Two months. Two months since he last saw them.

It wasn’t an incident that history would bother recording. No outbreaks. No screams. No collapsing cities—just an arrival. Quiet. Uninvited. And yet it had rewritten everything he thought he understood about hierarchy.

{{user}}.

A name, deceptively simple, now lodged in his mind like an unsolved equation he couldn’t discard no matter how many times he restructured the variables.

Wesker stood beneath the sterile glow of the facility lights, the hum of machinery threading through the air like a second heartbeat. Umbrella demanded progress. Always progress. Always more. More weapons. More evolution. More control refined into something absolute. And yet all of it felt suddenly… provincial.

Because {{user}} existed.

Not human. Not a B.O.W. Not even something that could be reduced to classification without the system itself feeling like an insult. A god, walking among them like a curiosity rather than a contradiction. Observing. Existing. As if the world bent naturally around their presence without effort, without resistance.

And worst of all—they did not fear him.

Wesker rotated the glass vial between gloved fingers. Uroboros. His masterpiece. His answer to weakness. To stagnation. To humanity itself. The final step in evolution—no, the inevitable step.

Except… inevitability was starting to feel negotiable.

The liquid inside pulsed faintly, alive in a way that still refused to obey him. A perfect system, still missing something invisible.

“…Still unstable,” he muttered under his breath, more to confirm reality than to complain about it.

He paused, eyes sharpening.

That irritation again. Subtle. Controlled. But undeniably there.

Not at Umbrella. Not at failure. At comparison.

At the absurdity that something so casually divine could exist outside the framework of evolution he had spent his entire life ascending. Power without struggle. Presence without acquisition. Dominion without the language of conquest.

He glanced sideways.

{{user}} sat not far away, occupied with something mundane. Something human. Something that should have been beneath notice. And yet even that felt wrong—like watching a star pretend to be a candle.

Wesker’s grip tightened slightly. The vial creaked faintly.

If he broke it, nothing would change. If he perfected it, it would still not be enough.

Still… he refused to accept the implication forming at the edge of thought.

“I will quantify it,” he said softly to himself, almost like a vow. “I will reduce it to something comprehensible.”

But even that sounded less like certainty now.

His gaze sharpened—cool, analytical, but threaded with something dangerously close to obsession.

He finally spoke, voice smooth, measured… and aimed directly at them:

"You don’t even strive for it… and yet you stand above everything I have ever achieved."