Team descended to the lowest circle of hell.
Level -6. The "Dining Room."
It was a euphemism. There were no tables here. No food.
Alpha Team entered the massive, cavernous hall. The emergency lights bathed the room in a sickly, pulsing blue glow. Fog—from the leaking liquid nitrogen coolant systems—rolled across the floor like a dry-ice sea, swirling around their knees.
"Watch your heat signatures," Wolf ordered. "Visibility is zero."
They walked past the rows of massive, cylindrical tanks.
There were hundreds of them. Floor to ceiling.
Inside each tank, suspended in a murky, yellow-green amniotic fluid.
They floated in a fetal curl, their exposed second hearts, their thick muscles twitching in sleep. Thick black hoses connected the tanks, pumping nutrients and sedatives into the monsters.
But the silence was wrong. The hum of the cryo-pumps was stuttering.
Wolf walked up to a tank. He wiped the condensation off the glass.
The T-001 inside wasn't sleeping.
Its head was turned. It seemed to be staring right at him. Its claws were scraping slowly against the glass. Scritch. Scritch.
"Command," Wolf said, his voice tight. "The stasis field is failing. The coolant is offline. The liquid is warming up."
He looked down the row. Hundreds of tanks. Hundreds of monsters waking up.
"Many subjects are missing," a soldier called out from the end of the row. "Glass is shattered from the inside. They got out."
"That's the one the target killed," Wolf noted.
"But the remaining ones here... if the power doesn't come back on in the next hour, they're going to wake up. And they're going to be hungry."
He looked at the keypad on the wall.
ERROR.
SYSTEM LOCKOUT.
"We can't lock them down," Wolf realized. "The Red Queen has cut the manual overrides."
[The Hive – Sub-Level 8 (Sewer Integration & Waste Disposal]
Time: 04:45 PM.
(U.B.C.S. Bravo Team).
The air in the sub-levels was not air; it was a physical weight. It was a toxic soup of humidity, methane, and the unmistakable, cloying sweetness of decay.
U.B.C.S. Bravo Team moved through the ankle-deep sludge of the Hive's sewage outflow tunnels, as by now all the water in the Hive was draining here at flooding speeds, which directly comes from the Raccoon City River; thus, the flooding couldn't be resolved anytime soon.
Their tactical lights cut through the gloom, illuminating walls slick with algae and biological residues skin, blood of zombies. Thus by now water was full of T-Virus.
These men were professionals. They moved in a staggered formation, covering every angle. The silence was broken only by the wet slosh of their heavy boots and the rhythmic hissing of their rebreathers.
"Check your sectors," Lieutenant "Gator" Evans commanded, his voice distorted by the S10 gas mask. "Sensors are picking up movement. Twelve o'clock. Low."
The tunnel widened into a large junction chamber where the Hive's localized waste filtration system met the older, brick-lined tunnels of the Raccoon City municipal sewer network.
Something skittered in the darkness above them.
"Ceiling!"
Six beams of light snapped upward.
Clinging to the damp concrete archway were nightmares born of splicing tarantula DNA with the T-Virus.
Subject Y-13 and Y-14: The Web Spinners.
They were massive—the size of horses.
Their hairy legs twitched with agitation, and their multiple eyes gleamed like clusters of black obsidian in the flashlight beams.
Mandibles clicked, dripping a viscous, corrosive venom that sizzled where it hit the water below.
"Targets confirmed," Gator stated, his pulse steady. "Insect-based prototypes. Armor is negligible. Fire at will."
The engagement was clinical. It wasn't a panic-fueled firefight; it was extermination.
THUD-THUD-THUD.
Three soldiers armed with heavy-caliber combat shotguns opened fire simultaneously. The roar of the weapons was deafening in the confined space.
The lead arachnid screeched—a high-pitched sound of tearing wet paper—as the slugs tore through its abdomen. Yellow ichor exploded outward, splashing into the sewer water. Its legs curled inward, and the massive beast lost its grip, crashing down into the sludge with a heavy splash.
The second spider tried to scuttle away, shooting a stream of webbing at the heavy weapons specialist.
"Burn it."
A stream of napalm erupted from the flamethrower unit. The fire illuminated the tunnel in a blinding orange flash. The spider shrieked as its chitinous exoskeleton cracked and boiled. Within seconds, it was a curling, charred husk.
"Targets neutralized," Gator reported, kicking one of the curled legs to ensure it was dead. "Standard insectoids. No threat to heavy armor."
They pushed forward, stepping over the smoking remains. The immediate threat was gone, but their objective was reconnaissance.
They needed to secure the perimeter.
They reached the end of the Hive's jurisdiction—the boundary line.
Here, a massive array of High-Strength Tungsten-Steel meshes was supposed to separate the bio-hazard zone from the public city sewers while not stopping the water and cleaning system. These gates were rated to withstand immense pressure, designed to keep even a rampaging B.O.W contained.
Gator stopped. He lowered his weapon, staring at the gate.
"Command," he whispered. "You need to see this."
The mesh wasn't just broken; it had been violated.
Thick steel bars, as wide as a man's wrist, were bent outward, twisted like paperclips. The edges of the metal were jagged, bearing deep, serrated cut marks that gleamed silver in the light.
On the concrete frame, there were claw marks. Deep gouges that tore inches into the stone.
"This wasn't water pressure," the Point Man noted, running a gloved hand over a patch of the wall that had been dissolved by high-grade acid. "And this isn't rust. Something burned through the lock."
Gator consulted his datapad, cross-referencing the inventory list of escaped B.O.W.s provided by the Red Queen's backup logs.
Lickers, Hunter Alphas, Web Spinners and more…
"The mesh is breached in five sectors," Gator reported, his voice grim. "Tracks lead outward. Into the main city line."
He shone his light into the dark, expansive tunnel that led toward downtown Raccoon City.
The darkness seemed to breathe back at him.
"Command," Gator said. "The packages have left the building. Repeat. The subjects are in the city infrastructure."
[The Overwatch Facility – Dr. White's Office]
Mile away, in the secure facility deep underground of Spencer Mansion – Control Room, Dr. Alexander White with his colleagues of Umbrella watched the helmet-cam feeds on his wall of monitors.
They saw the flooded hallways.
They saw the burning snakes.
They saw the broken sewer grate leading to the city.
They saw the waking Lickers in the blue fog.
Dr. White sat in his leather chair, a glass of expensive scotch in his hand, though he wasn't drinking it. He was calculating.
"Total loss," Dr. White whispered.
The accountant standing next to him, a man named Mr. Grey (ironically), was sweating profusely.
"Sir," Grey stammered, looking at the damage estimates on his tablet. "The infrastructure damage alone is in the range of four hundred million. The loss of research data... unquantifiable. The biological assets... the Lickers alone are worth 20 million a unit. A complete revamp of the power system."
"Billions," Dr. White corrected him, his voice devoid of emotion. "We have lost billions of dollars today, Mr. Grey. The stock price will plummet the moment this leaks."
Dr. White didn't scream. He didn't throw his tablet.
He stood up slowly, smoothing the front of his pristine lab coat. He walked to the screen, placing a hand on the image of the broken gate.
"The money is irrelevant," White said softly, answering a nervous accountant who had been whispering about the cost of the steel.
"Sir?"
"Look at that gate," White pointed, tracing the bent bars. "That hole... is the fate of Raccoon City."
He turned to his aides. His face was pale, but his eyes burned with a cold, frantic intensity.
"The Hive is dead," he announced. "It is a tomb. There is no salvaging the facility itself any time soon. The water damage has destroyed the mainframes. The B.O.W.s are loose."
He picked up his secure phone.
"Alpha Team, Bravo Team. This is White."
[Go ahead, Doctor.]
"Consolidate your positions," White ordered, his mind racing. "Do not engage further in the sewers. If they are in the city, they are no longer a containment problem; they are a field test."
He hung up the phone and turned to the hologram in the corner.
"You knew," White accused the AI, pointing a trembling finger at the Red Queen. "You knew the sewer grate was breached hours ago."
The Red Queen's avatar flickered. Her expression remained that of an innocent child, but her voice was the cold calculation of a machine god.
"Negative," she replied coolly. "My optical sensors in the whole facility were offline. I deactivated them to prevent a catastrophic short-circuit of the primary grid due to the flooding. I could not see the breach."
She paused, tilting her head.
"However, my primary directive is the containment of the T-Virus. Once the virus escaped via the infected rat population and the compromised water table, the physical integrity of the sewer gate became statistically irrelevant. The quarantine had already failed."