Location: The Richard Estate, Scottish Highlands
Date: August 13, 2017
Time: 09:00 GMT
The mist clinging to the Highlands was thick enough to swallow a man whole, but inside the Richard Estate, the air was clear and sharp with the scent of beeswax and old timber.
Alen stood before the mirror in his guest quarters. He traced the lines on his chest with a fingertip. The necrotic black veins from the A-Virus aftershock hadn't vanished. They had settled into his skin like a dark, spiderweb tattoo, stretching from his heart up the side of his neck.
They were no longer active—thanks to the vaccine Ada had procured—but they were a permanent mark. A receipt for the price of power.
"Battle scars," Alen whispered to his reflection.
He turned away. Vanity was a luxury for the dead. He had work to do.
He walked to the heavy steel safe in the corner of the room. He spun the dial—left, right, left—and the tumblers clicked with a heavy thud. He pulled the door open and retrieved a reinforced, lead-lined briefcase.
Inside rested the most dangerous object in the Northern Hemisphere.
The D-Series Core.
It was a tissue sample harvested from the remains of the Baker estate incident—specifically, a preserved sample of the "E-Type" Mutamycete. It was the biological engine that had powered Eveline.
Alen snapped the case shut. He didn't just want to study it. He wanted to weaponize a cure.
He grabbed a second item: a ruggedized, encrypted hard drive containing the stolen server data of The Connections.
"Time to go to school," Alen murmured.
The Matriarch's Study
Alen walked through the silent corridors of the East Wing, the floorboards creaking softly under his tactical boots. He stopped at the double mahogany doors of his grandmother's private study.
Knock. Knock.
"Come in, Alen," Amalia's voice drifted through the wood, calm and authoritative.
Alen pushed the door open.
Amalia R. Richard was sitting by the window in a high-backed leather chair, the gray morning light illuminating the pages of an antique medical journal she was reading. She looked up, closing the book. Her eyes, sharp and blue, assessed him instantly.
"You look better," she observed, though her gaze lingered on the black veins creeping up his neck. "But you have the look of a man who is done resting."
"Resting is for when the war is over, Grandmother," Alen said, stepping into the room. He placed the heavy lead case on her coffee table. "And the war is evolving."
Amalia raised an eyebrow. "What do you need, my dear? You have that specific look—the one your mother used to get when she had a dangerous idea."
"I need your mind, Amalia," Alen said seriously. "I know virology. I know how to splice genes and sequence DNA. But I don't know fungi. I don't know the intricate biology of mycelial networks. But you do."
"Mycology," Amalia corrected gently. "The study of fungi. A fascinating, terrifying kingdom of life. Why do you ask?"
Alen didn't answer with words. He reached down and unlatched the case.
Hiss.
The hydraulic seal broke. Alen lifted the lid.
Sitting in a suspension of amber fluid, encased in bulletproof glass, was a pulsating, greyish mass of tissue. It looked like a brain, but it moved with a slow, rhythmic breathing.
Amalia's eyes went wide. She leaned forward, her breath catching in her throat.
"Lord save us," she whispered, her Scottish accent thickening in her shock. "Is that...?"
"The E-Series Core," Alen confirmed. "Harvested from the source. I thought about giving it to the BSAA, but they leak like a sieve. Blue Umbrella is cleaning up the mess, but they are still Umbrella. I couldn't trust them with this."
"So you collected it," Amalia murmured, looking at the sample with a mixture of revulsion and scientific awe. "And you brought it to my house."
"I intend to kill it, Grandmother," Alen said, his voice dropping to a growl. "This world is getting worse day by day. First, it was the T-Virus. Then Las Plagas. Now, this mold. The Connections may be dismantled, but the data is out there. Someone else will try to play God with this fungus."
Alen looked her in the eye.
"I need to make a universal E-Necrotoxin. Not just a syringe to cure one girl, but a weapon. Necrotoxin bullets. Gas grenades. I need a way to calcify this mold instantly. I need to be the exterminator."
Amalia stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, a smile spread across her face. It wasn't the smile of a grandmother; it was the smile of a scientist who had once studied alongside James Marcus.
"You really thought this through, didn't you?" Amalia stood up, smoothing her skirt. "You want to create a cytotoxin that specifically targets the fungal cell walls—the chitin and glucans—of the Mutamycete."
"Exactly," Alen nodded.
"Then let's go," Amalia said, walking past him. "I might show you something intriguing. Some 'souvenirs' I collected from my own expeditions when I was young, before I hid away in these hills."
Alen blinked. "Really?"
"Don't look so surprised, boy," she chuckled. "Intelligence runs in the family. Follow me."
The Sanctum
Alen followed her through the winding halls of the estate, deep into the foundation of the house. They stopped in front of a blank stone wall in the wine cellar. It looked solid, impenetrable.
Amalia reached out to a dusty sconce on the wall. She twisted it forty-five degrees to the right, then pressed a loose stone near the floor.
Click. Whirrrrr.
Hidden hydraulics groaned to life. The stone wall swung inward, revealing a steel elevator shaft.
"After you," Amalia gestured.
They stepped inside. The elevator descended deep into the bedrock of the Highlands. When the doors opened, Alen stepped out and whistled low.
"Damn, Grandmother," Alen said, looking around. "You're really something else."
The lab was a cathedral of science. It was a perfect fusion of the Victorian and the Modern. Brass microscopes and leather-bound journals sat next to state-of-the-art centrifuges and liquid nitrogen tanks. The lighting was warm, not the sterile white of Umbrella labs, but the equipment was top-tier.
"I may be an old country doctor to the village," Amalia said, walking to a workstation and flicking a switch that hummed to life. "But one does not study with Oswell Spencer without learning the value of a private workspace."
She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. "Put the sample in the isolation chamber."
Alen placed the case inside a glass bio-hood. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out the black, ruggedized hard drive.
"I brought a party gift," Alen said, plugging it into the main server bank. "The entire research archive of The Connections. Every failed experiment. Every formula regarding the Mold."
Amalia watched the data stream populate the monitors. Her eyes lit up.
"You are full of surprises, Alen," she murmured, scanning the chemical structures appearing on the screen. "Do you know how much I despise The Connections? They perverted the natural order without elegance. But this data... this is the Rosetta Stone. With their research and my knowledge of fungal biology, we will make progress in weeks, not years."
Alen rolled up his sleeves, revealing the black veins. He looked at the data, then at the pulsating mold sample.
"Let's get to work," Alen said.
Project: Mold Neutralization
Time: 14:00 GMT
The hours melted away.
It was a strange dynamic. Alen, the weapon, and Amalia, the architect.
"The Mutamycete is unique," Amalia explained, pointing to a slide on the digital microscope. . "See this? It acts like a super-organism. It shares a hive mind consciousness. To kill it, we can't just attack the body. We have to sever the connection."
"Like cutting the signal to a drone swarm," Alen mused.
"Precisely," Amalia said. "The E-Necrotoxin developed by the Umbrella remnants was crude. It causes rapid calcification. Effective, but slow. We need something faster. Kinetic."
Alen pulled up a file from The Connections' drive. "Lucas Baker. He was working on a variant. He found that the mold reacts violently to extreme shifts in pH levels when introduced to a specific enzyme."
"Show me," Amalia ordered.
She studied the chemical formula. "Smart boy, that Lucas. Psychotic, but smart. If we synthesize this enzyme and bind it to a carrier agent... say, a heavy metal isotope..."
"We could create a bullet," Alen finished the thought. "A hollow-point round filled with the toxin. Upon impact, it shatters. The isotope drives the enzyme into the fungal bloodstream instantly."
"Total cellular collapse," Amalia nodded. "The target wouldn't just die. They would crumble to dust in seconds."
They worked in tandem. Amalia handled the biological synthesis, mixing reagents with the steady hands of a surgeon. Alen handled the weaponization, calculating fluid dynamics, payload dispersal, and calibrating the centrifuge to handle the volatile mixture.
By evening, they had a prototype.
It wasn't a vaccine. It was a predator.
Amalia held up a vial of glowing, amber liquid. The Refined E-Necrotoxin.
"This is it," Amalia said softly. "The end of the Mold."
Alen took the vial. He carefully loaded it into a specialized cartridge press he had set up on the workbench. He capped the bullet with a polymer tip designed to fracture on impact.
He held the finished round up to the light. It was sleek, deadly, and contained the power to wipe out a bio-weapon species.
"One down," Alen said. "Thousands to go."
"Alen," Amalia said, wiping her hands on a rag. She looked tired but proud. "You have the mind of your grandfather James. The brilliance. But you have the heart of Jessica. You use the science to protect, not to rule."
Alen pocketed the round. "I'm just a janitor, Grandmother. Cleaning up the mess the 'great men' left behind."
He looked at the servers, still churning through data.
"We have the Necrotoxin," Alen said. "Now I need to build the arsenal. If I'm going to hunt the people who make these monsters, I need to be ready for whatever they throw at me."
"And I will help you," Amalia vowed. "The Richard Estate is no longer just a home. It is a fortress. And we are the guardians."
Al
en nodded. The Project was a success. He had his weapon.
Now, he just needed a target.