Chapter 117 Hundred and seventeen
The Leviathan didn't die quietly. It screamed with the voice of a thousand crushing atmospheres.
From the penthouse of the Ark, I watched through the panoramic glass as a localized geyser of superheated, crimson steam erupted from the top of the massive dreadnought's armored back. The beast shuddered violently, its localized gravity-shielding failing as the pressure-core Dax had just ruptured began to tear the submarine apart from the inside out.
"They're coming out!" Captain Reyes yelled, leaning so close to the glass her breath fogged it.
Launching out of the column of blinding red steam were fifty heavy motorcycles.
Dax led the pack, the Interceptor airborne, entirely backlit by the fiery death of the deep-sea machine. They didn't fall into the churning, green-lit water of the crater lake. They landed hard on the broad, barnacle-encrusted spine of the dying Leviathan itself.
The heavy tires slipped and skidded on the oxidized iron, throwing up arcs of black fluid and seawater, but Dax didn't brake.
"We're on the roof!" Dax’s voice suddenly crackled back into my earpiece, the Abyssal signal-jamming dying with the beast. "But the ship is going down! We need a ramp to the Ark, Ghost!"
I looked down. The Leviathan was sinking fast, the water rushing over its lower flanks. It was three hundred yards away from the breached hull of Neo-Angeles.
"I can't freeze the water again, Dax!" I shouted, staring at Leo, who had completely collapsed onto the floor, unconscious from the biological ping he had used to guide Dax's blade. "The kids are tapped out! You have to jump it!"
"Choppers don't jump three hundred yards, Mia!" Jax's voice roared over the comms, riding on the back of Tank's massive trike.
"They do if they don't have to fight gravity," my father, Chen Wei, suddenly interrupted over the tactical channel.
I turned around. My father had stepped out of the grav-lift and into the penthouse, his lab coat stained with grease and his eyes wild with scientific adrenaline. He wasn't looking at the kids; he was looking at the massive, stripped fiber-optic cables I had used to connect the Code-Born to the Ark's turrets.
"Dad, what are you doing?" I asked as he grabbed the master conduit.
"The localized anti-gravity repulsors that kept this city floating are dead because they lost the sub-ether feed from the earth," Chen explained rapidly, his hands flying over the terminal. "But the projectors on the lower hull are still structurally intact. We don't have enough power to lift the city, but we have enough ambient power left in the Ark's capacitors to project a localized gravity-tunnel outward!"
He slammed the conduit into a different port, entirely bypassing my Origin-Code architecture and using the Founder’s raw grid.
"Steele! Aim for the breach!" Chen yelled into the comms.
Out on the sinking Leviathan, the water was already up to the axles of the bikes. Dax didn't question the mad scientist. He pointed the nose of the Interceptor dead at the gaping, five-hundred-foot hole in the side of the grounded Ark.
"Hit the ramp!" Dax commanded.
The Vanguard accelerated, using the sloping, armored snout of the sinking Leviathan as a massive jump.
Fifty heavy choppers launched into the open air over the churning, boiling crater lake.
At the exact same microsecond, my father smashed his fist down on the EXECUTE key.
The lower hull of the Ark hummed. A cylindrical, distorted tunnel of air violently shimmered to life, extending from the breached durasteel doors directly across the water, catching the airborne Vanguard in mid-flight.
It was like watching a slow-motion magic trick.
The moment Dax and the bikers entered the invisible gravity-tunnel, their downward trajectory vanished. They didn't fall. They floated forward, their momentum carrying them horizontally across the three-hundred-yard gap as if they were riding on solid glass, entirely unbothered by the laws of physics.
"I love science!" Tank bellowed, his booming laugh echoing through the tunnel as his massive trike drifted weightlessly toward safety.
They hit the flooded lower promenade of the Ark, their heavy tires splashing down into the knee-deep water just as the Leviathan behind them gave one final, agonizing groan and sank completely beneath the boiling green waves of the crater.
"We're in!" Dax reported, skidding to a halt inside the safety of the durasteel walls. "Good catch, Chen!"
"Don't thank me yet," my father muttered, staring at the telemetry on the console. The frantic energy drained from his face, replaced by absolute, chilling dread.
The weaponized hurricane outside wasn't dissipating with the death of the flagship. It was intensifying.
The sickly green lightning flashed faster, turning the sky into a continuous, blinding strobe. The water in the crater lake began to violently rotate, creating a massive, localized whirlpool exactly where the Leviathan had just sunk.
"Mia," Captain Reyes whispered, pointing out the panoramic window. "Look at the clouds."
The dark, swirling localized gravity-wells in the storm clouds weren't just dropping rain anymore. They were descending. Massive, funnel-shaped atmospheric anomalies reached down like the fingers of an angry god, touching the surface of the churning crater lake.
They didn't create tornadoes. They created Anti-Gravity Spouts.
Millions of gallons of seawater were violently pulled upward into the sky, creating massive, roaring pillars of rising ocean that defied nature. And they weren't stationary. The massive water-spouts began to drift, guided by the Abyssal fleet's meteorological AI.
They were drifting directly toward the grounded Ark of Neo-Angeles.
"They're using the storm to build a bridge," I realized, the horrifying scale of the Mariana Ark's tactical capability finally dawning on me.
The first massive water-spout slammed into the side of the Founder's Spire, right below the penthouse. The impact shook the entire five-mile-wide city. But the water didn't crash and fall; the localized gravity-well kept it flowing upward, pinning a rushing river of seawater directly against the glass of the Ark.
"Look!" Sienna’s voice screamed over the comms from the lower decks.
Through the roaring, inverted waterfalls pinning the city, shadows were moving.
They weren't the slow, heavily armored Trench-Walkers. They were Abyssal-Strikers.
Sleek, fluid-dynamic cybernetic assassins, armored in hydro-slick black carbon-fiber. They didn't carry heavy acoustic cannons; they carried high-frequency harmonic blades that vibrated fast enough to part water and durasteel alike.
They were swimming up the anti-gravity spouts, using the rising water columns as high-speed vertical highways to bypass the lower defenses entirely and breach the upper levels of the Ark.
CRASH.
The reinforced smart-glass of the penthouse window spider-webbed as a sleek, black-armored Striker launched itself out of the anti-gravity waterfall and slammed onto the outer balcony.
"They're on the roof!" I yelled, drawing my heavy pistol as my father backed away from the console.
The Striker stood up, water shedding instantly from its carbon-fiber armor. It raised a harmonic blade that hummed with a piercing, high-pitched frequency, and easily sliced a perfect circle through the remaining reinforced glass.
Before the glass even hit the floor, Captain Reyes was moving.
She didn't fire her plasma rifle the harmonic blade would have deflected it. She drew a standard, scavenged combat knife, slid across the pristine white floor, and kicked the falling circle of glass directly at the assassin's chest.
The Striker sliced the glass in half without breaking stride, but the distraction was all Reyes needed. She closed the distance, engaging the deep-sea assassin in a blindingly fast, lethal dance of close-quarters combat right in the center of our hacker's nest.
"Hold the penthouse!" Dax roared over the comms, the sound of his Interceptor's engine screaming as he threw it into gear. "The Vanguard is on the way up! Don't let them touch the Code-Born!"
I planted myself in front of the couch where Leo and the kids were sleeping, raising my pistol with trembling hands.
The tutorial was definitely over. The World Council was here, and they had brought the ocean with them.