July 29, 2025 · The Frozen Lotus Temple, Mount Song (Songshan), Henan Province, China · 09:39 CST
The corridors of the Frozen Lotus Temple stretched deep into the mountain like veins carved from ancient stone and modern steel. Cold blue ambient lighting cast long, ghostly shadows across the polished floors, the faint scent of sandalwood incense drifting down from the temple levels above. The Hound Wolf Squad followed Alen in tight formation, boots echoing softly. Every step felt heavier than the last.
They were elite operators — men and women who had stared down Lycans in the Romanian wilderness, survived the horrors of the Megamycete, and fought alongside Chris Redfield against Mother Miranda herself. Yet walking behind this man sent an instinctive chill down their spines.
There was an aura around Alen. Not loud. Not theatrical. Just a quiet, absolute weight that pressed against the air like gravity. He moved with predatory grace, the Midnight coat flaring slightly, the red interior lining flashing whenever he turned a corner. No one spoke. The squad exchanged uneasy glances behind his back, hands hovering near their weapons out of pure instinct.
Then they reached the sewing room.
Donna Beneviento sat at a small wooden table, pale hands moving with eerie precision as she stitched a new Angie doll. The doll's porcelain face stared blankly into the room. Scraps of fabric and thread floated gently in the air around her, lifted by some unseen force — a silent, unnatural ballet of cloth and needle. The air felt thicker here, colder, as if the temperature itself feared to disturb her work.
The entire Hound Wolf Squad stopped dead.
Rolando's hand went instinctively to his sidearm, voice low and unsteady. "Sir… is that Donna Beneviento? One of Miranda's Lords? Shouldn't she be dead?"
Dion stared, barely above a whisper. "Ethan killed her in her manor. In the Village."
"I agree," Charlie said. "This is wrong."
Emily's voice cracked. "She should be dead."
Alen stopped. He turned slowly, the same clinical, unreadable expression on his face. The blue light caught the gold inlays on his titanium arm, making them gleam like weapons forged in moonlight.
"No," he said, voice low and precise. "That is the real Donna Beneviento. I came to that village long before Ethan Winters and any of you arrived. I tricked everyone. The Donna Beneviento Ethan fought was a fake."
The squad's collective reaction was immediate. Mouths open. Weapons half-raised in pure instinctive shock. A ripple of disbelief passing through them like a wave.
Alen glanced at Rebecca, who gave him a subtle nod from a few steps back.
He let out the faintest breath of exasperation and slapped his forehead with his organic hand. "Sit down. I'll explain. It will be short."
The squad dropped onto the nearby couches. Even Chris and Jill leaned in, though they had heard pieces of this before.
Alen stood in the centre of the room, hands sliding into his coat pockets, voice calm and clinical.
"The Black God — the Cadou and Megamycete — is a biological computer network. The Megamycete itself is the hard drive. It stores the consciousness of every person who has died in that valley for centuries. A massive biological database."
He drew invisible lines in the air with one finger, sketching on a hologram only he could see.
"The Mold is the network infrastructure — the optical cables. It transmits data. Mother Miranda is the system administrator. She has root access. She can read, write, and execute at will. The Four Lords are VIP users with elevated privileges."
He pointed toward an imaginary Lycan.
"The monsters — glitch bots. Failed uploads. The Cadou parasite is the modem. It is the receiver that connects the biological hardware to the network. My vaccine is a connection jammer. I disconnected them from the server."
Emily's mouth fell open. "You made a vaccine for that?"
Donna Beneviento spoke softly from her sewing table, voice barely above a whisper, yet every person in the room heard it clearly.
"He did."
Chris and Jill exchanged a glance. The squad looked like they had been told the laws of physics were provisional.
Rolando found his voice, shaky. "How did you manage to stay inside Miranda's territory without any trace?"
Alen's tone remained ice-cold and matter-of-fact. "My mother, Alex Wesker, was the Queen of Fear. She spent her life studying the breaking point of the human mind. The T-Phobos virus runs in my veins. It did not just give me fearlessness. It gave me something else. Something I have kept dormant."
He raised a hand.
"Cognitive Dominion. A legacy from Alex. While Albert gave me the body, Alex gave me the keys to the mind. I can emit a bio-electric field — a Phobos Frequency — that strikes the amygdala directly. I do not need to fight Donna's hallucinations. I can override them. I can broadcast a White Noise signal that jams her control entirely. To her fear-based systems, I am a void. A ghost she cannot haunt."
He picked up a tiny device from the nearby table — a micro-drone smaller than a dragonfly.
"And the Mold and Megamycete cannot track what registers as nothing."
Dion's voice was barely a whisper. "You have that kind of power. You're more dangerous than Wesker. An Omega-level threat in the bio-organic weapon category."
Alen's expression didn't change. "It has a cost. Using that power burns calories quickly. But I do not use it lightly. Because when I open that door — I feel her. I feel Alex. The cruelty. The desire to break things just to see how they work. It erodes the man I am trying to be."
Charlie shook his head slowly. "Damn, sir. That's not good. You really have to be careful with that ability. Alex Wesker created something horrifying."
Alen continued, voice steady. "For what I did in the village — I told Donna to make replica dolls of herself and Angie. She did. Then I told her to steal a Cadou parasite. She did. With that, and Mother Miranda's decaying research book, I reverse-engineered the Cadou parasite. Miranda spent centuries on it. I did it in months."
The entire Hound Wolf Squad physically recoiled. Several nearly left their seats. Eyes wide with pure, unfiltered shock.
Alen nodded to Rebecca. She rose quietly, walked to his desk, and returned with a silver reinforced briefcase. She placed it on the table in front of the squad.
Alen clicked the biometric latches open. Cold vapour spilled out. He withdrew two cylindrical containment jars. Inside, fluid glowed with a faint bioluminescent white. Floating within were parasites — but not the dark, oily Cadou of Mother Miranda. These were pale, sleek, and pulsed with a rhythmic, artificial heartbeat.
"The Nexus Cadou 2.0," Alen said, holding one jar to the light. Ocean-blue eyes examining the specimen with cold, scientific precision.
Charlie murmured, voice dropping. "It's white. It doesn't scream like Mother's Mold."
"Because it is purified," Alen stated, setting the jar down. "Using the data from Miranda's journal combined with my own research into the Las Plagas variants, I stripped away the Megamycete's hive-mind control frequencies and replaced them with a bio-relay."
He turned to Donna, expression unreadable behind the dark sunglasses.
"This is the key to her salvation. Once implanted in the replicas, they mimic her specific bio-frequency. To Miranda, the dolls sing just like she does. They bear the load of the connection, allowing me to sever her from the network without alerting the Administrator."
Rolando stared at the jar, then at Alen, voice hoarse. "Sir, you're really a freak. Albert made Las Plagas Type-3 with help from Tricell and a full team. You made this alone using a decaying notebook. Albert and Alex needed men and pawns. You work alone. You surpassed your parents."
Alen's voice remained perfectly calm. "I made universal E-Necrotoxin and vaccine for mold-based weapons. I will give most of the credit to my grandmother, Dr. Amelia Richard. Without her groundwork, none of it would have been possible."
John leaned forward. "Universal E-Necrotoxin? It can kill any mold-based weapon?"
"Yes," Alen said. "Only for mold-based weapons. But any mold-based weapon."
Emily's voice was soft with awe. "How did you manage to rescue Donna in the first place?"
Alen answered with the same clinical precision he used for everything. "I understood how she worked. Unlike the other Lords, Donna's mutation is primarily neurological. The Cadou parasite fused with her frontal lobe and limbic system. But there was a massive anomaly — her consciousness had been partitioned. The Cadou adapted to extreme psychological trauma and social withdrawal by offloading a significant portion of her personality — specifically her social capability and her capacity for aggression — into the Angie doll. They are connected via a high-frequency bio-signal. Two people sharing one architecture."
Rolando's eyes widened. "And your vaccine?"
"I injected both Angie and Donna simultaneously. The vaccine rewrites the Cadou parasite — severs the chain that binds the host to Miranda's network. It costs a significant portion of the Cadou's power, but the host retains their life. She is free. Mold-based biology, but her own biology. Her own will."
Emily shook her head slowly. "How did you do all the initial research? The dissection, the compounds, the testing?"
Alen's answer was simple and clinical. "I acquired the Trevor Manor in the mountains near the village. It has seven vein-tunnel systems running beneath it. I used those tunnels to capture specimens — Vârcolac, Lycan, Uriaș, Samca, Moroaică — and brought them into the lab I built inside the manor. I dissected every one of them. I ran the compounds. I developed the E-Necrotoxin and the vaccine entirely from that data. No human experiments. I am not my father."
Charlie shook his head, stunned. "Sir. You went through all of that alone. Albert and Alex needed assistants and teams. You had your AI assistant and the contents of a dead woman's notebook. You have the mind of both of them combined but you used it to save people instead of rule them." He paused, looking at Alen with genuine respect. "You are Dr. Victor Frankenstein. I will give you that title with both hands."
Chris chuckled darkly from the side. "Yeah. I told them the same thing. He is that doctor from Frankenstein."
Emily grabbed the leather-bound research journal Alen had placed on the table — his personal notes on the Cadou, Megamycete, vaccine formulas, hand-drawn blueprints of Vârcolac and Lycan biology. Her eyes widened as she flipped through the pages.
Her voice was barely a whisper. "Sir — you are Victor Frankenstein. Albert and Alex created Victor Frankenstein. You're a black-ops operative, hacker, virologist, psychologist — you work alone. You revived the Red Queen. You research alone. Just you and Trinity. You dissected every undead creature in that valley. You are more dangerous than Albert and Alex combined — and you are still doing all of it to save lives. You are the total opposite of everything they were."
Alen's expression remained stoic. "Chris trusts you. That is sufficient reason to share it. The world needs men like this squad. And a captain like him."
A long silence settled over the room. Then Rolando spoke for all of them, his voice carrying genuine, unperformed respect.
"It is an honour to work with you, sir."
Alen raised a hand slightly, the faintest discomfort crossing his face at the weight of it. "Sit down. No need for that. Let's get prepared for the mission."
The team returned to their seats, still staring at the man who had single-handedly rewritten the rules of the game they thought they understood.
The phantom had shown them a glimpse of what he truly was.
And the final hunt for Frederic Downing was no longer just a raid.
It was the beginning of something much larger.