SAVEGUARD ⟼ leon s. kennedy

xlix. not blind enough

He hurries up to her, and before he can touch her, she yells, a spine-tingling cry that takes him by surprise for a second. The Hunter B.O.Ws start circling them, and Leon curses under his breath.

"I knew they wouldn't be well-behaved for long with you as their owner," he says, and quickly gets his own pair of handcuffs from his hip pouch, and in one swift moment is standing behind Jessica, who's still clutching her throat, trying to stop coughing and wheezing.

He grabs her arms and pulls them behind her back. She resists at first, and Leon can tell she's using all of her strength to wrestle his hold.

"Jessica, stop fighting, you're done," he says, trying to keep her from thrashing and moving so much under him. "I'm taking you in."

"You think it's that easy?!" She screams, moving her whole body.

Leon expects some more acrobatics out of her, but his patience is at an all-time low. He grabs her by the elbow, and forcibly yanks her hand down. As soon as he feels something cracking under his touch, she screams, but he's deaf to her cries as he handcuffs her, her arm bent at an odd angle.

"You don't look very comfortable," he tells her, pushing her out of the way, as he readies his gun for the Hunter B.O.Ws.

"I didn't even lay a fucking finger on you, you asshole!" She cries, on her knees on the ground.

"I'm sure it'll heal quicker than the bullet wound you gave me," he says, and feels the Hunters back him into a corner, between two containers.

He casts a look at you across the room, and breathes as he realises no Hunters are close to you yet.

The Hunters start circling him, and as he shoots them, he realises he has nothing near penetrable enough to be able to take all of them down. Their thick scaly skin is making it difficult for his bullets to go through.

"Get the fucking girl you useless baboons!" Jessica screams at them.

Leon watches in panic as a couple of them divert their gaze to your body. He shoots at them, trying to redirect their attention onto him. One of them lunges at Leon, its eyes yellow and red, its breath too reminiscent of blood. Leon dodges, but ends up too close to the next Hunter, which is more precise in its aim, and as it claws the air around him, its talons end up slashing through his arm.

Leon staggers backwards, the blood already dripping at his feet. The Hunter's talons dug deep into his skin, and he stares at his arm in disbelief, realising how the cut drags out from right under his shoulder and wraps around his bicep and elbow, ending right in the middle of his forearm, missing his veins by a few inches.

"Better quit while you're ahead, Lee," Jessica sneers from behind him. "That is, if you want to leave behind a pretty corpse."

Leon takes a second to breathe through the pain, wiping the blood that had splattered across his cheek with the back of his hand.

"So you're the puppet master?" He asks her, using all of his strength to not let his clawed arm go limp.

"What do you mean by that?" She asks, her face serious.

"If I take you out, does that mean they'll have no one to answer to?" He asks, grunting as he shoots at the Hunters, the kickback of his gun sending waves of pain across his arm.

"What, you're just going to let a bunch of bioweapons roam around without a master? Who knows who they'll end up killing." she says carefully, her voice calculated, like she's trying to read his mind. "Doesn't sound very anti-bioterrorism of you."

Leon doesn't have an answer for that, she's talking too much and leaving no time for him to plan.

"You can kill me," Jessica says soberly, and he feels her looking up at him. "But know Lansdale will stop at nothing."