Chapter 122 Hundred and twenty two
"Vent the core!" Dax’s agonizing roar echoed through the tiny, pressurized cabin of the Mantle-Pod.
My hands hovered over the terminal, my fingers slick with cold sweat. I was looking through the optical feeds at the massive, sickly green thermal vent pumping raw energy from the Earth's crust directly into the Deluge Spire. The Sovereign of Abyssal-One stood right beside it, his Singularity-Staff pressing the Vanguard into the iron floor with localized, crushing gravity.
"I can't just hack a hole in the earth, Dax!" I yelled back, my voice cracking as the pod's tungsten hull groaned under the failing Phase-Shield. "The Prime Forge drills are back on the surface! We only have the plasma turrets!"
Behind me, Leo let out a weak, wet cough, his head slumping against the crash-webbing. The sapphire light in his veins was flickering violently, turning a pale, dying blue. He was completely burning out. If the shield dropped, we would be compressed into atoms in a fraction of a second.
"Then use the turrets!" my father, Chen Wei, suddenly shouted over the comms from the Ark miles above us. He was tracking our telemetry through the Origin-Code link. "Mia! The Founders didn't build those pods to shoot plasma at enemies. They built them to inject superheated plasma directly into tectonic faults to cause eruptions!"
My eyes widened as the sheer, chaotic brilliance of the old-world science clicked.
"I'm not aiming at the Sovereign," I realized, my hands flying over the manual gunnery joysticks. "I'm aiming at the planet."
I gripped the controls, the iridescent blue Origin-Code surging from Leo through my deck and directly into the retrofitted turrets mounted on the nose of our sinking iron coffin.
"Dax! Get clear of the vent!" I screamed over the comms.
Out in the crushing dark, Dax didn't have the strength to walk. The gravity-wave from the Singularity-Staff was physically tearing his carbon-fiber suit apart. But he didn't need to walk. He hit the manual release on his magnetic boots, allowing the localized current of the deep sea to violently sweep him backward, sliding across the black-iron grating away from the towering deep-sea warlord.
"Firing injection sequence!" I bellowed.
I didn't pull the triggers for a short burst. I locked them down.
Two massive, sustained beams of pure, unrefined Origin-Code plasma erupted from the nose of the pod. They didn't strike the Sovereign. They bypassed him entirely, slamming directly into the glowing green thermal vent at the base of the Deluge Spire.
The reaction was instantaneous and apocalyptic.
The Mariana Trench didn't just boil; the tectonic plate fractured. The iridescent blue sub-ether violently collided with the raw, green thermal energy of the planet's mantle.
For a microsecond, the freezing black water of the abyss was illuminated by a blinding, catastrophic flash of white light.
Then, the crust blew wide open.
A localized volcanic eruption of superheated magma, steam, and corrupted Origin-Code exploded upward from the trench floor. The sheer kinetic and thermal force of the eruption hit the Sovereign of Abyssal-One dead center.
The towering deep-sea warlord didn't even have time to swing his Singularity-Staff. The localized black hole at the tip of his weapon was instantly overwhelmed by the raw, unfathomable power of the Earth itself tearing open. The Sovereign’s midnight-blue armor superheated, cracked, and was instantly vaporized in the thermal blast.
With the Sovereign dead, the crushing gravity-wave instantly dissipated.
"Move! Move! Move!" Captain Reyes screamed over the comms, scrambling to her feet as the crushing weight lifted off her shoulders.
The Vanguard didn't hesitate. They hauled themselves off the shaking iron causeway. Tank grabbed his logging chain, Jax hoisted his gear-axe, and they sprinted through the blinding, boiling water back toward the fifty-foot Phase-Shield protecting the pod.
"The Spire is collapsing!" Sienna yelled, looking back over her shoulder.
The massive, biomechanical Deluge Spire the machine designed to flood the world was leaning dangerously. The tectonic eruption had entirely shattered its foundation. With a deafening, metallic screech that tore through the water, the colossal tower began to topple, crushing thousands of paralyzed Abyssal-Strikers beneath its falling iron mass.
Dax was the last one through the Phase-Shield. He threw himself over the threshold, his suit smoking and covered in localized frost from the pressure differentials.
"Lock the hatch!" Dax roared, ripping his helmet off the moment he crossed the airlock threshold.
Tank slammed his massive hand onto the hydraulic release. The heavy tungsten door slid shut, locking with a pressurized, final clank.
"We're sealed!" Tank yelled, collapsing against the bulkhead, his chest heaving as he gasped for the stale, cramped air of the cabin.
But the danger wasn't over. The entire pod violently pitched upward, throwing us all against our crash-webbing.
"Ghost! What's our depth?!" Dax shouted, dragging himself up by the magnetic rails.
"We're not sinking anymore!" I yelled, staring at the rapidly spinning altimeter on my terminal. "The thermal eruption! It created a massive, superheated updraft! We're caught in the boiling water column!"
The Mantle-Pod was essentially a cork trapped in a deep-sea geyser. The raw force of the exploding mantle was violently pushing our ten-ton iron coffin straight up toward the surface at a terrifying speed.
< DEPTH: 25,000 FEET. ASCENT RATE: CRITICAL. >
"The pressure differential is dropping too fast!" my father’s panicked voice crackled from the Ark. "Mia! If you ascend at that speed, the pod will decompress! The tungsten will shatter like glass before you hit the surface!"
"I can't fire the downward thrusters! The updraft is too strong!" I frantically typed, trying to reroute power. "Leo! I need the shield to hold the pod together!"
I looked back.
Leo was completely unconscious. His head was lolled to the side, the sapphire veins on his neck entirely dark. He had given everything he had to block the Sovereign's gravity-wave. The battery was dead.
The iridescent blue Phase-Shield outside the pod flickered, sputtered, and died.
Instantly, the tungsten hull began to scream. Small, hairline fractures spider-webbed across the reinforced interior walls. The rapid decompression was literally tearing the metal apart.
"We're going to pop!" Jax yelled, bracing his massive arms against the buckling ceiling.
Dax didn't panic. He looked at me, then at the dead terminal.
"Mia," Dax said, his voice cutting through the terrifying screech of the tearing metal. "Back in Coldwater, when you stopped the Nullity command ship... you didn't use Leo."
"I used the Red-Queen's grid!" I yelled back. "I don't have a grid here! It's just me!"
"You have the Origin-Code in your blood," Dax said, stepping up right behind my chair. He reached down and grabbed my bare hand, lacing his calloused fingers through mine. "You don't need a battery. You are the Architect. You tell the metal what to do."
I looked at our joined hands. I felt the steady, unbroken rhythm of his pulse. He was grounding me, sharing the sheer, reckless willpower that defined the Speedrun King.
I closed my eyes. I didn't reach for an external power source. I reached inward.
I found the small, chaotic spark of sapphire light that had bonded with my DNA the night I first jacked into the Citadel's mainframe. I grabbed it, and I pushed it outward, flooding my own nervous system with the raw frequency of creation.
My eyes snapped open, glowing a blinding, incandescent blue.
I slammed my free hand flat against the trembling tungsten hull of the pod.
"FORMAT THIS!" I screamed.
I didn't project a shield outside the pod. I injected the Origin-Code directly into the physical matter of the hull itself. The thick, black tungsten instantly glowed with a brilliant, phasing blue light. I was temporarily converting the entire massive iron coffin into a sub-ether state, making it entirely immune to the physical laws of decompression and hydrostatic pressure.
"Hold on!" Dax bellowed, wrapping his free arm around the back of my chair to brace himself.
We rocketed upward through the Midnight Zone, bathed entirely in blue light.
< DEPTH: 10,000 FEET. >
< DEPTH: 5,000 FEET. >
The pod shot through the ocean like a phased bullet. The water boiled around us, the deep-sea geyser propelling us with the force of a tectonic bomb.
< DEPTH: ZERO. >
With a concussive, deafening roar, the Mantle-Pod breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
We launched a hundred feet into the air, flying entirely clear of the raging, boiling water. Gravity finally reasserted its dominance, and the heavy iron cylinder plummeted back down, hitting the ocean surface with a massive, splashing impact that threw us all violently against the webbing.
I ripped my hand from the hull, gasping for air as the Origin-Code faded from my veins. The blue light extinguished, returning the pod to solid, cold, dented tungsten.
We bobbed violently on the surface of the waves.
For a long, agonizing minute, the only sound in the cabin was the heavy, exhausted breathing of the Vanguard.
"Is everyone in one piece?" Dax coughed, leaning heavily against my chair.
"I think my ribs are bruised, and I'm never taking a bath again," Jax groaned from the floor, "but I'm alive."
"Look," Sienna whispered, unbuckling herself and pointing to the optical monitors.
I routed the exterior cameras to the screens.
We were floating just a mile off the coast of the mainland. In the distance, the massive, grounded durasteel sphere of Neo-Angeles sat safely in its crater.
But it was the sky that made us stare in awe.
The violent, bruised black storm clouds and the sickly green lightning of the Abyssal fleet's weaponized hurricane were rapidly dissolving. With the Deluge Spire destroyed and the Sovereign dead, the Marianas' control over the weather had broken.
Rays of pure, golden sunlight were breaking through the clouds, illuminating the churning, white-capped ocean and striking the gleaming white-and-gold hull of the Ark.
"The Deluge Protocol is offline," Reyes breathed, a weary, triumphant smile spreading across her scarred face. "We stopped the flood."
Dax looked at the sunlight hitting the water. He let out a long, slow exhale, the tension finally leaving his broad shoulders. He looked down at me, a fiercely proud smirk returning to his lips.
"Hell of a driving, Ghost," Dax said softly.
"You didn't do so bad yourself, Pres," I smiled, leaning my head back against the chair, utterly exhausted.
"Vanguard, do you copy? Mia! Steele!" my father's frantic voice suddenly burst over the restored comms channel, completely free of static.
"We copy, Chen," Dax answered, hitting the broadcast button. "The Mariana Trench has officially been canceled. Send a couple of heavy scav-crawlers to the shoreline. We're going to need a tow back to the Ark."
"Copy that, King! The Revers are already mobilizing!" Chen laughed, the relief palpable even through the speakers. "Welcome back to the surface!"
Dax turned to the team, looking at the battered, bruised, but unbroken faces of his pack.
"Rest up, Wolves," Dax commanded, the fire in his eyes settling into a steady, unyielding burn. "We just knocked out the deepest Ark on the board. The World Council knows exactly who we are now."
He looked out the optical feed at the horizon, where the sunlight was banishing the dark.
"The ocean is ours. Tomorrow, we start looking at the sky."
?