P E A C E M A K E R
Jeremy Urbano Rosete (Bad Ronald)
I.
Water World
Agent HUNK glanced at the briefcase he clutched in his gloved hands. Looking through the red lenses of his gas mask, which dimmed his focal perception a bit, but not enough to limit his vision, he held the briefcase up and slipped off his knapsack, stuffing the case inside. The case contained the files his employers needed in order to restart Umbrella corporations; albeit in a different name.
The higher-ups even offered HUNK a position on the developing executive staff, but he declined to stick with the security and retrieval sector. He turned other job prospects down not out of loyalty… but because Umbrella paid well, established stocks or not. HUNK zipped up the pack and slipped it back on again, his brisk walk faltering upon the sound of klaxons blaring. He checked his clasp-watch and mentally counted to the time he radioed in his location. Five minutes past to grab what he needed, five minutes due until the chopper arrived.
Agent HUNK took a moment scratched the parts of his skin not covered by his leather gas mask (a mere slit between the chin-cover and his throat, the rest layered with leather and Kevlar), and surveyed his surroundings. HUNK recalled one of his superiors referring to his mission impudently as "Project Water World," and only now, looking at the expanse of water and wooden shacks, could he ascertain why.
Boat harbors and fishermen wharfs with rickety-wood rails, tied bridges, and shack buildings made from oak or bamboo suspended over seawater. Only ocean as far as the eye could see, with linking fishing villages held aloft over water, connected by scaffoldings and pulleys, reminiscent of the overdone sets in the turgid movie of the same title.
Agent HUNK moved away from the window frame, settling down to the desk cabinet laid up against the wall. Just to rest for a minute. He turned, set his elbows on the wood, and watched the door slam open.
One of those damned villagers stood in the doorway with a chain-mace, yelling and gibbering, frothing at the mouth with eyes lined crimson. HUNK shot to a standing position, immediately hunching over and charging the villager out the door. They stumbled into another room with stairs leading to the roof. The villager clutched to the agent, growling and howling, spittle flying from his mouth and landing on the agent's red lenses.
The mercenary kicked him aside with a good punt to the face. His enemy shakily got up, and before he could charge blindly at him, HUNK grabbed his TMP machinegun and jammed it into the villager's gnashing mouth, shoving the barrel of his machine gun deeper in to force his head backwards.
His desperate enemy grabbed at the TMP, then involuntarily slapped HUNK on the side of his face— the tin canister of his gas mask ringing at the impact— when the villager's cerebellum shot out of its shattered cranium, punched in by a single burst from the Umbrella agent's TMP.
He let go of the villager, stepping over and looking out the window to see the rest of the fisherman town at arms, every villager with their faces quivering with hate, their eyes diluted to the point of pure rage glaring directly at him.
HUNK's eyes tracked each stalking villager. One across the bridge, a man with bundles of dynamite stuffed inside his ragged charcoal shirt pointed and yelled at the agent, and fell over the rails after his face caught a round from HUNK's machine gun. His comrades, still undaunted, ran blisteringly fast across the platforms to get to the agent.
The agent could not stop smiling grimly behind his mask; he had never felt this way before, so densely challenged and literally fighting for his life. The retrieval years back in Raccoon and Bluecreek, along with the cleanup expeditions in London, had been filled with ritual training, surveillance; the occasional outbreak.
Even then, his challenges consisted of mindless undead with no function other than to feed, coupled with the rare instances of highly lethal bio-engineered black projects which, upon encountering, remained few and far between. Now, as a mercenary, this felt better. A lot better.
The villagers his mission directives had designated codename Ganado could think, fight, devise, plan. Smart packs of men, these Ganados, each shrieking for his blood and waving their clubs and electric tazers.
Best to fragment them, then, to separate each for a kill. He couldn't allow them to group up too densely when he saw their formation; the beginnings of an unstoppable mob. He leaped down the platform outside the room, into the snarling, festering pack of ganados, roughly shoving two aside and narrowly dodging when he heard a whistling slice of a blade.
HUNK turned, fired three shots, and grabbed hold of the ladder at the back of the building of him, climbing up at a furious pace to the roof of the shack, shaped obscurely like an L. The villagers stepped over their three dead comrades, gritting their teeth, brandishing their weapons.
Each climbed up after him; the agent looked back and found them still relentless, never tiring.
HUNK reached into his knapsack and took out two hand-grenades, flicking away the ring off one grenade and rolling it towards the top rung of the ladder. He watched it drop down and the villagers' indignant squawks were drowned out in the blast. The agent ran across the roof of the shack, shooting a villager in the face and caving in the throat of another with the stock of his TMP.
He saw a scaffolding on the end of the roof, the top of the "L," and yanked at the handles on the pulley line leading all the way down to the roof of the second wood-shack building. The pulley rocketed him towards the other rooftop of a smaller shack and he took headshots at the stumbling villagers, punching a hole through their noses, eyes, mouths, foreheads, knocking each down in a show of swift sharp shooting. He landed with a roll, taking sweet advantage of the temporary lull in the battle to reload his machine gun.
The radio slung to his hip crackled to life, conveying to him, "—on route, Mr. Death, go directly to the evac location, it is an L-shaped building with a —" HUNK cut the radio-feed; he heard all he needed to hear and shook his head. They marked evac on the building he just left, the villagers had him nailed balls to the wall, and he realized he finally found the challenge he'd been waiting for a long time in his professional life.
However, when he got it, he blew it by doing a very stupid thing; the mercenary underestimated the situation, and the ganados took advantage of it. He got excited, became… emotional, very unlike him.
So he had to leave and recoup, to plan, to prepare for the next encounter with a village of ganados because he went woefully unprepared, not expecting them to be so cunning and relentless.
Easy to say, but to do just that, to fight them for a second time, he had to leave this place alive.
NOTES:
Shit, looks like I did it again. I actually divided by zero. I'm sorry to ruin your eyes from such OWN, but I couldn't help but write after getting incredibly baked and then laughing my ass off at the RE4 intro. Only when I played Mercenaries Mode with HUNK in my favorite stage, the Water World, did I realize that I was quite literally narrating off the story straight from my ass. Excited with this new prospect, I decided to try and capture it in all HUNK's glory.
Sure, there are few times I took some liberties with how the fights go and stuff... but writing is never without taking a few liberties, is it?
Look at that button on the left-side corner, the one that says Submit Review? Yeah, you should do it, because we fanfiction authors FEED on these things...Mmm.