Chapter 179: Falling onto the Icefield

Chapter 179: Falling onto the Icefield

Above the Arctic Circle, the sky hung low and leaden, pressing the world into a suffocating gray-white.

The transport plane skimmed the ground at dangerously low altitude. External instruments were locked at negative forty-five degrees. The inner walls of the fuselage had long since iced over with razor-sharp frost, throwing pale reflections of tense faces under the dim emergency lights.

In the cockpit, the pilot gripped the violently shaking controls with white knuckles. The cold sweat at his temple froze the moment it ran down. The altimeter hovered at a dangerous sub-five-hundred feet. Outside the windows, howling snowlines slashed past like arrows. Visibility was nearly zero.

Jack sat deep in the cabin with his eyes closed.

In his mind, the intricate underground three-dimensional layout Tomb had left behind ran on a continuous loop — every branching corridor, every heavy blast door, every backup passage marked as a death trap, all of it precisely rebuilt in the depths of his consciousness.

His right fingertips tapped slowly on his knee, steady as a perfectly calibrated clock.

"Approaching the drop zone," the pilot's dry voice cut through the silence. "Countdown. Sixty seconds."

BOOM —

The rear cargo door ground open with a roar of pressurized air. Arctic blizzard tore into the cabin like a wild animal, and the moisture in the air crystallized into a thick white fog within seconds.

Jack opened his eyes. His pupils showed nothing — no excitement, no fear. He rose in one motion, snapping his bulletproof vest buckles tight with a practiced backhand. The silver Desert Eagle was tucked against his right outer thigh, spare magazines locked to his hip, the folding combat knife pressed flat against the inside of his boot.

"Comms check." Eli's voice came through the channel, clean and cold, no static at all.

"Akira, online." "Lawrence, online." "Seraphina, online." "Nolan, online." "Zack, online." "Zero, online."

"Thirty seconds," the pilot bellowed over the storm. "Ground winds at twenty-two meters per second. Visibility under six meters. Good... luck."

The warning lights at the tail snapped from blinding red to cold green.

"Go!"

Jack was the first to throw himself into the white void. The negative forty-five degree wind hit his faceplate like a steel blade, sharp enough to feel like cuts.

In free fall, he corrected his body position and forced his eyes through the wall of snow, looking down at the frozen wasteland below — a land locked in ice for hundreds of millions of years.

The parachute snapped open, yanking him hard. He worked the risers through the blizzard with precision, gliding like a hawk skimming the earth, then dropped hard onto the ice.

The moment his boots hit, he rolled forward to shed the impact, came up in one motion, and drew his knife in the same movement — cutting the chute lines clean and shoving the whole bundle deep into a crack in the ice that had no visible bottom.

Then, one by one, shadows dropped out of the storm.

Akira's landing knee-bend and roll were textbook smooth. Lawrence hit the permafrost like a falling wall, drawing a deep, teeth-aching creak from ice that had been frozen for a thousand years. Zack's landing was unsettlingly quiet — like a crow settling silently from the air. Seraphina came last, the massive Judgment anti-materiel sniper system case strapped to her back, and she touched down without her spine bending a single degree.

"All down." Akira dropped low and swept the darkness with an infrared scanner. "The three perimeter automated defense towers are all offline. Confirmed... Tomb's work."

Jack slowly raised his head.

At the far edge of the storm, a massive and brutal gray complex lay deep in the ice field like a steel beast sleeping underground. Most of the structure had been buried into the permafrost. What remained above the surface were a few isolated anti-aircraft towers and ventilation shafts as thick as the organs of some enormous creature.

"Move," Jack said quietly.

The team pulled tight in the howling snow. Lawrence pushed to the front like a moving armored wall. Akira and Nolan locked down the left and right flanks. Seraphina stayed protected in the center. Zack drifted around the outer edge like a ghost.

Jack's perception opened to full capacity.

In the frozen air, he picked up the low-frequency vibration of mechanical gears grinding several kilometers below the ice. And through the curtain of snow, he caught sight of a stealth drone swarm running a low patrol five hundred meters out.

"Drone. Ten o'clock. Thirty meters up." Jack's voice was flat.

Before he finished the sentence, Seraphina had already stopped.

The case hit the ice with a clean click and the black Judgment rifle was broken down, reassembled, and chambered in under two seconds. Her hands moved like the motion had been burned into her bones.

The crosshairs locked instantly onto the blurred shape in the frozen haze.

Pfft.

The suppressed shot was swallowed by the storm.

A sharp orange fireball burst open in midair. The shattered drone wreckage hit the ice and burned a scorched black pit into thousand-year-old permafrost.

From case open to target down: six point seven three seconds.

"Clear." Seraphina collapsed the rifle and melted back into formation.

The team surged toward the absolute blind spot Tomb had marked on the layout — a point beneath an ice-covered rock face.

Jack dropped to one knee, swept away the thick packed snow with a gloved hand, and uncovered a high-strength alloy door frame and an old electronic keypad glinting cold beneath.

His fingers moved quickly across the frost-stiffened keys, entering the code Tomb had left behind for this world.

A beep. Green light. The heavy metal door retracted inward and slid open.

Behind it, a narrow maintenance tunnel dropped away into darkness, thick with the smell of rotting concrete and seeping groundwater. The passage plunged straight down for two hundred feet, then opened abruptly at the bottom into the base's main corridor.

Pale fluorescent tubes flickered overhead. Every ten meters, a camera with infrared night vision rotated slowly, its indicator light blinking a deep red.

Akira crouched in a blind corner along the wall, reading a heat map on a tablet that showed the cameras' dead zones precisely marked.

"Fifteen meters ahead on the left, three-second window. Thirty meters on the right — use the ventilation duct to block the third camera's field of view."

"Lawrence. Move."

Lawrence's large frame moved with a speed that was genuinely unsettling. He pressed flat against the wall, breathing pulled in almost to nothing, not a single footfall making any sound, slipping through the gap within Akira's predicted three-second blind window.

The rest of the team followed in turn, passing through the corridor like a chain of ghosts.

At the end of the main passage, the view opened without warning. A massive three-way junction stretched out in front of them.

Left pointed to the laboratory wing. Right toward living quarters. Straight ahead, the direct route to the core server room — and sealing it off completely, a red laser grid criss-crossing the entire hallway wall to wall.

"High-frequency infrared grid," Seraphina said through her night vision. "Twenty-centimeter spacing. Dual pressure and spectral sensors. Blowing out a node triggers a facility-wide alarm."

Akira moved close to the edge of the grid and stared upward. "To kill the nodes, you have to cut the backup power first. Tomb marked it — there's an isolated breaker box in the ventilation duct thirty meters up."

"I've got it."

Zack's voice drifted from the back of the group, cold and flat.

He didn't wait for acknowledgment. He swung his MP5 behind his back, pushed off the ground, and drove his hands like iron hooks into the rivets on the outer wall of the duct above.

His movement was clean and almost beautiful. Not a single unnecessary sway. Completely clear of the laser detection zone.

A minute later, the breaker box above was pried open. A short, sharp sound came down — insulated cutters biting through cable.

The red laser grid below flickered violently twice and went dark.

Zack dropped from the height in silence. The soles of his boots touched the cold metal floor and left no echo at all.

"Cleared."

The team pushed deeper, tearing through the defenses layer by layer. Akira led from the front, working with something close to artistry, neutralizing three pressure mine arrays in three minutes.

While pulling the fuse from the last high-explosive mine, Akira turned almost imperceptibly toward Nolan, who was rigid with tension beside him, and spoke without any particular weight in his voice:

"Bomb disposal isn't luck. It's patience. Only people who are afraid get blown up. People who aren't afraid — they make it through."

Nolan's pupils contracted slightly. He gave one firm nod and carved those words into his memory.

At the end of the corridor, the final barrier appeared.

It was a nuclear-rated hydraulic blast door, its surface covered in dense sensor coils and heavy hydraulic locks. Set directly in the center of the door was a cold, hand-shaped biometric panel.

Marcus Kane stepped out slowly from the back of the group.

His face was paper-white and his breathing was heavy, but something absolute burned in his eyes. He pulled off the heavy tactical glove from his right hand and pressed his palm — the one carrying the Kane family genetic signature — hard against the cold biometric surface.

Hmmm —

Blue light surged and expanded. A beam traced across his palm lines, veins, and bone structure at high frequency.

IDENTITY CONFIRMED: MARCUS KANE. MAXIMUM CLEARANCE UNLOCKED.

Gears that had been silent for decades ground to life with a heavy roar. The blast door, weighing tens of tons, pushed open on both sides and revealed the absolute darkness behind it.

And within that darkness — countless hibernation pods, each one glowing with a faint, cold blue light, housing the super-soldiers sleeping inside.