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“Yes!” DSO junior operative Grace Ashcroft exclaims after cutting through the chain using the bolt cutter.
Before her is the imposing facade of an abandoned oil rig off the coastline, reported by DSO's Intel as one of the Connections’ hideouts. It’s also where her mentor (and long-time crush) Leon S. Kennedy is held captive for a month. Right after the Elpis incident, Leon took her under his wing as his protege at the DSO. Her heartbeat’s heavy imagining what they might have done to him. Intel revealed it's a secret laboratory engaged in BOW experimentation. She slows her breathing to keep it together. Psyching herself out isn’t going to bring him home.
After removing the chain, she opens the metal door to an empty hallway. She sneaks along it, staying close to the wall. At the end is a ladder heading up to an uncovered vent opening. It’s not her first rodeo doing this, having crawled through ARK’s ventilation shafts. “Yipee-ki-yay,” she jests.
As she traverses through the shaft, the scent she encounters is briny. Bright light comes out of the slits along the shaft’s walls. If she’s learned anything about Umbrella and the Connections, she’s at the lab segment of this facility already. She finds an exit, a flimsy vent cover, that she pushes out of the way.
Landing on her feet after she jumped out of the shaft, she’s in a large room filled with enormous glass vats of water. With her standard-issue Requiem gun at hand, she explores the area. Most of the vats contain creatures which look like they were born out of a nuclear bomb test in the ocean. There’s a Humboldt squid with a set of arms, an electric eel that has tusks, and a school of Angler fish wherein each has multiple escas emitting fluorescent green light. Eventually, she stands in front of a vat bigger than the rest.
“Oh my God. What have they done to you?” Grace rubs her eyes at the creature—formerly a man—floating inside of it. He’s asleep.
She figures out it’s Leon. His physical appearance is completely changed, save for his signature hair—his entire body resembles an anthropomorphic fish. It’s covered in scales shimmering with iridescent hues in shades of blue and green. Various dorsal fins and crests jut from his torso. Frilled gills run along the sides of his neck. He has webbed hands and feet with elongated fingers that have sharp claws as fingernails. What strikes her the most are Leon’s cryptid-like facial features: his large eyelids, his outstretched mouth, and his prominent forehead adorned with an elaborate seal.
Touching the thick glass, Grace vows, “I’ll get you out of here.” She scans the room for any kind of control panel or switchboard which could open the vat. Unfortunately, there are no signs of either mechanism. “Fuck it,” she mutters, pointing her Requiem at the vat. Her experience with it shows it’s no ordinary gun.
Blam. The bullet manages to crack the glass. “It’s working!”
She fires three more shots. Blam. Blam. Blam.
Upon the fourth gunshot, the glass encapsulating the vat shatters as Leon falls on the floor; the water he was immersed in disperses all over the lab.
“Leon!” she says, running to him. Kneeling on the floor, she cradles his amphibian body saying, “Thank God! I finally found you.”
As he opens his eyes, the low, gurgling sound leaves his mouth.
“Jesus Christ. What did they turn you into?” she asked him with tears streaming down her face. She’s met with his reply that’s animalistic rather than human: deep, resonant rumbles in place of linguistic phonations.
Their heartfelt moment of reunion doesn’t last when a large blast door opens; a squad of Elite Soldiers storms the room. “Let’s get out of here,” Grace says. She helps Leon up; her jaw drops at how he’s considerably grown in size.
Not only are they outnumbered, he’s in no position to fight at all, so they hightail it. “Come on, this way!” she yells at him, attempting to head back to where she first entered the room. But the soldiers block the path going there and start shooting at them. The duo immediately take cover behind one of the vats. “Shit! We have to find another way out,” she hollers.
While she searches for an alternative route, Leon points to the other end of the room. She turns to where he directs her attention. There’s a gap extending from the wall lined with railings along its borders. She nods and they dash toward the gap, all the while evading the soldiers’ gunshots. As they near it, her eyes widen at how high up they are from the ocean surface, maybe around forty meters above it.
“It’s too far down but we don’t have a choice!” she screams.
They sprint to a part of the railing low enough for them to jump over. She leaps first—only to have one of the gunshots hit the left center of her back, rendering her unconscious. A roar bellows from Leon who’s behind her.
As she falls to the ocean, he dives for her, using his fins to pick up his speed. Upon reaching her, he wraps her in a tight embrace. By sheer instinct, he excretes some kind of mucus from his glands and coats Grace with it to cushion her from the impact. They hit the surface, plunging a few feet underwater, so he uses his webbed feet so they both float. The water around them becomes red—and her face becomes pale white; she’s lost too much blood. In a desperate attempt to revive her, his mouth swoops down to capture hers.
In an instant, her eyes—and the newly-formed gills around her neck—open. Leon’s piscine face doesn’t conceal his expression of dread from what he turned her into. But it goes away—when she kisses his cold blooded lips. As long as they're together, it doesn’t matter that they aren't human anymore.