December 17, 1998. Having pursued her brother since she escaped the doomed Raccoon City, Claire's drive to find her missing sibling leads her to Paris, where she attempts to infiltrate an Umbrella facility in hopes that they have been keeping tab on him. Unfortunately, surviving a zombie apocalypse does not mean she's a natural spy, and soon she is running for her life from armed guards. As she approaches a window, she learns first hand just how seriously Umbrella takes protecting its secrets when an attack helicopter roars into view and opens fire on her with its chainguns!
Luckily, Claire dives for cover just in the nick of time, but her pursuers are not so lucky. As the chopper keeps firing, she races through the building, and finally loses it down a flight of stairs... only to find herself in a room with about two dozen armed guards. Luckily, there's also a tank of flammable chemicals, and with a fake out and a deft bit of gunplay, Claire puts her last few bullets into it, the explosion's shockwave hurling Umbrella's goons flying.
Unfortunately, Umbrella has more goons than that. One catches her just as she gets to her feet, and though her reflexes are quick, his gun is loaded and hers isn't.
Claire is promptly bundled unceremoniously into one of Umbrella's private copters, a bag over her head, and flown far, far from Paris to an isolated prison complex that the megacorp illegally maintains on an isolated island. Here, Claire is told her new serial number, sarcastically welcomed to her new home, and knocked out cold when one of her guards cracks her in the face with the butt of his rifle. Whilst she's out cold, she's moved to a private cell.
December 27, 1998. Ten days after her capture, Claire is jolted in her cell by the faint sound of thundering impacts and the shaking of the earth around her. Locked alone in the dark, the power having been cut off to her cell, she has no clue what's happening, until the door to her prison suddenly swings open. A man shambles in, clutching his stomach, and Claire cautiously uses her brother's lighter to see who it is. To her surprise, it's the guard who captured her back in Paris.
The man suddenly unlocks her cell and throws the door open, then turns and shuffles over to a chair at a nearby desk. Slumping down, he ignores Claire as she cautiously steps out, instead pulling a clearly empty bottle of medicine out of his pocket and examining it before throwing it onto the floor in frustration. Not bothering to look at her, he tiredly tells her to leave; the island is finished, having been attacked by a "special forces team". He tells her that she can go where she wants, but as far as he's aware, there's no way off the island.
He then ignores her, and Claire quietly starts going over the desk nearby, looking for anything of use. She quickly grabs a spare combat knife for self defense, and also takes notice of a manifest on the the desk which gives her the name of the man who first captured and now released her: Rodrigo Juan Raval, a member of Umbrella's medical division.
When nothing else of use presents itself, Claire stops to take notice of the medicine bottle; it's hemostatic medicine, a coagulant drug used to treat internal bleeding. With the way her former captor is clutching his stomach, clearly he needs the medicine. But there's nothing she can do for him now, and so she makes her way up to the surface.
Here, she finds herself in a cemetery, a sudden shower of rain drizzling over her. A truck has crashed through the wall nearby, blazing merrily. The gas tank suddenly detonates, tearing off the door... which is when the burning figure of the truck's driver suddenly crawled out of the flame; he's a zombie! To Claire's horror, more decaying forms suddenly thrust their way out of the sodden earth and lurch towards her. Calling on the skills she honed in Raccoon City, Claire evades the cannibalistic infectees through a combination of superior agility and defensive bladework, escaping through a nearby door.
Unfortunately, she has barely taken two steps into the yard beyond when somebody in a nearby guard-tower opens fire. Luckily, there's a makeshift barricade nearby, formed by the crashed truck - even better, there's a handgun on the ground next to a dead guard. She snatches up the pistol and, when her attacker stops firing, blazes away, putting out the spotlight they had trained on her and eliciting a yelp of dismay from her former assailant, who begs her to stop shooting. Strangely, he sounds younger than Claire had expected, and after some hesitation, he drops down from the tower to join her.
Claire's attacker turns out to be a teenaged prisoner named Steve Burnside. Flirtatiously, he apologizes for attacking Claire, explaining that he had mistaken her for a zombie, and that he heard that there's an airport somewhere on the island; he was hoping to find a plane there and escape. Perhaps because Claire seems uninterested in responding to his flirtations, he sets off on his own, waving off Claire's attempt to follow and claiming that she'd just slow him down.
Seeing no way to change his mind, Claire sets off on her own. From the courtyard she's in, the cemetary lies to the west; a door in the south has been sealed shut by damage, whilst a large door northwards has been sealed by an elaborate lock that requires a key equivalent in the shape of a shield. With no other choice, Claire heads east, and finds herself in what seems to be the core of the prison. Here, a raised structure dominates the section of the complex, and she makes her way inside.
The structure turns out to have been the mess hall and sleeping quarters for the bulk of the prisoners. Dispatching any zombies here, Claire finds a prisoner's diary which contains an estimation of the prison's location - somewhere south of the equator - and also ominous tales of prisoners disappearing into a building hidden behind a stand of guillotines nearby. She also locates a map of the complex. A zombified trooper that smashes its way in through a window provides her with a pair of M-100P Semi-Automatic Pistols, increasing her arsenal.
With nowhere else to go, Claire leaves the prisoner's dorm and follows its circumference. Ominously, something drags a human corpse under the dorms as she approaches, but though Claire keeps her guns at hand, nothing approaches her until she makes her way to another door that had been barred from her by a simple gate. This leads her to a section of the complex intended for the staff who used to run the prison; making her way past a garage and a fenced-in area where zombies are battering futilely at the gate, Claire reaches a processing center. At the other end of it, she catches up with Steve, currently busy investigating the computer, which is still functioning.
After brief hellos, Steve asks if Claire is related to a "Chris Redfield", revealing that Umbrella has him under electronic surveillance. He also reveals that the computer still has functioning internet, and snarkily suggests that she could contact somebody she knows on the outside. Claire thinks that's a great idea, and proceeds to send the island's latitude and longitude to her brother by way Leon Kennedy, assuring Steve that Chris will arrive to help them soon. To her surprise, this engages Steve, who bitterly asserts that other people can never be trusted to do anything except disappoint you, and then storms off, leaving the baffled Claire wondering what his problem was.
As she continues to poke around the office - a doorway leading to another part of the island is blocked by some fallen crates on the other side - she finds a golden-colored metallic eagle crest, which looks like it would fit the ornate lock back in the courtyard where she first met Steve. The problem is that she can't get it out of this room, as it triggers the security detectors. However, there's a 3d image scanner in the room, and Claire notes this for later. Flicking a power switch, she leaves the processing center.
Back outside, she can now enter the previously locked garage - after dispatching some zombies lurching around inside with the aid of a handily explosive fuel canister, that is. The garage houses a door to another section of the prison - and this one has been set up as a makeshift executioner's yard; bloodstained holes around firing posts and gore smeared across a functioning guillotine paint a nasty picture of the minds that were running this place. Claire's caution makes her decide against exploring the nearby building, and instead she turns back to the garage.
Here, she discovers a fire extinguisher, and remembers that, during the chaos of her flight from the graveyard, she spotted a briefcase amidst the burning wreckage of the truck. Wanting to avoid pressing past the execution yard as long as possible, she makes her way back to the cemetery, dodging or killing zombies - two-legged and four-legged - along the way. Once she has retrieved the briefcase, it turns out to have a block of some metallic alloy; a convenient memo explains that this is a sample of "TG-01 Alloy", which doesn't set off metal detectors. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, and she promptly legs it back to the processing center; one sample of TG-01 Alloy in the sculpting segment of the 3d scanner, one Hawk Emblem in the scanning segment, and she promptly has an emblem key that she can smuggle past the security detectors.
Armed with this, she returns to that impressive gate and opens it. Crossing a long, partially damaged bridge, she finds herself on the other side of the island; to the north looms an elaborate mansion, whilst to the east is what looks like some kind of military training complex. Claire decides to head north, and see what can be found in that direction.
(At the player's discretion, Claire can choose to investigate the training complex first, but quickly finds her progress blocked by locked doors, and is forced to backtrack to the mansion to the north.)
Slaying several zombified guard dogs, Claire finds herself standing before the mansion. Spotting a gate to the east, she heads that way first, picking up a strange hexagonal plaque with an emblem of a ship etched into it and an embedded green gemstone from the rubble of the courtyard before descending down stairs to a small dock. Unfortunately, there's no sign of any boats that could get her out of this nightmare - but there is a strange platform with a steering column, sans steering wheel, close by. Claire promptly backtracks her way to the mansion and enters.
Although visibly damaged by the bombing raid that ravaged the island, the place was clearly a sumptuous, palatial residence before everything went to hell. She tries the doors on this level; one leads to a bathroom, where she finds a locked duralumin case that she can't open without a lockpick. The other is locked by a computer controlled lock, and whilst the computer itself survived the bombing, it's passcode-protected, leaving Claire with no way to access it.
Fortunately, there's a large staircase on the right wall, leading up to the second floor, and she promptly makes her way up it. At the top of the stairs, to her left, across a small balcony that runs the back wall below an enormous portrait, stands one door; this is locked with silver-colored lock, and Claire can't progress. Heading back to the right and up some small steps, an unlocked door leads her to a study.
Here, she finds a secretary's journal on a desk, which sheds a little light on this madhouse she's been imprisoned in: apparently, the base's commander is somebody named "Sir Alfred", who lives in paranoid seclusion with his sister "Alexia" in a private residence on a nearby hill. The study leads to a sight familiar from her days in Raccoon City; a puzzle-locked door, which won't open unless she can fill the two Luger pistol-shaped indentations in the golden plaque set into it. Fortunately, a glinting in the corner of her eye reveals an employee's ID Card dropped under a nearby cupboard, so she hasn't reached a total dead end.
Back on the first floor, the card unlocks the computer, which in turn unlocks the door. This reveals a hallway, and after dispatching the zombies shambling around, Claire is free to try the doors; the one directly in front of her is locked, as is the one around the corner at the far end of the hall. But the one straight at the end of the hall lets her through into a media room, which has been tricked out as somebody's private war museum: military paraphernalia adorns the walls, including mounted handguns and models of battleships.
The one exception to the military is a sculpture of an ant, with a button nearby. Pressing it causes the room's screen to come to life, displaying the flickering images of an ancient home movie. Before Claire's eyes, confusion gives way to horror as a pair of beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins - a boy and a girl - cruelly rip the wings from a living dragonfly before dropping it into a giant ant farm, smiling to each other in delight as the ants tear the crippled insect apart.
Claire pushes the disturbing imagery and the questions it raises aside as a nearby display case suddenly slides open, revealing a hidden door. Investigating, she finds she's hit the jackpot; not only is the miniature steering wheel from the platform at the docks here, but so are the gold-plated Lugers she needs for the door in the study! But... when she goes to grab them, the door suddenly seals shut behind her, and hidden heaters switch on, turning the room into a makeshift oven. Desperate to avoid being roasted alive, she hastily stuffs the Lugers back into the plaque she took them from; her gamble pays off and the trap deactivates.
Figuring she'll find some way to circumnavigate this trap later, Claire takes the steering wheel and leaves the media room, heading for the dock again - but, no sooner has she reached the mansion's front door than she hears somebody screaming for help. She races back to the room, where she finds the secret chamber sealed up; a computer screen has revealed itself, and shows Steve trapped inside the furnace room, flailing about in a panic. For whatever reason, he doesn't think to put the lugers back; luckily, Claire now has access to a control panel that allows her to deactivate the trap, whereupon Steve stumbles out into the media room, visibly singed, but still clutching the Lugers for dear life.
When he sees Claire, Steve tries to act tough, flaunting his "cool new toys" for her. Claire asks him for the Lugers so she can unlock the room in the study, but he childishly refuses to give them to her. Instead, he demands she find him a "fully automatic" gun to replace them with if she wants them, and then runs off again. Sighing, Claire decides to pick up on her prior task.
But she is interrupted in the mansion's main room again - this time by a sniper bullet that narrowly misses her head! She takes shelter behind a pillar as her attacker reveals himself; a princing, giggling, effeminately pretty blonde man, dressed in a childish parody of an army outfit or an elite club member's uniform. Ranting almost more to himself than to Claire, the man reveals himself as Alfred Ashford, the base's commander, and he accuses Claire of having allowed herself to be captured so she could lead her people to the Rockfort facility. Claire, naturally, denies this, but Alfred won't hear of it, instead laying the blame for the T-virus leak squarely on her feet.
Realizing that she can't reason with this madman, Claire instead attacks his ego, declaring that he must be one of Umbrella's more unimportant flunkies to be assigned to a backwater like this. Enraged, Alfred screeches about how the Ashfords are one of the world's oldest, greatest families, descendants from one of the original founders of Umbrella, and then forcibly calms himself. Declaring that he doesn't need to finish off a "rat in a cage" like Claire straight away, he storms off in a huff, trying to pretend that he has the upper hand.
Once she's sure that he's gone, Claire returns to the dock. Using the steering wheel allows her to access a mini-sub, which in turn takes her to a hidden seaport. Here, she finds something that gives her hope; a fully-fuelled seaplane, ready to carry her out of this nightmare! Only problem is that access is barred behind one of Umbrella's trademark puzzle locks; this one requires three hexagonal proofs. The one she found in the mansion courtyard fills one slot, but that still leaves two more. She explores the seaport, but none of the others turn up - she does discover a bridge with a missing control lever, and more importantly a keycard marked with a biohazard symbol.
Undaunted, Claire returns the way she came, determined to continue exploring to find the missing puzzles. With her new keycard burning a hole in her pocket, she makes her way to the military training installation she passed on her way up to Alfred's mansion in the first place.
As she enters the yard outside the installation, the earth suddenly buckles and heaves as a monstrous mutant worm erupts from underground, lunging for Claire. She evades the beast's clumsy assault and races into the facility, slamming the door shut behind her.
Inside, Claire's attention is immediately caught by a pair of stairs leading up to the second floor, which are immediately to the right of the door. Wanting to avoid being close to the ground for the time being, she promptly makes her way up them. On the second floor, she finds herself in the observation segment of a bioexperiment laboratory, where she retrieves a bowgun for a bit of added firepower. On a nearby desk, she spots a memo from one researcher to another, mentioning that a "red picture of a human skeleton" in the back of the bioexperiment room carries the passcode needed to access it.
Intrigued, Claire walks over to the observation window, trying to see if she can make out the painting with the code from here. Suddenly, a researcher in a biohazard suit flings himself up against the window, frantically beating on it in an obvious plea for Claire to let him out as a red hazard light flashes. Claire tries, but without the passcode, there's nothing she can do; an enormous, malformed hand suddenly seizes the researcher's head and slams it brutally against the window, smashing it to a pulp and smearing the glass with gore. An automated voice suddenly blares into life, announcing that the room is being sealed due to a biohazard outbreak, and Claire desperately pelts down the stairs to avoid being trapped; she just manages to roll under the containment door before it slams home.
Now stuck on the ground floor, Claire resumes her exploration. She spots a second door on the eastern wall, and enters it; this brings her to a security monitoring room, with a zombified security guard still inside. Once she's dispatched it, she can investigate further, discovering a locked storage cabinet and a printer that, when she gives it an experimental poke, spits out a map of the training facility. With this to guide her, Claire returns to the main hall and heads through a wooden door in the northeast corner.
This brings her first to a locker room, and then to a bathing room, set up with some saunas, a shower, and an enormous, pool-like communal bath, as well as a number of zombie trainees she must dispatch along the way. She spots something glinting in the pool underneath a lion's head fountain; turning it off, she recovers a key that turns out to unlock the weapon storage cabinet in the security room.
With nowhere else to look, Claire uses the biohazard keycard she found at the hidden dock to unlock a metallic door back in the main hall. This brings her to an older part of the facility... where Alfred takes another shot at her. Fortunately, he only succeeds in blowing up some fuel drums, and when she sprints up the stairs to the 2nd floor balcony he is taking potshots at her from, he flees. The balcony has two doors; the one closest to the stairs is locked, so Claire gives chase into the other. it leads her down a long hallway, to a room with two doors; one in the northern wall, and one in the west. Claire decides to check the northern door first, and finds herself in a loungeroom of some kind. Here, she finds ammunition, healing herbs - and a vial of the haemostatic medicine that Rodrigo was looking for.
(The player can choose not to take this for Rodrigo, but this recap will presume that she did.)
Stowing this away, Jill leaves the employee lounge and enters the western door instead. On the other side, she finds herself in what looks to be a warehouse - before a steel door suddenly slams shut behind her, locking her in. Alfred taunts her over the intercom, claiming he has prepared a "special surprise" for her, and asking her "not to die too quickly". With no other choice, Claire makes her way forward and finds herself on a balcony, with a pair of Ingram submachine guns lying discarded nearby. Remembering what Steve said, Claire immediately goes to scoop them up... which is when a door on the other side of the room opens up and something lurches into view.
It's a new kind of monster, vaguely reminiscent of the Lickers that Claire fought in Raccoon City. It's a disfigured, bipedal humanoid, swollen veins standing out amidst bloated, almost rubbery, jaundice-yellow skin. Dead eyes stare at her amidst a skeletal face atop a bulging, muscular torso, which flexes and expands with an almost rubbery consistency. Its left arm is missing, whilst its right arm has swollen into a distended, tentacle-like appendage, tipped with an enormous claw-fingered hand. Claire will later learn that this monstrosity is the Bandersnatch, a Rockfort Island project to create a cheaper, mass-producible alternative to the Tyrant. At the moment, all she knows is that it is deadly, as she recognizes it as the creature that killed the researcher earlier.
Using its ability to extend its arm like a biological grapnel, it latches onto the wall and half-leaps, half-drags itself across the gap to confront her. Like the Lickers she fought in Raccoon City, the Bandersnatch is much tougher than a mere zombie - worse, the Ingrams are empty. Luckily, she came prepared, and has soon dropped the monstrosity. Looking around for Ingram ammo, she spots some on a box on the ground floor of the warehouse, and heads down some stairs to retrieve it.
On the floor, suddenly, another Bandersnatch ambushes her, the rubber man dropping from the ceiling and seizing her head in its singular oversized palm. Claire struggles vainly against it as it hoists her into the air, threatening to either crush her skull or suffocate her.
Suddenly, a window above the creature shatters. Steve dives through it, blasting the rubber man with the Lugers. Roaring in pain, the rubber man drops Claire. Steve drives it backward with a barrage of gunfire, kicks it into the corner, and finishes it off with a final gunshot to the head. He walks over and greets Claire, claiming to be her "knight in shining armor." Claire denies that he's any such thing, but offers him the Ingrams she found in exchange for his Lugers.
Steve accepts the trade eagerly, crowing to himself over his awesome new weapons - and earning an amused giggle from Claire at his obvious confusion when he realizes that the guns he traded for haven't got any ammo. After letting him pout for a moment, Claire tells him about the ammo atop the nearby storage container, and after a brief leg-up, she retrieves it for him.
Suddenly, the floor they're on begins to descend; they were on a cargo elevator, and Alfred is obvious still wanting to play with them. Not that it bothers Steve; by the time the elevator has hit the bottom floor, he's loaded his guns, primed them to fire, and is eager to "test out his new toys", charging off ahead of Claire before she can stop him. She follows him through ancient, dungeon-like chambers, following the sound of gunfire as he blazes down anything standing in his way. She finally catches up to him in a bridge overlooking flowing water - possibly the island's sewage system.
Cocky and full of pride at his recent killing spree, he boasts to Claire that this shows why he trusts guns and other weapons more than people. Claire is shocked at this misanthropic outburst, and asks why Steve was on this island to begin with, and what happened to his family. Steve snarls at her to shut up, blazing away with one of his Ingrams so that the echo of gunfire drowns out Claire's words. She refuses to be intimidated, but Steve will hear nothing of it, instead sullenly telling Claire to follow him or be left behind.
She follows him up a nearby elevator and through a door, with the two of them making their way onto a wooden balcony overlooking a motorpool. Suddenly, the rotted wood collapses beneath them, dropping them both onto the ground below.
Steve falls free, but Claire is pinned underneath a chunk of rubble. A zombie shambles towards Steve, who raises his Ingrams, but doesn't fire. Claire yells at him to shoot it, but Steve freezes. The zombie turns towards Claire. Steve hesitates for a single long moment, then levels both Ingrams at the zombie and yells, "FATHER!" He empties both guns into the zombie and sinks to his knees, sobbing.
Steve explains to Claire that his father used to work for Umbrella, but had begun stealing information and auctioning it off to the highest bidder. Umbrella caught him. Steve's mother was killed, and he and his father were sent to this prison. He despises his father for being so reckless and stupid. Claire comforts him, telling him to rest, and leaves him alone to mourn.
From the motorpool, Claire finds her way to what seems to be some kind of art storeroom. Here, she finds a copy of the Ashford family crest; a shield-shaped emblem of blue metal emblazoned with an eagle, which is clutching a golden halberd in its claws. Strangely, a portrait on the wall near the door depicts the same room that Claire is in - but with a crimson painting on the wall where she took the crest from, and a scale model of the prison complex. Filing this curious discrepancy away, Claire resumes exploring.
Her path takes her through the motorpool and a small courtyard at the far end of the military training facility, past an old tank. The giant worm stirs at Claire's footprints, but she dodges it by fleeing back inside the training facility. Here, the biohazard card unlocks the door that Alfred had sealed behind her in his earlier ambush - fortunately, he seems to be long gone now. Climbing back up to the balcony, Claire tries fitting the crest emblem into the indentation she saw earlier; it opens a hidden compartment and reveals a new keycard, this one emblazoned with the Ashford family crest.
With this new tool, Claire is able to continue exploring, unlocking doors that were previously barred to her. She even descends back down into the basement area where she and Steve were trapped, where she finds a familiar friend: a grenade launcher. Now she has the firepower to stand up to anything that might be hanging around on this island!
Her path ultimately brings her to a monitor room, where she discovers the second of the emblem-keys needed to access the sea plane. A nearby file reveals another Rockfort-engineered horror; a salamander-based B.O.W called the "Albinoid", which can produce deadly electrical shocks and grow to maturity at an uncanny pace. More importantly, not only does the monitor inform her that the contamination lockdown on the lab has now been lifted, she can use the camera's zoom function to read the code on the painting in that lab and memorize it to unlock the door.
With no other opportunities presenting themselves, Claire returns to that lab. However, no sooner has she taken the painting from its place on the far wall when infant Albinoids suddenly erupt from their incubation capsules. One actually tears through a nearby duct and flees into the air vents; this outbreak forces Claire to run for her life before she is sealed in with the little horrors, which are already trying to kill her with their electrified claws.
Recalling the mystery of the art storeroom, Claire takes the painting - a gruesome portrait of a skeleton in a tattered pirate's outfit against a blood-red, apocalyptic sky - and returns there. When she fits it onto the wall that she took the shield emblem from, the rear wall suddenly retracts, revealing the scale model of the training compound. Lying atop it, Claire finds a golden key.
At this point, Claire is confident that she's explored everywhere that she can reach in the training facility. Besides, the golden key has jogged her memory of the puzzle-locked door in the study back at Alfred's mansion. Grenade launcher in hand, she makes her way back there, putting down several Bandersnatches along the way. Before she heads up the stairs to the second floor, she stops; she remembers seeing a door locked with a golden lock here on the first floor, in the hall leading to Alfred's personal "war room".
Sure enough, the key unlocks a portrait room, a strangely sinister shrine to the Ashford family, with an oil painting of a 12-year-old Alfred in the place of highest honor. Strangely, the inscription instructs the reader to find "the true master" of the Ashfords. With the aid of an ancient memo from the family butler to the young Alfred, and identifying hints on the various portraits and pieces around the room, Claire puzzles out that she needs to press buttons at the base of each portrait in this order: woman, man holding twin babies, redheaded man with teacup, redheaded man with plate, man with vase, man with candle, and finally Alfred's.
When she does this, Alfred's portrait spins around to reveal a new portrait, that of a girl - this must be Alfred's mysterious sister, Alexia. It also reveals a vase; when Claire looks inside of it, she finds a statue of a queen ant, its abdomen comprised of a large red jewel. She tucks this away, certain it will come in handy, and then heads up to the second floor.
With the golden lugers, she unlocks a private study, clearly used by Alfred. A music box sits against one wall, and a computer sits on a desk. When Claire tries to get into it, however, it demands a password. She looks over the desk for any clues, but all she finds is a memo with the cryptic words "1: Left, Right; 2: Left; 3: Right; 4: Right, Right, Right". Well familiar with the twisted minds of Umbrella employees at this point, Claire follows these directions and inputs them into the music box, taking note of the number revealed by completing each step. She then attempts to enter these numbers into the computer; sure enough, "1971" turns out to be the passcode.
The music box whirs into life, playing a strange lullaby before sliding away to reveal a hidden door. Claire's momentary flush of triumph is drowned out when yet another Bandersnatch suddenly leaps into the room through the window behind her! Blazing away, she drops the creature in a twitching mass in the middle of Alfred's study, and makes her way through the secret door. It takes her over a wooden, enclosed bridge that leads to a winding trail on a nearby mountain, near the peak of which sits an enormous mansion.
Claire heads towards it as lightning and thunder crash in the distance, and a woman's mocking laughter echoes over the island.
The house has been hit fairly hard by the assault on the island. It's guarded by Bandersnatches, but Claire easily slays or avoids them and gets inside. The interior of the house is a twisted parody of childhood, with either dolls or books covering every available surface. A larger-than-life doll dangles from the chandelier hook in the ceiling, eviscerated. Most of the furniture is sized for children, or for dolls.
Aside from a Bandersnatch skulking around in a dining room, the first floor houses nothing, so Claire reluctantly climbs the tall, winding staircase and balconies to the upper reaches of the mansion.
On the house's second floor, Claire walks in on a conversation between Alfred and his until-now-absent sister, Alexia. As Claire lurks outside her bedroom window, Alexia asks an unseen Alfred what's taking so long, when his opponent is only a little girl. Alfred's success is necessary, Alexia continues, to restore the honor of the Ashford family. Alfred insists that he doesn't need to be reminded. He intends to raise Alexia to the position of leader of the once-again-glorious Ashford family. Alexia almost sees Claire, but chalks it up to her own imagination. The twins, having finished their conversation, leave.
Cautiously, Claire enters the twins' bedrooms, but no one is in either of them, and she didn't see either of them in the hall. A music box nearby is playing the same tune as the music box she saw back in Alfred's office. Reading a cryptic clue inscribed on the inside of the music box, she turns it off, causing the lid to snap shut and lock itself. However, at the same time, the canopy on the bed nearby opens up, revealing a silver key on the bed. Claire grabs it quickly - and almost loses her hand when the canopy suddenly snaps back into place.
Now flat against the bed, the canopy reveals a previously hidden ladder set into the wall. That must be how the Ashfords disappeared. Claire tries to follow, but the top is sealed by a trapdoor. Climbing back down, she takes another look at the music box, which is adorned with red gems and an indentation where something ant-shaped could fit. Placing the red queen ant statue in that space unlocks the music box and reveals the music plate. Figuring that it could come in handy, Claire takes it as well.
Exploring, Claire finds that the second floor houses another bedroom, housed just opposite to this one. This second bedroom also has a music box in it - but this one is locked, missing its ant statue, and adorned with blue gems. There must be another ant statue hidden somewhere on the island, but it's clearly not here, and so Claire makes her way back to the other mansion, ready to explore the remaining rooms.
The silver key unlocks a game room on the second floor, where Claire finds a piano missing its roll. Nothing else immediately valuable presents itself, so Claire descends to the first floor, where the silver key unlocks a meeting room. Slaying the Bandersnatches lurking inside, Claire finds a memo from somebody called "Hunk", who reveals they transported another B.O.W to the island, as well as a second emblem plate, like the one she used before to get the emblem keycard. Now, where has she seen another lock with that design...?
After a moment's thought, Claire remembers that she saw a lock to fit this emblem in the execution yard back at the prison. More importantly, she remembers poor Rodrigo - she still has his haemostatic medicine! Mind made up, she races back to the prison, first heading to her former cell under the cemetery.
Fortunately, Rodrigo is still alive - and both surprised and grateful to Claire for the medicine. For added comfort, she gives him the lighter that she received from her brother, so he doesn't have to sit in the dark. Rodrigo gives her a set of lockpicks for her generosity, and then slumps back in his seat. Seeing no reason to disturb him further, Claire makes her way to the execution yard.
Here, the second emblem unlocks a door, allowing her access to a part of the prison complex she couldn't reach. Firstly, Claire finds the door into the security area where she and Steve contacted Leon earlier, and removes the crate obstructing it, allowing her to retrieve anything useful she was forced to leave behind in the security boxes. She also unlocks the Duralumin Case she found earlier, revealing some bow gun powder to assemble explosive bolts for her bow gun.
(The player should also use this opportunity to retrieve the empty fire extinguisher, if they didn't put it in an item box earlier.)
That divergence done, Claire makes her way into the medical hut. Here, she finds, amongst some supplies, a partially dissected prisoner's body on one of the beds, and a zipped-up bodybag. In an antechamber that clearly serves as the doctor's personal study, she finds a journal that reveals the doctor was as sick and twisted as any Umbrella scientist; the sadistic freak liked to torture and murder prisoners for his gratification, a foul desire that Alfred happily indulged him in, and would even come to watch. He boasts of Alfred trusting him with a secret key to a hidden door, and asserts that nobody will ever find it. Claire briefly examines the antechamber, but other than the anatomy model strangely missing an eye, nothing unusual stands out. So, with no choice, Claire enters the nearby door - strange, she could have sworn she heard rustling from the bodybag behind her...
She doesn't have the time to think about it, though, as she finds herself in the incinerator room, where the doctor disposed of the dead. Three zombies lurch to attack her from amidst the roaring crematoriums and piled bodyparts, forcing her to defend herself. Once they lie dead on the floor, she investigates, but all she finds is another Duralumin Case, this one housing some parts to customize her trusty handgun into a semi-automatic weapon.
Which comes in handy when she steps back into the medical office. The bodybag is empty, the zombified doctor feasting on the partially dissected corpse on the bed. It turns from its meal and lunges for fresher meat, the mutilated prisoner's corpse lurching up off the bed to join the attack. Unphased by this horrifying sight, Claire guns them both down, and then grimly searches the doctor's remains. All she finds is a glass eye... but Claire is experienced enough with Umbrella's puzzles to put two and two together.
Sure enough, when slotted into the anatomy model, the eyeball unlocks a secret door. Down dark stairs and through a dark corridor, Claire emerges in a torture chamber, still housing the roaming corpses of its former occupants. In a chamber designed to resemble an old-fashioned dungeon, Claire is forced to pull a rusty sword from the hands of a knight statue, which triggers a trap that sees toxic gas pouring from vents in the floor. Luckily, using a handle to turn another statue 180 degrees shuts the gas off, as Claire is too experienced to panic at this. Once the trap is deactivated, the knight statue spins around to reveal an iron maiden with a slot in its center; thrusting the sword's blade into this slot opens the iron maiden, and once Claire has killed the impaled zombie inside, she can retrieve the piano roll.
With no other options presenting themselves, Claire returns to the game room in the mansion. However, outside of the mansion, she finds herself confronted by a mysterious stranger, a pale-skinned blonde man, wearing sunglasses despite the fact that it's evening. He mockingly describes himself as a ghost returned to haunt Chris Redfield, and Claire realizes that this is none other than Wesker, the traitorous former leader of S.T.A.R.S!
She tries to defend himself, but the revived traitor moves with inhuman speed, manhandling her like a doll; he is almost about to kill her for the sake of making her brother suffer when his radio suddenly rings. On a whim, he lets Claire live - to her shock, she sees Wesker's eyes visibly glow red behind his sunglasses, and then he moves a literally explosive burst of speed, his whole body blurring as he suddenly leaps over the patio railing into the darkness. Hauling herself to her feet, the rattled Claire has no choice but to return to her original plan.
(The encounter with Wesker only occurs in the "Code: Veronica X" remake of the game.)
When she inserts the roll into the piano, one of the slot machines opens a hidden compartment, revealing a blue ant statue. Grabbing this, Claire makes her way back to hidden mansion of the Ashford siblings, fighting zombies and Bandersnatches along the way. In the southern bedroom, the blue ant unlocks the blue music box - which turns out to be empty. Claire's prediction that she would need the music plate from the red music box comes true; when she inserts it into this music box, the canopy on the bed lowers, revealing another hidden ladder. This one, she is able to ascend, exiting into a creepy kid's playroom; she's standing in the middle of a full-sized merry-go-round, with several horses, amidst an array of toys and childish keepsakes. On one side of the room a giant mural of an ant is painted on the wall; looking closer reveals a concealed keyhole in the ant's mouth. Looking around the room reveals a silver dragonfly statue with detachable wings; remembering the twisted home movie she saw in Alfred's war room, Claire detaches the wings and inserts the dragonfly into the ant's mouth. Sure enough, it acts like a key, starting up the merry-go-round briefly and revealing a ladder to yet another level in the room.
This level is a well-cared for study, filled with thick and well-thumbed books on a variety of topics relating to the biological sciences - biology, chemistry and genetics. A newspaper clipping carefully laid out on a stool near a chair talks about a 10-year-old girl who graduated from a university with top honors, and was promptly snatched up by Umbrella to become one of their head researchers. If this is talking about Alfred's sister, then Alexia was clearly on a whole other level compared to her arrogant dimwit of a brother. Claire spots a book hidden atop a butterfly collection, and after pushing over a chest to serve as an impromptu stepping stool, she retrieves the book; it's Alfred's diary, filled with the ravings of a clearly unhinged mind. He's obsessed with his sister, speaking of her in reverential terms and vowing to make the whole world bow to her.
Claire has little concern for the unwholesome affection between the siblings; along with the diary, she's found the last of the military-themed hexagonal emblems she's been collecting. She and Steve can finally get off this forsaken island! She hurries back down the ladders, finding herself in the northern bedroom. As she makes for the door, Alexia suddenly confronts her from nowhere, brandishing her brother's sniper rifle. Ranting about the need to restore the honor of the Ashford family, she fires at Claire - luckily, she's as lousy a shot as her brother, so the first one misses. As she lines up for a second shot, Steve suddenly bursts into the room; although Alexia instinctively shoots him, all she does is graze him, and in return Steve rakes her with a blast from his Ingrams. He doesn't seem to actually hit her, but she screams in panic and flees; the statue built into the wall turns out to be a revolving hidden door. Claire helps Steve up and the two of them give chase.
But the southern bedroom is empty. Save for a blonde wig on the music box... as Claire picks it up, Alfred suddenly leaps down from the canopy, knocking her to the ground with a strike from the butt of his rifle. Before he can do anything more, Steve interrupts, hurling Alfred to the floor with a violent shove. As the crazed Umbrella official hauls himself upright, the two teens freeze in shock at what they see, now that he's still; confused, Alfred looks into the mirror nearby, and realizes he's wearing lipstick and false eyelashes. He screams in denial and flees before either Claire or Steve can think to stop him.
Steve asks Claire what the heck is going on, and she deduces that there must never have been an Alexia; as Steve puts it, Alfred must think he's two people. Thoroughly convinced of the man's insanity, Steve avows that they must leave, now.
And with perfect ironic timing, alarm klaxons suddenly blare, an automated voice declaring that the self-destruct has been activated. Cursing Alfred's madness, the two teens fight their way to the dock - as they reach the mini-sub, planes roar across the sky; evidently, they weren't the only survivors left on this cursed island after all. With time running short, Claire has no choice but to hope that Rodrigo was on one of those other planes as she and Steve make their way to the hidden seaplane's dock. With the other two military emblems in place, the hydraulic arm activates, allowing them to enter the seaplane - but now the damn maintenance bridge is in the way.
Telling Steve to prep the plane for launch, Claire dashes off to remove the obstacle, grabbing the formerly missing control lever from a chair in the plane itself. Once the bridge is moved, she has to take the long way around, using the airport's cargo elevator to return to the training facility courtyard. By the time she reaches that point, the same feminine voice she heard when escaping Birkin's lab under Raccoon City warns that she has only five minutes to make it back to the seaplane.
But Alfred is still on the island. Ranting to himself in his "Alexia" voice, he vows revenge on Claire from his position in the monitor room, using the computers to release the creature that Hunk brought to Rockfort Island - a new model of Tyrant, with spiked, club-like forelimbs.
As Claire runs to the mini-sub, the Tyrant smashes its way through a nearby fence. Refusing to go down without a fight, Claire blazes away with the heaviest firepower she has, ultimately dropping it to the ground. Jumping over its body, she races back to the seaplane, where Steve is relieved to see her. The first explosions are already starting to rock the base as they power up the plane and roar into the sky, finally daring to breathe again as they leave the island behind.
Unbeknownst to them, Alfred is right behind them. Racing to the antique tank kept in the training facility courtyard, he uses a special key - a golden halberd - in a hatch on its rear to reveal a secret passage. As his former base starts to tear itself apart, he runs for a private VTOL jet in a concealed hanger. As he climbs aboard and takes off, he promises to show Claire the real meaning of terror.
Unaware of Alfred's survival, Steve apologizes to Claire for his behavior on the island, and wishes her luck in finding her brother. Claire suggests that they set course for Hawaii, a decision that Steve is happy to comply with... and then a sudden impact shakes the whole plane. Glancing at the instruments, Steve dumbfoundedly reveals that the cargo bay door has come open. Claire instructs him to concentrate on flying, whilst she checks it out.
To her horror, the Tyrant from the island is still alive, and has forced its way onto the plane. She knows from her past encounters with Mr. X that she doesn't have the firepower to kill it herself... but, the ship's cargo catapult offers a glimmer of hope. She unloads her heaviest firepower onto the man-beast, desperately staying out of its reach in the tight confines of the cargo bay. When it staggers from its wounds, she lures it in front of the cargo catapult and slams its activation button; too dazed to brace itself, the Tyrant is swept off of its feet and flung into the ocean thousands of feet below to its doom.
Sealing the cargo bay door, Claire returns to the cockpit, casually telling Steve that she just took care of their problem. But her triumph is shattered mere moments later when the autopilot suddenly kicks in, and Alfred broadcasts a video transmission to them, taunting them about having arranged for a new destination.
Tired and unable to disable Alfred's remote control, the two teens allow themselves to fall asleep. Hours later, Steve awakens first and, giving in to the feelings he has developed over their time spent fighting together, tries to kiss Claire - only to pull hastily away when she wakes up in turn. Checking their instruments, they learn they have wound up in Antarctica, where their auto-pilot is bringing them in to a small facility. Cargo planes are already here; this must be where the other survivors of Rockfort Island fled to as well.
Unfortunately, the autopilot sucks at landing, and the two are lucky to survive when it makes their plane skid across the frozen landing strip and crash partially through the wall of a transport terminal. Shaking off their aches and pains, the two teens emerge into the chill of the building and, for lack of a better plan, decide to split up to see if they can find some way out of what is clearly another Umbrella facility.
Claire works here way around the platform to a set of sleeping quarters. Here, she finds several Umbrella employees... dead in their beds, at least until she gets too close, and they promptly stir to life and attack. The Rockfort survivors evidently brought the T-Virus with them when they escaped the island, and now this base has been overwhelmed as well. Exploring the sleeping quarters, Claire turns up a worker's diary that complains about Alfred's tyrannical behavior, and also repeats rumors of a monster called "Nosferatu" sealed away somewhere in the depths of the base.
Continuing her exploration, Claire heads down a level, through a corridor filled with weird webbing and ominously cocooned corpses. Heading straight down from where she started, Claire finds herself in a richly furnished office. Here, she finds a memo written by Alfred's father, Alexander, which talks about how his family's connections to Umbrella, the creation of the T-Virus, the death of his own father and the subsequent fall from grace for the Ashford family. Arguably the most interesting revelation to be gleaned from this memo is that there's a great deal of competition within Umbrella over the development of new B.O.W species and viral weapon strains. This has to do with competition with other companies in the business of dealing in monsters.
Strange thudding and scratching noises make Claire investigate, and she finds a bookcase can be pushed back to reveal a secret alcove. Here, she finds some lockers, one of which is the source of the sound. Gun in hand, she cautiously opens it... only to reveal a little mouse. It scampers away as she breathes a sigh of relief. Looking in the locker reveals a letter addressed to Alfred from the family butler; apparently, there really was an Alexia, but she died in some mysterious accident fifteen years ago, which happened shortly after the equally mysterious death of their father. No wonder Alfred is missing more than a few marbles. Another examination reveals a button, but it does nothing when pressed; the power must need to be restored.
Leaving the study, Claire turns a corner, only to encounter the source of the webbing; a giant mutant moth, which lays its egg on the back of a cocooned corpse and then comes fluttering over to her. A well-aimed bullet blasts it out of the sky, but Claire resolves to be careful; more of the monsters will undoubtedly begin hatching soon.
Continuing her exploration reveals that the complex she and Steve have been stranded at seems to be some kind of combination of a mine and a storage/shipping complex for Umbrella. Battling zombies, zombie dogs and giant spiders, she explores the complex and ultimately makes her way to the turbine room, where she manages to kickstart the generator and restore the power.
(If the player finds a bar code sticker and applies it to a package after switching on the power, then sends the package on its way, Chris will recover a Magnum later in the game.)
That done, she heads back to the manager's study and tries the hidden switch she found before. Pushing it slides a door back, revealing a room with a mesh floor. Far below this room, a screaming man is blindfolded, gagged, and shackled to the wall. An ornate battle axe is embedded in the wall with its haft across his chest. His scream is a completely inhuman, bone-chilling sound. This must be the "Nosferatu" that the miner was writing about. Relieved that the creature is at least restrained, Claire retrieves a key to the base's machine room from its position at the bottom of a pot hidden in this alcove and beats feet.
The machine key seems to be the last tool that the teens need; from the machine room, they can power up the giant mining drill machine that Claire found in one part of the complex. When Claire gets back to the machine room, she meets up with Steve, who cheerfully informs her that he's found out that they're only seven miles away from an Australian research outpost. If they can make it there, then they're home free!
With a plan set, Claire gives Steve control of the drill, and they start the machine up. Unfortunately, at a crucial moment, Steve is so busy staring dreamily at Claire that he causes the drill to smash open a pipe carrying toxic gas. The digger screeches to a halt and Claire drags Steve out of the mine by the scruff of his neck before the gas can kill them both.
Steve is pissed and humiliated, but Claire assures him that's okay, and they split up again to find a way to cut off the gas. With the aid of a gas mask recovered from a B.O.W storage room, Claire finds a valve handle in a storage room on the second floor; it's the wrong shape for the switch-off slot back in the mine, but a cutting machine in a room on the opposite side of the level takes care of that. Moments later, Claire has entered the mine and turned off the gas.
She doesn't have long to savor her triumph, though. Alfred chooses that moment to ambush her, only to be ambushed in turn by Steve; this time, Steve dodges Alfred's shots and lands some clear Ingram fire of his own to Alfred's chest. The crazed aristocrat staggers, slumping against the railing, but it gives way and sends him crashing onto the floor below. Alfred survives... but then the edge of the deep pit in the center of the room crumbles beneath his feet as he staggers upright, pitching him screaming into the void.
As he falls, the Nosferatu's frenzied roar suddenly echoes through the base. Rattled, the teens quickly rally and decide to get whilst the getting's good. Pausing only for Claire to drop down to where Alfred fell and pick up his sniper rifle for herself, they hop into the digger machine and attack the wall once again.
As they bore through the wall and out the other side, the heat produced by the drill melts the ice they are drilling through and reduces it to water, which in turn floods most of the base.
In his prison below Alfred's office, Nosferatu roars. His chest splits open with a sickening crack, revealing his oversized, pulsing heart heart. With casual ease, he pulls himself away from the wall, snapping steel shackles like spiderwebs. The axe across his chest is thrown across the room and sticks in the floor. Despite his blindness, he shuffles forward purposefully; whether he is motivated by the need to kill or some twisted remnant of paternal love for his slain son is impossible to say, but he heads unerringly for a meeting with the teens.
Once the drill breaks through the wall, it runs out of fuel. Steve suggests that they look for help on the helipad, and the two head their way up the staircase. As they cross the helipad and ready to head down, they stop; Nosferatu has cornered them. It twitches and convulses as four long, insectile limbs tear their way out of its back. Steve throws himself in front of Claire, trying to protect her, but before he can fire his trusty Ingrams, Nosferatu's longest arm whips around and knocks him clear across the helipad, sending him rolling over the edge.
Claire races over in panic, but Steve is still alive, clinging for dear life to a broken support strut. He begs her to run and save herself, but Claire refuses, declaring that she'll "wax this monster" and help him up. Whipping out Alfred's sniper rifle, she does her best to stay out of the way of Nosferatu's flailing arm and gouts of toxic purple mist, whilst drilling the creature in its exposed heart. Shot after shot she fires, but after seven direct hits, Nosferatu howls one last time and falls flat on its face.
(If Claire was poisoned by Nosferatu, it comes into play later in the game.)
With the immediate danger out of the way, Claire rushes to help Steve up. Despite his own efforts at rescuing Claire throughout their trials, Steve is ashamed, feeling he failed Claire against the monster. The younger Redfield just dismisses it, clapping on his shoulder and unintentionally aggravating a bullet wound. Steve hides his pain, and instead quietly promises that next time, he will protect Claire.
Descending the stairs, the teens find a snowmobile; finally, their luck has turned around. They should reach the Australian outpost easily, and they waste no time in taking off.
Meanwhile, amazingly, Alfred has survived his shots and his fall, but he is definitely mortally wounded. Defiantly, he drags himself down a long hallway, ranting to himself as he goes, promising that things aren't over with Claire. He makes his way to a laboratory, collapsing on a set of stairs that lead to a raised platform. As he faintly murmurs his sister's name, a series of computers and monitors around the lab suddenly flash into life. A cryogenic capsule rises up from the platform, its cylindrical surface defrosting and embryonic fluid draining away to reveal the the form of a naked blonde woman.
Alfred smiles in rapture at the sight; this is his sister, Alexia Ashford, finally restored to him. He speaks to her, thanking her for finally waking, and then dies, one hand outstretched in supplication to his beloved sibling. Alexia takes in the sight of her brother dead, her eyes widening in anger.
An enormous plant-based tentacle suddenly erupts out of the Antarctica base, racing across the frozen tundra. Within moments, it has caught up with the snowmobile, ending Claire and Steve's relieved chatter as they spot it in the rearview mirror. The tentacle slams into the snowmobile like a cannon shot, knocking it onto its side and then wrapping around it before lifting it up and slamming it into the ground, reducing it to a blazing wreck.
Back at the Antarctica Base, Alexia sits quietly on the stares, cradling her brother's head and humming their lullaby as she strokes the corpses hair, watching the snowmobile burn on a nearby monitor.
Meanwhile, back on Rockfort, a small boat drops off a single passenger. Slowly, Chris Redfield climbs hand-over-hand up a sheer cliff, burdened by a heavy bag filled with equipment. As he hauls himself up, one of his handholds breaks away, and Chris accidentally drops his bag into the ocean. Grimly, he continues onward, finding a cave on the side of the cliff.
The cave is home to a mauseoleum, but none of the occupants show any signs of moving. If Chris had any intentions of turning back, they are quickly cancelled when a roar causes the ground to quake, and the ceiling collapses behind him, sealing him in.
With no way to go back, Chris continues forward into the mausoleum. Here, he finds Rodrigo, having taken shelter from the self destruct here; the former Umbrella employee claims to be the last survivor left on the island. Chris explains that he is here to find his sister, Claire, and Rodrigo tells him about having helped Claire to escape, asserting that he's certain that Claire was on one of the planes that fled the island before the self-destruct.
Chris thanks Rodrigo for his help, but then, with perfectly ironic timing, the monster worm that Claire encountered attacks them both. Chris dodges, but the wounded Rodrigo is easy prey, and it swallows him whole. Chris refuses to give up, dodging the mutant when it surfaces and raking it with fire from his assault rifle. Finally, riddled with bullets, the worm convulses, spits out Rodrigo, and collapses dead on the sand. Chris rushes to Rodrigo's aid, but he is mortally wounded now; he returns Claire's lighter to Chris and tells him to find his sister, then dies, his final words being to happily declare that he will finally see his family again.
Mournfully, Chris leaves Rodrigo's body here in the mausoleum and heads onwards. With the lighter, he is able to open a simple puzzle lock and retrieve a pair of sub-machine guns, then take an elevator up out of the cave. It turns out to be the large locked door in the motorpool that Claire couldn't open before - amazingly, the military training facility seems to have survived the bombing relatively intact. Venturing outside, Chris finds the tank that Alfred's escape route is hidden beneath, with the button he used to move it still visibly exposed. When he hits it, the tank moves again, exposing the elevator that Alfred took.
Descending down, he finds himself in a small corridor. One door close to the elevator leads to an underground office; here, a chest of drawers has been sealed with a puzzle lock. Fortunately, a painting over the wall with a poetic description at its bottom reveals the correct order to open the colored drawers in to release the lock on the bottom-most drawer. Inside, he finds a golden Luger replica, which he pockets for luck.
Returning to the corridor, he finds himself at the door to a hanger, which is an obvious escape route off of this island to find his sister. But it's been sealed with a lock, based on a mostly complete design of an eagle clutching a halberd - one look tells the S.T.A.R.S veteran that he needs to find a halberd-shaped key in order to get through. Laying on the floor nearby is a battery, and he grabs it - then comes under attack by a pair of enormous black widow spiders.
Splattering their guts across the walls, Chris heads back to the motor pool, where the battery charges up a movable lift which he uses to reach the second floor. Here, he finds a key to a chemical storage room, and a report about a special new alloy, Duploid, which has apparently been used to construct models of the Ashford family crest - he takes particular note of the chemical compound that can apparently dissolve this new alloy, which is a mixture of two different "Clement" chemicals. Tucking his finds away, Chris heads out a door to find himself in the corridor leading to the control room.
The sound of a woman singing draws Chris into the control room, where the central monitor is displaying an image of a blonde woman cradling a dead blonde man, singing a child's lullaby to the corpse. Chris watches, confused, until the display suddenly cuts out.
He is unaware that he is not alone on the island. From a temporary base in the airport where Claire and Steve made their futile attempt to flee the island, Wesker curses to himself as he sees the broadcast from the Antarctica Base; somehow, he knew that Alexia Ashford was alive, but he was unprepared for her to be released from stasis on this day. When his hacking into the security cameras reveals Chris in the control room, though, his mood brightens; using his laptop, he activates a set of stasis capsules nearby, releasing a strange flying drone - and the scaly, hulking form of a new breed of Hunter!
Oblivious to this old enemy, Chris resumes his exploration. From the control room, he enters the courtyard where Alfred ambushed Claire - and spots one of the Ashford crests lying in the shattered remains of the pedestal where it was used. When he tries to grab it, though, the chunk of the walkway it's sitting on gives way and drops it down through a hole on the ground floor into the underground river several layers down. Realizing that this has to be the key to his accessing the hanger, Chris heads east; a raging fire blocks off the route to the storage facility that Claire and Steve took, but the wall has been blown down by the self-destruct sequence, allowing Chris to explore the remnants of a destroyed lab.
Finding nothing except a door that has lost its doorknob and so is sealed shut, Chris returns to the corridor leading to the control room, where he takes the elevator down one floor. This brings him to the diorama room, but nothing immediately stands out there, so he continues on down to the next level.
Here, he finds himself in the underground dungeons. Most of it has been flooded by toxic gas leaking from a set of drums; the ventilation unit that was keeping the gas in check when Claire came this way has switched itself off. Fortunately, a stairway that had been raised on the steel bridge directly south of the elevator has now fallen, allowing Chris to reach a part of the facility that Claire couldn't.
At the base of the stairs, he finds a shotgun on a mount; when he takes it, the stairs swing back up, leaving him effectively stranded. When he puts the shotgun back, the stairs swing down again. Taking the shotgun, he heads under the bridge, following the river to a ladder around a bend; when he climbs the ladder, he finds himself back in the corridor leading to the hangar. Having found this escape route, he returns to where he found the shotgun and enters a nearby metal door, entering a laboratory with numerous large capsules.
From here, he makes his way through to a storage room full of junk - he spots a doorknob lying on the floor and goes to pick it up, confident that it will come in handy further down the line, but suddenly spots a strange robot drone clinging to the ceiling above him, projecting a moving scan-light - one that he's just broken. It lets out an electronic alarm, and suddenly two Hunters, of a model he doesn't recognize, come clawing out of the air ducts to attack. He blows them away with his new shotgun and moves on to another lab linked to the same storage room. In here, he finds a chemical storage refrigerator, which he unlocks with the key he discovers earlier - unfortunately, he can't tell which of the chemicals, if any, are one of the two he needs for the cocktail to dissolve the emblem plate. He remembers that the report said that one chemical changes color at a certain temperature, one apparently linked to the founding of the Rockfort Island base - which he learned in the diorama room. Setting the temperature on the fridge to 12/8, he sees the reaction he's looking for and grabs the chemical.
Moments later, another Hunter bursts in to kill him through grating in the northern wall, this one with unusual reddish-purple scales. This model will later be dubbed a "Seeker", equipped with poisonous claws.
Blasting it, Chris backtracks his way to the hangar bay corridor - only to find that two of the "Spotter" drones are now patrolling it. Narrowly evading the things, Chris makes his way back to the surface, and to use the doorknob on that door he saw earlier. It only opens up to a balcony back in the motor pool, but exploring here turns up a small model tank with a plug on its base. Come to think of it, as Chris recalls, the diorama had an empty socket in the courtyard corresponding to the one where the tank is sitting in real life.
That makes as much sense as any of the puzzles he saw in the Spencer Mansion, so he heads back to the diorama room. By this point, he is facing regular resistance from the zombified remnants of men clad in black military gear and wearing night-vision goggles - the last remnants of the soldiers who attacked Rockfort Island at Wesker's behest, not that Chris knows that. The experienced monster-killer slays them all and continues in his explorations.
Sure enough, when the tank is plugged into the model, a hidden switch is revealed as the painting of the room slides out of the way. It's protected by a set of three different lasers, with a trefoil shape comprised of three linked hexagons obviously calling for a set of keys. Fortunately, outside of the lasers, there is both a note revealing a secret passageway under the diorama and a turn table key - and Chris passed one of those back down in the basement levels.
Grabbing the key, Chris makes his way back to the basement storage room. As he passes through the lab again, he finds himself confronted by the last person he ever expected to see: Albert Wesker, who couldn't resist showing up to taunt his old enemy again. He reveals himself as the man who attacked Rockfort Island, and also that he has encountered Claire. Chris immediately draws his gun, but Wesker lunges forward with superhuman speed, knocking Chris aside like a ragdoll and sending him hurtling across the room, before grabbing him by the throat and hoisting him into the air with just one hand. As Chris chokes and gasps for air, Wesker casually reveals that he has "sold his soul" to a new employer, which led to his attack on this Umbrella base, and also that Claire has found her way to the Antarctica Base, with Alexia Ashford.
Chris interrupts him by punching him in the face, though all this achieves is to knock off Wesker's sunglasses. To Chris's shock and horror, the eyes revealed are inhuman; fiery red-yellow orbs with slitted pupils.
Wesker seems ready to break Chris' neck, but suddenly a video screen blares to life, revealing Alexia. She simply laughs at Wesker, and then disables the transmission, but that seems to be enough to change Wesker's mind; he flings Chris into one of the storage capsules, cracking it, before it then explodes as a Bandersnatch rips its way out, howling for blood. By the time Chris has blasted the rubbery humanoid, Wesker has disappeared.
More determined than ever to get off this island, Chris picks himself up and keeps going. Riding the turn table elevator to the ground floor, and moving some boxes around, he is able to reach the main hall of the military training complex through a hole in a wall. Exploring the monitoring room, another broken wall enables him to reach the stone courtyard where he saw the emblem plate fall. Through the same ladder that Claire had used earlier, he descends to the room where the poisonous gas is leaking, only this time he's in a position to reach the fan lever and turn on the ventilation. Now he's able to move through the once-inaccessible area to reach a storage chamber, where he finds not only components to upgrade his Glock with greater penetration, but also the other chemical he needs to create the Duploid Alloy-dissolving Clement Mixture. Now he just has to try and find the emblem plate...
Retracing his steps, Chris makes his way to the training facility's main hall and leaves via its front entrance. Battling hunters, he finds that the elevator next to the doorway leading to the rest of the island is now unlocked, allowing him to ride it down to the cargo room in the hidden seaport. Fighting his way through zombies and hunters, he makes his way to an oil gauge room so that he can lower the bridge that Claire and Steve raised before; with a little basic mathwork, he refills the oil gauge, lowers the bridge, and is able to make his way to where Claire and Steve took off from. Here, he retrieves the three military proofs they used to access their seaplane; useless for that purpose now, but obviously useful for the laser-locked switch back in the diorama room.
After a long hike, Chris finally deactivates the laser and flicks the switch, revealing a ladder down to a secret tunnel. Before the self-destruct, this passageway led all the way to the Ashfords' private manor, not that Chris would know that. It still leads to a large, shallow pool fed by the underground river, in which he can see the golden halberd glinting. But before he can leap in to take his prize, something stirs; a massive, deformed, quadrupedal abomination slithers through the water, guarding its murky lair. Claire would be able to identify it as the albinoid that escaped the lab before the self-destruct - only the formerly cat-sized mutant has grown into a massive crocodilian beast. Chris only knows that it's standing in his way.
He is about to step into the water to get a better shot at it, but the moment his boot touches the water, he gets an electric shock that almost stops his heart! Luckily, he survives, but he realizes that joining it in the water is certain death. Luckily, the creature is either unable to leave the water, or too stupid to try and come after him on land; whilst the process of standing on the banks of the pool and blasting at the Albinoid when it comes within reach as it frantically swims around is slow, Chris holds his impatience in check. He's the only one who can save his sister.
Finally, the Albinoid lies in a spreading swathe of gore-stained water, and Chris can wade in and retrieve the emblem plate. He applies the Clement Mixture, and the blue plating dissolves, leaving only the golden halberd he needs as a key to access the VTOL Hanger.
He races back to the hanger, and soon has flown off into the night sky in a surviving VTOL, heading straight for the Antarctica Base. Luckily, the on-board computers guide him straight there, and soon he has set foot into the frozen ruins of the base. Wasting no time, he sets off looking for Claire - and immediately runs into enormous, vegetative tentacles, though fortunately they retreat when he shoots them. Following in Claire's footsteps brings him to the study; the enormous backwash of water generated when the teens dug their way to freedom has flooded the base and subsequently many regions of it solid, preventing Chris from accessing the lower portions of the base.
In the study, the golden halberd unlocks a cabinet in the south wall. Here, he finds a sigil-adorned cube paperweight and Alfred's diary, which reveals part of the sordid history of the Ashford twins: they were not born normally, but "created" somehow, an attempt to cover up a "blunder" of Alexander Ashford's. When the twins learned of their origins, they were outraged, and sought revenge on Alexander. Luring him into a secret lab, they used him as a guinea pig for Alexia's new creation; a mutagenic virus of her own design, which turned Alexander into the monstrous Nosferatu.
Whilst this was ample revenge from Alfred's viewpoint, his sister saw more potential. She became convinced that the virus could be used to grant a host great powers without turning them into a mindless mutant. So, soon after Alfred was officially declared the new head of the family, she had herself infected and placed in cryogenic stasis, calculating that within 15 years, her body would have assimilated the virus and she could cohabit with it. The strain of being alone without the sibling he worshipped caused Alfred to lose what was left of his sanity, and he developed a split personality, which he combined with repression of Alexia's true fate to deal with his loneliness.
But such information is of little concern to Chris; he has his own sister to find. Fortunately, the diary also mentions that there is a secret passageway leading to a hidden underground segment of the base devoted to his and Alexia's personal use - if Claire is anywhere, she's likely to be there. But to get there, he needs three jewels, worn by Alexander, Alexia and Alfred. Chris promptly sets off in search of the jewels.
As the bottom-most chambers of the base are frozen solid, he makes his way to the second floor, entering the upper layer of the cargo-sorting room. Something massive is stirring beneath the ice, a shadow that glides back and forth, but it fortunately doesn't seem to notice it. Instead, Chris explores the rooms he can reach from this layer.
First, he goes south-west to the digging room, where he retrieves the valve handle that Claire had used to stem the tide of poisonous gas. Zombies break their way from the ice, and Chris mows them down with well-aimed headshots. Returning to the sorting room, he heads directly east, recovering some goodies from a zombie-haunted storeroom, before heading back to the sorting room.
When Claire was here earlier, part of the walkway above the sorter had collapsed, keeping her from going through the doors on the other side of the room. Now, Chris can just jump off of the walkway and run across the ice to the other half of the catwalk. A crane hook is stuck in the ice, but Chris needs a key to work the hook's controls. Grimly, he heads towards the closest door, entering a part of the facility that Claire couldn't.
Unfortunately, as soon as Chris enters, a Spotter lets out its electronic wail, and he must fight off the Hunter that comes racing to investigate. Wesker has beaten him here! As if he needed the extra motivation...
Soldiering on, Chris enters a monitoring room, with a large glass tank built into one wall with something glittering inside of it. When he climbs up the ladder, though, he finds that he needs a square-socketed valve handle to turn on the outflow and drain the tank. But the valve handle that he has is octagonal in its base. Obviously, he'll have to come back for this later.
Activating a vertical control switch hoists a container of fire extinguishing chemicals up into the lab, allowing Chris to refill the fire extinguisher that Claire left for him. A yellow cargo elevator nearby brings him down into the first floor storage room; putting out the fire allows Chris to both access the crate that Claire had sent on earlier, giving him a powerful Magnum revolver, and to detonate the remote explosive she'd set up so he can access the contents of an ammunition cabinet.
(All of the above, in game, only happens if Claire completes the three mini-quests essential - putting the empty fire extinguisher in the item box on Rockfort Island, and prepping the detonator and mailing the crate in the Antarctic Base.)
Heading back into the corridor from whence he accessed these two rooms, Chris dodges a pair of Spotters and heads to a set of elevators at the far end. Descending, he finds himself attacked by a Seeker; once it lies twitching on the floor, he enters the door immediately ahead of him from the elevator. This brings him to an icy corridor, where a door to the north opens into a generator room. With the aid of his valve handle, Chris replaces a fuse and triggers a set of transformers, restoring power to the base.
Outside again, he fights his way through a small swarm of zombies released by the power, and heads down the corridor to a new room - one that looks exactly like a chamber he saw on the first floor of the Spencer Mansion, all those months ago! There's even a statue of a woman holding a vase with something in it - only here there's no handy stepladder to retrieve it from. But, when he pushes it onto a cracked section of the floor, it plunges into a hole, allowing him to recover a map of this part of the base. Passing through the door brings him to both a small elevator and to a longer corridor, at the end of which he spots a familiar tiger statue. Drawn by his curiosity, he investigates; when he removes one of the jeweled eyes, it rotates to display an alcove on that side. By taking each eye out in turn, he takes a socket which fits onto his octagonal based valve handle, turning it back into a square-based one, and a spare clip of magnum bullets. Returning both eyes, he makes his way to the small elevator and descends deeper into the base.
The sight that greets him makes him stare in amazement and disgust. A gantry has been built around an enormous ant hill, swarming with ants the size of rats. Advancing to the base of the ant hill, he finds a small sculpture of a dragonfly's wing, and pockets it. The gantry extends to two alcoves, one on the left-hand side of the room, one on the right.
To the left, Chris discovers a small office, containing a report written by Alexia on how she created the "T-Veronica" virus by mixing the T-Virus, or at least the Progenitor Virus, with the virus she discovered within a fossilized queen ant. It also talks briefly about Nosferatu, revealing that the mutated Alexander produces a unique venom that the common blue herbs used by Umbrella can't counteract; she has synthesized a specific antidote and stored it in the weapon/chemical warehouse on floor B2 - the very room where Chris retrieved his magnum from. This same office also houses a long-dead ant's nest.
To the right, Chris enters a small lab, where he finds another Alexia-written report - this one on the T-Veronica Virus itself, which details her obsession with world domination and her plan to "bond" with the virus to achieve it. This same lab contains the stasis capsule that Alexia was kept in for the past 15 years. But it's been sealed shut. When Chris examines it, the computers call for a code, which he finally guesses by using the strange paperweight he found in the study; from the double-A logo and rotating it clockwise, he gains the right sigils. This causes a small drawer to open, with a space for the cube. Once this is inserted, it closes, and the capsule opens, revealing Alfred's body. Remembering what he read earlier, Chris takes Alfred's ring for use in finding the secret passage.
He then heads back up one floor; following the corridor from which the Seeker came, he finds himself in an underground courtyard, built before a replica of a luxurious mansion. Exploring, he finds two more of the replica dragonfly wings; one on the ground near a merry-go-round at the front-most section of the courtyard, and one on the rim of a fountain in the middle of a small moat that runs through the courtyard. Once he has grabbed those, he heads inside.
What he sees leaves him momentarily dumbfounded: it's an exact replica of the main hall of the Spencer Mansion! The most obvious difference is that when he goes up the stairs, he is confronted by a portrait of Alexander, Alexia and Alfred, each of which has a small indentation that could fit a jewel; on a ring for Alfred, on a choker for Alexia, and on an ear-piercing for Alexander. Sure enough, when Chris examines the ring he took from Alfred's corpse, he can easily detach the jewel and insert it into the equivalent gap in the portrait. 1 down, 2 to go...
All of the doors on both floors of the main hall are locked. But when Chris checks behind the staircase, he finds his sister, encased in a cocoon of green slime! He quickly cuts her free with his combat knife and gently lowers her to the floor.
If Claire was poisoned by Nosferatu during her encounter with him, Chris has to retrieve the antivenom that Alexia developed from the weapons and chemical storage room to save his sister's life first. Otherwise, they simply express their joy at seeing each other again, before Claire explains that she was captured by Alexia alongside Steve, and insists that they need to find him.
As they enter the main hall, Alexia suddenly emerges from the door on the upper floor, taunting and mocking the siblings. Claire gives chase to her as she vanishes back into the door she came from, with Chris close behind - but not close enough. One of Alexia's tentacles suddenly bursts through the wall and destroys the stairway, trapping Chris on the ground floor and Claire on the upper floor. She tells Chris to look for a way to join her, and that she's going to look for Steve, and then follows Alexia through the door she used.
Claire finds herself in a small study, where after solving a few mini-puzzles, she continues on through a hallway that her brother would recognize. Smaller tentacles burst through the window, but retreat when she blasts them with handgun bullets or bowgun bolts. At the end of the corridor, she finds a doorway into an old-timey jail, with several zombified prisoners roaming around. Dispatching them, she climbs onto a higher platform, where she finds a security file, which reveals a self-destruct mechanism for the lab can be activated with the code "Veronica", and a cannon. When she dips the cannon's nozzle, a crystal orb rolls out of it, with a security card suspended in its center. This also triggers an old-timey dropping-block trap... which is nowhere near the right position to actually hit her. Instead, she uses it to smash open the crystal ball and retrieve the card.
Further exploration reveals a locked elevator, and more doors - all of which but one are locked. In this room, a card reader controls a set of old-school security bars, which slide up into the ceiling when Claire runs the card through the meter... whilst the door also locks behind her. Hesitantly, she advances through a long hallway - and finds Steve bound to a chair at the far end by an enormous battle-axe that has been jammed into the wall. She desperately tries to free him, but Steve begs for her to run; Alexia said she was going to experiment on him, just like she did with Alexander.
But his warning comes too late; before Claire can even comprehend what he's saying, Steve suddenly clutches his chest, screaming for help as blood bursts from his throat. He rumbles, deep and guttural, and his body begins to bloat and swell, expanding to nearly triple its former size, skin developing a layer of armor-like green scales, limbs twisting into bestial claws and bone spikes jutting from its flesh. Horribly, Steve's face remains almost unchanged by the transformation.
The mutated Steve frees himself from his bonds without a hint of effort and attacks Claire, who runs desperately for her life as the roaring monstrosity that was her friend tries to hack her down with his enormous axe. She manages to slide under the security bars just as they close, but the door is locked and she can't get it to open.
As Steve hacks his way inside, one of Alexia's tentacles suddenly bursts through the wall, grabbing Claire and starting to slowly squeeze the life from her. Steve hacks his way through, and is about to take her head off... when he stops. In a choking, guttural voice, he gasps out her name, and then turns the axe on the tentacle, slicing her free. The flailing, mangled appendage promptly slams into Steve with bone-crushing force, sending him flying across the room. As it withdraws, Steve suddenly shifts back into his human form, and Claire hurries to his side. Although she tries to plead with him to hold on, assuring him that Chris has arrived to save them, but Steve is dying. He thanks her for being there for him, and with his last breath, confesses his love for her. All Claire can do is cradle his body in her arms and weep.
Back in the faux-mansion's hall, Chris's plans to find the other jewels are cut off when Wesker suddenly barges into the main hall. Chris takes cover as Alexia appears at the top of the stairs, with the two mad mutants bickering; Wesker demands that Alexia come with him, as the only source of the T-Veronica Virus, but Alexia has no intention of bowing to him. As she strides regally down the stairway, she bursts into flames, which burn off her clothes. When the fire dies away, she has mutated into something that is clearly inhuman, with slate-gray skin and her hair, right arm and left leg transmuted into something that resembles both vegetable matter and insect chitin, yet still repellently recognizable as the woman she was.
The two mutants engage in a brief test of strength, but Alexia overpowers Wesker - just how badly depends on the edition, with Wesker putting up a much better fight in the "Code: Veronica X" remake of the game. The end result is that Wesker flees, leaving Chris to face off against Alexia. After desperately unloading his heaviest firepower into her, Alexia falls. Chris scavenges her choker and takes the red jewel from inside; that just leaves Alexander's jewel to find.
Unbeknownst to Chris, as he leaves, Alexia stirs behind him and rises again, clearly having inherited the full measure of the Progenitor Virus' regenerative abilities.
With no better clue, Chris heads to the monitoring room, where he uses his socketed valve handle to drain the tank. At its bottom, he finds the crane key, and after finishing off the Seeker that attacks him in the tank, he heads back to the room with the crane. When he uses the key to turn it on, it winches up the corpse of Nosferatu, still wearing Alexander's piercing. But before he can take the final jewel, he must defeat an enormous version of the giant black widows he has slain up until this point, which emerges from the ice after Nosferatu's corpse and tries to crush him inside the crane room.
(If Chris comes to retrieve Alexander's piercing before freeing Claire, Alexia will appear briefly and mock Chris before the black widow queen attacks.)
With the last two jewels, Chris hurries back to the faux-mansion on the bottom-most level. Alexia's corpse has ominously disappeared in his absence, but he refuses to be daunted. With all three jewels in the painting, it slides open to reveal a hidden passage. Passing through, he fights his way through zombie-infested corridors and finds his way to a replica of the Ashford twins' bedroom back on Rockfort Island. Each room has a locked music box, and Chris intuitively realizes that he needs gems to unlock them. The slots are just the same size as the gemstones in the tiger statue's eye sockets... if he turns out the power, then he should be able to retrieve both at the same time.
Further exploring this area turns up a former study and library, with a key to the sterile room area. This allows him to unlock the doorway directly linking the tiger statue's corridor to this underground mansion. After a long jog to the power room and back, Chris retrieves his prize and proceeds to unlock the two music boxes; just like on Rockfort Island, he has to take the music plate from the red box in Alexia's room and put it in the blue box in Alfred's room, revealing a ladder that leads up to an otherwise unreachable chamber.
Specifically, it's a dining hall, with portraits of the whole Ashford family on the walls - Alexander's stands out immediately, having been defaced by the angry twins. A long-dead ant farm that would be very familiar to Claire sits on the table; laying in the dirt is a wingless golden statue of a dragonfly. Chris takes the three wing sculptings he's located throughout this level of the base; sure enough, they fit inside without a problem. But there's one missing...
Returning to the lower portion of the mansion, Chris's exploration brings him to a lab. Here, he finds the last wing, and a document on a "Code: Veronica" project that finally fills in the missing pieces and explains Alexia and Alfred: they were a genetic engineering experiment conducted by their "father", Alexander Ashford; unable to compete with the researchers of other Umbrella bases, especially after accidentally killing his own father with a biohazard outbreak, and fearing the prestige of his family was slipping away, he attempted to clone the most brilliant member of the Ashford family, his great-great-grandmother, Veronica Ashford, whilst also applying his own genetic tweaking to further augment the clone's intelligence. Born to a nameless surrogate mother, Alexia was his creation - Alfred was an unexpected hiccup in the experiment. Discovering this was what turned the sociopathic siblings on Alexander, and saw him transformed into the Nosferatu.
From the upper levels of the lab, Chris is able to reach the dungeon where Claire is trapped, still cradling Steve's body. She explains briefly what happened, and that she's sealed in; their only hope to get her out is to activate the emergency exit protocols by turning on the self-destruct - that will also activate the nearby elevator to the escape hangar, so they can leave this wretched place. She slides him a security binder, which confirms her claims, and also contains the security card needed to activate the self-destruct mechanism.
The self-destruct chamber is nearby; the golden dragonfly that Chris assembled is the final key needed to unlock access to the computer. Gunning down a few stray zombie workers, Chris powers on the computer and inputs the code to confirm the sequence. He doesn't even need to think to figure out what to type, as it's a name that the Ashfords have all invoked repeatedly.
Code: Veronica.
Klaxons blare and an automated voice begins playing, warning the non-existent faculty of the self-destruct's activation. As the countdown begins, the base's nuclear reactors decouple and prepare for detonation, whilst the automatic locks throughout the facility are released.
Chris promptly beats a hasty retreat, and is met on the gantry outside of this control room by his sister. The Redfield siblings share a brief hug of relief at finally seeing each other in the flesh again, but before they can run for the emergency elevator, one of Alexia's monstrous tentacles bursts through the floor. Opening a grotesquely mouth-like orifice, it disgorges Alexia, drenched in slime, returned to her human form, and curled in a fetal position, but quickly recovering from her special mode of transport and rising to her feet.
Realizing that this is not going to end peacefully, the Redfields run for a nearby dual-locked emergency locker, whose label proclaims it to house an anti-B.O.W weapon called a "linear launcher". With the two siblings in place, they can open the locker, but the weapon needs to be charged before it can be fired, and it starts slowly building up a charge.
By that point, Alexia is fully revived, has resumed the partially armored form she attacked Wesker in, and is advancing on the siblings. Chris tells Claire to run for the elevator whilst he covers her; she warns him not to die and makes a break for it, but Alexia cuts her off with a wave of burning blood. As the mutated Ashford lunges for Claire, Chris interrupts her by shooting her in mid-stride, causing her to crumple to the floor, clutching her arm and starting to mutate again. Claire flees, whilst Chris remains to fight.
Alexia transforms into a repulsive monstrosity; her arms replace themselves with two pairs of diaphanous, dragonfly-like wings, whilst the lower portion of her body swells into a repulsively pregnant cross between a plant, an insect, and a distended birthing sac. The only part of her still remotely human is her face, which leers at Chris as she attacks him, summoning more of the crushing vines and spawning grotesque, ant-like progeny to attack the S.T.A.R.S officer.
There isn't much room on the gantry to evade, but Chris does the best he can, blazing away with the heaviest weaponry he has to hand. Finally, her "throne" seeping noxious ichors, Alexia screams and writhes, tearing herself free and taking to the sky in a new, dragonfly-like form. As her abandoned flesh dissolves into a thick sludge, the linear launcher chimes to let Chris know that it's finished charging.
The only problem is that Alexia is darting around nimbly, and the linear launcher is a heavy, clunky affair. Dodging her attempts at bombarding him with flaming blood, Chris blazes away with the remainder of his ammunition; when Alexia slows to a mid-air crawl, hovering in place as she tries to regenerate from the damage he's inflicted, he grabs the linear launcher, aims and fires.
A bolt of energy erupts from the cannon and strikes Alexia, making her whole body swell like a balloon full of gore as she is cooked from the inside out and explodes in a shower of fluids. Chris doesn't have more than a moment to savor his triumph as the base begins to shake, small explosions erupting throughout the base as preliminary detonations are triggered. The Self-destruct has entered its final stage.
Dropping the linear launcher for greater speed, Chris sprints through the flames and into the tunnel - where he discovers Wesker has captured Claire. His former commander smirks at Chris, then pushes Claire through a hole opened up in a wall, forcing Chris to give chase. Narrowly evading zombies that lurch into his way, the elder Redfield chases Wesker all the way to an underground seaport.
Here, Wesker lets Claire go, declaring his mission a success, but that he wants revenge before he goes. When Chris points out that Alexia has been destroyed, Wesker reveals he's retrieved Steve's body, which also contains T-Veronica (or, as he calls it, "T-Alexia") virus. He then taunts Claire that maybe Steve will come back from the dead and come looking for her, the way he did.
Chris stops Claire before she can attack Wesker, telling her to get to the hanger and prep a VTOL for escape. He will stay behind and finish it. Claire reminds Chris of his promise to come back to her alive, but leaves as instructed.
Unfortunately for Chris, his bold words turn out to be all he has. Wesker is faster, stronger and tougher than him - a Tyrant in the skin of a man. He readily overpowers Chris, who only survives by spotting a hanging load of steel beams and shooting a lever, dropping them onto Wesker. Even this doesn't do more than injure him, but a timely explosion burns Wesker's face and cuts them off from each other with a wall of fire. Wesker vows he will kill Chris when next they meet, but makes no move to attack as Chris, in contrast to his bold words, beats a hasty retreat.
As fire sweeps through Alexia's precious private lab, burning her ant colony to ashes, Chris rides down the elevator just in time, being forced to leap from a balcony to land on the waiting VTOL jet in the hanger to keep from being cooked by the firestorm. He manages a cocky reply when Claire asks if he's alright, but quickly scrambles inside the VTOL so that they can take off.
As the Antarctica Base is engulfed in flames behind them, the VTOL soars off towards civilization. Claire pleads with Chris to never leave her alone, to which Chris shakes his head and apologizes, saying that before their lives can get back to normal, Umbrella must be destroyed, once and for all.
The VTOL disappears into the horizon, as the last legacy of the Ashford family is swallowed in a mushroom cloud, the nuclear reactors detonating at last and putting an end to the last remnants of one of the twisted founders of Umbrella.
