Best of Intentions: The Monster You Created (ch. 32)

The old Simulacurum trick. The favorite bait and switch of upper class wizards, as the spell was almost designed around the idea of sending a copy of yourself into the waiting arms of a blatant trap to see what happened when it was sprung. And, in this case, it allowed me to pick up quite a bit of information. 

Firstly, it lured them into a false sense of security as they led us right to their super secret base in Romania where I could observe them without detection. Secondly, it allowed my Simulacurum to get the info that we needed to act -- the locations of the planned outbreaks and the methods of delivery. It would have been better if Miranda had waited a few days before ripping my heart out so I could do a little more digging, but as things were… we had enough information to act. 

“This is it,” I began, looking out at the assembled members of Storm, most of whom were attending the emergency meeting through video call. “This is the moment that we've been waiting for. Umbrella took the bait and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. They thought they had us exactly where they wanted us and acted like it, and in doing so they opened themselves up for the death blow.” 

I leaned forward on a table before a video camera, looking at those in the room as much as I was those on the video screen. A dozen conference rooms, each containing dozens of people. People that we had gathered and recruited over five years, building our organization up until it was ready for this moment. I saw their steely gazes looking back at me, sitting straighter in their seats, clenching their jaws as they swallowed down bitter memories and eagerness to get the job done. 

“We know where they are. We know what their plan is. We have the element of surprise and we are going to hit them so hard that they never bounce back. Today is the day this fight ends,” I continued, letting them all know what I expected. “All of you are heading to your mission objectives. You know what to do. And I don't need to tell you the consequences of failure. You've all seen these kinds of attacks first hand, most of you have lost friends and family to them, and you are here because you promised that you would never let that shit happen to anyone else.” 

I had recruited slowly to maintain operational security, most often recruiting those that we pulled from the rubble caused by a science experiment escaping the petri dish. Every single one of them had the motivation to stick it to Umbrella. They saw what happened when they ran amok and now they had the opportunity to put them to rest with their own hands. 

“Across the globe, we are going to perform a series of surgical strikes. However, the moment that they begin, the clock will start ticking. It won't be long before they realize that we're removing the gun they have pressed against the head of the world, and when they do they'll start squeezing the trigger because in their narcissistic hellscape of a mind,  if they can't have the world, no one can. Your job, as such, is to get in, remove the threat, and then get out as fast as possible before moving to the next target.” 

With a gesture, I brought up the clock. “Ten minutes. These ten minutes will be the most important minutes of our lives, if not the most important ten minutes of everyone everywhere. What happens in that time will decide if the world is saved or doomed. So, don't fuck up,” I finished. That earned a few grim chuckles and uneasy smiles, everyone feeling the weight on their shoulders. “Meanwhile, I and a few others will be putting things to rest in Romania. Simply put, I expect Oswell or Miranda to possess some manner of dead man’s switch, so we can't just wipe the area off the face of the Earth. Sadly.” 

In essence, we would spend those ten minutes as a diversion. Get them to monologue a bit, see what extra aces they had up their sleeves, and deal with them before we wiped them off the face of the planet. I was inclined to send them all to the astral plane along with a few nukes, just to make extra sure that they were gone and dusted. 

“Any questions?” I asked, and there was a very loud silence that followed. “Good. Because there isn't time for any. Suit up and let's get this done,” I finished, seeing a bunch of people move to do exactly that before the transmission ended. Meanwhile, I looked to those arranged around the table. 

Jill and Chris. 

It was a small team, but it felt fitting. Everything had begun with the three of us, and it would end with us. Narrative symmetry. That, and we were spread so thin that adding one more person to the distraction team would probably be the straw that broke the camel's back. Ada, Leon, Claire, Rebecca, and all the others were needed elsewhere. 

Jill and Chris both looked ready for the battle to come, and we exchanged a curt nod before we headed down to the launch bay. Wordlessly, we prepared our Javelins for launch with mine being a back up while Chris had had his repaired with Mend. It was barely a minute later when the three of us were floating outside of the Bus in the stratosphere, overlooking Romania while everyone else in Storm got into position. 

But the silence was broken by Jill, “Do you really think that this is it?” She asked through comms, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking for reassurance or an honest answer. Either way, it remained the same. 

“It will be,” I replied, with certainty in my voice. One way or another, this fucked up game of cat and mouse crossed with whack-a-mole would come to an end. Either through me throttling the life out of Oswell with my bare hands, or… 

I was Level 25. I had been leveling up through milestones since Raccoon City, and I couldn't think of a bigger milestone than taking down the founder of Umbrella. That would bring me to Level 26, and with that… there was a chance. A chance that I would earn a 9th level spell slot and possibly one of the most broken spells in all of DnD. 

So, one way or another, this ended today. 

The signal went out, and the operation began. The three of us hit the gas, erupting forward with a burst of speed that abandoned all thought of stealth in our entry. Heat started to flicker at our armor, the paint being charred off as we plummeted down at hundreds of miles an hour down towards the isolated castle in the Romanian backwater. My shoulder cannon shifted forward as I took aim at the tower where Miranda ripped my Simulacurum's heart out. 

A five pound tungsten slug erupted from the barrel of my rail cannon, streaking forward at hypersonic speeds to where it punched through the rooftop with enough force that the entire tower collapsed. Jill and Chris landed in the courtyard while I landed on the castle wall. A layer of dust hovered in the air, but the HUD cleared that up with ease. Because of it, I saw a large malformed creature erupting from the rubble. 

I blinked in surprise, “Big Lady?” I muttered, seeing that she wasn't a lady anymore but had traded that for becoming an even bigger… dragon-looking thing. Its skin shifted, adopting a marble-like paleness and texture, while her body emerged from the back between a set of malformed but serviceable wings. Her bottom half was a misshapen beast with a massive maw filled with jagged teeth, no eyes, and obscenely large claws. 

“What… did you do… to my daughters?!” The creature roared with Alcina Dimitrescu's voice, just warped through a mouth that wasn't made for speaking. And, for a moment, I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about as she exploded out of the rubble. But, as she did, I saw it. 

A woman in a black dress, one of the sisters, was in the rubble, crying out frantically as the insects that composed her body were rapidly dying. Freezing. The result looked like a woman that was rapidly turning into stone before crumbling apart. I, for my part, watched with an air of stunned disbelief. 

These fuckers really set up shop in the Romanian mountains, where it got cold as shit, when one of their fellows had a fatal weakness to sub thirty degrees fahrenheit. 

Just… 

Fuck. 

“Rude?” Chris questioned sharply. 

“Light ‘em up,” I ordered, raising two dual heavy machine guns at the malformed creature, the bullets impacting one after the other and stripping it of its natural armor with every hit. The stone hide flaked off, falling in bits of rubble, while Dimitrescu roared at the three of us and lunged towards me, blinded by rage. 

Jill acted, her thrusters flaring to life in a short burst that gave her enough momentum to slam into Dimitrescu, sending them both slamming through an ancient castle wall. As they did, another emerged from the rubble, waving the dust away with his hat. 

“Now, what in the hell-” Heisenberg began, only to be cut off when Chris decided for a rematch. He darted forward, and Heisenberg had just enough time to let out a noise of confusion as to why his powers weren't working on the suit before he was tackled through a wall and promptly filled with lead. My Simulacurum hadn't been aware of it, but back on the Bus, I had gone over all of the data to pinpoint how his powers worked. The past couple of hours had been spent figuring out a solution to deal with them.

The answer? A non-magnetic layer of armor, making it difficult for him to grab onto anything. 

I, meanwhile, set my sights on different targets. I waited a beat for Miranda to show herself, but no such luck there. I didn't think she was dead for a second, though, meaning that I would probably have to wait until she revealed herself in a suitably dramatic fashion. Oh well. In any case, with her out of the way, I had a date with my arch-nemesis. My boosters came to life, focusing into needle points as a quick scan revealed where the crazy old bastard was. 

I barreled forward, trusting the others to fight their own battles, while I kool-aid man'd through a half dozen walls before I arrived at the ballroom where I had met the others at. And there I saw Albert and Oswell. Neither looking like they were panicking. 

Alarm bells were ringing in my head when Oswell took one look at me and sighed in obvious disappointment. “I had hoped to be wrong.” 

Ugh. Ew. He really was pulling the whole ‘I'm not mad, just disappointed card’ huh? It made my flesh crawl and every single instinct that I had told me to raise my guns and to not stop firing until every last cell of the man before me was obliterated. But, that was counter-intuitive. The more I let him yap, the more time I bought, even if I was certain that he would be stalling as much as I would. So, it came down to who had better help and who could play their ace first. 

“There wasn't another way that this could end,” I said, landing heavily enough to crack the stone underfoot. All the while, I was keenly aware of a hundred different factors all at once -- how Jill and Chris were both winning their fights. How Storm had made successful first strikes against Umbrella. 

“I don't believe that,” Oswell continued in his disappointed tone. “A month. With a month, I think you could have come around. To see the potential of what we could accomplish together.” 

“You took the planet hostage and hoped Stockholm Syndrome would kick in before I saw you were completely full of shit?” I retorted, aware of the werewolves entering the fray against Chris while Jill and Dimitrescu fell towards a lower swamp area. A place where another one of Miranda's rejects dwelt. “Fat chance of that.” 

“Am I?” Oswell replied, leaning into his wheelchair and giving me a look of superiority that I didn't at all care for. “Do we not both do what is necessary to safeguard the human race? Are you not already a guiding hand for humanity, so we do not destroy ourselves with short sighted arrogance? We aren't so different, Mr. Rain-” 

“Uh, yeah. Yeah we kinda fucking are,” I blurted, genuinely caught off guard with that appeal. Like, what the actual fuck? He couldn't be that deluded, could he? “For starters? I'm not going all ‘for the greater good’ while performing horrific experiments on innocent people while cheerfully ignoring how that ‘greater good’ also happens to be good for my bottom line. I also don't think that I'm the guiding hand that humanity needs. Or wants. I mean, shit- people are stupid, sure, but that means you put some fucking training wheels on the bike. You don't put slugs in people's brains to control their every fucking thought. Jesus fucking Christ -- ‘we aren't so different’? Are you out of your fucking mind!?” 

Probably not the best move to buy time, I will admit. I could see the look of reproachful disappointment, like he was my grandpa and he’d caught me smoking in the garage, starting to melt away to a frigid anger. Which told me that he had actually believed the bullshit that he was spewing. And that was crazy. Like actually insane, to the point of needing to be condemned to a padded room, in a straight jacket, inside an asylum. It was so crazy it made me feel like I needed to do some self-reflecting to unfuck whatever it was about myself that this asshole saw reflected in himself. 

It was a bad idea, sure, but I had to admit -- it felt good to say. Felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders. So, naturally, I kept running my mouth. 

“Let me clear some things up for you- I hate you, Oswell. I don’t believe in God, but I hope there is a Hell, because I could spend my life making sure you suffer for every twisted evil and vile thing you've ever done and it still wouldn't be a fraction of what you deserve. I hate everything about you. I hate everything you stand for, everything that you believe in, and everything you have ever done in the entirety of your life. I fucking hate the way you look, the way you dress, and just… everything. I hate everything about you. Fuck. I'd rather be bathing in liquid shit than be here, having this conversation, in the same room as you. So… fuck you, Oswell. Fuck. You.” 

There was a lengthy beat of silence following my outburst and any warmth that had been in his gaze hadn't gone cold. The guy looked like a geriatric psychopath. “I see,” he said, a scream of inarticulate rage scratching at the walls of a cold tone. “I underestimated your personal feelings on the matter. I had thought someone of your unmatched brilliance would be a bit more… professional. And not speak like a teenager who just discovered curse words.” 

Ah. Well, that was fair. I think I said fuck like ten times in the span of a few sentences. However, rather than admit that point, I flipped him the bird and his lips peeled back into an expression of disgust. 

“Very well then. Miranda was right. In the end, we don't require your consent,” Oswell started, and I tried to resist. I really, really, really did. 

But I gave into temptation, raising my machine guns, and unloaded into Oswell without a hint of hesitation or mercy in my heart. I was reminded of the scene from Robocop where a machine unloaded .50 caliber bullets into some CEO or executive for a solid minute -- just a dude on a table getting shot to shit. I was happy to discover that it was surprisingly accurate when I did the same to Oswell, only a lot messier as his wheelchair came apart, as did the wretched fuck himself and Albert behind him. 

But the instant the first bullet struck him, I knew something was up. By the tenth, when Oswell was a puddle on the ground? That really gave it away. Milestone levels were a bit finicky, and I didn't know what my ability would consider an earnest milestone, but killing my arch-nemesis would earn a level in my book. 

So when I stopped shooting, I was unsurprised to see the blood and gore start to bubble and blacken. The pieces flowed towards one another, pooling upwards and slowly taking the shape of a man, complete with his clothing. After a long few seconds passed, I saw him. 

Oswell Spencer. A younger version of himself, and I never thought to compare them, but I was surprised to see how much he looked like Albert. I was almost certain that they were related now, but I suppose that was a moot point. 

“That explains Albert's continued presence on this planet of reality,” I remarked, watching as Oswell smoothed back his pale blonde hair and formed a cane out of the same black mold his body was made of. 

“Albert was one of our greatest successes, though he didn’t realize it. A pity what became of him. But, I knew his history with your compatriots would prove too tempting to ignore,” Oswell said, looking at me with that same air of superiority. Like he knew a punchline to a joke I didn't get. 

Irritatingly, he was partly right to. This was an unwelcome surprise, and one that I hadn’t quite puzzled out. Had it all been a trap? ‘Albert’ baiting me into attacking, the computer filled with information about Oswell’s plans -- was all of it a bait and switch? My initial reaction was to assume so, but the pieces didn’t quite fit. 

The information on that computer had been too damning. Too informative. If it really was just bait for me to spread out my forces so I couldn’t react to his real blow… Then he would have said as much. That would have been the ultimate fuck you to my ‘you suck’ speech. A real kick in the dick that Oswell wouldn’t have been able to resist hitting me with. Meaning…

Meaning that he didn’t know what had been on Miranda’s computer. Meaning that they were partners but subtly working against each other for dominance. Meaning that whatever Oswell was, despite seemingly being made of mold… he was something other. He wasn’t entirely Miranda’s puppet. 

And that rang warning bells in my head even before the ground began to shift under my feet. Black mold began to sprout between the stones like weeds, exploding upwards to grow like trees until the entire castle started to come undone. With its foundations rocked, the ceiling caved in, but it meant little as the sea of mold continued to surge upwards with Oswell at the center of it. 

My thrusters came alive as I jumped up before the churning sea of mold beneath my feet could claim me, and as I flew up, I saw the vastness of the mold colony. The hill that the castle was built on started to crumble as the mold escaped its confines, tendrils erupting across the village as the landscape itself came alive. 

I let out a low whistle at the sight of it as Jill and Chris flew up, disengaging from their fights as the mold tried to ensnare them. What I saw instead were Heisenberg and Dimitrescu getting caught in the mold before they seemed to melt into it. And from the noise they made it wasn't a gentle process. 

“Rude?” Chris prompted, looking at me. 

“Five minutes left,” I replied, already knowing what he was going to ask. Meanwhile, I sent a command to the Bus. All the while being keenly aware of every passing second. Five minutes was enough for the virus bombs in the cities to be disabled, but the ones in orbit were a different beast. There were thousands of them to ensure saturation, and Storm only had three hundred members. 

As the last of the rubble fell, shaking off hundreds of tons of stone, the dust cleared to reveal both Oswell and Miranda. They stood next to each other, as equals, and I gave them both a scan, trying to figure out what exactly was going on. And, in a few seconds, I had it. 

They were two separate mold colonies. Similar, but ever so slightly different. 

“I'm sure you've figured it out by now,” Oswell said, the mold twisting into violent shapes on his shadow. “It was something that I've avoided for decades -- Miranda was kind enough to grant me a sample of the Mold. A sample that I always kept close. It was cultivated, mastered, but never used… until you came along.” Oswell continued, the monsters of mold taking shape and I saw familiar faces. 

Tyrants. Nemesis. Recreations of the real thing, only nastier.

“It became a necessity. I knew that it was only a matter of time before you found me, and the ability to transcend my consciousness across a mold mass… it was a sacrifice, as it meant I couldn't become the herald of the new world,” Oswell continued and I could hear noises of absolute bafflement coming from Chris and Jill. 

Seriously, this guy… “Boohoo,” I returned, having none of it. “You made yourself functionally immortal. Real big sacrifice there. You are so full of shit-” 

“And you are an impatient welp!” Oswell snapped at me with a stamp of his cane. “Do you even understand what you have set in motion?! Do you think I would be so unprepared that I wouldn't have redundancies?!” 

Given that up until this exact moment I had been absolutely convinced that neither he nor anyone in Umbrella even knew what the word redundancy meant… kinda. 

“You have damned the world in this petulant display! I'm sure that your ‘Storm’ are well on their way to disabling the virus bombs planted in the cities, but they aren't the only ones! Scattered across the atmosphere, I have positioned satellites to release more of them in orbit! There will be nothing untouched by the T-Virus! Do you understand that?!” 

A slow smile spread across my lips as he just gave the game away. My gaze flickered to Miranda, seeing her give no reaction to the outburst, her hands simply clasped together, acting as a silent partner. One who had just stabbed Oswell in the back. 

My response wasn't in the form of words. It was the arrival of two machines that arrived screaming from orbit. 

They struck the ground with thunderous force, sending out a wave of dust and mold, but they emerged from the craters unscathed. 

Dakka and Kaboom. 

Their twin chassis stood at fifteen feet tall, shoulder mounted cannons and other weapons primed and ready to fire. Oswell and Miranda looked at them with faint alarm, the tension in the air swelling… 

Until it suddenly snapped, and the final battle began in earnest.