The thing was already changing.
Leon could see it in the movement — the arm dragging on the extension, the body overcorrecting on each stride, the coat shifting from the inside in pulses that came too close together. Each swing carried too far. Recovery came late. It was getting stronger and less controlled at the same time, which made it more dangerous in ways that didn't help him.
He fired at the arm — two shots, forcing it to pull back — and stepped in rather than away. Distance favored it. Up close, it had to choose.
It chose power.
The backswing came faster than the one before it and he didn't get clear in time. The edge of it caught his left side and he hit the storage unit behind him and stayed on his feet by decision more than physics.
Marvin moved left.
The right call — flanking while Leon had the attention, splitting the target, the reflex of someone whose training went deeper than the injury.
The arm didn't track toward Leon.
It swept sideways through Marvin's position. Marvin got his arm up. It didn't matter. The impact lifted him and drove him into the far wall and the sound of it was not something Leon's brain fully processed because his body was already moving — crossing toward the wall, toward the floor, toward Marvin on it.
One hand pressing into his side. Breathing. Not moving beyond that.
The thing turned back toward Leon.
"—shit—"
He fired. Missed. First miss of the night. He pumped and fired again and hit but the thing was already mid-stride and kept coming. He ran — not away, diagonal, forcing it to track a direction. He got to the far wall and turned.
It wasn't moving cleanly anymore. One motion didn't follow the last. The head twitched right while the feet went left. It recovered and came forward and he moved left and it was already there — he had no idea how — and the arm came through the space he was entering.
He drove into it rather than away. Shoulder into the extension, using its own reach against it, the arm passing over him instead of through him.
Close.
He came out the other side and his shoulder was wrong. Not broken — but something had shifted and certain angles were gone. He adjusted his grip and kept moving.
It came at him full.
He moved right. Wrong direction. The arm caught him across the chest and he didn't get a say in where he landed. He hit the floor on his back, shotgun still in his hands because his fingers had decided that before the rest of him caught up. The ceiling was close. Too close.
He rolled and got up.
The thing was already coming.
He fired from one knee — the shot hit, the arm recoiled — and ran through the opening before it closed. He put the remaining storage unit between them and used the two seconds to look at Marvin.
Still down. Still breathing.
Alone.
He turned back.
It came forward and he waited — moving, cutting angles, keeping distance variable — watching the overcommitment build. He could see it accumulating. Each exchange, the arm extending further than the strike required, the recovery slower, the body leaning into momentum and not getting all of it back.
It came at him full again.
He went right, and right was wrong, and he went into it instead of away — shoulder down, driving through — and the arm passed over him and kept going, too much behind it to stop, the follow-through carrying it wide.
The arm slammed into the pipe bolted to the wall.
It stopped.
The arm was jammed in the angle between the pipe and the concrete, the full weight of the extension pushing it into a space it couldn't easily pull from. The coat across the arm had stretched under the strain.
The eye was open.
Leon raised the shotgun.
Empty.
The click in that moment was the loudest sound in the room.
He dropped it.
The arm was pulling free — he could see the bracket giving — and there was no time. There was the eye and there was the knife and there was the distance between them which was almost nothing.
He crossed it.
The blade went in at the wrong angle — shoulder wrong, grip wrong, resistance not what he expected — and the thing's reaction was immediate and total. The arm tore free. The body lurched. Leon was still connected to the arm by the knife and the movement threw him sideways and he let go of the handle on the way out because the alternative was going with it.
The knife stayed buried in the arm. Then the arm moved — and it was gone.
Leon hit the floor.
Got up.
The thing was not functioning correctly.
The eye was closed — collapsed, the tissue around it wrong — and the arm was swinging in short violent arcs with no target, just movement, the body lurching with each one. The coat across the back had split at the shoulder seam. Not torn from outside. Pushed from inside. Something pressing through that hadn't made it all the way yet.
It was bigger than it had been. Faster. Less readable.
Leon pulled the magnum.
He fired and the recoil through the bad shoulder was considerable and the round hit the arm below the ruined eye and the body listed hard right. He stepped in and fired again and drove it back a step. He pulled the shotgun from his back — two shells left, he could feel it in the weight — and fired both into the arm in sequence and kept moving forward, not stopping, using the shots to steer rather than stop, pushing it right, then further right, then back.
The far end of the room was dark. He knew where the grating was. He'd filed it when they dropped from the ladder.
He fired the last magnum round and the body listed hard and overcorrected and the back foot came down on the grating's edge.
The last bolt tore free.
Leon was already moving sideways.
The near edge dropped. Then the far. The thing went with it — the arm carrying it forward into the drop, the body following, no recovery, no floor left to argue with.
The sound of it going down was enormous.
Then less.
Then nothing.
Leon stood at the edge with the empty magnum still raised.
He didn't lower it.
The dark below was still. No sound. No movement. His eyes kept moving across the drop anyway, tracking for something that wasn't coming back up, because his body hadn't received the message yet and he wasn't sure he trusted the message anyway.
His hands were shaking. Not from pain.
He stayed there longer than he needed to.
He listened — past his own breathing, past the ringing from the magnum at close range, down into the dark below.
Nothing moved.
That didn't mean anything. He knew that. He lowered the gun anyway and stepped back from the edge because standing at the edge wasn't useful and useful was the only category that mattered right now.
He turned around.
Marvin was sitting up against the wall.
He'd gotten himself off the floor at some point during the fight — Leon hadn't seen it happen — and made it as far as the wall and stopped. The gun still in his grip. His hand pressing into his side. His face the wrong color in a way that had moved past exhaustion into something with a different cause underneath it.
His eyes were open. Tracking Leon when Leon crouched in front of him.
They stayed on Leon for a moment. Then moved — just briefly — to the dark where the grating had been.
"…William," Marvin said.
Leon frowned. "Who?"
"Birkin."
A breath that didn't come clean.
"Umbrella… researcher…"
His hand tightened at his side.
"Him. His wife… Annette…"
He swallowed. Tried to keep going.
"Worked with Wesker… before…"
A pause. His eyes unfocused for a second.
"After… something was off."
Another breath. Shallow.
"We thought—"
He stopped. Reset.
"Didn't matter."
His gaze snapped back to Leon.
"That face…"
A beat.
"…it was him."
His voice dropped. Thinner now.
"I know it was."
Then he looked back at Leon and didn't say anything else about it.
"It's down," Leon said.
Marvin looked at him for a long moment. Then nodded once — confirming something he'd already calculated the answer to.
"Yeah," he said. Quiet. "I heard."
The girl was there. Leon didn't know when she'd moved. She was standing a few feet back, watching Marvin with the still attending focus she used when she was reading something — taking inventory of what she saw and understanding what it meant.
She looked at Leon.
He looked back.
Neither of them said it.
"We need to move," Leon said.
"Yeah." Marvin shifted his weight from the wall and stopped. His jaw tightened once, released. He pressed harder with his hand. "Give me a—"
He didn't finish it.
Leon waited.
Marvin exhaled slowly through his nose. Set his feet. Tried again.
"Okay," he said.
His voice was quieter than it had been.
"Okay."
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Adding a few reference images below for things we've seen so far.
I'll update them as new elements appear.