Chapter 55: JoJo... Ada Wong's Bizarre Adventure
My name is Ada Wong. Yes, I've introduced myself before.
In any case. I'm currently in a village somewhere in rural Spain, looking for something called "Amber."
According to the information my employer provided, the amber's core is actually parasite eggs of some kind.
I don't know what he wants with parasites. But he's paying me, which means this is my problem now.
After some discreet investigative work across several channels, I located a village that appears to be holding what I need.
Unfortunately, the village seems to be under the control of some local old-money noble family. Getting to what I'm after is going to take some effort.
Ada stood on a rooftop in a red wool sweater and leather trousers.
Fine drizzle came down steadily and had worked its way into her clothing and hair.
She looked out at the village. It was quiet in a way that didn't feel like peace. Overgrown fields. A corner of the settlement where animal carcasses had been left to rot without anyone appearing to notice. No people visible anywhere. No movement.
It had the specific quality of a horror film's establishing shot.
Ada went through her loadout. Three flashbang grenades. One MP5 with four magazines. One Remington shotgun and twenty shells. The grappling hook gun.
She had not planned to bring this much. In her original plan, the MP5 and a sidearm would have been sufficient. Matthew had overruled this and insisted she take the full equipment. At the time she had thought it was excessive. This was enough to start a small conflict.
She was revising that assessment.
For now, she moved without making contact with the locals. No reason to announce herself before she had what she came for. She followed the route the intelligence network had provided.
The grappling hook gun Matthew had included was, she admitted to herself, excellent. Five stars.
One complication the original plan had not anticipated: the Raccoon City crisis hadn't happened. Umbrella was still operational. Which meant Luis Sera, who in another timeline would have been her inside contact in this region, was currently employed as an Umbrella researcher and was entirely uninvolved in any of this. Without an inside contact, the difficulty of the operation had increased substantially.
In the dark, in the rain.
The grappling hook caught the outer wall of the castle without a sound.
The line pulled taut. Ada stepped up onto the top of the wall.
Standing there, looking at the full scope of what she had climbed into, she understood for the first time what Luis had described as an "old noble castle."
If she hadn't had her electronic devices with her, she would have questioned the century.
Trebuchets. Crossbowmen. Shield infantry.
She raised her monocular.
"In the current era. Someone is openly maintaining a private army of this size." She kept her voice very low. "And the local government has nothing to say about this."
She now understood why Matthew had insisted on the full loadout.
If she was spotted, she was going to need every round.
She spent several minutes studying guard rotations and patrol patterns. By the time she was done, she had a route mapped in her head.
A patrol came toward her position. She pressed into the shadow and held still.
They carried torches and moved them steadily across the surfaces around them. No conversation. The atmosphere that came with them was the particular kind that made every small sound feel like an announcement.
Ada watched the nearest figure from two meters away and didn't breathe.
The patrol leader called out. The group turned and moved back toward the main body.
As the last soldier turned his back, Ada stepped out of the dark behind him. No sound. One hand over his mouth and nose, her body pulling back and taking him with it, into the shadow, away from the torchlight.
He tried to struggle. She didn't give him the window.
The blade in her other hand went through his throat with the precision of someone who had done this before and found it straightforward. The windpipe separated cleanly. Whatever he had been planning to shout stayed where it was.
She worked efficiently. His uniform was on her within a minute. His body went over the wall into the dark below.
The rain and the dark handled the rest.
She walked back into the rain, let the water wash the blood smell off the clothes, noted the patrol group still moving ahead of her, and caught up.
Just like that, Ada walked with the patrol all the way into the castle's interior.
Along the way, she saw creatures that had no straightforward explanation. She also saw the castle's layout take shape: secret passages, one-way doors, mechanisms set into the walls, at least one structure that appeared designed to breathe fire.
Whoever built this place, she thought, had either been working from a medieval dungeon blueprint or had a serious and unaddressed psychological condition. This was not a castle. This was a death-trap obstacle course designed by someone who didn't want guests.
She peeled away from the patrol when they reached what she estimated was the castle's inner section.
"Whoever's in charge here really hasn't heard of hygiene." She looked at the robe she'd taken, which was not improving on close inspection, and shook it. "Do none of them wash?"
She turned around.
A shadow dropped from the ceiling behind her, completely silently.
The way it spread down the wall before she caught the edge of it in her peripheral vision meant that if she had been looking anywhere else, she would not have seen it at all.
Her hand went for the submachine gun under the robe.
Hanging from the ceiling like something that had chosen the wrong film set to wander onto, the Verdugo fixed its eyes on Ada's movement. A predator that had been stationary long enough to have forgotten what patience felt like.
Its movements were extremely quiet.
Its tail drew back, the huge stinger compressing like a spring under load.
Then it moved.
The strike came with a sound like a whip through wet air, aimed directly at the center of Ada's back. At that speed and with that mass behind it, even the best trauma surgeon would have had a difficult conversation to offer afterward.
Just as the Verdugo expected this to be finished.
Ada went backward in a full backflip, cleared the reach of the strike, pulled the MP5 out from under the robe, and put a burst directly into the creature.
The sound in the enclosed space was considerable. Shell casings hit the stone floor.
The bullets hit the Verdugo the way they would have hit the side of a tank. With approximately the same practical result.
The Verdugo advanced through the fire. Step by steady step, absorbing rounds, eyes still tracking her.
"What is that thing?"
She didn't wait for an answer she wasn't going to receive. The gun came up, swept through the window glass, and she followed it through in a single motion, out into the rain and the dark.
The Verdugo watched her go through the broken window with what a human might have considered disappointment if the Verdugo had been human, which it was not, and arrived at the window just in time to see her falling.
Two floors down, Ada's grappling hook found something solid.
The line snapped taut. She swung, released, and came up onto a rooftop significantly higher than the one she'd left.