Day 25. London Underground
At the beginning of midnight, Lara traverses in a seemingly abandoned underground station. It's called Aldwych, and it has been won by let's say punks. "This is surely the hand of Sophia Leigh," Lara thinks. The ones ruling the underground have a green-laden flesh, and that is to name the least noticeable of the deformities. Their defense weapons are torches and spiky clubs, so it's an easy feat for Lara.
The building has been tampered with somehow. Two keys were hidden in adjacent unended constructions. "Masonry?" Lara asks. Her suspicions are later confirmed when she manages to enter into an underground building with the famous square and compass. These are the labyrinthic foundations leading to a great hall with beautiful violet curtains.
The mason building leads to yet another area of Aldwych station that has been isolated in time. And here thrive those who have mutated under the hands of Sophia Leigh. Yet Lara keeps pushing and shooting them dead. The trail leads her to an old abandoned coach. Lara commando crawls below it and finds an opening to a yet lower tunnel, and in it the punk's lair.
Lara gets picked by one punk and led to a leader. She just cannot get herself free from the punk's grip. "So you are after Ms. Leigh," the leader, holding a trident staff, says. "Not for pleasure, business," Lara clarifies. Of course, they ignore what she did to the punks above. The leader, like the other punks, worked as a cosmetic assistant to Ms. Leigh. Good job conditions, no experience required. Little did he know he would be placed in a lab tank for ages. "Where's my face?" He asked himself the first time he got out the tank. "Where's my skin?"
Lara and the leader seem to reach some sort of agreement, as poking on Sofia Leigh seems to be a shared interest. "Embalming fluid?" Lara asks. Preserving the little skin these punks have left is essential. So, in the first hour of the day, Lara heads to the Museum, under the guidance of one punk who knows the underground passages of London.
The museum has night-shift guards, who she takes down with stealth. The arrangement of the Egiptian displays is reminiscent of Lara's adventures in Khamoon, minus the mommy-dressed Atlantean soldiers. She recovers the embalming fluid, which was stored nearby the sarcophagi, in an upper section of the museum.
In exchange for getting embalming fluid, the punks open a trapdoor to a shaft leading to further flooded foundations. This time though, an underwater propulsion unit has been facilitated to Lara. These seem to be the foundations of Sophia Leigh's warehouse, as they are heavily guarded. A piece of cake, anyways, to Lara who is nearing the 100 death toll. That is, but for the mercenaries licensed in scuba diving. She's not that good with harpoons, so she draws them near a hungry, and seemingly lost crocodile. "Where did this come from?" she asks herself. But that's not the only question, as these flooded foundations go from high-tech to old-age in a puzzling way, until Lara makes it to the surface, this is, the actual offices of Sophia Leigh.
This time, the blond, crazy, scientist and entrepreneur is at her office. And quite a nice office it is. "I'd probably have an unsightly face judging from your previous experiments," Lara answers upon Leigh's sarcastic invitation to become the face of her cosmetics corporation. After all, it's 2 o'clock, and Lara's only here for a meteorite rock artifact. Upon which, Leigh picks up her staff with the artifact and goes for the long-range fight, far away from Lara's bullets.
The long range fight leaves Lara at a great disadvantage against the offensive and defensive firepower of the artifact. So for now it's dodging and climbing the skyscraper. But Lara has more than gun power - wit. A layline is nearly above Leigh, and Lara shoots at it. Thus an electric arc ends up taking down Leigh. She's unconscious, not dead, in the adjacent tower. The artifact has protected her life. Lara simply crosses a bridge connecting the towers and picks up the big prize.