While Bella was sealing the breach at the back, the virus inside Deputy Kim forced the front open again, and she went to patch that too, like plastering over a crumbling wall.
Her psionics chased the Uroboros Virus down and hemmed it in on every side. Bella worked Flesh to Stone with her right hand, and the instant the coverage passed seventy percent, she flicked her left hand upward. The ice magic she'd set up in advance froze Deputy Kim's left leg outright, the frost spreading fast.
In the cold, the Uroboros Virus's proliferation slowed by more than half, and by the time it finally shook off the ice's grip, Bella had already brought the spell to completion.
"In the end, you're nothing but a mindless virus. Die!" As her psionics linked front to back, Flesh to Stone took full hold of Deputy Kim's body.
This twisted, warped young man, no longer recognizable as human, turned entirely to stone. From going berserk to becoming a statue, the whole thing took less than three seconds.
The statue he'd become looked like the sculpture of some deranged artist in the grip of a fever dream — contorted, deformed, for all the world a monster stepping straight out of a nightmare. Of the man Deputy Kim had once been, only a rough silhouette remained; no recognizable face or limbs could be made out at all.
"Bang, bang, bang." Bella fired three rounds and shattered the statue, putting the matter to rest for good.
…
That evening, the ill-fated KTX 101 broke through every obstacle in its path and at last pulled safely into Busan Station. The army had taken control here. Busan was safe.
"Thank you. Thank you for everything you've done for us!" Sang-hwa came with his pregnant wife to thank Bella. This plain, honest man wasn't smooth-tongued like the fund manager; a deep bow was the only way he knew to show his gratitude.
"Have you decided on a name for the baby?" Bella asked.
At the mention of his daughter, the honest man broke into a wide grin. "Su-yun! My daughter's name is Yoon Su-yun. Isn't it wonderful?"
The high school baseball players and many other passengers came to thank Bella as well, and she returned the courtesy to each in turn.
"Goodbye, big sister." Seok-woo's daughter gave her an exaggerated, sweeping bow. Seeing that Seok-woo still stood off to the side in a dazed, hollow stupor, Bella ruffled the little girl's hair and murmured, "Big sister will tell you a secret, okay? I actually know magic. Hurry home now — my magic tells me your mommy is safe and sound, waiting for you at home."
The little girl could only pick out a few words; the long stretches of English were beyond her. But she caught mommy and home, and she gave another ninety-degree bow before finally leaving Busan Station with her father.
"That was exhausting." Bella let out a long breath. She stayed quiet for a while, then said her farewells to the conductor and the attendants.
Thirty minutes later she was in Gyeonggi-do, pulling Alec Trevelyan — 006 — out of a running battle with a bio-monster in the middle of the Han River.
Like Natasha, old 006 had been enhanced by grafting the Progenitor Virus onto his own cells, which gave him an extremely high resistance to bio-viruses. Short of drinking the Uroboros Virus like it was cola, there was no way he'd get infected under normal circumstances.
The Han River Monster, Gwoemul, was no pushover. Hit by the double whammy of chemical contamination and viral infection, and fighting in the water besides, it had actually managed to battle 006 to a draw.
In front of 006 there was no need to hide anything. One Freezing Spell, one Flesh to Stone, and Bella finished off the Han River Monster and pulled old 006 clear. Linking up with a team of Weyland-Yutani's Assassins, they headed back to Busan together.
By now Busan was fully under military rule. Several of Korea's neighboring nations had sent troops to help, and in the end President Benjamin Asher couldn't come command in Busan himself, so he pulled every U.S. force in the Asia-Pacific region over to support the effort.
With the BSAA's isolation spray, most survivors had made it out of the cities. As for how many had died — there was no way to count yet.
"Was it really a homegrown Korean company that leaked the bio-virus?" Bella asked 006. Weyland-Yutani ran a tight operation, but other companies were another matter.
She hadn't taken Deputy Kim and Seok-woo's words entirely at face value. There was a glaring flaw in the character of these Korean men — they acted on impulse, and whether the thing was good or bad, so long as it boosted their notoriety, they were happy to lay false claim to it. They'd claim an ancestor who wasn't theirs; they'd claim guilt that wasn't theirs either. Get sweet-talked by the real culprit, then bravely leap out to take the fall — that was exactly the sort of thing they'd do.
006 weighed it carefully. "As it stands, it does look like a homegrown Korean company. Which one exactly seems to be complicated — they're still investigating internally. Or rather… they're busy covering up the truth."
Bella sighed. That was precisely what she feared.
The big companies all had something to lose. Even Umbrella back then hadn't set out to destroy the world; Umbrella researched bio-viruses purely to make money. What she feared were the small companies — ignorant and fearless, charging ahead with no clue what they were dealing with, and leaving one hell of a mess behind.
"Let's pitch in too. Ship all the antiviral serum we've got over here, and send out a search-and-rescue team to sweep the route from Busan to Ulsan."
006 nodded. "Understood. I'll see to it."
A company was still fairly powerless in the face of a disaster like this; the backbone of the relief effort remained the militaries of the various nations. The next morning the coalition declared Busan fully retaken, and by that noon the road from Busan to Ulsan was completely reopened, U.S. warships combing the coastal waters and pulling a steady stream of civilians to safety.
By evening Seoul was retaken, and after it Daejeon and Gwangju. The Korean government finally began to function again, and the nationwide toll was gradually tallied and compiled.
The economic losses were beyond calculation.
The human losses were staggering too. Out of a population of fifty million, Korea had lost at least seven or eight million people in one blow, most of them city dwellers, with Gyeonggi-do — Seoul's province — and Incheon hit hardest of all. That was where the bio-virus had first broken out.
…
While Bella was organizing her people to aid the relief work and help move supplies, two figures on a distant rooftop were watching her every move through some kind of imaging device.
The one in front stood 1.75 meters (about 5 feet 9 inches) tall. His skin was an indigo blue, and he wore a strangely shaped purple helmet and a green cloak of some unidentifiable material. His overall getup looked a little like an astronaut's, though not so bulky, and at his waist hung something silver, shaped like a pistol.
Beside him stood a burly white man in a business suit.
Watching Bella bustle back and forth with the relief work, the astronaut-clad man let out a cold laugh.
"What a pitiful little primitive. She actually gave up her chance to hunt you down just to help those people. And she was so close, Mr. Sator — one more step and she'd have had you. Tell me, isn't she laughably stupid? For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost. She thinks she's stopped one disaster, when in truth she's brought about an even greater one."