Chapter 85 - The Abyssal Dive
"Never," Elena snarled.
In that split second of standoff, Elena didn't shoot Vance. She threw herself sideways toward the manual ballast emergency dump console on the starboard wall.
With a roar of maternal rage, she slammed her weapon's butt into the glass safety casing, shattering it, and yanked down the red dual-action lever marked *EMERGENCY NEGATIVE BUOYANCY.*
"Stop her!" Vance roared, his aristocratic calm shattering instantly.
The submarine’s lower floodgates groaned open. Hundreds of tons of freezing seawater violently rushed into the secondary auxiliary tanks. The *Montgomery Sovereign*, already weighed down by the parasite vessel docked to its hull, lost all positive buoyancy and entered a catastrophic, vertical dive into the abyss.
The sudden tilt of the deck threw everyone off their feet.
Vance’s mercenaries slipped on the slick, flooded iron deck, crashing into the torpedo bulkheads as the vessel tilted downward at a violent forty-five-degree angle. Vance himself was thrown against the central gantry, his gold-plated pistol skittering across the floor and sinking into the bilge water.
Elena used the momentum to slide along the angled wall, her boots finding traction on the exposed conduit pipes. She held Maya tightly against her torso, absorbing every shock with her own body.
Behind them, Victoria screamed as an unsecured maintenance crate broke loose, sliding down the incline like a battering ram, pinning her against the bulkhead with a sickening crunch of bone.
"Elena! You insane bitch!" Victoria shrieked over the deafening blare of the depth alarm. "We’re going to implode! The hull can't take twelve hundred meters!"
The digital depth gauge mounted on the bulkhead was spinning frantically: *600m... 750m... 900m... 1100m...*
The hull plates began to groan, a horrific, metallic shriek that sounded like a dying beast. Bolts began to pop from the ceiling, shooting across the corridor like high-caliber bullets. Water sprayed from pressurized seals in violent, needle-thin jets.
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Through the swirling water and darkness, Elena spotted the secondary personnel escape pod tucked beneath the torpedo racks—a reinforced titanium bathysphere designed for extreme-depth survival.
She scrambled across the sloping deck toward the pod's hatch, her fingers clawing for life.
