The Fight For Us Part III | Resident Evil |

15 - Sliced to Ribbons

Leon's beside Henry, his face twists into a snarl as he bares his teeth. Henry has his switchblade in one hand, and the other ready to hit, the blade glints in the castle's dim light. Ethan still isn't fully there yet, he watches from the sidelines while he phases in and out of periods of consciousness.

The floor around them is shaky. There's a chunk of old wood that seems to be covering something nearby. But that seems like a lesser threat when the woman produces long knives from the tips of her fingers. Like she can manually grow her nails made of steel. One, two, Freddy's coming for you: Plays through Henry's mind due to the obvious parallel. But these claws made Freddy's look downright puny.

Lady Dimitrescu looks down at her leg, the blood staining her dress.
"You filthy pig!" she shouts, her imposing stature seems to grow taller with each shout from her horse-sized lungs. They don't know how to even approach her, how do you fight something they can't even understand? Can she even be killed?
"Ethan, get back!" Henry shouts before the woman claws at him. Her bladed fingers clink against the cobbled floor beneath them. She growls in annoyance,
"You're certainly quicker than I would've anticipat–" she's cut off when Henry jumps on her back. He jams his knife into the side of her neck, blood spills out fast but she doesn't stumble. In fact, she seems almost entertained by his attack.

The brunette drops to the ground. She wipes the blood from her neck with a disturbed grin, the wound closed back up on its own. "You really put your hands on a woman?"
"Yeah, wanna see me do it again!?"
"Far from a gentleman I see. What a shame, I was beginning to like you."
Leon keeps busting shots, but she doesn't seem bothered by them in the slightest. Red stains her white gown, but she stands firm without care.

Henry wasn't ready to be grabbed, but she grabbed him. She picked him up like a cat. Henry's then tossed aside. He lands right on a chunk of wood. It immediately breaks under his weight and he falls, just barely able to cling onto a root that's been exposed just on the rim of the hole. The wood was old, it's been covering this pit for a long time. Dirt is all the hole is made of. A sinkhole maybe. Did she even know this pit was here? Why is there a pit in the middle of the foyer?

He tries to pull himself up, shaky yet determined hands grasping at the surface only for them to slip back down from the mud. Everything's growing too slick to get a proper hand of, "Help!" He shouts. Caked Converse try to gain their footing on the wall of the hole, only managing to splatter his jeans in more mud and bring him down further. Leon appears above him, a hand put out to grab him. But it was futile, the root snapped, sending him down into the pit. The darkness of the hole grows to become all-encompassing as the dot leading to daylight above shrinks so small he can't see it anymore.

He feels as though he's falling at the speed of light, but then again maybe he's not falling at all. He can't hear anything, the wind is deafening. It's too dark to see anything, not even himself. It's as if he's entered a void of nothing. Completely and utterly lost in the darkness. He's not even thinking, he knows there's no fighting this. This feels like something beyond him, no matter how hard he could fight.

Suddenly, he stops. The wind dies out. More of a breeze than anything. He feels like he should be standing on something, but as he tries to feel his shoes to some sort of surface he finds nothing. He's just floating, as if he's in space, the air's cold, just like it is in space. But how would he end up in space from falling through a hole? Better yet, how would he be alive? With everything he's seen in this village, this shouldn't be all that surprising.

He has his knife in his hand, ready to slice anything in his way. He wouldn't see someone if they appeared though, it's too dark. Too loud. In this abyss, the last thing he was expecting was something to latch onto his face, but it did. Something slimy and heavy slaps against his mouth, like a melted hand cupping his lips. Reflexively, Henry grabs at it. He feels slick little claws around his head, it's holding him for a purpose he couldn't anticipate. He tries to get a hand between it and his face only for it to nudge at his mouth. It's trying to push something between his lips and he screams against it, but it nudges past his teeth and into his mouth. The appendage slides down into his throat, it snakes so deep he can't even feel it stop.

Nothing matters in this moment besides getting this thing off his face, and its thing out of his body. He doesn't know what it is. A tentacle? A tube? There's another possible type of appendage it could be, but he refuses to acknowledge that one. Something is put in him, he can't feel it but he knows that the tube is inserting something into him. Pushing. Implanting. He's starting to suffocate, he can't breathe with it on him. The tube has blocked the flow of air from his lungs and he's starting to writhe around.

With his lungs contracting and his eyes watering, Henry takes out his knife and stabs the thing as a last-ditch effort. The thing squeaks, its claws let go of his head and he rips it off him. Revoltingly, he feels every inch of the tube as it's ripped from his esophagus. Then something grabs his wrist and he's suddenly back on land. Leon's shaking him violently, "Henry?!" He shouts. The brunette's response is to throw up, which he does almost immediately. He hasn't eaten much as of late, it's mostly water he spits up. But there's something else in it, something strange. He can't describe it. He doesn't want to describe it.

"All this for two children who aren't even here!" The woman cackles, Henry's too delirious to notice anything. All he knows is Leon ran off, and Ethan suddenly tackled him to the ground. Then he heard a loud crash, something big and heavy slammed against the floor next to the woman. Pieces of glass were tossed over Henry and Ethan before Henry looked back toward the sound. Blood was pouring out, underneath a chandelier that fell from the ceiling. Leon must've shot it down. It worked, the woman's dead. Henry can just barely see her head underneath the mess of metal and deceptive glass beads, it's been split in half. Her black lipstick is smudged across her pale white face.

"Fuckin' hell." Leon groans, walking up to the mangled mess of the woman. "What the...?" He mumbles as the woman's body turns to rock as if she'd been frozen by Medusa. Her blood turns black, and her mangled memory is encased in a statue. Henry stumbles back to his feet, the three men standing around the mess when the brunette notices something strange. A bottle? A flask maybe, it's some sort of container. Yellow and glass, he can't see what's inside it. The glass is too opaque. It looks important.
"The fuck is that? Food or something?" Ethan inquires curiously.
"Looks important, guess I'll hang onto it."

If the woman needed to keep it on herself to protect it, obviously it holds some sort of value. He's not sure what kind of value, but there's a chance it pertains to Rose. So he holds it under his hand like a book. Leon and Ethan are looking at him strangely.
"Do I have something on my face?" Henry asks,
"Yeah, I don't know what though." Ethan then got closer to him, his finger wiping something off his cheek. Leon looks at him strangely when Ethan touches his face. Henry liked the touch more than he anticipated he would. Whatever it was, it was black and slimy. It was moving like a leech? A slug?

Ethan drops it when it twitches between his fingers and Henry promptly squishes it like a bug.
"Let's keep moving," Leon mutters, the three of them walking towards the front doors of the castle.