The central length of the heavy, iron chain connecting Rist's ankle became my focus. There was one shackle around his ankle, which had two links of chains off-shooting from it.
It was too heavy for a single man to swing, but with two wills, it transformed into a weapon.
…."The chain is reinforced with fragments!"…
At first I tried to break the chain using my own hex, but now I see that chain itself was of higher purity; there were definitely more fragments in it than any hex I had used. I propelled the chain outward, infusing every link with a controlled flow of the law of action. The chain whipped through the viscous water with impossible speed, clearing the silt and transforming from a length of dead iron into a snarling, metallic scythe.
It didn't swing toward Ramsey's torso; it swung toward his armored knee joint.
CRUNCH!
The impact was immense, the sound was a sharp, deep-sea thrum that reverberated through the pressure. The chain didn't penetrate, but the sudden force of the iron buckled the armored joint. Ramsey's giant form lurched sideways, the light beam momentarily dancing wildly.
"Again! His joints are his weak points! Strike the shoulder!" Rist commanded, his military training taking over the Law's application.
But we retreated, pulling the chain back. As it swung, I felt Rist use the recoil—a sudden, desperate surge of his own Law application—to crack the metal mooring point on his left ankle. He handed the part of the chain to me and had gained precious inches of leverage and mobility himself.
Ramsey recovered instantly, planting his clawed feet and stabilizing the suit.
"Admirable, boy. You've learned to value your life as currency."
The Colonel's Pistol
Ramsey charged, the two reinforced floats swinging open, ready to enclose and flatten us.
Rist's memory, shared in my mind, was focused on a piece of metal half-buried in the silt cloud we had kicked up: his crimson magnum I had tucked away!
"The gun," Rist's thought was frantic.
"I need my gun! Don't swing yet! Hold him!"
Ramsey was upon us, the floats closing rapidly.
They slammed shut just inches from Rist's head. The explosive pressure hammered the nonexistent air from our lungs. The silt exploded around us, momentarily blinding the chassis's floodlight.
In that fraction of a second, with the light gone and Ramsey reeling, Rist struck. He twisted his body, plunging his hand into the mud and clamping down on the cold steel of the pistol.
Ramsey's light reasserted itself, illuminating the scene: Rist, mud-slicked and shackled, pointing the muzzle of a waterlogged pistol directly at the chassis's faceplate.
I thought to myself that there was no way that thing could fire this deep in the water and with a bullet or so left at best.
Ramsey paused. "Ah, the relic? Colonel. That thing can't penetrate a pressurized depth field."
"Maybe not." Rist's voice was calm, utterly focused. "But I'll still try." He smirked, a sight I hadn't seen before.
He dug his hand into the silt and pulled up a handful of the seafloor, then shoved it into the cylinder.
Rist didn't pull the trigger; he infused it along with the rest of the weapon. He channeled every bit of the Law of Action—the guilt, the drive for redemption, the memory of the silent child—into the internal mechanism of the pistol. Those feelings became the propellant.
A soundless, localized kinetic burst erupted from the muzzle. The slug was hurled by nothing short of pure willpower, concentrating its energy on the visor where the chassis's main optical sensor was housed.
The General roared—a high-pitched screech of static over the sonic emitters as the lights on the chassis flickered wildly. The kinetic impact had blown out his central sensor, blinding the suit.
"You'll pay for that, Rist!" Ramsey bellowed, his voice distorted and full of savage rage.
"I already did, General!" Rist snarled, and the fused will shared the final order: "Run!"
With Ramsey momentarily blinded, we scrambled backward, and vanished back into the silt-choked blackness. The heavy chains clattered against the seafloor, sounding the retreat.
The silence was the most terrifying sound. After the sonic blast of Ramsey's floats and the warbling thud of Rist's propelled bullet, the water returned to a thick, oppressive quiet. But the chassis was still out there, its massive, armored form silent only because the acoustic sensors had taken over for the optical ones.
"He won't need sight to track us, bro." Rist's voice was a tremor of cold logic in my mind.
"Bro? Aw, you know you aren't as cold as I thought." I could tell his mood lightened.
"What?! Anyway, eyes up!"
"The chassis is using proximity sonar. Every tremor from these chains is screaming our position. We have less than sixty seconds before he triangulates the noise."
We moved with a desperate, half-swimming, half-crawling motion. The agonizing, law-driven breathing kept the crushing darkness at bay, but the effort was immense. The knowledge of Lightship 73 gave us purpose, and Rist's memory gave us direction.
"The maintenance manifold,"
Rist guided me through the black silt, his internal map of the continental shelf access points vivid in my thoughts.
"It runs power and life-support lines to the grid of outer lightships. It should be around here somewhere; we've been thrown so far around it's hard to tell."
"To make matters worse, we don't have any antennas, and we need to look for the structural seam—it's marked by a faint electromagnetic field."
"Fuck!"
Sensing Rist's frustration I pushed the limits of the Law, forcing my senses to perceive the unseen. If the sea turtles can do it, then I should be able to aswell. The thick water resisted for a couple seconds, but then a faint, almost imperceptible line—a barely detectable warp in the deep-sea magnetic flow—appeared on the edge of my vision.
"There!" I gasped internally, dragging Rist forward.
Suddenly, the silence was ripped apart. A wave of focused, high-frequency sonar washed over us. Ramsey wasn't just tracking us; he was actively scanning.
"He's found the range! Thirty seconds!"
We reached the seam. It was a massive, square metal bulkhead, covered in barnacles and rust, designed to be completely flush with the ocean floor. There was no handle, no visible entry point—just a smooth, impenetrable steel wall built to withstand millennia of pressure.
"It's not as hard as it looks; it's more like a semipermeable membrane," Rist explained rapidly.
"The General's forces used it during the expansion; it withstands pressure but also allows easy access if we are ever needed to fix something. In other words, it just needs to have the right force applied to it at the right spots. I don't have time to do that with these chains wrapped on me; I'll try to keep him at bay with my shots. In turn, you must use your power to replicate the force needed."
Ramsey's chassis was a ghost in the distance, its light still dim but its hulking steps growing closer. The fight was about to restart, and this time, there was no arena to collapse.
I pressed my palms against the cold, wet, metal-like texture of the bulkhead. I didn't have Rist's training, but I had his memory—the rhythmic pulse of his fingers on others in different locations, a complex beat of four short pulses followed by two long, separated by a distinct half-second pause.
I channeled the Law of Action into my fingertips, more precisely than before. I focused on the specific, minuscule frequency needed to trigger it.
Tap… Tap… Tap… Tap… Thud... Thud….
The energy pulsed out. For a terrifying second, nothing happened.
Then, with a low hydraulic WHOOSH that echoed in the deep, a section of the bulkhead—just wide enough for a person—began to sink inward, revealing a gaping, dark, sloping tunnel system.
Cutting the Anchor
Ramsey's suit broke through the silt cloud, its giant floats powering up, preparing to sweep the area.
"I won't let you use my back door, Colonel!" Ramsey shrieked through the emitter.
We didn't hesitate. I dragged Rist through the narrow bubble-like opening; it jiggled and bounced shut behind us. The tunnel was immediately drier, though the air was thick with old oil and moisture, smelling of stale machinery. We were out of the water but still not safe.
The tunnel was narrow and steeply sloped, leading downward into the infrastructure of the forgotten deep-sea power grid. Moving became nearly impossible; the heavy chains snagged on every pipe and valve, pulling us both off balance, but I couldn't let go of my newfound weapon just yet.
"We're trapped! We can't navigate this way!" I realized.
"We have to break the rest of the chain now!"
Ramsey's chassis was already struggling to squeeze through the outer door. We had seconds.
Rist's mind jolted. "The pistol. It's the only tool. The blast from it is focused and localized. I need to channel everything into a single point on the shackle."
I knelt, holding the heavy, taut chain steady with one hand. Rist, still bound at his left ankle, aimed his Law-infused pistol with a lucid look in his eyes.
The chain links were too thick. He aimed the pistol not at the chain but at the metal rivet holding the shackle to his ankle. He had to blow out the structural integrity without severing his foot.
Grabbing an old metal washer from off the damp floor, he crudely shoved it into the pistol.
"This is the only way out."
Rist's voice was a final, grim acknowledgment of the cost.
He fired…
The sound was a dull, contained THWUMP in the confined space. The blast, focused and powerful, disintegrated the rivet. A fragment of superheated metal shot across the tunnel, embedding itself in the steel wall with a sharp clink.
The chain fell.
Rist's shackle, mangled and cracked, dropped away from his ankle, clattering to the tunnel floor.
He was free…
Rist then stood on his own two feet for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. The physical burden was gone, but without the intense focus we had before, the Law's adaptive breathing mechanism immediately collapsed. I gasped, coughing up salt water and black mud, my lungs burning with the sudden return to reliance on normal air.
Rist, now fully mobile and armed with the pistol, moved instantly to the tunnel entrance, pushing me behind a massive junction box.
A steel door into the tunnel was slowly opening, struggling against the massive hydraulic chassis trying to force its way through. Ramsey, having abandoned the huge floats, was using the brute force of the suit's gauntlets to pry the entrance open.
CREAK. GROAN.
The gap widened. The single, low light of the chassis appeared in the breach. Ramsey's voice, now clearer and colder, issued a terrifying command.
"I have you now, Colonel. I no longer require your service; as of today you are decommissioned and obsolete."
"But before I send you off, just as you followed my order to take the seraphim, could you tell me the location of that little ghost you tried saving!?"
The voice was accompanied by a new, high-pitched whine from the suit. Rist slammed his back against the junction box, looking up at the rusted ceiling; his face paled under the grime.
"Within these tunnels he can track the slightest sound we make."
"There are only so many tunnel paths; it won't take long for him to realize the direction we're heading, and he will most definitely follow us all the way to Lightship 73."
"Or worse, send more of those assassins to intercept before we get there."
Ramsey's chassis finally ripped the tunnel entrance open with a sound of tortured metal and began to slide its enormous, heavy form down the narrow, dim hallway.