As temperamental and hard as Jake was, it wasn't easy persuading him to stay put for proper recovery from the shock. Unyielding, Leon and Sara refused to proceed otherwise, thus the five-minute respite extended to ten.

As they sat silently, Leon mulled over the recent events that had transpired. Although he appeared stoically collected, he was indeed concerned. The mission, already complex, had become a frustrating entanglement of intrigue within his own agency. The lives of the small group were an open book. Leon felt like a blind man in a lion's den―completely vulnerable to his adversaries who surrounded him unseen.

As if the agenda weren't already full enough, Leon now had to figure out how to keep Ada from obtaining the unknown virus sample. He knew from experience that it would be no easy task; somehow Ada always managed to stay a step ahead of him. 

Leon's somber eyes drifted to Sara, and he analyzed her surreptitiously from behind his veil of hair. Anxiety was etched on her face, and her hands were clenched in tense fists. He was well aware that his attempt to reassure her hadn't been entirely successful, and in his heart, he was equally uneasy. Unquestionably, Sara's unbridled power was a threat to him and Jake, but another fear harassed Leon: what toll could that power take on Sara herself if she inadvertently pushed it too far? There was a harrowing possibility that it could even destroy her.

Leon passed a hand over his face, trying to disperse the heavy questions and concerns. He needed clarity to face the rough road ahead. "Okay," he said suddenly, his voice echoing slightly through the ruined lobby. "I think we can head out now."

"Finally," Jake grumbled. "I was starting to grow mold here."

"The smartass returns," Sara remarked somewhat crabbily.

"Yep, he's definitely recovered," Leon agreed dryly. He paused for a moment, thinking. "We have an edge, for now. Unless they have any hidden scarecrows around here to prove otherwise, our pals Osakabe and Kuroki probably figure us dead. That should give us time to look the place over."

Flashlights lit, guns in hand, the team set out, treading carefully over the blackened, torn-up linoleum floors.

Jake scoffed disgustedly. "We're playing hell finding anything here except ash and soot."

Ignoring him, Leon looked around the lobby. A large, sooty plaque affixed to a broad column caught his attention. Picking his way through the debris, he approached it.

"What is it?" asked Sara, coming up beside him. 

Leon wiped away the grime from the plaque. "I think it's a directory," he declared. "Hey, Jake, mind doing the honors?"

Jake approached and studied the plaque. "Got a listing of labs… bunch of names… Eh, here's something interesting: CEO Dr. Reo Inagaki's office and Chief Research Officer Dr. Sunako Inagaki's office."

"Huh. Sounds like Shiroi Yoake was a family-owned company," Sara observed.

"Looks that way. Let's check out the CRO's office first," Leon suggested.

"Office 101," Jake read. "The CEO's office is 105."

They continued their trek through the facility until they came to room 101, the numbers on the plaque beside the doorway barely visible.

Nothing remained of the office save the metal frames of some desk chairs and the black and battered remnants of a large desk. Rusted file cabinets stood forlornly behind the desk. It didn't look promising. 

Stifling a sigh, Leon led the way in, looking around. "Just… look for anything that might be unobvious―maybe a hidden panel or passage."

"Damn. You usually find a lot of those in abandoned buildings?" asked Jake.

"I've seen a few in my time," Leon replied.

The trio fanned out, exploring the room thoroughly. The search proved fruitless, however, turning up only rust and piles of ash and soot.

Sara huffed. "Nothing!"

"Moving right along, then," Jake said. "For whatever the hell it's worth."

A short, cautious walk down the hall led them to room 105. As with the previous office, they met with the same sight of chaff and ruin.

They began their search through the room. Again, they came up empty.

"Well, that was time well spent," Jake cracked.

Leon crossed his arms. "I can't shake the feeling we're missing something."

A dull gleam coming from inside a steel storage cabinet standing ajar suddenly caught his eye. Brow furrowed, Leon approached it.

"Found something?" asked Sara.

"I'm not sure."

Leon pulled the cabinet door open. It immediately dropped off its rust-eaten hinges, falling to the floor with a resounding clash and a cloud of ashy dust.

"Shit!"

Everyone grimaced, waiting tensely for something to emerge, attracted by the din. Fortunately, everything remained still, and Leon recommenced his search. 

He stooped and picked up the gleaming object. He rubbed away the grime that obscured it and studied it briefly before holding it out for his companions to see.

"Check this out."

In his palm lay a peculiar medallion in the shape of two monstrous heads joined together. The head on the left lolled its tongue out.

Sara scrutinized the medallion. "I recognize that creature. That's Dōmo-Kōmo. According to Japanese legend, two renowned surgeons were so competitive that they performed surgery on each other, detaching and reattaching their limbs right on up to their heads to see who did a better job.

"The tie was impossible to break, so they decided to decapitate each other. In the end, there was no surgeon to reattach the heads. Naturally, both men died. This… thing is said to be their ghost."

Leon blinked. "I'm beginning to understand this bioterrorist's attraction to folklore; it's as twisted and bizarre as they are."

"What the hell's it for?" asked Jake, shrugging.

Leon turned the medallion over. There was a hexagonal groove in the metal. "I think it's a key to something."

He glanced back at the cabinet. "Maybe…"

Adjusting his ear mount flashlight, he leaned into it and peered inside. 

Unsurprisingly, the cabinet was empty, but oddly, there were no shelves. High up on the back panel was a hexagonal peg set in an indentation shaped like the dual-headed medallion. Leon inserted the medallion, pushing it in until he heard a low click.

The cabinet's panel slid quietly to the right, revealing a pitch-black passageway overhung with a thick curtain of cobwebs. The musty odors of wet earth and mildew blew through the doorway.

"Bingo. Hey," Leon called over his shoulder. "Secret passage, as expected."

As the others neared, Leon cleared away the cobwebs and shone his thin light beam into the narrow passage. A roughly-hewn flight of stone stairs, lined with a row of dead bulbs, plunged into the rayless void. A set of relatively fresh footprints cut through the heavy layer of dust coating the landing.

"Someone's been in here recently. Watch your step and keep your eyes peeled," he warned, entering carefully. 

Jake and Sara followed Leon's lead, and the three descended the steep stairway in focused silence until they reached the bottom landing. The passage stretched ahead of them, flanked by a room on each side. Strewn over the rocky floor were moldy file folders and faded documents. A trail of footprints spanned the length of the passage.

The group stepped around the debris, heading straight for the rooms while keeping watch for trouble. The doors were wide open, their thresholds littered with more papers and broken glass. Leon tried the room to the left, Sara following at a distance, while Jake wordlessly went right.

Leon and Sara found themselves standing in a small chemistry lab. The large lab table glistened with shards of broken test tubes and beakers. Other pieces of equipment lay smashed on the floor. The cabinets stood open as though they'd been hastily raided.

"Looks like Inagaki had a side gig going here," said Sara.

"And he really didn't want anyone to know about it," Leon added.

Sara tensed visibly. 

"Are you okay?" Leon asked, catching her disquieted expression.

"Yeah. It's just… this place reminds me of Halcyon Isle. I keep getting flashbacks."

Leon understood all too well. He wrestled constantly with his own hellish past which haunted him every night in the form of dark and bloody nightmares. Daybreak and the blaring of his alarm clock brought some respite, returning him to the safety of the present. Leon then carried on, compartmentalizing the terrible memories to face another day on the job, but in solitude and slumber, they returned, like a perpetual echo in the chamber of his mind.

Leon sighed low. "Yeah, I get it. Places like this always remind me of all the horror and destruction I've seen. Those memories are scars we'll carry with us for the rest of our lives."

He placed a gentle hand on Sara's shoulder. "But remember: you're a survivor. And you're all the stronger for having made it through."

Sara met his empathetic gaze and nodded, exhaling slowly.

"Hey," Jake suddenly called from the room across, dispelling the somber mood. "You might wanna see this."

Leon and Sara quickly left the lab and joined him.

They were now in a small office. A dust-piled steel desk stood in a corner, an old desktop computer still sitting atop it. Lined up along the walls were olive-hued file cabinets, their drawers open and ransacked. The contents thereof were scattered across the floor, forming a thick carpet of folders and documents. A large cork board hung on the wall across from the file cabinets, covered with newspaper clippings and red push pins.

Sara whistled low. "Whoa."

"Someone sure left in a hurry," Leon commented.

Jake delved through some of the files jutting out from the ransacked drawers. "I can read the documents, but I still don't understand a damn thing on 'em."

"What are they?" asked Sara.

"A bunch of receipts and jotted notes for different formulae," Jake answered.

Leon stood beside him, looking over his shoulder as he tossed aside the faded, crabbed documents. Jake drew another file filled with photos and diagrams of plants scrawled with notations.

"Wait. Let me see those," Leon said. He took the photos and studied them carefully. "I recognize these plants. Lily-of-the-valley, belladonna and… manchineel," he noted. "They're all poisonous."

"Poisonous!" Sara exclaimed. "Why would a cosmetic chemist be messing with poisonous plants?"

"Excellent question. Jake, what do the notes say?" Leon asked.

Jake skimmed the Japanese text. "They're all about the plants' toxins and which parts of the plants contain them." He was silent for a moment, scrutinizing a set of notes closely. "Looks like the guy had a thing for that manchineel plant. He did some extensive research on it."

Leon grunted. "Yeah, well, if he was going for 'deadly', manchineel is the cream of the crop. It definitely ranks high on the toxicity scale. I learned about it during a mission in South America. It carries a sap called phorbol which contains multiple toxins with effects ranging from skin-blistering to death."

"God…" Sara muttered. "This must be the kind of questionable work Hunnigan was referring to. But what was Inagaki doing?  Working with toxins would've resulted in a company shutdown and imprisonment. Once people started getting disfigured or dying, the trail was going to lead right back to him."

"Maybe he got busted. By the looks of this place, he decided to cut and run," said Jake. "And he must've been in one hell of a rush; I don't think he meant to leave these behind."

While Leon and Jake continued to study the plant diagrams and notes, Sara wandered over to the cork board, analyzing the newspaper clippings. 

"Leon!" she called suddenly. "You'd better come look at this."

Noting the urgency in her voice, Leon abandoned the files and came up beside her. She was pointing at one of the articles; a front-page headline with a large photo beneath it.

"Who does that look like to you?" Sara asked.

Leon inspected the photo. It showed two men seated on a platform with an interviewer, clearly locked in a heated discussion. A woman sat silently to the left of one of the men, her countenance careworn and dejected.

Leon stared long and hard at the man beside the unhappy woman. His brows shot up. "Oh, hell. It's Eito Matsuo."

Jake approached. "The CEO from Seishin who got nixed?"

"Yeah," Sara answered. "Would you read the headline?"

" 'Shiroi Yoake Inc. chairman Reo Inagaki, faces off against Shirubā Geisha Cosmetics chairman Ito Sanada'," Jake read. He scanned the article briefly.

"It says here Inagaki was accusing Sanada of trying to monopolize the skincare market in the region. Both companies were start-ups, picking up popularity in their respective towns and gaining national attention. Sanada countered the allegations by accusing Inagaki of corporate espionage and trying to steal his formulas."

"Who's the woman next to Inagaki?" Leon inquired.

"Dr. Sunako Inagaki." Jake turned his ice-blue gaze on Leon. "Chief Research Officer and wife of Dr. Reo Inagaki."

Leon turned away from the board, processing this new information. "It was worse than espionage. Judging by those notes, it was corporate sabotage. Some pieces are starting to come together."

"Yeah… Inagaki was preparing a poison cocktail which he was gonna taint Shirubā Geisha's products with. Son a bitch probably had a team of infiltrators in the production line ready to pour that shit in," said Jake.

Sara nodded. "Matsuo was trying to submarine Sanada. Things probably got hot, so he took off. He went to America, assumed a new identity, and started a whole new life and business. That's why he didn't want us digging into his company; we were bound to find some of his skeletons."

"That's what the medallion symbolizes: Matsuo's rivalry with Sanada. Matsuo probably burned the place down himself to destroy the evidence before grabbing whatever he needed and taking off," Leon deduced.

"Excuse me, Sherlock and Watson, but how is this helpful now?" Jake queried. "How's it gonna help you find this Hana and stop the terrorist?"

"Elementary, my dear Jake," said Leon, returning Jake's narrowed gaze coolly. "We've got probable motive for Matsuo's murder, a reason why the bioterrorist chose Fukushū for their ops base, and a clue about the components used in the viral engineering here. It looks like the same plant species Matsuo worked with thirty years ago are being used to create the B.O.W.s we've encountered. Some of the toxins in those plants have psychotropic effects, and both the Ōmukade and the Nuppeppō released mind-bending gases that affected you and Sara. We have some idea of what we're dealing with, at least."

"And knowing is half the battle,"Sara added.

"So, what, you think this whole thing is connected to the sabotaging?" asked Jake

"Could be," Leon answered. "Revenge would explain why Matsuo was targeted."

"But not the outbreaks and the virus development," Jake pointed out.

Leon frowned pensively. "True, but it may still be a factor."

Sara continued to study the article. "Mrs. Inagaki doesn't look particularly happy with what's going on. Whatever happened to her, I wonder? There was no record of Matsuo having a wife, estranged or deceased."

"That's true," Leon acknowledged. He thought for a moment. "I just realized something: Hana's thirty five years old, which means she was born before Fukushū's destruction―while Matsuo was still living here with his wife. Sunako Inagaki is Hana's mother, then. Matsuo brought Hana with him to America, but his wife's fate is a mystery."

"Maybe he killed her," Jake suggested simply. "What if she threatened to rat him out? If he was capable of sabotaging Sanada's products, I doubt murder would've been out of bounds for him."

Leon crossed his arms and nodded. "It's possible." He sighed. "This case is turning out to be a real hydra: for every answer we find, three more questions pop up."

"Well, I don't think we'll find any more clues here," Sara said. "We should move on."

"Works for me," Jake said. He stepped out into the main tunnel again. "Let's see where this passage goes; there's gotta be an exit at the other end unless Inag―Matsuo―sealed it up."

The team set out again, treading deeper into the obscure, stony gallery. The only sounds to be heard were their footsteps and the soft rustle of their clothing. Presently, a distant croaking noise broke the earthy hush.

"What is that?" asked Sara.

Everyone paused, listening.

"Grey heron," Jake replied at length. "There's gotta be a river nearby."

As they walked on, a cool breeze whistled through the passage, carrying the fresh scent of vegetation and the musty odor of river water. The grey heron calls intensified. Within a yard, they reached an iron door with a small barred window.

Leon cautiously tried the knob. The door swung open with a deep, rusty groan, letting in a rush of air and light. The group then stepped out into the open, finding themselves in a sequestered cove under an old bridge. The river Jake had mentioned lay just a few feet away, its bank overrun with croaking grey herons flapping about.

As the trio advanced, the noisy flock of birds took to flight, abandoning the riverbank and vanishing into the mist. Their departure revealed an old skiff resting on the bank, half covered by a filthy brown canvas tarp.

Leon approached the boat, scanning the distant bank across where a row of sakura trees bloomed cheerfully. "Matsuo designed the perfect escape route. He could come and go without a single witness."

He turned back to the skiff and pulled off the tarp. Despite being dirty and  rusty in some places, it seemed sturdy enough. The outboard motor was useless without fuel, but fortunately, a pair of oars lay on the floor. Beside the oars sat a speargun still in its bag.

Leon pulled the bag out and drew the speargun. He inspected it briefly then laid it back in the boat. "Hm. Looks like it still works. It might come in handy. And the boat seems solid; we can cross the river."

"Great, so let's get the hell outta here," Jake said. He moved to the skiff's stern and began pushing it toward the water hastily. 

Leon joined Jake's efforts, but abruptly halted. A small paper wedged beneath one of the seats caught his eye. "Wait."

He climbed into the skiff and took hold of the paper. It was a note, hurriedly crafted into an origami butterfly. Leon's lips formed a tight line. He knew instantly who the writer was. "Very cute," he remarked.

"What is it?" asked Sara. 

Leon held up the butterfly. "A little message… from Ada."

Sara's mouth formed a slightly soured pucker. "How adorable. So it was the she-devil's hoofprints back there. She's quick, I'll give her that. What's it say?"

Leon unfolded the paper. " 'Dear Leon,' " he read. " 'I knew you'd find my little clue; you always were clever. Congratulations; you've made it this far, but it's only the beginning. Every disease has a cure, and you'll find it at the Shinsei temple―if you can figure out which temple is which. Word of warning, though, this town doesn't take kindly to strangers, so watch out. P.S. Your DSO shadow goes by the name Marcos Queiros. Ring any bells?' Signed: 'Ada'."

Below the signature was a ruby red kiss mark.

Leon held out the note for his companions to see.

Sara took it, perusing its contents with a slight sneer. She glanced up at Leon, brow arched. "My, she is a tease, isn't she?"

Leon huffed. "Just one of her many games," he said sternly.

Sara balled up the note and pitched it into the river. "Sounds like Ada discovered there's an antivirus. But what about the virus itself?"

"The virus sample is her interest; that information she'll keep to herself. Anything Ada decides to share is always incomplete. Though, frankly, I'm surprised she bothers at all. Another thing I never understood about her," Leon replied.

Sara laughed wryly. "Wow. Guys can be so oblivious sometimes! It's more than obvious that Ada is attracted to you. But more than that, she begrudgingly respects and admires you. Think about it: when she met you back in Raccoon City, you were a raw rookie cop. Yet you defied the odds and survived a zombie/mutant apocalypse. Then you made a career out of sticking it to bioterrorists. I can see why she's willing to throw you a bone; her nature compels her to be drawn to you and repelled by you at the same time. Just make sure you don't get in the way of her plans."

Leon blinked in surprise, exchanging glances with Jake who quirked a brow at him and smirked slightly. Sara's acumen was striking; none of these things had ever occurred to him in all the time he had known Ada. He shrugged it off. It didn't matter anymore.

"Well, anyway, the important thing is that we've got a new addition to our to-do list: find that antivirus. And judging by Ada's line about strangers being unwelcome, we've definitely got our work cut out for us," he said frustratedly.

"Who the hell's this Marcos Queiros? Either of you know him?" asked Jake, leaning against the boat.

"I'm new to the Division; I only know the people in our immediate department," Sara answered, shaking her head.

"I don't know him, either," Leon replied. "But, apparently, he's our mole. We'll have another research assignment for Hunnigan when she calls in."

He hopped out of the skiff then he and Jake pushed it out into the water. He waited for his companions to board before climbing on himself. 

"I'll drive," Jake said, taking hold of the oars.

"How do you think Ada got out of here without the boat?" Sara wondered.

"Must've grappled herself up to the bridge," Leon answered.

Sara clicked her tongue. "Slick."

Silence fell over them, and for several minutes, the creaking of the boat and the sloshing of water against the oars were the only sounds to be heard.

Leon turned his intent gaze to the water, watching the ripples over its surface. A flash of movement below arrested his attention. Frowning, he leaned forward, staring hard. A long, large figure slid out from beneath the skiff then vanished.

There was no doubt; a creature lurked in the river.

"Leon, what's wrong?" Sara asked, seeing him tense.

"Something's in the water," he answered tautly. "And it's not a fish."

Jake ceased rowing and pulled in the oars. He rose quietly, drawing his gun. Sara followed suit.

Leon took hold of the speargun, carefully rigging it. He stared into the river, every muscle rigid as he aimed the weapon into the deceptively still waters.

A sudden rush and gurgle of water from behind them made the trio whirl about. An enormous creature burst from the river's depths. 

Leon's eyes widened, his countenance hardening into severity at the sight of a scaly crimson serpent with a woman's head. She glared at the group with pale green eyes that glowed from behind a cascade of thick black hair streaming down her face.

The creature flicked her tongue out at them then opened her mouth wide in an earsplitting shriek.

Setting his teeth, Leon raised the speargun at the serpent-woman. On either side of him, Jake and Sara stood their ground, poised to fire.