September 29th. Raccoon City. 1:30 A.M.
The fire didn't roar; it screamed.
The sound of twisting metal from the Black Hawk crashed in the center of the plaza mingled with the crackle of burning aviation fuel, creating a suffocating atmosphere of death and gasoline. There were no cries from the civilians, no last-minute prayers; the impact of the massive rock thrown by Nemesis had turned the aircraft into an instantly compacted metal coffin. The annihilation of Mikhail and the survivors was absolute in its speed, leaving behind a void that weighed heavier than the crash itself. Black smoke rose toward the Raccoon City sky like an obelisk of failure, marking the spot where the last hope of evacuation had evaporated.
Carlos Oliveira fell to his knees, his wide eyes reflecting the flames. In a second, his redemption had turned to ash. His hands shook so violently that his rifle clattered against the pavement, a rhythmic and pathetic sound amidst the chaos.
"No..." Carlos stammered, his voice breaking. "We were supposed to get them out... this was supposed to be the end. Mikhail! Goddammit, no!"
"Get up!" John's voice cut through the hot air like a whip. There was no compassion, only a cold tactical urgency. John was already on his feet, ignoring the heat searing his face, with the Benelli M4 at low guard. His eyes, deep wells of determination, didn't look at the fire, but at the shadows. He knew the disaster was just the backdrop for the true final act.
Jill sat up coughing, her face stained with soot, tears of helplessness drying instantly in the heat. Ada, more pragmatic, was already scanning the Clock Tower, her submachine gun raised. Her posture was elegant even in hell, but the tension in her jaw betrayed that even she was feeling the weight of the situation. She knew mourning was a luxury the dead could no longer afford.
"It's coming!" Ada shouted, pointing towards the heights.
From the tower's facade, the monstrosity that was once Nemesis released itself. It didn't fall; it propelled itself with a violence that cracked the century-old stone. A thirty-meter free fall that ended in a seismic impact against the plaza's pavement. The creature slowly rose amidst the smoke, a silhouette that defied all biological logic. In its second form, Nemesis was an evolved nightmare: its leather trench coat was gone, revealing a grotesque mass of exposed muscle, pulsating pustules, and a right arm transformed into a giant, fleshy tentacle that hissed as it grazed the ground, leaving a trail of acidic mucus.
"Fire," John ordered, his voice barely a whisper that overrode the roar of the fire.
Chaos broke loose. Carlos, driven by a suicidal fury and the desire to punish the thing that killed his friends, emptied his magazine in uncontrolled bursts. The 5.56mm bullets impacted the mutated flesh, but the biological mass absorbed the hits like high-density gelatin, closing over the projectiles before they could cause structural damage. Nemesis didn't even flinch.
With a roar that rattled the broken glass of the plaza, Nemesis abandoned its bipedal stance. It dropped to all fours, its deformed limbs digging into the asphalt. It no longer moved like a soldier; it moved like a rabid beast, a chimera of speed and mass. It lunged forward, running in circles around the group, using the surrounding buildings as springboards.
The beast scaled the facade of a department store in seconds, its claws tearing through brick and concrete, defying gravity with terrifying brute force. From the height, it launched itself at a light pole, bending it under its weight before propelling itself back toward the ground. The sound of its movement was a constant thunder: thump, crack, hiss. It was omnipresent. The speed was such that they could barely track it, a blur of black flesh and tentacles circling their position, tightening the noose.
"I can't get a lock! It's too fast!" Carlos yelled, spinning around, panic starting to seep into his training.
"Hold formation!" John bellowed, tracking the creature's movement with the barrel of his shotgun, his blue eyes fixed on the pattern, looking for the pause in the chaos.
Nemesis wasn't just running; it was hunting. It roared past the right flank, its tentacle sweeping a row of parked cars, tossing them through the air like toys. A burning sedan flew toward them, forcing the group to scatter violently. The formation broke.
Jill rolled to dodge the burning chassis and took position behind a shattered granite fountain.
"John, flank him! I've got the artillery!" she shouted, loading her MGL grenade launcher with expert but trembling fingers. She knew bullets were mosquito bites; they needed massive shockwave trauma.
Nemesis, with a tactical intelligence that seemed to sharpen with every wound and mutation, knew instantly who the biggest threat was. The beast ignored the others, braked hard leaving deep grooves in the pavement, and charged at Jill. It moved with arachnid agility, leaping over debris, its open maw dripping black ichor. The sense of power was overwhelming; they weren't fighting an enemy, they were fighting a natural disaster made flesh. The difference between human fragility and the power of the bio-weapon had never been so evident. A single hit from that thing and any of them would cease to exist.
John reacted on pure instinct, years of combat etched into his nerves. The world around him blurred, reducing to the monster's physiology.
In John's mind, he could analyze every movement of Nemesis. It's shifting weight to the left flank... that right arm is too tense, the tentacle is looking for traction. It's going to jump now.
He saw the tension in the monster's hind leg an instant before the leap. John slid laterally over the rough pavement, firing the Benelli in the air. The slug hit squarely in Nemesis's knee joint in mid-flight, a shot of surgical precision that deviated its trajectory by inches. The beast landed heavily next to Jill, missing the killing blow, but the shockwave of the impact threw the officer several meters back, leaving her stunned among the debris.
Nemesis didn't stop. It spun around with the flexibility of a boneless predator and lashed its main tentacle at John. The appendage struck the air with the sound of a whip breaking the sound barrier. John raised his left arm to block, trusting the reinforced Kevlar of his suit, but the force was overwhelming. The tentacle grazed his shoulder, and despite the armor, John felt the fabric tear and the skin underneath split. A superficial but burning cut appeared on his bicep, blood beginning to stain the sleeve of his white shirt.
"Dammit!" Carlos growled, opening suppressive fire to cover John.
Nemesis responded with a brutal backhand. Its left claw struck Carlos glancingly, throwing him against a brick wall. The mercenary fell to the ground, and when he got up, three deep, bleeding lines marked his tactical vest and chest, blood welling from the jagged cuts.
"Screw this!" Carlos yelled, spitting blood and firing again, ignoring the pain.
Ada sprang into action. Taking advantage of the beast being occupied with the men, she slipped into Nemesis's blind spot. With lethal precision, she fired a burst from her TMP submachine gun directly into the exposed eyes on the mutated flesh mass of the creature's shoulder.
Nemesis roared, distracted by the stinging pain. Ada didn't stop. She tossed a flash grenade at the monster's feet.
"Move!" she shouted, rolling backward with deadly elegance.
The white flash disoriented the beast for a second. John seized the window. He reloaded and fired rhythmically, a metronome of violence. Boom. Click-clack. Boom. Every shot was aimed at critical zones: the milky eye, the exposed throat, the tentacle joints. However, Nemesis was developing absolute resistance. Where the bullets hit, the skin instantly hardened, becoming black, vitreous, and chitinous. Shots that previously penetrated now ricocheted with a metallic sound.
It's adapting. That skin turns to stone where I hit it. No blind spots... no point in keeping shooting there. I need to break that crust first, John thought.
Ada, seeing an opening while Nemesis focused on John, fired her grapple gun toward the creature's exposed neck. The cable hissed through the air, seeking flesh. But Nemesis was no longer a brute; it remembered that attack at the station. With a reflex that defied physics, the beast caught the cable in mid-air with its claw, wrapping it around its forearm with a sharp movement.
Nemesis didn't pull immediately. It looked at Ada with an almost human malevolence and gave a sharp yank. Ada, realizing she was going to be dragged into the beast's jaws, had to let go of the weapon at the last second. The grapple gun flew toward Nemesis, who crushed it in his fist, turning the cutting-edge technology into a useless mass of sparks and metal.
"Great..." Ada muttered as she unsheathed her knives with a cold smile. "That was a limited agency edition. Now it's personal, you damn bag of organs."
The battle turned critical. Nemesis roared and charged again, this time using his body mass as a battering ram. He smashed through a brick wall as if it were paper, flanking John. The assassin calculated the next attack based on the rotation of the beast's shoulders: a horizontal sweep of the main tentacle that would cut the air at waist height. He tried to roll under the blow, a move he had executed a thousand times, but then, physical reality failed.
As he loaded all his weight onto his right leg to push off, John felt a sharp, electric, paralyzing prick in his calf. The world seemed to stop. A shard of tempered glass from the helicopter crash, embedded deep and hidden by the previous adrenaline, had shifted from the muscular effort, severing the tendon and touching the nerve directly.
No, not now... The leg won't respond. Damn it!
His leg gave way completely, sending him to the ground in a clumsy manner he would never allow himself. The movement broke. For a brief, terrifying instant, John saw himself from the outside: he was no longer the Boogeyman, the unstoppable killer, but a mortal man, wounded, facing a deity of extermination that knew no fatigue.
Does it end here? In this absurd way? No... I'm not going to die yet.
It was enough for Nemesis. The tentacle struck him in the chest with the force of a hydraulic piston.
"JOHN!!" Jill's scream tore through the air, charged with a pure panic John had never heard from her. It was a cry of loss, as if she were watching the last pillar of her sanity die.
John was flung backward like a ragdoll, slamming into a brick wall with a dull crunch that resonated across the plaza. The air left his lungs in a cloud of vapor and blood. He fell to the ground, and the world went blurry, a mix of blood red and smoke gray. He tried to get up, but his arms were lead. The pain in his chest was a fire; he felt the fragments of his own broken ribs rubbing against each other, threatening to puncture his lungs with every desperate attempt to breathe.
John could only hold one thought currently: Oxygen.
I can't... air isn't coming in. Come on, focus... stand up, he told himself to keep from passing out.
Nemesis, ignoring John, considering him neutralized, turned toward Jill. She was trying to reload her grenade launcher, but fear and shock made her fingers fumble. She was cornered between the burning wreckage of the Black Hawk and the hulk of flesh advancing toward her. Nemesis raised its claw, preparing a blow that would split her in two.
Carlos Oliveira saw the scene. He saw Jill defenseless, saw John defeated, spitting clots of blood against the pavement, and saw the trail of destruction Nemesis had left in his life. In that moment, Carlos's fear died. His mind, previously chaotic, cleared with crystalline purity. It wasn't an act of madness, but the smartest and most logical decision he had ever made in his life. He couldn't beat Nemesis in a war of attrition, but he could hurt it in a way no one else could.
"I can't kill it from the outside. I have to kill it from the inside. It's the only way for them to get out of here," Carlos muttered, as he walked directly toward Nemesis.
Carlos reached into his tactical pack. He pulled out his last block of C4 and two M67 fragmentation grenades. With a calm only the doomed possess, he rigged the grenade pins to the plastic explosive's detonator. He looked at John, who was struggling to sit up, scraping the asphalt with bloody fingernails. Their gazes locked. In that second, John saw the resolve of a man who has found his purpose.
Carlos didn't wait. There were no heroic shouts or speeches. Only action.
He broke cover, running at full speed toward the beast's open flank, the explosive package clutched to his chest.
"HEY! OVER HERE!" Carlos shouted, trying to get the creature's attention to throw himself onto it.
But Nemesis didn't play.
The beast, with supernatural reflexes, detected the incoming threat. It didn't fully turn; it simply fired its main tentacle backward, without even looking, with the speed of a whip breaking the sound barrier.
The sound was wet and terrible. CRACK!
The tentacle impacted Carlos in mid-run, hitting him with such force that it broke his spine and sternum instantly. Carlos was flung backward, but the tentacle coiled around his torso before he hit the ground. Nemesis pulled him in violently, lifting him into the air like a broken doll.
Carlos tried to raise his hand to detonate the charge, his fingers grazing the trigger.
"Eat sh..." he tried to say, blood welling from his mouth.
Nemesis gave him no time. With a sharp movement of its free claw, it crushed Carlos's right arm, pulverizing bone and muscle. The detonator fell from the mercenary's limp fingers, bouncing on the asphalt, useless and out of reach.
"NO!" Jill screamed, watching her friend being dismantled.
Carlos, his body shattered and hanging helplessly in the beast's claws, looked at Jill one last time. His eyes glazed over. He had failed. The charge was on his chest, but his hands wouldn't respond. Nemesis, with a grunt of contempt, tightened its grip around Carlos's torso, preparing to tear him in two and continue its hunt.
John saw everything from the ground.
His vision was blurred by pain and blood loss, but his tactical mind was still functioning on a different plane. He saw Carlos die. He saw the detonator fall. But he also saw something else: the C4 block and grenades were still strapped to Carlos's tactical vest, gleaming under the firelight, exposed and pressed against Nemesis's chest.
John didn't think. He didn't feel sorrow. He only calculated the trajectory.
His right hand moved, not toward his wound, but toward his back waist. His fingers found the cold grip of his suppressed P30L.
Distance: fifteen meters. Target: explosive package. Moving target. Unstable pulse.
The world stopped. The roar of the fire faded. Jill's screams vanished. Only the line between the barrel of his gun and the explosive on his ally's corpse existed.
John raised the weapon. His arm shook violently from the effort, but at the moment of the shot, he froze in perfect stillness.
Sorry, Carlos, John muttered as the pistol took on an astonishing stability despite John's state.
And without hesitation, John pulled the trigger.
Pfut.
The sound of the silenced shot was ridiculously small amidst the chaos. The 9mm bullet crossed the air, spinning, and found its mark with divine precision. It impacted directly in the center of the C4 block.
The reaction was instant.
The bullet detonated the plastic explosive through kinetic impact and heat. The C4 explosion triggered the fragmentation grenades in a chain of sympathetic destruction.
KA-BOOOOM!
The explosion was monstrous. Since Carlos's body was pressed against Nemesis by the beast's own grip, the detonation had nowhere to go but inward. The expansive force pulverized Carlos's body and acted as a massive shaped charge against Nemesis's torso.
The monster's ribcage disintegrated. Mutated organs, reinforced bones, and parasitic tissue were liquefied and ejected backward in a cloud of black blood and fire. Nemesis's roar of triumph was cut short, replaced by the wet sound of flesh being torn at a molecular level.
The beast was thrown backward with the force of a derailed train, crashing into the foundations of the Clock Tower. The structure, weakened by the combat, gave way, and tons of stone and masonry fell onto the smoking remains of the creature, burying it under a tomb of rubble.
John let the pistol drop, his arm hitting the ground without strength. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the darkness threaten to take him.
"CARLOS!" Jill's scream broke the silence following the explosion.
Jill ran toward the smoking crater but stopped short. There was nothing to recover. Carlos Oliveira was gone, turned into the force that had saved them. She fell to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably.
Ada approached John. Her face, usually impassive, showed a crack of genuine astonishment. She looked at the blast site and then at John, who was struggling to breathe.
"One shot..." Ada muttered, shaking her head. "You made that shot with broken ribs and half dead. You're a goddamn legend, Wick."
John didn't answer. With a groan of pain that made him see stars, he forced himself to sit up. He ripped the shard of glass out of his leg with a sharp, quick pull, and bandaged the wound with a piece of fabric torn from his shirt, tightening until the bleeding stopped.
He stood up, staggering, and walked toward Jill. He lifted her from the ground, not gently, but with the firmness needed to keep her together.
"Jill," John said, his voice raspy and metallic. "Jill, look at me."
She looked up, her eyes lost in horror.
"I couldn't do anything... he..."
"He completed his mission," John said, forcing her to focus on his eyes. "He gave us a way out. If we stay here, his sacrifice is garbage. Do you understand me? We have to go. Now."
Jill nodded, swallowing the pain, saving it for later.
"I understand."
John looked one last time at the crater. There were no pretty words. Only a silent and absolute respect for the man who had the courage to run toward the monster.
"Let's go," John ordered, turning toward the darkness of the side streets. The Clock Tower was a tomb, and they still had to survive the night.
They walked in a dense silence, broken only by the sound of their boots on the wet asphalt and the distant echo of explosions that no longer mattered to them. John leaned heavily on Jill, every step an electric stab running up his spine, a constant reminder that his body, despite his iron will, was still flesh and bone. Ada walked on the other side, maintaining her watch with a calm that bordered on supernatural, but her gaze constantly drifted back toward the Clock Tower, fading into the distance, wrapped in a haze of ash and death.
"That thing..." Jill began, her voice a barely audible thread betraying emotional exhaustion. "Carlos's explosion tore it apart completely. It has to be dead. There's no way anything organic survives a point-blank C4 detonation."
John shook his head, a short movement that made him grit his teeth from the pain radiating from his chest.
"It's likely that beast is still alive," he stated with a crudeness that made Jill tense up immediately. "I've seen men survive the impossible through sheer luck, but him... I've seen him regenerate from trauma that would kill an entire army in seconds. It adapts, it evolves. And right now, we aren't in any condition to face it again. At least, I'm not. My body has reached its limit."
Ada let out a cold sigh, adjusting her TMP as her eyes scanned the rooftops. She knew John wasn't exaggerating; the assassin's tactical realism was what kept them alive.
"I agree. The damage analysis is simple: we're out of heavy ammo, wounded, and exposed. If that thing crawls out of that rubble in the next ten minutes, we'll just be three more corpses in Umbrella's ledger, a footnote in their cleanup report. We need a hole to hide in, a blind spot for its sensors, and we need it now."
John wasn't listening just with his ears. He listened with the refined paranoia of a man who has spent half his life being the hunter and the other half being the prey tracked by the world's best assassins. In his mind, images crowded together: he remembered the catacombs of Rome, where the echo was his only friend; the rooftops of New York in the rain, where every shadow was a shooter. He knew that on the surface they were easy targets. Nemesis didn't use informants or contracts; it used predatory instinct and cutting-edge biological technology that could detect the precise location of its prey.
If it sees us from above, we're dead by its reach. If it follows us by scent, it will find us in any building. We have to get out of its line of sight... we have to get out of its world and enter one where its size is its disadvantage.
His eyes fixed on a heavy cast-iron cover in the middle of the street, semi-obscured under the flickering light of a broken streetlamp. A sewer. It was the lowest corner of Raccoon City, the place where the city hid its waste, and now, their only salvation.
"Underground," John said, stopping by the cover with a dull groan. "I don't think that thing will start digging like an excavator if it loses the thermal trail under concrete and water."
Ada arched an eyebrow, looking at the rusty metal cover and then at her high-heeled boots, before giving him a look charged with that elegant irony that was her personal armor.
"Sewers? How romantic, John. I knew Raccoon City would bring out your most glamorous side sooner or later, but this is another level of decadence, even for a man who lives in the shadows."
"The logic is sound," Jill intervened, ignoring the spy's sarcasm and helping John position himself to lift the lid. "Nemesis is too big, too massive for the narrow maintenance tunnels. If we go deep enough, the density of the cement, the lead of the pipes, and the water flow will hide our chemical trail. It's the only place where it can't rush us."
They went down with agonizing care, a slow descent into the city's bowels. Ada descended first, covering the entrance with her weapon in a 360-degree angle, followed by Jill, who practically carried half of John's weight while he went down the metal ladder with a nearly useless leg and his calf screaming in pain. The atmosphere down there was cool, heavy with humidity and strangely silent compared to the hell of screams and fire on the surface. Murky water ran through the side channels, a constant murmur that, paradoxically, helped calm nerves still vibrating from the explosion.
They walked a few steps down the main tunnel, the echo of their movements bouncing off the curved brick walls covered in mold. About seven meters in, a reinforced steel door cut off the service corridor. A rusty sign, barely legible under Jill's flashlight, read: "GENERAL SERVICES - SECTOR 4". A heavy padlock, devoured by rust, kept the door closed with a false promise of security.
John didn't wait for Jill to look for a tool. He drew his P30L with the silencer still hot from the previous combat.
Pfut.
The hollow-point projectile impacted the padlock mechanism with surgical precision, sending metal flying in a shower of sparks. He pushed the door with his shoulder, revealing a maintenance room that was small but surprisingly clean and dry. It was an oasis of order amidst chaos: shelves with aligned tools, a couple of gray metal desks, a well-stocked wall first aid kit, and most importantly, it was a sealed space, with thick concrete walls isolating them from the city's claws.
John entered with a faltering step and let himself drop against the back wall, sliding slowly until he was sitting on the cold floor. For the first time in what seemed like eons, he closed his eyes and let out a long sigh that dragged with it months of accumulated fatigue. He felt the adrenaline, that bitter fuel, finally retreating from his veins, giving way to a physical exhaustion so dense it weighed more than his own body. He could relax. One second. Just one second of peace before becoming the weapon the world needed again.
Jill didn't waste time on sentimentality. She knelt in front of him with medical alacrity, immediately noticing the dark stain, almost black under the fluorescent emergency light, soaking the left side of his wool jacket and rib area.
"John, you're losing too much blood. The wound reopened with the effort of the descent," she said with professional urgency, looking for trauma supplies in the kit. "I need you to take off your shirt. It'll be easier to see the structural damage and if there are any internal fragments."
John nodded weakly, trying to unbutton with clumsy fingers he could barely feel, as if his hands belonged to someone else. The pain in his ribs had become an insurmountable barrier, a stab that cut his breath every time he tried to rotate his torso. Ada, watching from a corner with crossed arms, keeping a prudent but attentive distance, approached when she saw John could barely coordinate his movements.
"Let the professionals handle it," Ada murmured with unusual softness in her tone.
Between Jill and Ada, with coordinated efficiency, they helped him remove the shredded jacket and the white shirt that was once impeccable and was now a crimson, sticky rag of cotton. As John's torso was left bare, both women fell silent for a moment, the air in the small room seeming to grow heavier.
John Wick's body was a living testament to violence and survival. He had a physique sculpted not for aesthetics, but by decades of extreme functional training and real combat; every muscle was designed for lethal efficiency. But what was shocking was the map of pain covering him: old bullet scars that looked like craters on his skin, long thin knife cuts crossing his chest like forgotten paths, and burn marks on his shoulders that spoke of past torture. Currently, his skin was decorated with purple and greenish bruises of alarming size where Nemesis had struck him, and the cut on his ribs was an open, deep wound, pulsating with every heartbeat, revealing the severity of an impact that would have fractured anyone else's spirit.
Jill ran her fingers with extreme delicacy near a particularly ugly circular scar on his shoulder, one that looked like the trace of a large-caliber bullet. She prepared to clean the new wound, searching for the right words.
"John, this right here... is this from the fall in the subway or is it something from before? It looks like..."
There was no answer.
Jill looked up, surprised by the silence. John had his head resting against the concrete wall, his chin dipped slightly onto his chest in a posture of absolute surrender. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic, and deep. He had fallen asleep on the spot, collapsing into a dreamless sleep, overcome by a physical, chemical, and mental exhaustion that would have been lethal for any other human being hours ago. His body had simply said enough, seizing the first ounce of safety to shut down and begin the repair process.
Ada, looking at the now vulnerable and unconscious figure of the most feared assassin on the planet, let out a small, dry laugh, barely audible, breaking the tomb-like silence of the underground shelter.
Ada let out a small dry laugh, breaking the silence.
"Wow, and here he is, unconscious and alone with two women... It's probably any man's forbidden dream, if it weren't for the fact that his body is torn to pieces and we're in the center of a biological apocalypse."
Jill sighed, beginning to clean John's blood with care.
"How can you joke like that? Carlos died. We almost didn't make it out of that plaza and this man... I don't even know who he really is, but he's saved my life more times than I can count."
"It's my defense mechanism, Valentine," Ada replied, losing some of her mocking tone. "Besides, look at him. You see a soldier or a government agent with too much bad luck. I see someone who simply refuses to die out of pure stubbornness."
Jill paused her hand for a second, observing a scar crossing John's back.
"I don't think it's just stubbornness. Look at these marks, Ada. Some are years old. They aren't from training, they're from... pure survival. What kind of life has this man led before arriving in Raccoon City?"
Ada smiled sideways, keeping the secret Jill didn't suspect.
"A life that would make this hell look like a walk in the park, Jill. Trust me, John isn't the type of person who asks for permission to survive."
Jill finished bandaging John's side firmly.
"Whoever he is, right now he's just a man who needs rest. We'll watch the door. If Nemesis shows up, I'll handle it. He's done enough for tonight."
Ada didn't answer, but nodded slightly as she leaned against the metal desk, keeping her gaze fixed on the darkness of the tunnel while the man the world knew as death slept on the floor of a sewer.