Village: Resident Evil VIII
Chapter Fifty Eight: The Megamycete
No matter what Tobias said from through the rusted, now open doorway, there was no was that Chris was going to leave Zoe Winters alone, not after everything she had been through in the past month… Jesus, a month, the Captain knew that Miranda was with Ethan in their home for a while, but not that long. It took a while, but Lobo and Night Howl were eventually able to reach their position, reporting that the battle between the BSAA and Miranda's Lycans had continued to escalate, with both sides apparently having no shortage of reinforcements.
"The whole south region of the village has been destroyed." Night Howl reported. "But everything around here is mostly clear, so if we're going to evacuate Mrs. Winters, we need to get her out right now."
Zoe didn't want to go, still shocked about the death of her husband, and naturally wanting to help get her daughter back from Miranda, but the short haired woman was in no condition to help with anything at the moment. The Captain assured her that he could save Rose, but Zoe was skeptical since he hadn't been able to do anything else that was promised. God damn it, why did Tobias just have to blurt out that Ethan was dead, didn't he care about her feelings at… well, no he probably didn't. Fuck, what a shit show this whole damn mission turned out to be, and now after finally convincing Zoe to escape with Lobo and Night Howl… now there was still the matter of Miranda and Tobias.
For over a minute Chris just stood there in that laboratory, or archive, or whatever this place was, genuinely unsure as to what his next move should be. He could bust into the next move and simply gun down the soldier, not that the Captain wasn't curious as to why Tobias was being so cooperative all of a sudden. Curiosity didn't stop him from checking to make sure his rifle was still loaded, and then Chris kept the weapon ready as he moved through the old rusted doorway into a much larger section of the caves that looked more natural. The strange part was that this large cavern was warm, warm and humid like the inside of a greenhouse, and… and something was moving up above.
Aiming his flashlight upward, the Captain saw that hundreds, if not thousands of black tendrils like the ones outside stretched across the cavern's ceiling in all directions, pulsing and twitching randomly while the light beam following it all the way back to the center where a gigantic black and red mass occupied most of the chamber, embedded into the rock wall so its true size couldn't be measured. The mass hung down so that it almost touched the rocky floor at its lowest point, and that was where Tobias was, standing right in front of it as if he were a scientist about to make a brilliant discovery.
"So this is it? The cause of it all?" The soldier asked, not taking his eyes off the Megamycete as Chris approached. "I assume you have a plan for this? A bomb, maybe?"
As a matter of fact, he did, a precision tactical device that once assembled should be strong enough to destroy this giant fungus… as well as the cave system and most of the village. The device was broken into three harmless looking pieces that were on the Captain's weapon belt as if they were just another set of tools, capable of being assembled by even the lowest ranking grunt in the field in case of emergency, and… and definitely not something that a person like Tobias Liquid should ever get his hands on.
"Relax, Redfield, I want this thing gone, too." Tobias said, smirking as he finally looked at him. "If my near death experience at the reservoir taught me anything, its that Miranda, her mushroom, and her entire freakshow all need to be destroyed, so go ahead… here, I'll step back."
Keeping his hands out to the sides as he moved away from the Megamycete's central mass, the soldier remained where he was while Chris assembled the three pieces of the device, only allowing himself to let out a sigh of relief once the thing was activated and drilled into the black and red mass with its own anchors. Once mounted and set, the device couldn't be turned off by anyone unless they knew the abort code, and attempting to remove its anchors while the thing was on would result in premature detonation. The timer was set for a couple hours to make sure everyone was out of range, but he planned on setting it off a lot earlier than that with the manual switch.
"Nice, isn't it? The two of us working together toward a common goal?" The soldier asked while the device beeped and flashed. "It's too bad you and STARS couldn't cooperate like this back in '98, huh? Raccoon City might still be there, and I'd probably still be human, looking forward to my retirement. I might not look it, but did you know I'm almost sixty years old? So that makes you what? Getting close to fifty? My, my, where does the time go?"
"Shut the fuck up, or I'm gonna plug you right here." Chris snapped, his rifle aimed once again. "You wanna help take Miranda down? Fine, but as soon as that's done it's over for you and your wife. You're a terrorist, Tobias, you've killed hundreds of people, and I'm gonna personally put both of you into the same kind of deep freeze that Alexia was in… forever."
The soldier just stood there waiting patiently for the Captain to finish his speech, before calmly telling him that his bomb wasn't going to be enough by itself. Not enough, Chris thought? That device was nuclear rated, how the hell wasn't it going to be enough? Instead of answering him, Tobias took a second knife out behind his back and sliced the palm of his own hand so that a large amount of blood was visible. First setting the flat part of the blade right on top of the wound, and then flipping it over once the weapon was thoroughly soaked, the Soldier stabbed the bloody knife into the Megamycete's outer skin, leaving the blade stuck there while he started wiping even more blood all across the organism's surface.
No reaction came from the mass being stabbed, but the blood smeared across the red and black flesh was slowly vanishing, like the fungus was absorbing it, and Tobias kept smearing more and more of it until his healing ability closed up the cut on his hand. Chris knew that the soldier's blood was a powerful anti-BOW serum that could cause some pretty devastating mutations, but was it possible for it to have an effect on something as large and powerful as the Megamycete? The soldier nodded in approval after watching some of his blood be absorbed, before spinning around and flicking his wrist so fast that some of his blood splattered across Chris's face.
The Captain's immediate reaction was one of horror, remembering what happened to everyone he had ever seen infected with Tobias's blood, but then he remembered that the Daylight Vaccine he had received years ago protected him from it… just in time for sparks to fly when the soldier's baton fell down his sleeve into his hand. Taking the hit right into the lower stomach where his body armor didn't cover, Chris was knocked off his feet while a surge of electrical pain stretched out across his whole body, and it started to subside just in time for the Captain to see Tobias picking up the fallen rifle.
"I need to borrow this for a minute." The soldier said, removing the clip and then ejecting the first round into his hand. "You don't mind, right?"
It was like the Captain's body had gone numb and electrically charged at the same time, leaving him able to do little more than groan and twitch while Tobias rolled the loose bullet around in the little bit of blood that remained on his hand. Once the whole tip was stained red, he put it back into the clip on top, reloaded the weapon, and gave Chris a solid kick to the face just as he was starting to be able to move again. Another hit of that shock baton to the back caused the Captain to scream in agony, his whole body twitching violently for a couple seconds and then leaving him unable to move once again.
"No-no, don't get up, I got this." Tobias said as he walked toward the exit. "Oh, and don't threaten me, Redfield, it's bad for your health… I mean, if Leon Kennedy can't beat me, what the hell chance does a retard like you have?"
This time it took a lot longer for the feeling to come back into Chris's body, with his first two attempts to get up ending in failure after almost getting to his hands and knees. Once up that far, the Captain had to rest his head on the rocky ground for a minute, but then thankfully the feeling was coming back to the rest of him. Legs still a bit wobbly when he stood up, but Chris was able to stumble his way back through the rusty door into Miranda's archive, moving a little bit better with each step, never mind the part where the Captain knocked over a whole row of bookstacks when he fell into them.
Shaking off the last of the lingering electrical effects just as he moved through the first cave toward the surface, Chris was just about to pass through the hole they had cut through the black tendrils, when he remembered that Tobias stole his rifle. He still had a pistol, but the sounds of gunfire and roaring monsters was now a lot closer than it had been before, meaning that if the Captain was going to have any chance of reaching the site where Miranda was located, he was going to have to move quickly.
Rain had still been falling when they went into the cave, but now that was over, replaced with thick falling snow that was being blown hard in the wind. This allowed Chris to see the tracks of his men, along with Zoe's smaller ones, heading away from the combat zone, while another set, Tobias's, headed toward the other grouping of black tendrils. Was it tempting to just cut losses and escape in order to just blow up Miranda, the Megamycete, and Tobias in one shot? Yes it was, but he could never leave Rose like that, so the Captain followed the single set of tracks to the west, toward where Miranda was waiting, and hopefully toward a confrontation that would end this whole nightmare once and for all.