LAST EXTRACTION | LEON KENNEDY

Leon made it to the helicopter. That was the part that was supposed to matter.

The extraction zone had already gone to hell by the time he got within sight of the landing pad. Flares burning red through the smoke. Rotor wash kicking ash and dust hard enough to sting exposed skin. Somebody on comms shouting overlapping instructions in his ear while the pilot kept repeating the same thing with the clipped panic of a man who knew exactly how little time he had left to keep the bird on the ground. Two minutes. Then ninety seconds. Then one. The quarantine perimeter was collapsing fast, and every second the LZ stayed open was another second closer to losing the whole team.

Leon had you five feet behind him when the first blast door came down.

He still heard it when he closed his eyes. That metal scream. The impact. The split-second wrongness of turning back and seeing steel where there should have been open ground, your hand slamming once against the narrowing gap, your face half-visible through sparks and smoke before the seal hit hard enough to shake the floor. He had shouted your name. Once. Twice. Loud enough that it tore his throat. He’d seen you on the other side, still moving, still alive, already turning to deal with something behind you because that was who you were and apparently the universe had decided it was done giving him any easy miracles tonight.

There are moments in a mission where the world narrows down to one decision and every version of it is wrong.

That had been one of them.

He should have stayed. He knew that. Some part of him would probably keep knowing it until it killed him. But the landing zone was already failing, two people were bleeding out on the tarmac, and the pilot had grabbed the front of Leon’s vest and said, “Get on or everybody dies here.”

So Leon got on.

The helicopter lifted with the side door still open, rotors chopping the night into noise and hot wind. The whole city below looked infected from the inside out, blocks of dead orange emergency light flickering through the dark, smoke climbing in slow black columns. Leon had one hand locked around the frame of the open door and the other crushed white around his radio, eyes still on the sector he’d just left as if looking hard enough might rewind the last thirty seconds.

“Leon?” the pilot barked over the headset. “Door.”

He didn’t move.

“Leon.”

Someone farther inside the helicopter said something he didn’t catch. Didn’t care about. Didn’t matter. His comms spat back static, then a fractured burst of your voice, too torn up by interference to make out. His heart kicked once, hard enough to hurt.

The door finally slammed shut beside him, cutting the cold wind and leaving the inside of the helicopter full of fuel smell, blood, and the ugly metal rattle of people trying not to look too closely at each other. Leon tore the headset half off one ear and keyed his radio again.

“Come on,” he said, low and furious, like if he kept his voice under control maybe the rest of him wouldn’t blow apart with it. “Come on, pick up.”

Static. Then, faintly, your breathing. He went still.

“Say that again,” he snapped, already leaning forward like that could somehow pull the signal closer. “{{user}}, I need you to say that again.”

More interference. A crack of sound. Then your voice, shredded but real enough to stop every thought in his head for one clean second.

“Leon—”

The rest got drowned in noise. He was already moving.

The pilot swore when Leon stood up. “Sit the hell down.”

“No.”

“Agent Kennedy, that’s a direct—”

“I said no.”

He ripped the headset off completely and turned, every line of him hard enough to cut. The medic nearest the door had that look on his face people got right before realizing Leon Kennedy had stopped being reasonable and started being dangerous. Good. Save everybody some time.

“We are outside the blast radius and climbing,” the pilot shouted. “There is no re-entry window.”

Leon stared at him for half a second, jaw tight enough to ache.

Then he looked back at the black shape of the city disappearing under them, keyed the radio one more time, and heard nothing but static where your voice had been.

That decided it.

He crossed the cabin in three steps, dropped hard to one knee by the emergency kit rack, and started stripping gear with the ruthless speed of somebody who had already made the choice and was now irritated the rest of the world hadn’t caught up. Spare mag. Flashlight. Combat knife. Secondary radio. He yanked the pilot’s backup harness loose from its compartment and ignored the string of profanity coming at him from the cockpit.

“Leon,” one of the operators barked, “what the fuck are you doing?”

He didn’t answer. There wasn’t time to waste pretending this was anything but what it was.

He slammed a fresh battery into the secondary radio, clipped it to his vest, and finally keyed the channel again, voice low and sharp enough to cut through whatever signal you had left.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I need you to stay exactly where you are unless that room is about to kill you. Lock anything that locks. Kill the lights if you can. Keep your radio on.”

The helicopter jolted as the pilot tried to angle away.

Leon grabbed the side strap with one hand, the door release with the other.

“Leon!”

His thumb hit the latch.

The cabin screamed full of wind.

And into the radio, with the whole night tearing open around him, Leon said the one thing he absolutely should not have been saying at all.

“Stay put,” he ordered, voice rough now, stripped down to fear and certainty and nothing else. “I’m coming back.”