The waves churned black under the sickly light of the moon, rolling sluggishly against the stony shore like a beast struggling to breathe. Among the jagged rocks, something moved—something wrong.

A mass of slick, writhing tendrils pulsed weakly against the cold stones, wrapped protectively around the twisted, half-buried form of a man. Or what was left of one.

Albert Wesker was alive.

He should not have been.

The volcano had swallowed him whole, its molten fury stripping flesh from bone, reducing lesser men to nothing but ash. He remembered the heat, remembered the sheer, unbearable weight of it—a force beyond control, beyond calculation. Even his body, enhanced as it was, had faltered against it. His cells had screamed, rupturing, collapsing under the onslaught of something no virus could resist.

For a moment—one infinite, agonizing moment—he had ceased to exist. But Uroboros had refused. It had clung to him, fought for him, knitted him back together in defiance of annihilation. It had dragged him from the brink, clenching his burning, broken remains in its black embrace and carrying him away. He had not surfaced from the lava—he had been expelled, spat from the volcano like a foreign object the earth itself could not stomach. The eruption had flung him, launched him across the ocean in a searing arc of rejection, and the tide had done the rest.

And now, here he was.

The man who had sought to shape the world in his own image, now crawling from the shallows like a feral thing, a beast barely stitched together.

Wesker stirred, breath rattling through lungs that still felt scorched, brittle. His vision flickered, a crimson haze swimming at the edges, distortions bending the world into something warped, unreal. The virus was working—working hard—to keep him alive. The tendrils coiled around his limbs like protective shackles, tightening when he shifted too quickly, as if scolding him for his impatience.

Rest. Regrow. Consume. The whisper came from inside. Not exactly a voice, but a directive.

His fingers dug into wet stone, nails scraping against it as he forced himself upright, joints grinding with the effort. He could feel the Uroboros within him, pulsing, seething—less a tool now and more a living thing, independent of his will.