Prologue

The Gotham City Police entered the building slowly, cautiously, the lights from their flashlights playing across the scene. One officer whistled under his breath, while a second cursed in amazement.

The lobby of the corporation's branch office in Gotham City looked like a war zone. Corpses lay scattered about, lighting fixtures were broken, shattered glass was strewn about the debris littering the floor. Bullet holes stitched the walls, doubtless from the dead security guards and heavily armed SWAT-style response guards the corporation liked to employ.

One officer's boot crunched loudly on a large piece of glass as he crossed the lobby, looking for the attacker. The officer glanced down, and noticed he was standing on top of the corporation's logo, painted on the floor.

It was the top, overhead view of an open, red-and-white umbrella, the symbol of Umbrella Inc.

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Seven guards lined up in the hallway, their guns up and ready. Four of the men were regular security guards, armed only with pistols, but the other three carried submachine guns and body armor, as well as helmets and gas-masks, the typical uniform of Umbrella Inc.'s Secret Security Patrol Team.

The men crouched low to the floor or took cover near convenient doorways as they anticipated the arrival of their target in the elevator ahead. They watched the lights above the elevator blink as the intruder who had shattered the upstairs lobby descended to the basement levels.

The elevator stopped at their level with a cheery "bing!" and the doors slid open.

All seven guards opened fire, pouring bullets into the elevator's open door. They continued firing, bullets stitching the back wall, the steady stream of automatic fire from the submachine guns highlighted by the higher-pitched, intermittent fire of the pistols. After about fifteen seconds, the weapons ran dry, and over a two hundred bullet holes marked the rear wall of the elevator.

But, there was no sign of the intruder.

"Biggs, Wedge, check it out," one of the SSPT troopers ordered, and two of the security guards ran forward to investigate the elevator while the rest of the group inched forward, reloading their guns.

Biggs and Wedge reached the elevator and stepped in, glancing around. They turned around, Biggs shrugging while Wedge opened his mouth.

"Nothing in-" he began to say when a figure dropped down from above, doubtless bracing against the walls overhead in a classic evasion maneuver.

One of the man's hands closed around Wedge's throat, and with a single twist of his wrist he shattered the guard's neck. His other arm closed around Bigg's gun hand and twisted as well, breaking the wrist and dropping the gun. He the grabbed Biggs by the front of his shirt and spun him in front, placing the unfortunate guard right in the path of the incoming bullets from the rest of the guards.

Biggs served as an adequate shield, protecting the intruder from the hail of bullets as the intruder lifted him up. The intruder charged, still holding Biggs off the ground as a gruesome shield against the bullets.

"Grenade!" one guards shouted, pulling a hand grenade off his belt and pulling the pin. The other two SSPT troopers agreed, grabbing their own grenades. As one, they rolled them down the hall at the attacker.

Their attacker responded by dropping Biggs's dead body and by running, fast, directly at the guards, almost covering the distance between them in a second, getting him well out of the range of the fragmentation grenades as they exploded behind him. At this close range, the men could see their attacker's features, making out the smooth, combed-back blonde hair, the cold, aristocratic features, and the reddish glow from behind his sunglasses.

The man proceeded to grab the closest guard's handgun, then spun the man around to act as another shield with his free hand. As the SSPT troopers emptied their magazines into another of their fellow guards-turned-shields, the attacker used his appropriated gun to shoot the remaining security guard. Three shots struck him in the chest as the attacker hurled his dead shield at the armored troopers. The dead body knocked one man down and threw a second off balance, but the third leveled his gun at their attacker.

He responded by jumping forward and sideways, twisting his legs around so they touched against the wall. Then, the man ran on the wall over the heads of the two off-balance guards, his surprising and amazing maneuver catching the remaining guard by surprise and throwing off his aim for a second.

The man dropped down in front of the guard, and grabbed the gun, stripping his foe of his weapon with inhuman strength. He spun around and poured bullets into the two off-balance guards as they were recovering, killing them both, and spun around as the remaining guard scrabbled for his sidearm. Before the man could raise it, the attacker brought his stolen gun down on the man's head, shattering the top of the helmet and bending the butt of the submachine gun at a right angle to its original position. The remaining guard fell like a sack of bricks, his skull shattered.

Their attacker smirked and straightened his sunglasses, the eyes behind them still glowing.