Chapter 93 - The Abyssal Leviathan Awakes
"Victoria, can you access the reservoir flood-gates?" I shouted into the comms, bracing Richard against my shoulder as the rising water threatened to sweep him away.
*"I can't override the primary code from here,"* she gasped, coughing violently. *"Augustus has the sovereign terminal locked down. But Julian... the emergency ballast pumps have a manual mechanical release. It’s located directly beneath the turbine intake platform in your sector."*
"Julian! Look at me!" Richard wheezed, his face ghostly pale in the cobalt emergency lighting. He thrust something into my tactical vest pocket—a heavy, brass-encased cylinder stamped with Arthur's initials. "Arthur gave me this... on my wedding day. I thought it was an antique chronometer. It’s not. It’s an acoustic resonator. It disrupts mechanical servos."
"Why didn't you use this earlier?" I demanded.
"Because... because I was terrified of what was sleeping down here," Richard cried, tears freezing on his eyelashes. "Arthur told me if Augustus ever woke up, the human world wouldn't survive the winter. The syndicate... the money... it was all bait to keep the world's most dangerous minds looking in the wrong direction while Augustus built his war machine."
A sudden, deafening shriek of tearing metal echoed from the abyss outside the station.
Through the thick quartz viewports lining the eastern wall, the black ocean outside began to glow with a sickly, bio-luminescent emerald hue. A colossal silhouette, easily five hundred feet in length, detached from the deep-sea volcanic trench below the station.
It wasn't a biological creature. It was an abyssal dreadnought—a submersible behemoth armored in non-reflective obsidian plating, powered by a geothermal nuclear core. *The Archangel.*
"He isn't trying to escape," I realized with mounting horror. "He's launching the platform."
From the corner of the room, Eleanor lunged forward through the water, her broken hand trailing blood, her other arm swinging a piece of jagged steel pipe straight toward my head.
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"Give me that cylinder!" she screamed, her eyes completely crazed. "If they see I have the key, they'll let me on board! Give it to me, Julian! You owe me your life!"
***
