The water in the lower corridors of Trench Zero was not just cold; it was predatory. It seeped through the thick leather of Rebecca's boots, biting into her calves with a freezing, numbing ache.
Every step sent ripples echoing through the dark, flooded hallway. Above them, the rhythmic, muffled thumps of Enoch's depth charges continued to batter the ocean floor, sending terrifying groans of stressed iron down the facility's skeletal framework.
Dawson moved through the knee-deep water without a single splash. The super-human glided with a predatory efficiency, his broadsword held at a low guard, his oxidized steel eyes cutting through the gloom. The faint green glow of the emergency lumens caught the edges of his silver armor.
"Primary oxygen lines in this sector are entirely severed," Dawson reported quietly, analyzing the environment without breaking his stride. "Toxicity levels from the exposed magma conduits are rising. The air is increasingly unbreathable."
"I can feel it," Rebecca coughed, pressing the back of her grease-stained hand against her mouth. Her stomach rolled violently again. The metallic tang of blood and sulfur was suffocating. "Keep moving. The central engineering vault is three bulkheads down."
They navigated the labyrinth of black iron, passing flooded mess halls and collapsed research laboratories. The bodies of Colstar engineers—those who hadn't made it to the barricades before the lower rings flooded—floated face-down in the freezing water, their white uniforms stained dark.
Dawson suddenly stopped, his armored arm shooting out to block Rebecca's path.
"Hold," he commanded, perfectly still.
Rebecca froze. "Zealots?"
"No," Dawson said, his eyes tracing the rusted iron walls. "A localized kinetic anomaly. The water current in the next corridor is artificially disrupted."
He reached down into the freezing water and picked up a heavy, rusted gear that had fallen from a ceiling pipe. With a flick of his wrist, he tossed it ten feet down the dark hallway.
The gear splashed into the water.
Instantly, the walls of the corridor erupted. Six heavy, automated runic harpoons shot from hidden alcoves, tearing through the air with terrifying speed and slamming into the exact spot where the gear had landed. The heavy steel cables attached to the harpoons pulled taut, ready to drag whatever they had impaled into a shredder.
Rebecca swallowed hard, her heart hammering against her ribs.
"A high-tension perimeter trap," Dawson analyzed clinically. "Sophisticated deployment. Lethal force."
"The zealots didn't build that," Rebecca breathed, her engineering mind recognizing the flawless mechanical timing of the trap. "That's defensive. The survivors set it to stop Enoch's divers from breaching the vault."
Dawson raised his broadsword, preparing to sever the heavy steel cables and clear the path through sheer force.
"Don't," Rebecca snapped, grabbing his wrist. "If you cut the tension lines, it might trigger a secondary pressure trap. Colstar engineers are paranoid. Let me."
She waded past him, pulling her heavy brass spanner and a small, glowing runic decoder from her canvas satchel. She traced the hidden groove in the wall where the harpoons had deployed, finding the primary alchemical relay box. Her fingers were numb from the cold, but her mechanical intellect was absolute. She bypassed the trigger mechanism, severing the runic flow without disturbing the kinetic tension.
"Clear," Rebecca exhaled, stepping back.
They bypassed the deadly corridor, finally arriving at a massive, circular blast door made of reinforced tungsten. It was completely sealed, surrounded by hastily welded scrap metal to reinforce the hinges.
"Thermal signatures detected inside," Dawson reported, pressing his gauntlet against the frozen metal. "Seven distinct organic entities. Heart rates are elevated. They are terrified."
Rebecca stepped up to the door. She didn't bother trying to hack the lock; the keypad was smashed beyond repair. Instead, she picked up a heavy piece of scrap iron and hammered it against the tungsten door in a very specific, rhythmic sequence.
Clang. Clang-clang. Clang.
It was the universal cadence of the Northern Mechanics' Guild. A signal that meant I am a builder, not a breaker.
The silence from the other side stretched for ten agonizing seconds.
Then, a harsh, static-laced voice crackled from a small, hidden speaker above the door. "State your guild affiliation. If you say the word 'God', I'm flooding this corridor."
"I am Rebecca Sapien, Queen of Cypris and Chief Mechanic of the Obsidian Vanguard," she answered, her voice steady and echoing in the damp hall. "I intercepted your SOS on the deep-sea frequency. Open the door before the ocean crushes us all."
Heavy mechanical latches ground together. The tungsten door hissed, a rush of stale, pressurized air blowing past them as it slid open.
Dawson stepped in first, completely ignoring the six makeshift runic rifles aimed directly at his chest.
The central engineering vault was a sprawling, dry, multi-tiered room filled with towering brass mainframes and drafting tables covered in frantic, chaotic blueprints. Huddled behind the tables were seven survivors. They were starving, their faces gaunt, their white uniforms filthy with grease and dried blood.
Standing at the front, holding a heavy arc-welder like a weapon, was an elderly man with a thick, soot-stained beard and a missing left eye.
"You aren't King Aiden's rescue fleet," the old man rasped, lowering the arc-welder slightly as he took in Dawson's terrifying silver armor and Rebecca's canvas overalls.
"Aiden is dead," Rebecca said bluntly, stepping out from behind Dawson. "Colstar has fallen. The zealots own the island, and they own the shipyards above us. You are the only things left alive in Trench Zero."
A collective, shuddering gasp rippled through the survivors. The old man's shoulders slumped, the last spark of hope dying in his remaining eye.
"I am Master Builder Vance," the old man said, his voice hollowing out. "We heard the explosions. We knew the perimeter was failing. But we couldn't let them have the core."
"The Leviathan," Rebecca said, looking past him at the massive, humming brass pillar in the dead center of the vault. "You said you have the blueprints."
"They aren't blueprints, Your Majesty," Vance sighed, leaning heavily against a drafting table. He gestured to the brass pillar. "King Aiden didn't trust paper. The Leviathan schematics are encoded directly into a condensed alchemical memory core housed inside that mainframe. It requires a synchronized, dual-cipher extraction. If you just rip it out, the core wipes itself clean. And if the zealots breach this room..."
"They won't know how to extract it safely," Rebecca finished, understanding the catastrophic variable. "They'll smash the mainframe, and the Leviathan will be lost forever."
THUMP.
A depth charge detonated directly above the engineering vault. The shockwave was so violent it threw two of the surviving engineers to the floor. The heavy tungsten blast door groaned, and a sharp, terrifying crack echoed from the reinforced glass ceiling high above the brass pillar.
A single drop of ocean water fell, hitting the iron grate floor.
"The structural integrity of the primary dome has reached critical failure," Dawson announced, his head tilting up. "Estimated time until total localized collapse: four minutes."
"Get your people ready to move, Vance," Rebecca ordered, dropping her satchel on the floor and sprinting toward the central brass pillar. "Dawson, secure the perimeter. If the door buckles, hold it."
"Acknowledged," Dawson said, stepping to the massive tungsten door and planting his magnetic boots.
Rebecca reached the mainframe. It was a terrifyingly complex piece of machinery, a mess of interlocking gears, glass vacuum tubes, and glowing blue runic conduits. Buried deep in the center, pulsing with a faint golden light, was the memory core.
"I need the first cipher, Vance!" Rebecca shouted, pulling her decoder and splicing it directly into the exposed runic wiring.
Vance hurried over, his hands shaking as he typed a frantic sequence into a brass terminal on the opposite side of the pillar. "The sequence is heavily encrypted. Aiden designed it so it would take two master engineers ten minutes to bypass the failsafes."
"We don't have ten minutes. We have three," Rebecca grit her teeth, her fingers flying over the delicate glass tubes.
The facility shuddered again. The crack in the ceiling widened. A steady, freezing stream of water began pouring into the vault, splashing directly onto the hot brass of the mainframe. Steam hissed violently into the air.
Rebecca ignored the water. She ignored the freezing cold. She ignored the sickening nausea twisting her pregnant stomach. She tunneled entirely into the mechanical logic of the machine, matching Vance's inputs, overriding the security locks one by one.
"Secondary firewall bypassed," Rebecca yelled over the roar of the collapsing facility. "Disengaging the physical latches!"
CRACK.
The sound was deafening. A massive steel support beam near the entrance of the vault suddenly sheared in half under the immense ocean pressure. The ceiling above the door began to cave in, a torrent of black water rushing into the room.
"The archway is collapsing," Dawson calculated.
If the ceiling fell, it would crush the survivors and block the only exit.
Dawson didn't hesitate. He dropped his broadsword. The super-human surged forward, positioning himself directly beneath the buckling steel support beam. He raised his arms, engaging the absolute maximum density of his venom-laced musculature, and caught the collapsing ceiling.
The heavy silver plates of his armor shrieked, the metal groaning as thousands of tons of crushing ocean pressure pressed down on his shoulders. Dawson's boots ground into the iron floor, indenting the metal beneath his feet.
"Parameters updated," Dawson reported, his voice a strained, mechanical grind, but completely devoid of panic. "I can sustain this load for exactly ninety seconds. Extract the core."
"Go, go, go!" Vance screamed, typing the final sequence.
The brass pillar hissed, venting a cloud of white steam. The heavy metal casing slid back, exposing the glowing golden cylinder.
Rebecca reached in and grabbed the core. It was searing hot, burning the palms of her hands, but she didn't let go. She yanked it free from the mainframe, shoving it securely into her canvas satchel.
"I have it!" Rebecca shouted. "Vance, get your people to the airlock!"
The survivors didn't need to be told twice. They scrambled over the drafting tables, splashing through the rapidly rising water, rushing past Dawson, who was acting as a living, silver pillar holding the ocean at bay.
Rebecca ran after them, clutching the satchel to her chest. She stopped just as she passed beneath the buckling steel beam.
"Dawson, let it go!" she commanded.
"Distance to minimum safe clearance is insufficient," Dawson strained, his oxidized steel eyes locked forward. "If I disengage now, the kinetic collapse will crush you."
"I said let it go!" Rebecca roared, grabbing the edge of his armored breastplate and hauling him backward with all her strength just as she dove into the flooded corridor.
Dawson released his hold.
The ocean did not hesitate. The entire ceiling of the engineering vault catastrophically caved in with the sound of a bomb detonating. A massive, crushing wall of black water, twisted steel, and shattered glass slammed down, completely obliterating the room they had just been standing in.
The concussive wave of the water threw Rebecca and Dawson down the corridor, tumbling them into the freezing, waist-deep floodwaters of the outer ring.
Rebecca broke the surface, gasping for air, her lungs burning from the toxic atmosphere. She dragged herself up, her hand instinctively going to her stomach, terrified of the impact, before checking the satchel. The core was still there.
Dawson rose from the water beside her, completely unharmed, simply retrieving his broadsword from where the current had swept it.
"The primary vault is destroyed," Dawson reported. "The facility's collapse is now exponential."
Vance and his six surviving engineers were huddled near the tungsten blast door, shivering violently in the dark.
"We have the blueprints," Rebecca breathed, her whole body shaking as she looked back at the collapsed ruin of the vault. The water level in their corridor was rising inches every second.
"Your Majesty," Vance said, his voice trembling as he pointed a shaking finger down the corridor that led back to their submersible.
Rebecca turned.
The automated runic harpoon trap she had carefully bypassed earlier had been violently triggered by the shockwave of the ceiling collapse. The heavy steel cables were crisscrossed through the narrow hallway like a deadly spiderweb, completely blocking their path back to the airlock.
And from the shadows on the other side of the razor-wire trap, the faint, glowing red eyes of Trench Zero's automated security golems flared to life. The facility's final lockdown protocol had been initiated by the breach.
They had the blueprints, but they were trapped in a sinking tomb with a wall of lethal steel standing between them and the surface.