Chapter 95: Hunk: I Will Do Justice to the Name "Mr. Death"
Half an hour ago.
Several vehicles bearing the Umbrella logo pulled to a stop outside the abandoned meat processing plant.
Hunk looked through the window at the building, still and lightless, and spoke into his radio without any particular inflection.
"All units. Seal the perimeter."
"Any unknown element that approaches can be engaged freely."
"Copy."
The response came through with the characteristic flat crackle of a field radio.
Hunk didn't linger after that. He picked up the vibranium dagger Matthew had given him and walked toward the plant alone.
On his back, a specially customized Stanavistin unit pulsed with faint red light in rhythm with his breathing.
Beneath his skin, the dark blue-black veins of a symbiote moved continuously.
Tonight, he would do justice to the name "Mr. Death."
Heavy footsteps rang through the darkness of the factory interior.
Hunk made no attempt to conceal his approach or his position. He walked directly toward the objective.
In the abandoned space, Heisenberg heard the footsteps coming through the dark and something unexpected crossed his face.
"Your boss actually does have something to him. Cracked that bitch's plan this fast." He let the mockery settle back in. "But spotting it and handling it are different things. Sending just the one person seems a little overconfident."
Ada, still suspended from the ceiling, heard the word "overconfident" and found it faintly strange.
Her boss overconfident?
In every operation she had watched Matthew run, he never went in without preparation. Every situation he could have overwhelmed with three layers of insurance, he used four. If he had sent exactly one person here, there was one reason for it.
He thought one person was sufficient.
In the dark, the footsteps kept their steady, unhurried rhythm.
Hunk came to a stop and looked up at Ada hanging in midair, his grip easy on the vibranium dagger.
"Commander. Target confirmed alive." He relayed the status through the Las Plagas link without looking away.
Matthew's response arrived immediately. "Rescue her."
Confirmed.
That was all Hunk needed.
His body accelerated.
Stanavistin, activate.
A micro-current surged out of the device and spread through every part of him in an instant.
He crossed a hundred meters before the darkness around him had time to react.
Feeling the speed and the killing intent that came with it, Heisenberg's eyes went sharp in an instant. Whatever amusement had been on his face disappeared.
He spun toward the darkness. "Hey. Bitch. If you're not coming out right now, I'm just going to hand the prisoner back to him myself."
Wind.
Then a crash that shook the floor.
Alcina had come out of the dark and hurled an industrial pig-splitting machine at the incoming Hunk. The full weight of it.
Hunk didn't dodge. He didn't slow down.
"Armor."
"I'm here." The symbiote responded without delay.
Iron-grey symbiote armor formed over his body in a layer thick enough to matter.
CRACK.
Hunk hit the splitting machine at full speed and went straight through it. Metal fragments scattered across the entire floor.
He had learned a great deal from watching Nemesis fight in Spain. The combat approach was one of them, that near-reckless, forward momentum that simply did not stop.
Before he could do anything with what was next, the darkness above him took shape.
A massive pale claw studded with reverse hooks came down from directly overhead, cutting through the airborne debris and driving straight toward him.
Metal twisted and screamed through the factory interior.
Alcina was fast.
Hunk, running Stanavistin, was faster.
A blur of motion. Her strike missed completely, hit the concrete floor, and threw a cloud of dust across the room.
Before the dust could settle, five steel claws swept outward.
The wind from the swing cleared the air in an instant.
For the first time, Hunk could see her clearly.
Alcina Dimitrescu. Three meters tall, chalk-white from head to foot, her lips a scarlet that made the expression on her face look worse than it was. The claws extending from her leather gloves dragged slowly across the metal debris around her, producing a sound that traveled through the teeth. She tilted her head slightly and looked at the figure standing across the factory floor. The fangs she showed were not decorative.
"Child." Her voice was unhurried. "Don't you know it's extremely rude to disturb a woman's rest?"
She turned her head toward Heisenberg.
In the fraction of a second that her attention moved, Hunk shifted the Stanavistin to second gear.
Several points of light crossed the dark factory interior.
The next instant.
Sounds that had nothing clean about them.
Alcina Dimitrescu, still mid-sentence, was cut into sections. Her head was consumed by the symbiote before it had time to fall.
The muffled, slightly hollow voice came from behind the gas mask.
"Did your master not teach you that losing focus during a fight is how you die?"
Hunk turned toward Heisenberg.
"The Commander says your body can be preserved for experimental use."
"So. If you're willing to surrender now, I can take you back intact."
His voice carried nothing. No pleasure in the outcome, no irritation at the resistance. The words arrived at exactly the temperature of a piece of equipment operating correctly.
Heisenberg stood very still for a moment.
Experimental use.
Was this a joke.
Miranda that bitch wanting him for experiments was one thing. Now the bastard behind this guy also wanted him for experiments?
"Fuck!" He grabbed at his own hair. "Fuck! Fuck!" His voice rose to a full shout. "Why does every single one of you want to use people for experiments?!"
"Has any of you once stopped to think about what the experimental subject might want?!"
"Fuck your entire family!"
He gave Hunk a single extended middle finger, then, without any hesitation, extended one hand toward the ceiling and closed it around nothing.
A sharp crack from above.
The steel cables holding Ada snapped all at once.
In his fury, Heisenberg took Ada, metal bonds and all, and hurled her at Hunk like a cannonball.
She hit the air with force. By Heisenberg's own assessment of the physics, even a tank moving at full speed would have been knocked over by it.
He had, once again, underestimated what Hunk was currently capable of.
A dull impact.
The symbiote materialized in front of Hunk as a spreading grey mass and swallowed Ada's trajectory in an instant, the full momentum of her arrival absorbed into its body. It was careful about the internal pressure. Ada was inside. The goal was to stop her, not break her further.
Enveloped by the symbiote, Ada felt the wounds across her body begin to close at a speed she had no framework to explain. The metal bonds wrapped around her were torn outward from inside, the symbiote shredding them apart as it worked.
When it was finished, the symbiote returned to Hunk's body.
A brief red light moved through Hunk's eyes.
When he looked at Heisenberg again, whatever detachment had been there before had taken on an edge of cold precision.
"What the experimental subjects want is not my concern. And I have no interest in making it my concern."
"In my world, there is only the Commander's orders."
"And I only follow the Commander's orders."