Shortly after her transmigration, Bella had investigated this world's Umbrella Corporation. The company's reputation was nowhere near as vast or omnipotent as the novels from her previous life described. Two years before her transmigration, it had been dismantled—the government leading the charge while several major corporations swarmed in to divide the spoils.
Thanks to those novels and movies, she'd heard of the T-virus, G-virus, and the infamous zombies.
Viral outbreaks were indeed terrifying, but when it came to completely destroying human civilization, shambling zombies simply didn't have that capability.
Against humanity's military might and steel war machines, zombies were nothing but target practice.
In this timeline, Raccoon City in Colorado hadn't been destroyed by a nuclear bomb—only that most of its citizens had "disappeared."
Strictly speaking, Prosperity Town's casualty rate was even higher than Raccoon City's.
Zombies resulted from viral leaks causing infection among ordinary people. They spread quickly with high infection rates, but weren't actually bioweapons.
What could be controlled by humans, could accept simple commands, possess tremendous strength, be impervious to blades and bullets, and resemble muscular giants—that was a bioweapon: the Tyrant!
Bella wasn't intimately familiar with Tyrants, but she knew enough.
By current standards, these things were obsolete. Against handguns and rifles, they were indeed formidable, but facing tanks and fighter jets, they were just walking heaps of rotting meat.
A Tyrant in its power-limiter coat was no match for a tank. Remove the power-limiter coat and the thing went berserk!
Russia's T-90 main battle tank cost only a few million dollars—mass-produced on assembly lines, available in whatever quantity you wanted. How much did a Tyrant cost? Debugging, cryogenic operation, more debugging, installing limiters, more debugging again—each Tyrant had slight variations. After being tinkered with a dozen times over, the money and time spent could build ten tanks.
The Tyrant's only advantage was probably portability—it could create panic within cities.
Against ordinary people, this thing was indeed invincible.
No idea where these men had bought it from.
Bella was pondering her strategy when, perhaps because she'd lingered too long, the militants at the entrance approached viciously and slammed their rifle butts against her car hood.
"Get lost! You're not welcome here! Go!" the bearded leader barked in English.
Bella spoke Arabic, but this clearly wasn't the place for conversation. Several men wore weapons at their waists, and more inside the buildings held automatic rifles.
Front and back combined, over a hundred armed gunmen, plus that Tyrant of unknown operational status—she'd have a hard time dealing with them.
Most critically, she still had to rescue someone.
Bella smiled and backed away, leaving the town.
Two minutes later, cloaked in invisibility, she returned.
The greatest threat to her on-site remained the Tyrant.
This thing stood over two meters tall with a bald head, its entire body made of virus-enhanced muscle. Incredibly heavy, it could block an advancing tank at full force—strength Bella could never match.
Fortunately, full-form Tyrants were too violent to control. Humans could only use extensive limiter equipment to suppress their savage nature. In a limiter coat, a Tyrant's combat effectiveness dropped by at least fifty percent.
Bella crouched on a nearby rooftop and took out the Golden Apple. "Number Three, help me scan that thing over there."
Pale gold threads swept across rapidly. The militants were still preparing to unseal the Tyrant. They glanced around, thinking their eyes were playing tricks, and didn't take it seriously.
"Your Highness, this thing is just a clone, though some strange cells have been added to the clone base."
"What strange cells? Explain it simply so I can understand," Bella said. She cared about this—if these bioweapons were all destroyed, that would be perfect. But if even a trace remained and spread uncontrollably, she'd have to consider countermeasures for herself and her family.
War was never civilized. If someone released a bioweapon virus in Los Angeles or San Francisco, she needed defensive measures.
The Golden Apple seemed to perform some calculations internally. "This clone had 322 types of fern chromosomes—including Venus ferns and peninsular shield ferns—artificially added to its B lymphocytes during the embryonic stage, then modifications were made to the xylem and phloem..."
Bella threw in the towel. She couldn't understand any of this.
"Just tell me—can we control it or not?"
This time the Golden Apple's answer was much more definite than when dealing with Crusher: "Yes."
That was all she needed! Control it first, research it elsewhere later!
Stealthily, Bella raised the Golden Apple and projected her consciousness into the Tyrant's mental world.
The intrusion process was absurdly simple. This thing had virtually no defense against mental control, zero defensive awareness—all memories wide open for her inspection.
She saw a bunch of Soviet jokes...
The clone's original body must have been Russian. More specific details were impossible to discern.
Without further ado, she'd put it into hibernation mode for now.
She tried shutting down the Tyrant's consciousness but unexpectedly triggered some protection mechanism instead.
A ferociously violent storm erupted in its mental world, like a Category 5 hurricane. Bella's consciousness was forcibly ejected.
The Tyrant—missing one arm, with numerous bullet holes in its chest and back—suddenly opened its eyes. Not only did it forcibly expel Bella's mental control, it also savagely smashed the ground before it.
The militants were completely unprepared.
They'd acquired this Tyrant through international arms dealers, going through seven or eight middlemen before buying it from Europe.
Undoubtedly, this was battlefield salvage—damaged goods that someone had secretly stored and sold. For nations that had divided up Umbrella Corporation, Tyrants were expendable troops. But for these militants, it was an invaluable strategic weapon.
There was no after-sales service or warranty, and no one provided them with an instruction manual. A bunch of them cobbled together information—supplying power, infusing nutrients—but the Tyrant remained still as death.
Just as they were arguing about what to do, an iron fist struck.
The Tyrant's punch was like detonating an artillery shell on flat ground.
Several researchers in the immediate blast radius were pulverized into meat paste. Several nearby militants who couldn't dodge in time were sent flying by the Tyrant's monstrous strength—broken bones, suffocation, concussions all guaranteed.
"What's happening?"
"It's out of control?!!"
"Subdue it first!"
A crowd hastily opened fire. The Tyrant used its remaining arm to shield its head, broke free from several iron chains, then charged into the crowd and began a killing spree.
Bullets merely created dents in its body, but no one on-site could match the Tyrant's strength. A touch meant death; even a glancing blow meant injury.
In the blink of an eye, over a dozen corpses littered the ground.