The cold wasn't just physical; it was the cold of absolute, existential terror. But the cold was not the most immediate threat; the drowning was. However, the fusion of our wills, driven by the Law of Action, had pushed our bodies into a desperate, agonizing adaptation. The pain in my side was a searing, constant agony, but the law forced the remaining oxygen in my blood to function with superhuman efficiency while compelling our pores to draw minute amounts of filtered gas directly from the surrounding water. It was suffocating, metallic, and painful, but we were surviving.
Rist's panic—the primal, animal fear of the chains dragging him down into the depths, depths he had earned—flooded my mind, crushing the breath from my own lungs.
"You can't save me, kid! You'll drown! I deserve this!"
The thought wasn't a voice but a wave of pure, self-loathing intent slamming against my consciousness. I felt the sharp, desperate grip on my throat loosen, not because he actually believed he didn't need saving, but to pry himself from the constricting chains.
"No," my own will replied, small and fierce. "We share the debt now. We protect her."
The fusion wasn't a merger of identities but a coupling of intent. I didn't become Rist, the Colonel; I became the embodiment of Rist's single, defining choice: salvation.
His guilt—the sickening opulence, the crushed lives, the little girl's empty eyes—became my fuel.
My body, exhausted and bleeding, was suddenly overriding its limits, and I knew his was too.
We had no sight. The water was black, thick with silt, and utterly opaque.
We sensed the pressure, the depth, and the frantic movement of the water around us.
The chains, once Rist's prison, were now our anchor.
Contact
We were not alone. The movement was barely perceptible—a shift in the pressure a dozen feet below, moving upward with disciplined speed. It had too much malice for it to be Maro but too much control to be Ramsey.
The last assassin. The one who had dived.
He was a professional, likely equipped with closed-circuit rebreathers and goggles that were now useless in the dense silt cloud. He wasn't here to save us; he was relying on instinct and the sheer volume of water to hide his advance. His goal was to finish the job that Ramsey was momentarily prevented from doing.
"He's coming," Rist's mind whispered.
"His blade will reach us before we can react."
The assassin hit us like a torpedo—a sudden, violent jolt as a rigid, powerful body slammed into my wounded side. The pain was blinding, but our fusion held, the Law acting as a crude, internal tourniquet, forcing the blood vessels to constrict.
A thin, razor-sharp edge grazed my forearm; blood oozed and integrated with the surrounding murky waters.
The killer was operating on feel, his body perfectly angled for a silent, fatal slice.
I couldn't use my hands—they were desperately holding Rist, who was still wrestling with an animalistic panic.
"Move, damn it!"
My focus was on the heavy, wrought-iron cuff around Rist's left ankle. I got enough of it loose for me to force the chains to lurch violently sideways, a pure, sudden burst of torque in the water.
The chains, weighing maybe a quarter ton, swung out and struck the assassin high on the temple. The blow was solid, muffled by the water but effective. I felt the instant disorientation, the subtle loss of tension in his body.
"Gently now, I'm the one stuck to these things!"
The assassin recoiled, a cloud of frantic bubbles streaming past us—the clear sign of a killer losing control.
"Up! The surface!" Rist's will screamed, a desperate, final surge of energy.
"No. Down."
Ramsey expected us to run for the air, for the light, for the easy way. But Ramsey, too, was a Law user; he would follow that vector.
We dropped rapidly again, deeper into the crushing blackness of the silt-choked seafloor.
We didn't stop until we felt the thick, almost gelatinous texture of the mud beneath Rist's swinging chains. The ambient pressure was immense; the sound of the world above—the collapsing towers, Maro's desperate movements—was now completely gone. We were buried in silence.
We were safe from Ramsey, for a moment. But we were still shackled, injured, and sinking, relying solely on a fusion that could dissolve at any moment.
I felt Rist's panic finally subside, replaced by a quiet, horrific understanding.
"They are still here. He will find us. We have to move."
"I know," I thought, calming my mind to create a temporary moment of clarity within us.
We began to wade through the thick, viscous mud of the deep, relying on the Law to dampen the crunch of the chains as we moved away from the wreckage, toward the vast, empty dark. The fight for survival had just begun.