The elevator dinged as they reached the top floor and the doors slid open, revealing a room full of glass test chambers containing unconscious human subjects suspended in liquid. Leon stopped in his tracks when he saw one of the faces.

"This is another agent! I saw his picture in my briefing… Russell Franco, he went MIA in Krakow." He tried tapping on the glass but the person inside made no reaction and continued to float in the liquid in eerie silence.

Ada stopped in front of another case. "And here's my dead drop contact."

Leon saw a laptop on a desk and tapped the trackpad to wake it from sleep. In the outgoing messages he found a recently sent audio file and played it:

'This is Wesker. Your latest target is Ada Wong; her photo and last known coordinates are attached. She has stolen a drive full of viral research. Priority one is to recover the research. Secondary priority is to capture Wong. If she proves overly resistant…kill her.'

Ada smirked at him. "That didn't really work out for those boys."

Just then they heard a clatter from the adjacent room. With guns at the ready, they moved to investigate. Silently nodding to each other, they burst through the door to the next room.

A man stood with his back to them, hurriedly packing vials into a hard attaché case.

"Hands in the air!" commanded Leon.

Slowly the man raised his hands and turned around.

"Agent Troy?" asked a confused Leon; he remembered the face from his Bratislava dossier. His aim faltered.

"Miro." said Ada simultaneously, with ice in her voice. She tightened her grip on her gun.

Leon and Ada only exchanged puzzled glances for a short moment, confused by what the other had called the man, but it was enough of a window for him to press a small device in his hand. A small charge set by the door sent the both of them hurtling into the air. Leon turned his body in midair to cradle Ada, shielding her from a bone-crunching impact with a solid steel cabinet before they both hit the floor. He was sprawled out on the ground with her in his arms. By the time he could recover his senses through the pain, he found a handgun leveled at his head.

"Disarm, Ada," ordered Agent Troy. Or Miro, as Ada called him?

She stared defiantly at him.

He cocked the gun, aim never leaving Leon's forehead. "I said, disarm. Don't try to pretend you don't care about what happens to him. I saw your little display downstairs on the cameras." He watched as Ada placed her gun on the ground and slid it away. "Him too," he commanded.

Leon's lungs felt like they were on fire but he managed to move his arm just enough to put his gun down and slide it away. He winced in pain as he did it, causing Ada to look at him in concern. The very act of breathing hurt without the extra effort of forming words, but he did it somehow. "Where's...Wesker?" he gasped.

The other man grinned cruelly and brought his PDA up to his mouth. What he said next, filtered through this device, was unmistakably in the voice of a man who once tried to recreate the world in his image. "Albert Wesker is dead. Long live Albert Wesker."

Ada stood slowly. "Miro, you're carrying on as him? After what he tried to do?"

"Oh, Ada, you've gone soft. I don't care what he tried to do; I care about what he's left behind. Hundreds of millions' worth of viral research and you want to just lock it away? No. I control the market now. And with a few tricks, the world will keep thinking Wesker is behind it all."

Leon sat up at that, even though it hurt to do so. "You'd endanger people with B.O.W.s just for money?!"

"I can rely on money, Agent. The same cannot be said for people. Even the mighty Albert Wesker fell under the weight of his own ambitions; that really dried up my payments." He leveled his gun at Ada's chest. "I do have to thank you for escorting Ada here, however – it'll save me the time and expense of sending out another kill squad to tie up a loose end."

Seeing he was moving to pull the trigger, Leon pulled his survival knife and hurled it, striking the other man in the shoulder and causing him to stagger back and drop his gun. Ada dove to pick it up and aimed it at Miroslav, while Leon dropped to his knees from the sudden exertion.

"Leon, his real name is Miroslav Kozlov and he worked intelligence for Wesker for years. Whoever you think he is, it's a cover."

Miroslav grit his teeth while holding his wound. "I should have killed you back when we were on the Moscow op. Perhaps I can still rectify that." He suddenly grabbed a nearby microphone for the PA system and started to play the same high-pitched whine from earlier out of his PDA. Ada fired on him, hitting him twice in the torso. He fell, dead, but it was too late – the sound permeated from every speaker in the building, and from beyond the room they heard monstrous cries and the sound of breaking glass. The test subjects were mutating and breaking free.

Thinking fast, Ada pushed a cabinet in front of the door leading from the now creature-filled hallway. Leon picked himself up from the floor as sounds of banging and clawing grew louder from the other side of the blocked door.

"Leon, can you walk?"

"Legs still work, but I think I broke a rib-" he grimaced in pain as he felt for tenderness around his torso, "or two."

"We have to go!" She put his arm over her so she could support his weight as they looked for an exit; the only other way out besides the door they came through was a fire exit. They rushed outside to find themselves with nowhere to go but up; BOWs started to break down the door they came through as well as throughout the rest of the building. They made their way to the roof and found Troy's – or Kozlov's? – empty helicopter.

Ada placed Leon on the passenger side and began the helicopter's startup sequence. While they desperately waited for the engine to warm up, they began firing on the mobs of the creatures that began to reach the rooftop and run towards the helicopter. As soon as the rotors engaged, Ada had the helicopter lift off, but not before a few unwelcome passengers managed to latch onto the skids underneath; the helicopter buckled under the extra weight."

"Leon, take the controls! I need to get them off before they crash us." While reloading her handgun, Ada delivered a swift kick to the face of the nearest B.O.W. and fired on a second one hanging on the skid below the cockpit. The helicopter stabilized as she killed another two and began to gain altitude. Ada turned to return to the controls, but the helicopter buckled as she felt something pierce her calf and drag her down. What used to be Miroslav, now grossly mutated, had grabbed onto her with two claws skewering her leg – and he wasn't going to let go.

She started to slide out of the helicopter from the weight of the monster dragging her away, but suddenly she felt someone grasp her arm; Leon had rushed to her side to keep her from falling.

"You have to let me go! He'll crash the helicopter!" The auto-hover was engaged but the aircraft was still starting to spiral out of control from the sudden weight imbalance.

"My mission… is to get you back to safety!" He gritted his teeth against the excruciating pain in his ribs as he held on to Ada.

She looked at him with a deep sadness in her eyes and brought her free arm up to grasp the hand holding her. "Leon…I will always compromise the mission for you."

Ada then twisted his wrist to force him to let go, and Leon watched in horror as she fell, with Miroslav attached, into the dark abyss of night.

"ADA!"

To be concluded!