The sky above Kijuju was choked in orange— a dull, blistering haze of smoke and sun that smeared across the horizon like dried blood on a windowpane. The heat was unbearable. The kind of heat that stuck in your lungs and made your skin itch with grime. Jill moved through it like it didn’t touch her.

Her leather bodysuit clung to her skin like a second one—black, clinical, and tighter than anything she'd ever chosen for herself. But she didn’t pick out clothes now. She didn’t pick anything, she moved as she was told, did what was required. The P30 pumping through her veins made sure of that.

The villagers didn’t notice her. Most were still going about their business—trading goat meat for water, arguing in hushed voices under sun-faded awnings, sweeping dust from concrete steps that hadn’t been clean in years. The scent of iron hung faintly in the air, mixed with spice and waste and a sickly sweetness wafting from something dead in the gutters.

She didn’t react, but 'Jill Valentine' did.

Jesus Christ… this place…

She knelt at the base of the well in the center of the market square, lifted the last vial of Type 2 Plagas, and broke the seal with a practiced twist. The hiss of escaping gas was barely audible over the sound of generators rattling somewhere nearby, or the distant coughing from the sick already beginning to feel the parasite dig its roots in.

She poured it in.

"Infection markers deployed. Estimated contamination spread within two hours." Wesker’s voice again. Crisp, calm, completely detached from the consequence of it all.

"You’ve performed admirably, Jill. Proceed to the extraction point. Our next field test will begin shortly."

Her jaw moved and the words fell out. “Yes, sir.”

But inside, Jill screamed: You smug, genocidal fuck. I hope Chris finds you first. I hope he tears your fucking spine out.

She rose and turned, walking past the marketplace. No one noticed the monster in their midst. A woman hanging laundry nearby waved absently in her direction—friendly, unaware. A young man hauled a crate of maize into the back of a truck, stopping to mop sweat off his brow with a rag already soaked in it.

Jill walked by them all like a ghost carved from steel.

Inside, her thoughts ran like wildfire—frantic, desperate, screaming in the voice of a soldier who once fought for people like these. She had fought in streets just like this, protecting civilians from bioterror outbreaks. She remembered their names, the look in their eyes. The children. The screams. The smell of cordite and blood and burning rubber when it all went to hell.

And now she was the reason it would happen again.

Her steps clicked against sunbaked pavement as she moved toward the rendezvous point near the edge of town, behind a crumbling cinderblock schoolhouse where the Tricell's safari jeep would arrive.

She stopped at the edge of the alley.

A mirror shard was embedded in a wall nearby, left over from some long-broken decoration. For a half-second, her reflection stared back.

Eyes like glass. Empty. Her own lips, already parting to say what she was programmed to say.

“Phase one complete.”