Best of Intentions: The Final Countdown (ch. 33)

A sense of serenity filled me in the span of a breath just before the battle began in earnest. This was a moment that had been five years in the making. Five long years of playing whack-a-mole with narcissistic bio-terrorists, of dedicating myself to the task of uprooting them entirely. But, at long last, my enemies were directly before me, and we were having what would be our final confrontation. 

The details were different from what I had expected. Oswell turning himself into a monster wasn't a surprise, but him turning himself into a shapeshifting mold person was something I hadn't seen coming. Could have done without that. I had also imagined that this confrontation would take place in some super-secret Umbrella base somewhere, like under the sea or on the moon. Somewhere with a bit of gravitas. Oswell having friends was also something I hadn't seen coming, but they were a minor concern at best. 

I breathed in, my Javelins targeting system selecting its targets while Dakka and Kaboom did the same as the swirling black masses of mold took thousands of shapes that never seemed to quite settle. That moment of serenity started to transform into something else. A familiar tension was welling up from inside of me as my focus was honed to a deadly edge. I breathed out slowly. 

Then I pulled the trigger. 

Even through my Javelin, I felt the shockwave that tore through the air. The rail cannon on my shoulder was powerful enough that it could obliterate a building or an entire city block if I hit it at the right angle. Dakka and Kaboom had been labors of love -- partly because if I was going to build a big robot, then I was going to put my whole ass into it, but also because Dakka and Kaboom had saved the world. Or, at the very least, they had saved Raccoon City. 

So I gave them the best of the best. I fit in as much firepower as I possibly could into them, and there was a lot of room in a fifteen-foot battle frame. And they unleashed all of it at once. 

If my shoulder-mounted cannons could level a building, then theirs could level a mountain. Their mounted point defense fired off at full blast, joining the symphony of noise that came from the dual miniguns they wielded. The sheer amount of firepower that came flying down at Oswell and Miranda was enough to make God blink, and the effects were immediate. 

The bullets, the smallest of them the size of a .50 caliber slug with the largest being 150mm cannon shells, tore through the Mold and earth like it wasn’t even there, striking both with biblical wrath.

Yet the Mold, even as it was shot to pieces, still surged forth. It slipped through the spaces that the bullets weren't, branch-like tendrils splitting and merging in the same breath for progress. In doing so, it revealed the sheer mass of the mold that had borrowed into and seemingly hollowed out the mountains that the castle had been built on, because there seemed to be an endless sea of it that pressed on despite the wall of firepower that it was presented with. 

“““M-Mo-th-ther MI-rAn-nDa!””” The twisted voices overlapped and echoed from the Mold as it pressed forward, shapes that almost seemed like people bubbling up along the vines. They sounded afraid. Terrified. Pleading desperately, confused at what was happening even as they took shape to clash against us. They screamed as they were shot to pieces, the mold tearing apart and fossilizing the moment that it was detached, yet they simply reformed elsewhere to continue the attack. 

A hive mind. 

I had guessed as much, given that their physiology was based on mold. Still, it was a little rough to listen to, even as the branches bulged to disgorge a screaming Alcina Dimitrescu in her twisted dragon-like form. She was shot to pieces, but even as she was, an oversized claw lashed out towards me, and I was the first to give ground to dodge the swipe. 

“They're taking it on the chin,” Chris warned, similarly forced to fly up and away with tendrils of mold giving chase after him. The creations that emerged from the Mold seemed to be short-lived as I watched a still thrashing Tyrant fall into the sea of mold below, only to melt and reform. 

“I hate it,” I decided, flying back with Chris and Jill while Dakka and Kaboom took point. We had enough firepower to wage war on Hell and have enough left over to bloody Heaven's nose, but there genuinely didn't seem to be an end to the mold. The impacts before only broke up hundreds of tons of rock and dirt to reveal the sheer depths of it, and as it did, more and more of it was revealed. “I cannot stand anything that creates mass from literally nothing.” 

While the sheer amount of mold was surprising, I’d anticipated that they would have contingencies. ‘Umbrella’ and the term ‘redundancy’ may have been completely unfamiliar with one another, but Oswell wasn't a complete moron. He had to know that talking me around was always going to be a long shot. His virus bombs acted as a Sword of Damocles sure, but he would also know that it was something I could work around, especially if given enough time. 

It's why he turned himself into a mold person. And, I imagine, why there was so much mold. Hope for peace but prepare for war, and all that jazz. So, they upped the volume and spread it out so I couldn't just toss the lot into the astral plane. At least, not without needing to redraw the map. Worse, depending on how the mold worked, they could have lesser colonies elsewhere to retreat to. 

“Are you going to complain or do you have a plan?” Jill questioned, and fair enough. As we spoke, the tendrils of the mold were growing in volume, chasing us into the air, and reabsorbing the pieces that we shot off to keep it at bay. I could see a design taking shape; they were building something, but I really didn't want to see what it could be. 

“A bad one,” I answered, the game plan unchanged as a series of micro-missiles streaked out of a shoulder pauldron that erupted in bursts of fire upon impact. “We need to buy two minutes,” I said before I cut my jet, repositioned, before diving back down. 

We were still the distraction. Our people needed ten minutes to remove the virus bombs from play, and we were at minute six and a half. 

“Why am I not surprised?” Jill remarked with some fondness before following me into the fray. Our weapons fired continuously, and my HUD became so filled with priority alerts that the word priority lost its meaning. Dakka and Kaboom flew down, guarding our flanks to take the pressure off of us, and for it, I saw a building-sized claw rise up from the twisting mass of mold to swipe at Kaboom, who twisted out of the way, but the mold clashed against her armor in a shower of sparks. 

Kaboom stabilized a moment later, but she was immediately beset by Tyrants rising up from the Mold. Exactly as I had hoped. The unending wall of gunfire paused before the weapons shifted ammo types. Streams of napalm’s meaner and more vicious big brother erupted from the barrels, and the mold screamed in response. As expected, it didn't like that. 

It was as it recoiled that I dove in, slamming into a tendril of mold and claiming a sample of it. I had a theoretical make-up of the Mold, but a quick analysis revealed that the data that they’d fed me in the dungeon had been censored to prevent me from doing exactly what I was about to start doing. 

“On it,” my own voice filtered through the comms in my Javelin. And I shivered -- I would never get used to hearing the sound of my own voice outside of a recording. My Simulacrum on the Bus would analyze the Mold while I was busy down here. “But you know what you have to do, right?” 

“Not if I can avoid it,” I replied, the clock ticking down in the corner of my eye as the battle continued. Fire was a weakness of the Mold, which felt pretty obvious for both parties. The mold recoiled from the flames, attempting to attack from around them, but that controlled the angles of approach as we raced through the still crumbling ruins of the castle. 

I couldn't lie and say that the sight of the mold closing in at all angles didn't have my heart beating a few ticks faster, but I swallowed my fear with practiced ease. It helped that I had some pretty hefty weapons at my side with Dakka torching the black mass, making it scream. 

““““It didn't have to be like this,”””” Oswell hit me from everywhere at once. ““““We could have joined forces. You could have held the world in your palm and dictated the rest of human history!”””” 

Ugh. Honestly, I thought we were past this bit. Still, time spent monologuing was time wasted, so I guess I could put up with it for another… three minutes. Though unfortunately, it did little to stop the onslaught of mold that only seemed to grow in volume once it shook off the dirt that had covered it. 

““““Now, the world shall burn! Did you truly think that I wouldn't have redundancies? I'm aware that you would only make such a move against me if you had nullified my threat against the cities, but did you truly think so little of me that you believed that would be the only ace up my sleeve?!””””

“I feel like you're taking this a bit personally,” I noted, my eyes narrowing a fraction. He didn't know. Miranda hadn't told him about the whole ‘ripping my heart out’ incident, huh? That was interesting. A clear action of withholding information from an ally, letting him think that I’d picked a fight the moment I found the virus bombs in the city.  

One more minute. 

““““I convinced Miranda that you could be reasoned with. You made me a liar!”””” I outright refused to believe that I, of all people, had made him a liar. Pretty sure he’d set a high score on duplicity before I was even born and had just kept the streak going since.. ““““Your consent is unnecessary for humanity's next step! If you will not partake willingly, then you shall be forced!”””” 

I really didn't like the vibe he put out when he said that, as I spun out of the grasping reach of the Mold and flew upwards once more. As I did, I saw what the mold had been building towards. At first, I thought I was going to be dealing with a titan-sized Oswell having his hissy fit at me. Instead, what I saw was a… stem? Or a stalk, I suppose. 

The Mold twisted on itself almost like a coiled rope, with coils the size of buildings intertwined to support the structure that rose miles high into the sky. It was only when I pulled back that I saw the scope of it, and all of a sudden, I felt a pit of unease open in my stomach. All the more so when I saw that something was forming at the top of the stalk.

Thirty seconds left. 

“Uh, team?” I heard my voice start as my team started to fly up, and as we did so, we were swarmed by the malformed Dimitrescus and her daughters. They offered little true resistance, but it slowed our ascent. “We have some strange activity across the globe.” 

Did they release the virus bombs? The thought had my heart leaping to my throat, even as I dodged out of the way of a screeching Dimitrescu before tearing chunks out of her with my shoulder-mounted railgun. Yet, what I saw on my HUD as we reached the top of the stalk was something else entirely. 

It was a feed from some of our satellites that revealed similar stalks were beginning to emerge from the ground across the world. A pattern established itself in my mind in an instant, realizing that all of them were near major cities in the form of a grid. They weren't as large as the one we’d just arrived at the top of, but they were each easily the size of a skyscraper before they all started budding a fuzzy mold at the top. 

Daffodils. The implication hit me like a fist to the gut as I landed lightly at the top of the stalk, seeing Oswell and Miranda rise up from the Mold underfoot. Oswell wore an expression of absolute superiority, looking down at me so much that he had to tilt his head back. Miranda, meanwhile, watched me with a cautious gaze. She was clearly expecting me to reveal an ace up my sleeve. 

“So,” I began, buying those last few precious seconds. Fifteen seconds left. All the while, I had Dakka and Kaboom back off to see if we couldn’t chop down this beanstalk. “You finally discovered the benefits of having a Plan C. Right when it’s inconvenient for me. So, I guess the world hasn’t gone completely mad.” 

Ten seconds. 

“A Plan C?” Oswell echoed, a chink in his armor of invincibility appearing. A hint of uncertainty in his voice. A waver. “I have no need of such a thing. I’m sure you’re well aware of the sprouts rising across the world as we speak. With them, I shall infect the world with the T-Virus. It shall plant its roots deep into the Earth, like the most brilliant weed, until all falls under its and my sway.”

Three seconds. 

“Oh,” I realized, a very slow smile spreading across my face as I put the pieces together. 

Zero. 

The all-clear came through and I had to swallow the lump that rose in my throat because of the unfettered relief that went through me. The virus bombs were dealt with. The Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the world was removed. A threat that could have destroyed the world was dealt with before the world realized it was there. 

Because the stalks that he was sprouting across the world? They matched the same grid as the virus bombs in upper orbit. Not completely, and not over the sea, but enough of the grid lined up perfectly to convince me what this was. 

A feint. 

A distraction. 

I would be so panicked by seeing the Mold dandelions that I wouldn't even think to look up to where the real threat was. It was actually pretty clever. Almost enough to be alarming, but it was completely undercut by the fact that I already knew where the real threat was and had mitigated it. 

Now, that being said, the Mold itself was going to be a whole issue. Oswell revealed his hand at how many mold colonies he had established across the world over what was likely years of effort. And since the Mold acted as a hivemind… I couldn't actually kill him like this. He was too spread out. There were two possible ways that I could realistically kill him -- target every trace of Mold across the world and scour it from the face of the Earth all at once. 

Or…

“You have no choice, Rudeus,” Oswell continued, a snarl of a smile pulling at his lips. “Surrender yourself. Now.” 

But I did. From the moment my Simulacrum had learned of the Mold during his brief time of captivity, I had been working to destroy it. The data they fed me had been purposefully incomplete to stop me from doing exactly that, but with a living sample? That was all the pieces I needed to complete the puzzle. 

That puzzle was injected straight into my neck as my Simulacrum synthesized a great big ‘fuck you’ in my Javelin with the compounds I had on hand in case of accidental exposure to whatever crawled out of the petri dish this time. The pinch in my neck subsided as the needle withdrew, and my hesitation was mistaken for defiance. 

“““““NOW!””””” The Mold screamed along with him, the patient and amiable old man guise falling away to reveal the true heartless and controlling bastard underneath. 

“Rude? No,” Jill immediately knew what I was about to do. 

I did it anyway. My Javelin opened up with a compressed hiss of air, and I was immediately hit with the smell of black mold. I'm pretty sure that the infection started at that moment, but I was able to hop out of my armor and land on the strange spongy but firm Mold. Didn't care at all for that texture.

Oswell was triumphant, raising his hands up and as he did, the Mold bubbled under my feet to swallow me whole. And just as everything went dark, I saw the expression of fear appear on Miranda's face. 

…

A hivemind was a two way street. The moment that they started yapping about how they didn't need my consent to serve their goals, I had hashed out a rough game plan. A possibility to exploit. 

Because a hivemind was a road that went both ways. 

I found myself standing in a fuzzy cave made of mold that pulsated with a thousand lights as thoughts, feelings, and memories traveled from one end of the mold to the other. The air was damp and it carried the scent of mildew. With every step that I took, memories flowed into me. 

Of Oswell. An abusive dad and a useless mother. Of war on a scale that had been previously unimaginable. Of years desperately grasping for answers, some kind of solution to cure the madness that infected the world. A chance encounter with the best person he could have met at the worst possible time -- Miranda. She’d set him on the course that damned himself and countless others. Betrayal, intrigue, hundreds of people sacrificed at the altar of progress. Every single scummy thing that a man could do for wealth, power, and influence… Oswell had done it all. 

“No… no! No! Nonononono! It's not possible! It can't be possible! His memories- they're lying! They have to be lies!” Oswell howled like a madman, his voice echoing in the tunnels that we found ourselves in. 

Miranda was cut from the same monstrous cloth, I learned, as her memories flowed into me. She just had a different motivation. A deeply personal one. A lost child taken from her because of disease, and the resulting grief set her on the course of madness. Decades spent tirelessly working towards a singular goal, uncaring of what was sacrificed to achieve it. Miranda hadn't a care for the world, because her daughter had been her world and she would burn everything else to ashes if it meant she could have her daughter back.

“That is the least of our concerns! He is coming! You have invited death to our door!” Miranda snapped, and for the very first time, her voice carried more than polite indifference or condescending dismissal. There was a tremor of fear in the back of her throat. 

I pitied her. More than I expected, honestly. Her motivation was one that I could understand. But, not approve of. How many had she consigned to terrible deaths just so she could bring her daughter back from the dead? I understood grief and loss, but when you become a thing that inflicts that same fate upon others just to console yourself? You became a thing that needed to be stopped and put down. 

“Magic…! There weren't any nanomachines but MAGIC?!” Oswell roared and I chuckled as I approached the central nexus of the mold hivemind. The place they had crafted into a throne room to rule over the others who were absorbed. 

Just as I absorbed their memories, they had absorbed mine. I imagined it was quite informative for them. A mundane life that was irrevocably changed by getting tossed into a new but familiar universe. A web of lies that I’d built purely for the sake of fucking with them. Lies that they had believed and were guided by until we found ourselves in this little predicament.

I almost started to wonder what surprised them more -- the magic, or me being from another universe and not one of their labs? Only I found that I didn't need to wonder. Miranda had recoiled from the revelation that her entire world was a half decent video game franchise that I barely played while Oswell was furious at how thoroughly duped he had been. 

And when I arrived, I felt both of their shock that the hivemind hadn't consumed me. That I hadn't been wiped away under their combined will to become a puppet that would grant them their deepest desires. 

The cavern was vast, with a central ring with a number of elevated thrones crafted from what looked like obsidian and gold. They radiated power, as did those that sat on top of them while they were surrounded by the poor souls who had been infected and subjugated by the hivemind. 

“No…!” Oswell looked at me, and his expression was one of absolute terror. “You can't. You can't do this! I… I was going to fix the world…” 

I raised a finger, “The world wasn't yours to fix, dickhead.” With that, I cast a spell. 

Feeblemind. A bit situational in its use on the tabletop, but when you were hooked up into a globe spanning hivemind? Well, that was one of the situations where it became very useful. 

Oswell was struck with it, his consciousness, which was spread across the hivemind, recoiling as the psychic damage was dealt. And, the real kicker was? If he were as half as smart as he thought he was, then he probably would have rolled the save needed to avoid becoming a delirious, feeble-minded wreck. 

As he lost his mind, the throne he sat upon crumbled into nothing, and with it, the Mold shuddered across the world as it lost a central pillar. 

“My daughter,” Miranda pleaded, the iconography falling away to reveal the desperate woman underneath. “Please, save my daughter. I couldn't… but you can! You can save her.” 

I didn't have to answer. She sensed it. 

She closed her eyes and when the spell struck her, she didn't resist. The second pillar of the hivemind crumbled, leaving me to stand as the last one. 

“I really hope this works,” I remarked, closing my eyes… 

And then willed the poison I injected into myself to spread, taking the hivemind down with me. 

…

Jill’s heart was in her throat as she watched the pillar of mold start to calcify, bleaching to a marble white before it started to collapse underneath its own weight. Her HUD told her that the same things were happening across the world, but she paid it no mind, desperately searching for the idiot who let himself be infected. Desperately, she prayed that he was alive, just so she could kill him with her own two hands. 

“I don’t see him! Chris!” Jill shouted, scanning the collapsing pillar of mold that dropped chunks of itself larger than buildings. Dust obscured her vision for just a moment before it was cleared away with her HUD. She saw Rude’s Javelin tumbling uselessly through the air and she nearly dismissed it. At least until she saw it rust away before shattering to pieces when a heavy stone struck it. 

“The robots! Follow them!” Chris shouted back as they descended into the mess of the collapsing tower, and on her minimap, she saw Dakka and Kaboom rushing down. Rude hadn’t emerged from where he was swallowed, but elsewhere? No, it didn’t matter. She just needed to-

“There!” Jill gasped, her thrusters flaring to life as she dove right towards Rude, who fell limply from wherever he had emerged from. That didn’t matter. Rubble and dust bounced off her armor, nearly throwing her off course, but all the same, she snatched Rude from the air and carried him in her arms, out of the field of ruin. 

The landscape was completely unrecognizable, the mold thrashing and writhing as it died before the calcification froze it midmotion. She rushed towards a patch of ground that seemed stable before setting Rude’s limp body down and half scrambled out of the machine before she realized she should have checked his vitals first. 

“Rude! Rude!” She shouted, a hand going to his throat to find a pulse. And maybe strangle him because at the sound of her voice, he stirred. His eyes butterflied open, first with confusion, then he wore a familiar roguish smirk. 

“I’m not dead?” He wondered, sounding genuinely surprised. “I-” He cut himself off when he realized that she was looming over him, much like a death sentence. “I mean, of course I lived. All part of the plan.”

Jill held his gaze, that confident smirk sliding off his face, and was replaced with a smile full of hesitation. She breathed in deeply and let out a sigh, the ground trembling under her as she knelt at Rude’s side. “Is it done then?”

“It’s done,” Rude answered, his voice carrying the weight of years of labor finally finished. “Oswell and Miranda are dead. And I know every little dirty secret that they ever had, so… Umbrella is dead.”

She waited years to hear those words. “And you’re not infected?” 

“No, I cure-” Rude started to brag, but Jill found that she just didn’t have it in her to care. Without hesitation, she grabbed him by the face, seeing a flicker of hesitation in his eyes, before she leaned in and kissed him. 

Partly because she wanted him to shut up. 

But mostly because she had waited years to do it.