Chapter 114: Sinking of the British Flagship

The smell of boiling seawater, battery acid, and scorching copper filled the damp air four miles off the coast.

Tilted thirty degrees onto its starboard flank, the thirty-thousand-ton hull of the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious groaned like an ancient dying beast. The massive warship had avoided the initial tectonic surge that crushed the Vanguard, but its keel had run violently aground upon an obsidian basalt ridge dragged upward by Shadow Commander Thorne.

Steam hissed violently from the fractured cooling vents along the waterline. Across the shattered flight deck, three mangled reconnaissance helicopters hung over the edge by their tie-down chains, their rotor blades snapped like dried reeds.

Renan dropped from the low gray sky, landing softly on the upturned flight deck near the carrier’s island superstructure.

His dark woolen coat barely rustled in the cold gale. Beneath the soles of his boots, the three-inch steel armor plating shuddered, transmitting the desperate, frantic vibrations of auxiliary diesel pumps laboring deep within the flooded lower machinery compartments.

Beside him, Shadow Knight Arthur materialized from the gathering fog, his dark star-metal sabatons striking the nonskid deck with a heavy, hollow ring.

"The lower magazine remains pressurized, Sovereign," Arthur reported, pointing the tip of his silver claymore toward the forward lift well. "Before my descent, the Admiralty ordered forty Mark-Ten abyssal plasma charges moved to the auxiliary racks. They intended to use them to detonate the basalt shelf if the vanguard stalled."

"Let us make sure those charges do not go to waste," Renan replied quietly.

He walked toward the open hangar bay elevator. The steel cable drums had snapped under the impact, leaving a dark, gaping chasm sixty feet deep leading straight down into the carrier’s cavernous interior.

Renan did not wait for a maintenance ladder. He stepped off the edge, falling through the darkness in absolute silence before coming to a dead halt three inches above the oily bilge water pooling on the hangar deck.

The emergency amber lighting flickered intermittently along the bulkheads.

Dozens of young British technicians and damage control crewmen were knee-deep in freezing seawater, working frantically with hydraulic jacks to brace a buckled watertight door. When the shadow of Renan’s long coat fell across their worklights, the sound of wrenches dropping onto steel rang out in frantic succession.

A chief engineer, his face smudged with soot and grease, raised a heavy iron pry bar with trembling forearms.

"Keep away," the chief wheezed, his knuckles turning white around the rusted tool. "The compartment behind this bulkhead is flooded to the ceiling. If that hatch gives way, thirty thousand tons of ocean will pull everyone in this hangar straight into the trench."

Renan did not draw his void dagger. He did not summon the black dragon-fire of Ignis.

He simply took three calm strides forward, his violet pupils scanning the reinforced bulkhead. Behind the four-inch naval steel, his sensory domain detected forty cylindrical canisters of concentrated plasma gel, stacked neatly in reinforced brass cradles, protected from the encroaching seawater by emergency rubber seals.

"Your pumps are running on residual battery power, Chief," Renan said softly, his voice cutting through the hiss of escaping steam. "In four minutes, your generators will flood. You are bracing a door for an empire that has already written your death benefits."

The engineer’s jaw trembled, but he did not drop the bar. "We are sailors of the Royal Navy. We do not abandon ship until the order is logged."

A cold, heavy shadow fell over the engineer’s shoulders.

Shadow Knight Arthur stepped through the shattered companionway, ducking his crested helmet to clear the overhead pipe runs. The argent runes across his black star-metal breastplate cast sharp, pale geometric beams across the grimy faces of the engineering crew.

The chief engineer took half a step back, his boots slipping in the oily brine, the iron pry bar clattering uselessly into the water.

"Sir Arthur," the old sailor whispered, his voice cracking as tears cut clean lines through the soot on his cheeks. "They... they said over the radio that you fell at the shelf."

Arthur stood motionless, his argent eyes burning behind the narrow slit of his visor, reflecting the flickering emergency strobes.

"The knight who wore the crown fell, William," Arthur spoke, his voice carrying the deep, mournful echo of a tomb opened to the sea. "Only the duty remains. Drop your tools. The Sovereign offers you a choice that London denied you."

Arthur raised his left gauntlet, pointing toward the open hangar chasm leading up to the sky.

"The surface is clear," Arthur continued. "There are four intact rigid-hull inflatables on the port sponson. Take your apprentices and row west toward the neutral zone. If you stay to drown for the admirals in Whitehall, your souls will serve this trench instead."

The chief engineer looked from Arthur’s dark, towering form to Renan’s calm, unreadable face. The young technicians behind him were already weeping, their hands shaking so violently they could no longer hold their flashlights.

"Go," Renan said, not turning his gaze from the buckled magazine hatch. "Before the sea claims what belongs to me."

The chief swallowed hard, gave a slow, trembling salute toward Arthur’s dark armor, and turned to his men. Within sixty seconds, the splashing of their boots echoed up the emergency ladders as the last living crew abandoned the bowels of the Victorious.

Silence returned to the flooded hangar, save for the ominous groan of the ship’s twisting frame.

Renan placed his bare right palm against the center of the buckled watertight door.

[Monarch Authority: Kinetic Compression] [Target: Bulkhead Seal & Forty Mark-Ten Plasma Canisters]

The four-inch naval steel groaned under the sudden, suffocating application of gravitational pressure.

With a deafening shriek of shearing rivets, the massive door folded inward like parchment, peeling open to reveal the dry, secure ammunition vault beyond. The forty Mark-Ten plasma canisters, each six feet tall and glowing with unstable cerulean mana, rested securely within their magnetic dampening locks.

Renan did not order them loaded onto a barge.

He extended his Sovereign mana into the floorplates beneath his boots, connecting his consciousness directly to the colossal presence anchored forty fathoms below the hull.

"Thorne," Renan commanded through the abyssal link. "Consume."

RUMBLE!

The basalt ridge beneath the aircraft carrier fractured with the violence of an underwater volcanic eruption.

From the black depths of the Nero Trench, Shadow Commander Thorne rose, his massive stone-plated shoulders breaching the water alongside the carrier’s port quarter. The titan reached out with arms broader than highway bridges, driving his granite fingers directly through the carrier’s armored flight deck, locking the thirty-thousand-ton warship in an unbreakable embrace.

The ship did not capsize. It was dragged down.

With a horrifying, rolling roar that sent forty-foot waves crashing across the surrounding reefs, Thorne pulled the entire aircraft carrier down into the trench, submerging the hull beneath forty fathoms of black, freezing ocean.

At the bottom of the abyss, the shattered warship did not shatter upon impact.

Under the direction of Commodore Sterling and the four hundred shadow sailors manning the seafloor, the hull of the Victorious slammed into the existing network of forty-two sunken destroyers.

The forty Mark-Ten plasma canisters were instantly integrated into the central magazine network of the Iron Wall, their cerulean mana channeled through necrotic silver conduits directly into the eighty heavy kinetic cannons lining the upper bastions.

The iron wall of the seafloor expanded five miles outward, its submerged anchors biting deep into the continental shelf, turning the entire Eastern Strait into an impenetrable maritime fortress.

Renan stood on the surface of the calm, churning foam where the flagship had floated moments before, his boots resting weightlessly upon the water.

Beside him, Arthur lowered his silver claymore, his visor turning toward the south where the low maritime fog was beginning to glow with an eerie, unnatural emerald radiance.

Through the radio receiver at Renan’s lapel, Boss Victor’s voice tore through the static, taut with urgent tactical alarm.

"Sovereign! We have an emergency interception off the southern reef line! The Vatican auxiliary escorts didn’t retreat with the Americans! Their lead vessel just crossed the ten-mile perimeter, and their high inquisitors are deploying a purification barrier across our outer shallows!"