The storm had started to come in, light flakes of snow landing on the light gray of her nose. The burns from the heat and explosions had already faded away, though her clothing had new scorch marks and stank of smoke and the odorous fuel that had ignited below. Jill wasn't that thick skinned or adapted to the cold, but after what she'd endured rolling into the snowbank at the far side of the mostly empty lot felt like heaven. The dull aches numbed by the melting snow as she partially rubbed it against some parts of her body, even her gills opening and closing so the icy water could flow through her and purge the taint of what she had found beneath Heimfest. The carapace hood of flesh tugged down just below her eyes as her breath slowed, the itching and tightening of regrowing flesh fading into the background for one blissful moment.
Jill pushed forward, sliding along the ground and stretching out as far as she could, her tail idly swaying from side to side as she did. Maybe it was exhaustion and that hard fall after the adrenaline and panic burned out, but right now all she wanted to do was lay right where she was. Hell, the cold and nearly freezing water and quite frozen slush actually felt good on her closing wounds and still sore muscles.
"Maybe I should try this some other time?" Jill's tail flicked to one side, the fins regrown from where that noxious fluid had been trying to digest or convert her before and tingling at the fresh sensation of the cold air. That was an odd thought, one that had her letting out a sharp breath somewhere between a laugh and a cough.
Apparently she'd become a fish with a preference for cold water and not even noticed it.
"Barry would probably have some dumb joke about this…"
A Jill-sicle?
'Careful you don't end up in the frozen seafood aisle.'
'Didn't know you had a halibut for skinny dipping in ice water.'
Of course that was just his own habit as it were when dealing with stress. And there had been a lot in those early days before Raccoon. When they'd all still been trying to compartmentalize and get a handle on what they'd seen and done to survive. Before it all happened again, a thousand times worse. And then kept on going, dragging them further into scarier and darker world. One whose depths even now yawned beneath Jill like chasms with now bottom.
One she'd been pulled so far down into, she had no idea if she could ever swim back to the surface. Or would even know how to do so if she tried.
Her still and slowing heart beat no longer pounded in her skull, so she heard a droning hum approach. Jill's eyes peaked out under the blue-gray fleshy armor, shiny and black. There was nowhere to run, least not without getting seen by the spy drone flying overhead. So without a second's thought she rolled over twice, burrowing into the snow around her and welcoming the cold embrace about her. Her wounds had closed before she'd even climbed out from that tight and smoky drainage tunnel, guided by a strange sixth sense that worked in utter darkness and even now she wasn't quite sure how to describe. But for the moment she had other concerns. Such as covering her body, from tip to tail, in as much of the snow about her as she could. The lights didn't reach this far, not towards the back end of the lot where they must have piled up the snowbank prior to the virus's outbreak.
Such that when she wormed only the very tip of her face, nostrils tickled by a few stray flakes of snowfall, there was very little sign of Jill Valentine to be seen.
The drone's flight went over, passing into the distance and then back again. Long, slow, circles over the area. She wondered how long whoever was controlling it would keep up the search.
Other sounds, approaching from the road that led out of town and up to the old mine gradually grew louder. In the stark silence of perpetual night, Jill could discern the soft crunch of snow and gravel underfoot.
Or under feet as it were, as a small group passed by the chain link fence near her hiding spot. She didn't dare turn her head towards them, but the sounds faded a bit as they moved towards the open gate and into the main lot between Heimfest and a few dilapidated and truly ancient buildings at the outskirts of the old military base.
"What the hell is all this?"
The outburst was loud enough that Jill heard it easily and clearly. Unaccented English, as American as her own, coming from a tall figure covered head to toe in gray-white winter camouflage hooded jacket. They pointed around at the flaming spouts of smoke that continued to pour out from underground, brushing at their face as they got a good whiff of the foul odor that tainted them.
"Maybe a gas line burst down there? This whole shitheap's basically being held together by sticks and tape at this point?"
"But why now Carter?" the tall one said, turning towards the shorter woman that had spoken. Only for her coat to bulge out, an arm under it pointing at him angrily as he stepped back.
"For fucks sake, use codenames! Skadi . Call me Skadi while we're on the mission Kari ."
"Quiet you two. You can get back to flirting after we finish this op." The third spoke at last, almost as tall but broader looking that Kari or Carter-
"Skadi?!" Jill's mind raced back to that stabbing pain from before. She'd heard that name, that voice, just before she'd been rendered unconscious and almost dead. Was this them?
The true murderers that had eliminated the BSAA agents back on the island and left her for dead?
"Something crawled out from here."
"Checking thermals sir," Kari said, looking around the area slowly, placing hand under their hood as they did. An eerie green glow emanated from under the hood as whatever gear they were wearing beneath their jackets was pointed towards Jill's hiding spot for a moment. She held her breath, still as a corpse and stared back. She couldn't dare move or retreat further, even sliding her fleshy covering fully down would give her presence away at this point. But her fears were unfounded as a moment later he turned away, continuing to scan the entire empty lot.
"No good. It's all cold and dead. Only heat signatures other than us are coming from underground, and that could be masking whatever got out."
"The reports said that they'd terminated their test subjects before they pulled out."
"This was a decade before Raccoon, Skadi. They probably didn't even understand what they'd found at the time."
"What did they find-"
Something roared, guttural and deep. Not at the entrance Jill had swam through, but further towards the old barracks. The vent there bellowing more acrid smoke as the ground shook and the vibration traveled all the way to Jill's hiding spot.
"Firing positions! Skadi, point, Kari, set up for target immobilization."
"Understood Surtr!"
"Got you covered Sir," Kari said, pulling out an oversized rifle that had been slung under his cloak. Armored gloves tugged the firing stand down as he crotched low, snow boots loudly pushing back on the ground as he fell prone and aimed towards the disturbance. Skadi for her part pulled out an SMG and moved to the side as their leader went to the other. The sound redoubled in volume, whatever Jill had stirred up soon to make its appearance.
The ground shook as the far side of the lot exploded upward, smoke and flames bellowing outward. Partly covering the mass of meat and bone that rose out of the ground. Tendrils of flesh supporting its bulk, the amalgamation of an untold number of bodies which had slowly festered in that sealed crypt for years. With their nest disturbed they'd rushed out, spreading into the less hospitable frozen surface. Whether merely instinctual reaction to pain or some perverse form of territorial drive inherited and mutated down the line from the, likely, primate source of most of the biomass was unknowable.
Jill was an expert at killing these things, not analyzing them for the labs and papers that came later.
Which was why she moved forward slightly, unable to keep her surprise showing on her face, her hood tugged back almost entirely as the blue light came from the rifle.
"It can't be…"
The report of Skadi's guns echoed across the lot, filling the eternal night with sound and light. The abomination responded in kind, guttural screams of pain or merely the reaction of its body moving which showed that it would at least respond to injuries, even minor ones, in a predictable manner.
Predictability was not what was needed, as the weapon's charge reached its zenith and the recoil pushed Kari back slightly and Jill felt her tongue go numb, an odd pressure flowing through her for the briefest seconds. Not unlike what she'd felt when trying to swim and crawl through the suffocating blackness beneath Heimfest.
That was merely the side effect of firing a Mark IV Particle Rifle , the overpowered magnetic coil gun impacting the BOW with a force more like supersonic tank shot than anything else. The center of its body evaporated, flesh melted away by nothing more than overwhelming concussive force. The cored out carcass dropped to the ground, still writing about. Behind it the barracks exploded, every window shattering and a gout of flames coming out one end bits of metal and debris continued on into the distance. Alarms sang out into the night, a dirge for this thing's death.
For the third, likely their leader, tossed high temp anti-BOW incendiary grenades into the mass of meat before it could even begin the token effort of regenerating. The explosion and flames consumed and continued to consume its body, fuel that would burn under water and hot enough to melt steel destroying enough of its body that there would be no return for this nameless horror.
Though Jill was more focused on the trio before her, putting their weapons away and coming back together a safe distance from the smoldering corpse.
"That was a high-end Anti-BOW weapon." No one else was even allowed to use those, the very same laws that had seen them put into place as a last resort measure making clear what an atrocious war crime it would be to pull it out in other circumstances. So far the difficulty in use and maintenance, combined with the gross overkill of such a device against any normal human target, had kept that law easily enforced. But these were not BSAA agents, and she'd been told that there were maybe four of those in Europe, and all on field deployment through the Middle East and up in Poland. Her jaw tightened as she sunk down into the snow, thoughts burning with new questions. "Where the hell did they get one of those? And the rest of their gear? Thermal optics, BOW-grade phosphorous grenades… who are these people?"
"That didn't get out on its own."
"Sir?"
"Think Skadi. Someone must have tried to sneak through the tunnels underground while we were planting those charges in the mine."
"So what Conner-"
Kari was swiftly grabbed, pulled almost off his feet. No easy feat given he had to weigh at least a hundred kilos before counting the equipment and the powerpack for the railgun.
"Skadi and you can have your little game during missions, but remember I am your commander until I say otherwise," he said, letting go as Kari stepped back, rubbing around his throat and shifting something on his back as he did so. "So remember that and stop acting like damn rookies."
"Sir."
"Do you think there was a survivor?"
"No one that should have mattered, and anyone that comes looking would probably be glad we sterilized this place by then." He turned around, looking into the darkness near Jill's hiding spot. Eyes shining red in the dark, a pair of angry crimson points under his hood.
Jill's breath froze, her heart beating fast-
- Wesker looked down at her on the examination table, his sunglasses off for a change as he rubbed the side of her face, her new face. Fingers feeling how her skin had warped, bones pushing out and changing her features into something animalistic, predatory.
Inhuman.
"You look so wonderful like this Valentine," taking pride in his mistake, his mutilation and mutation of her being. "So much power and potential hidden inside of you…"
He forced her jaw open, pressing a finger on one of her teeth. She couldn't bite because she hadn't been told she could, but still she tasted his blood, if only for a moment.
"Just a little longer… and then the world-"
- she shuddered, eyes closed to the world as the memories flowed over her.
"Sir, are you sure about that?"
The conversation had continued, and taken an odd turn.
"I'd bet on it. We might need to move to the backup plan," he said as he turned back towards his subordinates. "Jill Valentine could still be alive."
Jill didn't dare move for almost another thirty minutes. She had plenty to keep her mind busy in that terrible tedium, even if the relaxing qualities of her impromptu snow bath were now a distant memory.
Whoever this small group of mercenaries were, whatever their purpose for being in the Arctic Ocean at the same time as herself, they were her enemy. And they were equipped to do so. Overly so in some ways. The crumbling ruins of the old Soviet barracks at the far side and the smoking pool of bubbling, boiling meat that had been living in that rancid hell beneath Heimfest gave ample proof of that.
Moreover they were, despite being conventional foes, far more dangerous to her than most zombies or BOWs or as of yet unclassified creations of twisted biomedical science. She was used to those, perhaps too used to them. Evil and cruel human minds, the ones that had created or unleashed such things were another matter. Even the most persistent and advanced BOWs she'd ever faced lacked a certain capacity for problem solving or ingenuity, and most were little better than the corpses they looked like in problem solving. They'd stopped being a legitimate threat to her long before she'd realized she was immune to most of their pathogens.
Before she'd learned to kill them so efficiently that she'd earned respect and admiration the world over as one of the top agents of the newly founded BSAA even in the short time she'd been able to serve there.
(And before Wesker had turned her into one of those very same monsters…)
"This is pointless," Jill thought, rising out of the snow as she felt her mind wandered back into those dark circles that never gave her any easy answers. The half-melted slush dripped from her body, which still felt oddly better than the frigid air around. Her regrown toes, or at least portions of them flexed the clawed tips of her feet and her tail rose up and shifted as she stretched it out as far as she could and worked a kink out of bones and muscles that were becoming disturbingly not alien to her the longer they were part of her body.
It seemed like you could get used to almost anything in enough time.
Time though was, at least at the moment, something Jill did not have in abundance.
The armored hood pulled back entirely and a bare toothed frown stretched across her face as she turned her gaze towards the still blinking lights of that old radio tower. She had maybe eight hours at most before the BSAA turned up, probably less than four before their pickup ride took off to find the dead and the bureaucrats that had been itching to have her killed and dissected before Chris Redfield had quite literally threatened to tear the place apart got their way.
Not much time, and certainly cutting it close when she had to take care to avoid being spotted by that trio and whatever drones or security they might have in play.
"They probably don't have much beyond the drones… especially not if they're shooting a Mark IV around like that." The base would have had ancient and derelict equipment anyway, and given this teams propensity for Anti-BOW tech on the very edge of feasible deployment she rather doubted they'd gone to the trouble of making sure a forty year old camera system was up and running let alone dedicating another member of their team to watch it. Obviously they'd have the drones and if any of them saw her first they'd tell the rest. Jill thought over it a bit more as she moved around the edge of the lot, avoiding both the dead unclassified BOW and the smoldering flames still bellowing out dirty smoke. "I wouldn't expect a lot of motion sensors or anti-personnel munitions either. They probably thought they'd cleared Heimfest out by the sound of it."
Which was fine by her.
It meant she didn't have to worry about anything but moving in quick, efficient bursts while keeping eyes on the sky and listening for the telltale sound of the drone if it was nearing her. Between the cramped buildings ahead she'd have an easy approach towards the tower. Crouched down and peaking out around corners she was almost invisible, the dull gray and blacks of her body, especially from looking from above or behind blending in naturally with the shadows and darkly shrouded architecture around her. Even if they did pull out a thermal scope to try and track her, she was still covered in bits of frost or snow and her wetsuit was holding a fair amount of the icy water next to her skin. You'd have to be pretty close to see any heat from her, and even then it would most likely have been just her face and a bit of her upper chest to neck where the wetsuit wasn't closed up that would have shown as anything notable.
Confidence in her surprisingly effective organic camouflage drove her on at a faster pace, snow crunching under clawed and webbed feet in quick, fast, bursts. Jill would peek her face out, the tip of gray nostrils, a shark faced snout, and then the black of her eyes peering down one lonesome and snow covered path. Before darting forward, only the odd prints of her feet left in her passage a moment later as she reached the next hiding spot, her back towards the sky and any possible watcher from above as you looked for the next place to run to. Thankfully she could avoid the larger open areas and the old storehouses next to the abandoned airfield. She idly wondered if they'd planned to set up missiles or merely use it as a forward base for monitoring the Arctic back during the Cold War, at least before they'd found whatever biological horror had led to them abandoning the whole thing and covering it up as best they could.
Not that that mattered now. Bioweapons (like herself according to some) were becoming the new focus of everything from WMD treaties to terrorism. The question was no longer worries about fictitious suitcase nukes or managing to get enough material for a dirty bomb, but if one of the increasingly terrible menagerie of weaponized retroviruses was going to end up deployed. With the weaponized variants, fully controlled Smart-BOWs now on the market and in use in most war zones on at least four continents at the moment. Treatments and vaccines only did so much unless administered before infection or very shortly after.
The rest…
Jill looked at her hand, the clawed tips of less fingers than she should have and the gray webbing between them.
"The rest might only be so lucky."
But at least for now she was feeling like fortune was certainly on her side. No one had spotted her, the drone patrol taking a more circuitous route that she'd avoided entirely (and they seemed to have only the one here at Heimfest). The path up to the old radio tower was open, but between her strength, surprisingly resilience to the cold and snow, and the same claws she'd been staring at a moment ago Jill could take a more direct route, between rocky outcroppings and barren snow covered gravel that were furthermore covered in an utter darkness.
That strange… sense around her returned as there was barely enough light to make out the ground. It wasn't like she could see it, but more that she just seemed vaguely aware of 'large shape here' and 'heavy thing there'. The particle rifle had been white hot rod pressed against these senses, but she'd felt them clearly below. Running in long threads down the passage as she'd swam too and from that nightmare…
"The wires," Jill thought, feeling it again as she passed over something and felt a sudden surge of awareness just below the ground. She pressed her body low, her face almost digging into the snow as she inhaled nothing, but still sensed presence tingling in the back of her nostrils right beneath her. Not smell but a new and utterly foreign sense that defied her human categorization and which she'd never really noticed until now.
Suddenly the annoyance of, and difficulty she'd had sleeping for months when all that equipment had been hooked up to her made sense. It hadn't just been waking into the living nightmare of her new body or the troubled dreams of the far worse memories as Wesker's slave.
She'd literally been kept awake by the fire in every wire connected to her, feeling that constant thrum of activity surrounding her, needling her, never stopping till she'd finally just gotten used to it and collapsed into dreamless and exhausted sleep.
There was no need for a path, no need to even look up and regain her bearings. Jill streaked across the snow, a blue-gray blur of indeterminate motion from on high, and barely that. Tasting the live wire underground and following its path right up to where it blazed brighter and closer, out of the ground through a plastic pipe and wrapping around the metal leg of the radio tower at last.
"Alright, now I just need to get this working."
At the very least she knew it was powered, not just battery operated emergency lights. She could still taste/smell the wire as she tried to quietly climb the stairs upwards to the next level. Only a single old padlock stood in her way, and that rusted and frost covered obstruction lasted no longer against her claws than the last one did.
The creaking and swaying of the tower itself smothered the sound of her body as the storm from before continued to blow through. Clouds covering the stars and the northern lights, what little illumination visible coming from the lights in the valley below and the red glare of the few live on the tower itself.
Jill reached a ladder and began her ascent in earnest. Only another ten meters or so before the partially enclosed level where the equipment had been kept. At one time it might have been possible to operate it from lower down, but by herself and with so much torn out or replaced she'd need to make use of the last systems kept on, those that were part of the transmitter and receiver at this level and would have been more trouble than it was worth to take apart when they'd abandoned the base. Thankfully the power still ran to them, so all she needed to-
Her hand froze at the next rung of the ladder. She'd heard something… another odd creak or sway of the tower? It was nearby certainly.
The hood of armored cartilage sunk down as she moved up. It was probably nothing, it had to be nothing. She'd taken a direct route as much as she could, seen no signs of anyone else and the door itself had still been locked shut when she'd arrived. "Keep it together Jill… there's no one here but you."
She stepped out onto the last, non-maintenance level of the radio tower, turning towards the controls and froze. A figure was there, cloaked and hooded and staring out into the darkness, one hand about the cold metal railing. Thoughts of how they could have possibly beaten her to the tower raced through her mind.
Much as the nervous tension made her tail do as tails did.
And the finned tip knocked against a small stool, precariously placed with an old toolbox sitting on top of it. The sound of it falling, wrench and hammer and so many bolts cascading down and onto the metal floors below them one by one set off a cacophony of noise. They turned, reaching for their gun by instinct before realizing what it was and how close it was at that.
Jill couldn't be more than two meters from them with not much more than that to move around. And Kari, the particle rifle he'd been reaching for, seemed ill prepared for such a fight.
"Shit," he'd said, a short and quick statement that summarized how things were likely to go. He'd already reached under his hood, likely to turn on the radio attached to whatever armored operations mask he was wearing both for the weather and the still glowing low light system powered on underneath it. But Jill was faster, grabbing at his arm and wrenching down. Her strength and CQC training enough to snap a man's limb with ease.
Or so she'd have thought, but her opponent moved with her, surprisingly quick in reaction and with equally notable strength. Not enough to escape her grasp but quick enough that she wasn't able to dodge a bladed strike to her side a moment later. Followed by a quick kick at the same time that had her letting go more in surprise than injury, the short blade not hitting anything important and even if it had something like that wasn't going to put her down anytime soon.
"Fine… fine, chance to gut a fish and show off my CQBZ training," he said, face unreadable beneath the hood and the mask, but the extra long combat knife and almost gleeful tone of his voice carried the feelings just fine. Stepping warily to the side as he unclipped the power back from his back, his cloak shifting along his back as he did, and angling the machete sized blade downward for lower, faster strikes at Jill's comparatively unprotected belly.
Jill's claws were comparatively small, but no less fearsome as she crouched low, keeping up a defense against a weapon that couldn't kill her easily on its own, but likely could cause injuries enough that it might give him the chance for a lucky strike and ensuring butchery needed to overwhelm her regeneration. Hell, she'd pulled the same trick herself on more than one BOW.
"Who are you assholes?" Jill asked, her tail hanging over the edge of the ladder behind her as she stepped back as far as she could, legs tensed and claws pressed against the metal floor. Ready to leap into an attack the moment she saw an opening.
"Paid too much to talk to some soon to be dead government lackey!" He lunged forward, a quick stab that was too fast for Jill to react to beyond doging back. Almost down the way she'd come, before she turned to the side and earned a slash at her side and back for her trouble. The cut on the front she'd expected, even if it stung and had her teeth showing in pain. But even the tougher plating along her back had been nicked from that passing exchange. He moved the blade from one hand to another, almost showing off his ambidexterity for some reason now that he'd managed first blood. "Don't even need a gun for you… too slow and too big."
He stabbed forth again, and once more proved shockingly quick as she lunged at him and only received a quick and sudden strike to her outstretched arm. Not enough to cut it off, but the deep slash almost hit bone through her skin and some of the cartilage armoring the sides. The serrated portion ripping flesh as it cut and the wound stinging even as it closed quickly.
"You're pretty cocky," Jill said, the armored flesh slipping almost over her eyes. She was either out of practice or not used to a smarter, faster enemy in this new body. No matter, she had more to rely on than just brute strength and flesh ripping claws.
Her mouth (and not just the razor filled maw part) might work here.
"Why not? You're a relic of the past, just another bleeding heart BSAA that thinks we can go back before Raccoon." The knife moved from one hand to the other, the showoff obviously gaining confidence the more of Jill's blood he spilled. "Should have just died there instead of trying to put it back in the bottle."
"At least I'm not a maggot feasting on the dead."
That set him off for some reason, his body quaking with barely contained rage.
"I'm gonna fucking fillet you with my Z-knife you bitch!"
This time she was ready. His speed was entirely too much for some reason, but she didn't need to dodge him. Just catch him. As soon as the knife went into her belly, through the wetsuit and deep enough she felt the tip strike the plates on her back her hands had already caught on to his arm. He'd realized his mistake a moment too late, trying to wrench back, but her grip was solid and she squeezed.
"Let go-"
She let the armor cartilage slip over, no longer needing to clearly see him and slammed her head against his. He pressed his feet down, kicking at her as she continued the assault. Sharp points from snowboots stabbing into her legs as she swung him from side to side. Into the support beam there, against the stairs leading to a power box over there. Pained cries coming out as the resilient mercenary kept tugging on the knife buried in her stomach. Finally she grew tired of it all and with all her strength ran towards the edge of the tower.
And let go.
Kari, knife and all, went flying out into the wind, the cry of pain and surprise quickly silenced by the fall.
Jill stepped back, putting a hand to her stomach, feeling the blood pour out for a bit before the wound stitched shut. Her mouth opened in pained expression as her body relaxed after the battle had ended.
"CQBZ training and a Z-knife?" Jill shook her head as she turned towards the radio controls at last. Who was that-
Something rattled across the floor, before detonating in a flash of sound and light that drove her back and almost off the tower herself. Covering her face she avoided taking a gunshot to the head as two large caliber pistol rounds struck her and Jill fell prone. Blinking away the spots in her eyes, she heard a slight buzzing sound and the impact of a body landing in front of her. The figure was silhouetted in red, casting an eerie glow over the wavering antenna that stood up from its head, mandibles open and then snapping shut as green glowing eyes stared down at her. An armored tactical vest, modified for the broad wide insectile wings sprouting from the back covered the chest, where more flash grenades and the now empty gun holster hung. The spiked chitin armoring the legs and arms was uncovered, though wet spots from her or… his blood could be seen. A short, stubby tail, tipped by pincer snapping angrily behind him completed the body as he took another step towards her, aiming the large caliber pistol down.
"Fine, we'll do this the hard way."
Z-Knife
The Z-Knife, or 'Zombie Butcher' was one of the many tools patented and produced for use in CQBZ (Close Quarters Quarantined Battle Zone) Combat. Ex-Umbrella Operator 'Grim Reaper' designed the oversized knife to rip and tear through re-animated and augmented flesh while damaging tissue to hamper regenerative properties. The composition of the metal was selected for non-hypoallergenic steel, an unusually high nickel composition as well.
As with most 'Anti-BOW' weapons, its use in combat zones and against human targets is under fierce debate and likely to remain curtailed for the foreseeable future.