The night was heavy with smoke and blood. Leon Kennedy limped through the ruins of the fallen city, his body battered, his side bleeding, but his eyes fixed ahead. He had made a promise — one that no grave could break.

She waited for him. Not in a mansion or a bunker, but in a quiet house beyond the outbreak zone. The girl with the scarred hands and eyes like storms — she was his anchor in this hell. When the world turned to ash, she was the fire that kept him alive.

He’d been shot, buried in the rubble, left for dead by the monsters that wore human faces. But as darkness threatened to claim him, he heard her voice in his mind — soft, defiant, real.

"No grave can hold my body down,” he whispered, clawing through debris, dragging himself inch by inch. “I’ll crawl home to her.”

Through broken streets, past the groans of the undead, he moved — not as a hero, not as a soldier — but as a man chasing the only light left in the world.

And when he finally reached her door, collapsing at the threshold, her arms around him felt warmer than the sun. He hadn’t cheated death.

He’d just refused to die without seeing her again.