Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats. / Chapter 129 / 130

Chapter 129 - Breach to the Storm

The explosive charges on the pod’s docking clamps fired with a muffled *boom*.

For two agonizing seconds, the capsule hung suspended in the lightless, freezing abyss of the North Atlantic trench. Then, the quad solid-fuel ascent thrusters roared to life.

The pod shot toward the surface like a silver bullet fired from an underwater cannon.

Through the reinforced viewport, Naomi watched the dying embers of the geothermal station vanish into the black abyss. Then came the sheer terror of the ascent. Outside the thick quartz glass, the water pressure dropped at a terrifying rate, the black oceanic void transitioning through shades of ink, indigo, and finally murky gray.

"Ten thousand feet," Naomi called out over the screaming whine of the thrusters. "Eight thousand... five thousand... two thousand..."

The pod hit the turbulent surface currents of the North Atlantic like a brick wall. The capsule rolled violently, tossing them against their harnesses as it breached the surface, vaulting thirty feet into the roaring night air before crashing down onto the crest of a massive, black-water ocean wave.

Rain lashed against the viewport with the fury of a hurricane.

Naomi immediately unbuckled, throwing open the emergency communications hatch to peer out into the tempest. The cold, salted gale-force wind slammed into her face, whipping her dark hair across her eyes and clearing the toxic fumes of the submerged station from her lungs.

They were in the middle of a massive maritime storm. Swells of twenty feet tossed the small spherical capsule like a cork in a whirlpool.

"Where are we?" Julian shouted over the howl of the wind, pulling himself up beside her to scan the storm-swept horizon.

Naomi wiped the freezing rain from her eyes, squinting through the blackness toward the northeast.

Through the driving rain and the lightning that tore across the purple clouds, she saw it: a jagged, black tooth of granite rising out of the boiling sea, battered by the Atlantic waves. And perched atop that sheer cliff, like a gothic monstrosity of concrete and rusted iron, sat Fortress Dreadnought.

A brilliant beam of blue light was already shooting straight up into the stormy sky from the fortress's central communications tower, piercing the cloud deck like an artificial spear.