Location: Matsed Village, Caucasus Mountains, Russian Federation
Date: June 17, 2016
Time: 01:00 Hours
The Arctic wind didn't just blow; it screamed. It tore through the jagged peaks of the Caucasus range, carrying shards of ice that could cut exposed skin within minutes. Below, the village of Matsed lay huddled in the valley, a graveyard of wooden structures and corrugated iron buried under ten feet of snow.
From a ridge three kilometers upwind, a figure stood motionless against the whiteout.
Alen Wesker adjusted the collar of his trench coat. It was heavy and made of a special ballistic weave that felt rigid against the cold. It was his coat. Albert Wesker's.
Just as the files described, Alen thought, the wind whipping the hem of the coat around his legs. Isolated. Impoverished. Desperate. The perfect feeding ground for Umbrella.
He looked down at the village through the advanced optics of his tactical goggles. Matsed hadn't just been a neighbor of the Umbrella facility; it had been a livestock pen. The villagers provided the labor, and when supplies ran low, the test subjects. Now, it was a ghost town, supposedly abandoned since the 2003 raid.
But his intel, pulled from the deepest and most secure servers of the FSB, said otherwise.
Alen looked down at his gloved hands. Tonight, Nicolas Lemanissier, the Texas rancher, was dead. John Kane, the Blue Umbrella operative, was on leave. Tonight, he was wearing the skin of his inheritance.
In the sparse safehouse hours earlier, he had opened the sealed Pelican case with a sense of dread. Inside lay the legacy: the midnight-black tactical gear, the trench coat, and the weapon. He drew the gun now—a customized Beretta 92F, the Samurai Edge (AW Model-01). The black slide and silver frame gleamed in the moonlight. It felt unnaturally natural in his grip, the weight and balance clicking into a muscle memory he hadn't earned, but was born with.
He had caught his reflection in the safehouse mirror. The slicked-back blonde hair, the sharp jawline, the cold blue eyes of his mother, Jessica. But the man staring back was a ghost.
"Let's see if the legend fits," Alen whispered into the gale. He holstered the weapon. "Showtime."
01:22 Hours – Village Perimeter
The storm was his cover. Alen moved down the slope, not trudging through the snow, but gliding over it—light, efficient, predatory.
At the perimeter of the village, he stopped behind the shell of a frozen tractor. He touched the temple of his glasses.
"Focus."
He didn't need technology for this. He needed the blood. He let the mental barriers drop, tapping into the Reality-Lens perception. The world shifted. The blinding white snow turned into a gray grid.
Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.
Through the walls of the nearest structure, four thermal signatures glowed hot orange. Patrol routes appeared as faint trails in the air, predicting their movements based on gait and terrain.
He glanced at his wrist-mounted tactical screen. It displayed a grainy feed from a stealth micro-drone he had deployed miles upwind. The feed confirmed his worst fear.
The "abandoned" village was a staging ground.
He saw heated temporary shelters, heavy-lift trucks with snow tires, and in the central square, the menacing silhouette of a Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter, rotors tied down against the wind. Men were moving crates—heavy, reinforced crates labeled with biohazard warnings.
"Not scavengers," Alen muttered, the realization settling like ice in his gut. "She's setting up shop. Ambitious little suka."
Svetlana Belikova, the President of the Eastern Slav Republic, wasn't here to pick through the trash; she was here to move in.
It was time for a more direct interrogation.
Alen closed his eyes for a moment, gathering the bio-energy in his cells. The drain was immediate—a spike of hunger, a burning of calories.
Spatial-Phantom Movement.
To the naked eye, he didn't run; he glitched.
His body seemed to dissolve into black smoke and static. He crossed the fifty meters of open ground in a heartbeat, phasing through the driving snow. He reappeared directly behind the perimeter guard.
Before the man could register the disturbance, Alen struck. A chop to the vagus nerve. The guard crumpled silently into a snowdrift.
Alen stepped over the body, his breathing slightly heavier. One.
He repeated the process. Phase. Reappear. Strike. He was a phantom in the storm, dismantling the outer perimeter with surgical precision.
01:45 Hours – The Captain's Tent
The command tent was warm, smelling of kerosene and stale coffee.
Captain Sergei Volkov of the Eastern Slav Special Forces was dozing over a topographical map, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand.
He woke up to the feeling of cold steel pressing against his carotid artery.
"Don't," a voice whispered in perfect, unaccented Russian.
Volkov froze. "Who—"
"Sleep."
Alen pistol-whipped him, a controlled strike that turned the lights out instantly. The Captain slumped forward onto the map.
Alen didn't waste time. He holstered the Samurai Edge and pulled a decryption device from his belt, jamming it into the Captain's ruggedized military laptop.
Crack initiated… 12 seconds remaining.
"Let's see what your mistress is up to," Alen murmured.
The files opened. Alen scanned them, his eyes narrowing behind his sunglasses.
Schematics: Geothermal Plant Repair.
Inventory: Industrial cement, reinforced steel, Class-4 Containment Cells.
Personnel: Biological Research Division – Alpha Team.
"She's not looking for leftovers," Alen realized, a cold anger rising. "She's trying to reactivate the whole facility. She wants her own private Umbrella."
He found a message from the Presidential Palace. << Secure the Red Queen core. If the AI is intact, the manufacturing capabilities can be restored within six months. >>
Alen ripped the drive out of the laptop. He looked down at the unconscious captain.
"Was your civil war not enough?" he asked the sleeping man. "You used Lickers on your own people, and now you want to mass-produce them? Not on my watch."
The mission parameters had shifted. This was no longer a retrieval mission. This was a denial of service.
02:45 Hours – Caucasus Laboratory (The Depths)
The main entrance was sealed, guarded by a platoon of Belikova's elite. But Alen had his father's notes.
He found the fissure in the rock face, a jagged wound in the mountain hidden by a decade of ice. He slipped inside, entering the maintenance tunnels that official schematics had forgotten.
The air inside the facility was dead. It held the silence of a tomb.
Alen moved through the shadows. The industrial hallways were coated in frost. Rusted railings creaked under the weight of time. But beneath the decay, the facility was sleeping, not dead.
He reactivated the Reality-Lens.
The darkness lit up with threats.
High above, in the vaulted ceiling of the main cargo bay, three heat signatures clung to the girders. Elongated limbs. Exposed brains. Lickers. They were dormant, hibernating in the cold, but the heat from the Belikova team's generators was slowly waking them up.
In a breached containment tube to his left, the faint, rhythmic pulse of a Chimera bio-weapon glowed.
Alen moved like smoke. He didn't engage. A fight would wake the hive. He was a ghost, passing through the belly of the beast.
He reached the primary structural support pillars—massive columns of steel that held the mountain up.
"Time to close the door," he whispered.
He unpacked the C-4 charges. He placed them methodically at the stress points, on the geothermal conduits, and at the base of the load-bearing walls. He wired them to a remote detonator.
This place would not be conquered. It would be buried.
03:30 Hours – The Server Room
The heart of the facility.
Alen stood before the massive sliding doors. He pushed them open with a grind of metal on metal.
The room was vast, dominated by towering banks of the mainframe. The walls still bore scars from high-caliber bullet impacts—the remnants of the battle where Albert Wesker had finally killed his rival, Sergei Vladimir.
Alen walked to the center of the room. He could almost feel the echoes of the past, the arrogance, the power.
"You killed the Colonel right there," Alen said to the empty room, looking at a stain on the floor. "And you stole the Red Queen right here."
The main console was dead. The primary core had been removed in 2003. But men like Sergei Vladimir—paranoiacs and true believers—always had a backup plan.
Alen approached a nondescript server rack in the corner. He engaged his enhanced strength, his muscles coiling. With a grunt of effort, he punched his fist through the steel plating of the false panel.
He ripped the metal away.
There, nestled in a lead-lined, EMP-proof compartment, sat twelve pristine hard drives.
The Backup.
"Hello, Queen," Alen whispered, a rare smile touching his lips. He carefully extracted the drives, sliding them into his padded, waterproof pack. "Let's get you out of the cold. I think we have a lot to talk about."
He zipped the bag.
"Now… let's finish this."
03:55 Hours – The Escape
He didn't walk out. He ran.
Alen triggered the timer on the detonator as he hit the maintenance tunnel. 60 seconds.
He sprinted, his breath tearing at his lungs. Behind him, the first charge blew.
BOOM.
The sound wasn't a fireball; it was a tectonic groan. The mountain shuddered.
BOOM. BOOM.
Alen dove out of the crevasse and into the snow just as the ground beneath the facility gave way.
He rolled, coming up to a crouch on the ridge, looking down.
It was apocalyptic. The internal supports snapped, and the roof of the underground complex—tons of rock and ice—collapsed inward. A massive plume of snow and dust shot into the sky.
In the village below, the lights in the Belikova camp went dark as the power grid severed. Sirens began to wail, a thin, panicked sound against the roar of the avalanche Alen had just triggered.
The lab was gone. The B.O.W.s were buried. The dream of a new Umbrella was crushed under a million tons of rock.
Alen stood up, the wind whipping his coat. He adjusted his glasses.
"Objective complete."
04:30 Hours – The Presidential Palace, Eastern Slav Republic
The office was a monument to luxury. Mahogany desks, velvet drapes, and a roaring fireplace.
Svetlana Belikova stood by the window, sipping tea from delicate china, watching the snow fall on the capital. She was waiting for confirmation of the facility's reactivation.
The secure phone on her desk rang.
She picked it up smoothly. "Report."
The voice on the other end was frantic. Static crackled over the line.
"Madam President! It's gone! The facility… it's gone!"
Svetlana's grip on the saucer tightened. "Define 'gone', Commander."
"Collapsed! A catastrophic structural failure. The mountain came down on top of us! The village outpost is buried. We have heavy casualties. The entrance is sealed under fifty meters of rock!"
Svetlana felt the blood drain from her face. "What caused it? The BSAA? An airstrike?"
"No radar contacts, Madam. No missiles. But… the perimeter guards… the ones we found conscious…"
"Speak!" she snapped.
"They said they saw a ghost, Madam. A man in black who moved like smoke. He took down the entire outer watch without firing a shot."
Svetlana slowly lowered the phone. She didn't slam it. She placed it back in the cradle with trembling precision.
Her leverage. Her factory. Her future. Erased in an hour.
Not by a government. Not by an army. But by a single man.
"A ghost…" she whispered, her eyes staring at her reflection in the window.
A primal scream of rage built in her throat, but she swallowed it down, turning it into a cold, hard knot of hate. She threw the teacup against the fireplace, the china shattering into a thousand pieces.
"Find him," she hissed to the empty room. "Find this ghost. And bring me his head."
The Shadow War had begun. And the enemy had just made his first move.
Mission Update:
Status: Success.
Asset Acquired: Red Queen Backup Drives (12 TB).
Target Neutralized: Caucasus Laboratory Destroyed.
New Hostile Identified: Svetlana Belikova (Alert Level: Critical).