Chapter 78 - A Father’s Savage Vow
Sarah fired.
The plasma-tipped round struck the glass deck millimeters from Daniel’s hand, vaporizing the multi-layered transparent casing and showering him in molten shards.
Daniel scrambled across the floor, scooped up Claire’s dropped combat knife, and ducked behind the central dais just as two more rounds chewed through the heavy steel console.
"You think you're a savior, Daniel?!" Sarah's voice shrieked, completely stripped of its aristocratic polish. The sound of her high heels clicked aggressively across the glass plates. "You are an insect! A genetic accident that happened to carry the matching lock to the greatest power in human history! You were nothing before me! I gave you Claire! I gave you Lily! I gave you everything you ever loved!"
"You didn't give me a damn thing!" Daniel’s voice came from the left of the dais.
Sarah spun, firing three rapid shots into the shadows. The rounds struck an empty holographic projector, bursting it into a shower of sparks.
*CREAK.*
Sarah turned back toward the center—just as Daniel burst from beneath the shattered glass plating like a demon rising from hell.
He didn't shoot. He didn't hesitate. He closed the distance with terrifying velocity.
Sarah raised her weapon, but Daniel’s left hand clamped over the slide, ripping the gun from her grasp and snapping her trigger finger in the process. Sarah let out a sharp cry of pain, but before she could recover, Daniel’s right hand caught her by the throat, driving her backward into the main console with bone-shattering force.
The glass consoles behind her shattered. Alarms screamed in protest as warning lights bathed the chamber in blinding, rhythmic strobes of crimson.
"Daniel..." Sarah gasped, clawing at his iron grip with her manicured nails. "You... you can't kill me... the Spire is locked... to my biometric heartbeat! If I die... the Spire detonates... and the shockwave will vaporize this entire quadrant of the ocean!"
Daniel leaned in close, his face covered in grime, sweat, and blood, his eyes burning with an ancient, terrifying darkness that made Sarah’s breath catch in her throat.
"You think I care about the world, Sarah?" Daniel whispered, his voice dangerously calm. "I only care about my daughter. And you made her cry."
"Daddy, look out!" Lily’s scream pierced the chamber.
From the shattered ceiling above, a mechanical hoist snapped free. A six-hundred-pound steel stabilization arm plummeted straight toward Daniel.
Daniel reacted purely on instinct, shoving Sarah aside and throwing himself backward. The steel arm crashed into the deck with thunderous impact, cutting the chamber in two and severing the main power conduits to the central console.
Darkness plunged over the room, illuminated only by the pulsing crimson glow of the biological core beneath the floor.
Sarah scrambled to her feet in the shadows, her velvet dress torn, her face bleeding from glass cuts. She dragged herself toward the primary launch control terminal on the emergency console.
"If I cannot have the new world..." Sarah screamed, her voice cracking with insane frenzy, "...then none of us will see the sunrise!"
She slammed her bloody palm onto the emergency launch interface.
*DEEP IMPACT PROTOCOL INITIATED. GENESIS SPIRE OVERLOAD IN T-MINUS THREE MINUTES.*
A deep, tectonic roar vibrated through the dreadnought’s hull. Outside the panoramic windows, the massive Spire deep within the trench began to glow with a blinding, apocalyptic azure radiance. The ocean water around it was beginning to boil, massive bubbles of superheated steam erupting to the surface.
"You're too late, Daniel!" Sarah laughed hysterically, clutching her broken finger. "The Spire will detonate from within the fault line! A nine-point-nine earthquake, followed by a bio-tsunami that will wipe every coastal city off the map!"
Daniel looked at the countdown timer: **02:45... 02:44...**
Beside the emergency console lay Lily.
The three-year-old girl was slowly crawling toward the pulsing core. The crimson light in her eyes was no longer flashing—it was burning steadily, like two dying stars entering supernova.
"Lily! No!" Daniel shouted, lunging forward.
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"Daddy..." Lily turned to him, tears tracing clean paths through the soot on her cheeks. Her voice was steady, calm, and terrifyingly mature. "I can stop it. But you have to open the hatch."
***
