October 7, 2025 · Connections Black-Site, Level 3 · 03:12
Level 3 smelled of antiseptic and recycled air and the low electronic beep of medical monitors running in empty rooms. Same arctic temperature as above. Same LED ceiling strips. No shadows to work with, which meant no hiding—only timing and speed.
Alen came through the stairwell door and paused. Reality-Lens still active. The corridor branched immediately: left toward the Biohazard Labs, right toward the Medical Suite. The guard ghost-trails painted the floor exactly as Yoko had described. One static post at the end of the right branch, checking vitals every ten minutes through an observation window. Patrol Team 3 on a sixteen-minute loop. Floating supervisor due to appear in approximately eighteen minutes.
He went right.
∗ ∗ ∗
Patrol Team 3 came around the corner from the Biohazard Labs on schedule, two men in full tactical rig, rifles held low. Alen let the bio-organic energy come up—not a flood, a controlled release, enough to bring his speed and force into the range that made the following three seconds work. He phased directly into their path. The lead guard had time to register the silhouette before the Thrust Punch connected with his visor—straight, clinical, full force. The visor shattered. The man's head went back and he was dead before he finished falling. Alen was already on the second man: an axe kick down onto the collarbone, heel driving the shattered bone into the lung. Both bodies to the floor before either could make a sound. He lowered them against the wall.
He did not stop.
The floating supervisor was coming out of the Centrifuge Room ahead, tablet in hand, ten minutes into his check. He saw nothing before the Thrust Punch took him in the base of the skull. Alen caught the tablet before it hit the tiles and set it on the nearest console.
Patrol Team 3 had looped back through the Medical Suite corridor on its next pass. He waited at the Data Server Room corner for the exact moment their sightlines overlapped, then moved. The first guard took a punch to the sternum that cracked the ceramic plate beneath the carrier; the follow-through axe kick lifted him off the floor and into the wall. The second fired before he could die—a suppressed burst, three rounds, centre mass. Alen phased through them, appeared inside the guard's reach, and ended him with a single strike to the temple. Both down in under four seconds.
He let the energy release back to baseline. Breathed once.
The static guard outside the recovery room was the last. Back turned, watching the vitals monitor through the observation window, checking it the way people checked things when nothing had happened for months and they no longer expected it to. Alen came through the wall itself, phased directly behind him, and applied one clean strike to the base of the neck. The guard folded. Alen lowered him to the floor and set him against the wall so he wouldn't slide.
Level 3 was clear.
He placed his palm on the recovery room door and waited for Trinity's protocol to cycle the lock.
∗ ∗ ∗
The room was small and dim, lit by monitor glow and one overhead medical lamp. The woman in the bed had long straight brown hair fanned across the pillow, her face pale but with a specific quality to the bone structure—high cheekbones, Latin American heritage, something in the jaw that suggested she had been through enough to change a face without altering it. Thirty-nine years old. She looked younger in the technical sense that the t-Veronica had preserved her biology in its locked equilibrium, and older in the sense that the eyes—even closed—had the specific set of someone who had not had an easy three decades.
Surgical scars along her abdomen and forearms. Fresh, still raised. The monitors tracked kidney function and tissue integration, both stable, both within acceptable parameters for now. The t-Veronica would begin rejecting the new organs in days without continued medical management. Her right arm, even unconscious, was held slightly away from her body—the old habit, protecting the injection site that had been there since she was fifteen.
He stood at the foot of the bed for a moment.
His father had sold the virus to her father. Had walked into that transaction with full knowledge of what it would do to the Hidalgo family and had done it anyway, because the transaction served his purposes at the time. Javier Hidalgo had been a desperate man making a catastrophic decision. Albert Wesker had been a man who did not make decisions out of desperation and who had looked at a family being destroyed by a hereditary disease and seen an asset.
Both were dead. The consequences were not.
He activated the comms link. "Rebecca. I have the asset. Beginning data extraction now. Configure the medical bay for active t-Veronica management, twelve-hour transit minimum."
Rebecca came back clean and steady. "Copy. Medical bay is configured. I have her vitals on the secondary feed. Extract and move."
He crossed to the wall terminal. Gloved fingers moved across the keyboard efficiently. Trinity's backdoor granted full access. He inserted the compact hard drive from his utility belt and initiated the copy sequence: research logs, t-Veronica stabilisation protocols, organ transplant records, C-Virus interaction trials, everything the Connections had accumulated in this facility's medical wing. The progress bar ran in silence. When it reached one hundred percent he ejected the drive, pocketed it, and killed the terminal.
He returned to the bed. He lifted Manuela carefully—arms under her knees and shoulders, her head resting against his tactical vest. She weighed less than he expected. The t-Veronica kept her body temperature slightly elevated, warm against his arm in the arctic chill of the room. She did not wake.
He carried her out.
— END OF CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT —