Shaw had never been afraid of anything in her life. Now that she had a pile of clone bodies to swap into, what was there to worry about?
She brandished the broken shield, showing it off to the group.
All three pairs of eyes locked onto it. Forget Hobbs, who spent his downtime studying Bruce Lee and Nietzsche—even Bella, who'd been visibly inclined to retreat, recognized what she was looking at.
Only about a third of the original shield remained. Its surface was caked in moss, but faint traces were still visible: the figure of a crowned woman holding a trident.
They'd just been talking about Atlantis, and now an Atlantean artifact had materialized before their eyes. The four of them exchanged glances.
Even if Atlantis ruins and the Hollow Earth that Monarch had spent years pursuing were two entirely different things, Serizawa's enthusiasm flared to a fever pitch.
God have mercy—this professor of biology, paleobiology, and pattern symbology was turning into a full-blown adventurer.
Bella smacked her lips. She was already picturing her full-body statue displayed next to Plato's for posterity to admire. The history textbooks would read: Plato was the first to mention Atlantis; Isabella Swan discovered it. Both were great figures of human civilization.
Her homesickness—the urge to go home—faded immediately.
She stopped talking about turning back. Instead, she pressed Shaw for details: where exactly had she found the shield fragment?
"Over by the riverbed. South from where we're standing..."
They found the riverbed quickly. The fragment had most likely been carried there by the current. How many years it had lain on the bank was anyone's guess—the river had long since shifted course, leaving only traces of its former path.
"Found it!" This time it was Serizawa—with his wealth of theoretical knowledge—who spotted the route first.
The four of them followed a thorn-choked trail northward. When they emerged from the jungle, the view opened wide.
Bright light flooded the landscape. Rubble and towering vegetation layered over one another, but from their elevated vantage point, they could see it clearly: an ancient city occupying a distant clearing.
A city abandoned long, long ago.
"Hooooo-ahhhh!" Hobbs looked about ready to transform into a gorilla. The sudden discovery tore a roar from his chest.
Serizawa wore a smile of pure satisfaction. Two months of hardship, a journey that had twisted in directions he never anticipated—but at last, a worthy result. Even Bella was captivated. She grabbed Shaw by the arm and the two of them broke into a giddy, impromptu dance.
The ruins weren't large. The city was laid out in three concentric circles—small, medium, and large—and at its peak had probably housed a few hundred people at most.
It was unmistakably Atlantean in style, but this was no capital city.
Unless the legendary Atlantis had only ever consisted of a few hundred inhabitants.
"Let's get in there!" Serizawa charged ahead. Even Bella was excited—the city hadn't registered on her perception at all. Had some exotic technology been shielding it from her senses?
They climbed six broad steps and passed through an archway 12 meters (40 feet) high and 10 meters (33 feet) wide. The architecture didn't merely resemble ancient Greece—it was the other way around. Ancient Greek design resembled Atlantis. Grand halls, great chambers, Ionic columns—everywhere they looked.
The outermost ring appeared to be commoner residences. A cursory inspection turned up nothing of value.
"This city seems to have been..." Serizawa noticed something, but struggled to articulate it.
"...submerged by the ocean, then resurfaced, then... submerged again?" Bella's sensitivity to seawater was sharp, but this pattern of flooding and re-emergence left her uncertain. Precise instruments would be needed.
At the bridgehead stood two statues, each over 30 meters (100 feet) tall.
The one on the left depicted a mature man gripping a shield and trident, his beard thick, his musculature immense. The one on the right portrayed a younger man carrying a bow and arrow, equally sculpted.
The bridge itself was wide—comparable to a modern two-lane road. Faint straight lines carved into its center were still visible.
The bridge alone, together with the concentric-circle layout, told them everything: the Atlanteans had been a people obsessed with order and precision.
Atlantis? In Antarctica? The Atlanteans had built a city in Antarctica? Bella's knowledge of this particular history was thin. She wasn't even sure whether this was Marvel's Atlantis or something from an entirely different story.
"Hey, everyone—do you see that thing in the river channel over there? What is it?" Hobbs pointed toward a spot east of the inner ring while the others were studying architectural details and sculptural styles.
Shaw raised a hand to shade her eyes and squinted for a long moment before speaking, one word at a time: "Metallic construction. Has wings. Looks like... an aircraft? It's a plane."
The two of them rushed over. After a thorough examination, Shaw hurried back to Bella's side.
"Send me home!"
Bella looked at the distant "plane," then at Shaw. This was a little hard to parse...
Shaw's face was full of bewilderment. She could only manage it haltingly: "No... not a plane. It's... a submarine."
"A submarine?!" Bella was taken aback. A submarine shaped like that? It was absolutely not current human technology.
Serizawa saw no issue. A winged submarine? So what? If Atlanteans could build a civilization, what was strange about them having technology different from Earth's?
Bella's instinct caught what the professor missed. A submarine berthed inside the city meant one critical thing: someone might still be here.
"Can you tell when the submarine was last used? How long has it been sitting there?" she asked.
Shaw drew on what remained of her field experience, running a mental estimate. "Thirty to seventy years. Somewhere in between."
The submarine question remained unanswered when the four of them made another discovery in the great hall at the city's center: a sleek, high-tech stasis pod.
No one knew what was inside. Judging by its dimensions, it housed something humanoid—but there were no guarantees.
Click. A soft sound. Their footsteps seemed to have triggered some mechanism in the pod. The lid began to descend, and seawater surged out from within. Then a powerfully built man stepped out—a wild tangle of beard and hair fused together, his physique immense.
He studied the four of them. His expression shifted from bewilderment to steel-hard resolve.
He spoke a sentence in an unfamiliar language. None of them understood. He switched to English almost immediately.
"Who are you?"
Serizawa—who had more or less defaulted into the role of team leader—stepped forward. The muscular man erupted in fury.
"In the hall of a king, you will kneel!"
"What?" Serizawa froze.