Chapter 104: The Iron Wall of the Seafloor

The churn of the freezing sea smelled of scorched grease, copper, and boiling salt.

Where the proud forward battery of the HMS Vanguard had aimed its heavy turrets toward the sovereign coast, only jagged, black iron ribs remained above the surface. The four-thousand-ton hull was sliding backward into the open maw of the Nero Trench, venting plumes of trapped air that burst through the foaming water in rhythmic, muffled gasps.

Renan stood on a tilted slab of the destroyer’s torn forecastle, his hands resting quietly in his coat pockets.

Beneath his boots, the slick steel deck groaned under the shifting ballast. Surrounding the sinking wreckage, hundreds of sailors and naval officers were thrashing in their life vests, their skin turning gray in the sub-zero brine. None of them shouted for help. The sheer kinetic vacuum left by Renan’s descent had ruptured the eardrums of every crewman within a hundred yards, leaving them trapped in a silent, freezing hell.

Renan looked down at the dark water pooling around his ankles.

"Victor," Renan spoke softly into the small acoustic receiver clipped to his collar.

A burst of sharp static hissed through the link before Boss Victor’s gravelly voice cut through from Coastal Bunker Alpha. "Reading you clear, Sovereign. Coastal radar shows the Vanguard’s emergency distress transponder went dead forty seconds ago. The Geneva main frequency is screaming with fleet-wide red alerts. The Seventh Carrier Fleet, commanded by the American flagship USS Titan and the British carrier HMS Victorious, just broke their cruising formation eighty miles out. They are vectoring toward your coordinates at full flank speed."

"How long until their lead strike fighters enter visual range?"

"Twelve minutes at current velocity," Victor replied, the rasp of a lighter flicking audible over the radio. "They’re launching fifty Class-S interceptors. And sovereign... satellite telemetry picked up an anomalous energy signature aboard the HMS Victorious. An ancient holy relic resonance. Sir Arthur Pendelton has taken the flight deck."

Renan did not shift his stance. A cold, faint breath escaped his lips, dissolving into the freezing maritime fog.

"Twelve minutes is plenty of time to build a dock," Renan said.

He closed the comm-link and raised his right hand toward the drowning sailors and the sinking wreckage of the three warships.

The deep violet mana within his core pulsed, releasing a dark, viscous wave of Sovereign miasma that seeped across the surface of the sea like spilled crude oil. The black fluid did not disperse with the ocean swell. It sank straight down, wrapping around the limbs, chests, and faces of the dying crewmen.

[Absolute Extraction System Activated] [Targets Locked: 420 Royal Naval Combatants & Technical Specialists] [Commencing Selective Soul Binding & Knowledge Inscription...]

The screaming in the water died instantly.

The drowning men did not thrash. Their eyes rolled back, pupils clouding over into milky white before igniting with sharp, piercing embers of deep violet flame. The water around them turned pitch black as midnight-steel diving armor synthesized around their flesh, sealing their lungs from the pressure of the sea and binding their loyalty permanently to the abyssal crown.

From the shattered bridge of the sinking Vanguard, a tall, shadowy figure pulled itself upright through the buckled viewport.

Commodore Sterling’s shadow stood upon the tilted hull, clad in a long, regal officer’s greatcoat woven from pure necrotic silk. His spectral eyes burned cold and steady as he drew his dark ceremonial sabre and dropped onto one knee before Renan, his blade resting flat across the iron deck.

"My Sovereign," the shadow commodore spoke, his voice carrying the deep, hollow resonance of a voice echoing through a sunken brass pipe. "The fleet awaits your deployment."

Renan looked down at the newly raised naval commander. "Sterling. What lies at the bottom of this trench?"

"Decades of military arrogance, Sovereign," Sterling answered without hesitation, his spectral hand pointing downward into the pitch-black abyss beneath their boots. "During the First Rift War thirty years ago, the Allied Coalition lost forty-two heavy cruisers, transport ships, and sub-surface mining vessels in this canyon. The Association declared the trench a total loss and sealed the maritime graveyard with anti-scavenger runes."

"Then let us break their seal," Renan whispered.

He turned toward the open sea and extended both arms toward the ocean bed.

[Skill Activated: Monarch’s Tectonic Resurfacing] [Target: 42 Sunken Maritime Graveyard Vessels & Nero Trench Bedrock] [Commanding Entity: Shadow Commander Thorne]

RUUUUMBLE!

The tectonic plates fifty fathoms beneath the water shrieked as if an iron mountain were being split down its spine.

A three-mile stretch of the ocean surface between the coast and the international boundary line began to rise, not as a fluid wave, but as a solid, ascending shelf of stone and rusted metal.

Massive, waterlogged hulls from forgotten wars, their titanium skeletons encrusted with black barnacles, deep-sea corals, and dead mana-mines, tore free from the mud. Lifting the entire submerged armada on his gargantuan, stone-plated back was Shadow Commander Thorne, his ten-foot frame roaring with the seismic force of an awakened earth titan.

The water cascaded off the rising wrecks in roaring, hundred-foot waterfalls.

The forty-two sunken warships did not simply float; they were slammed together by Thorne’s crushing gravitational grip, their cracked hulls fusing with the sharp obsidian bedrock torn from the trench walls. Iron girders bent, twisted, and locked into place like the teeth of a colossal bear trap.

Within three minutes, a three-mile-long, eighty-foot-tall floating fortress of solid iron, ancient armor plates, and jagged basalt rock locked itself permanently across the mouth of the Eastern Strait.

The four hundred newly extracted shadow sailors scrambled across the rusted decks of the barrier, manning ancient heavy kinetic turrets and retrofitting them with pure, volatile Sovereign mana. Automated mana-torpedo bays that had slept in the dark for three decades clanked open with heavy metallic groans, their firing tubes glowing with dark violet energy.

Shadow General Ignis leaped from the foam, landing heavily atop the central citadel of the iron barrier. The eight-foot titan drove its broadsword into the deckplates, sending veins of black dragon-fire snaking across the entire floating fortress, burning away the seaweed and locking the steel together with fused slag.

Renan stepped onto the highest parapet of the iron wall, his coat fluttering against the gale.

The freezing fog over the horizon was suddenly torn open by a blinding spear of golden light.

High in the western sky, eighty miles away, the cloud cover burned away as if scorched by a miniature sun. Flying at the head of fifty screaming supersonic fighter jets, a single man stood on a platform of pure, radiant silver mana, gliding through the stratosphere with the absolute speed of a meteor.

In his right hand, the man held an eight-foot broadsword forged from polished star-metal, its fuller engraved with the ancient crest of the British Sovereign Court. The blade radiated an SSS-Rank holy aura so pure, so violent, that the seawater ten miles ahead of his flight path began to evaporate into white mist.

Sir Arthur Pendelton had arrived.

The World-Class Hunter looked down at the three-mile iron barricade rising from the ocean, his voice echoing across the heavens like the trumpet of an archangel:

"Renan! I am the First Knight of the Silver Round! In the name of the Crown and the Geneva Council, I order your abominations to return to the dirt!"

Renan looked up at the descending golden light, his purple pupils narrowing into cold, predatory slits as his lips curved into a sharp, unyielding smile.

"Sterling," Renan commanded softly, without taking his eyes off the falling knight.

"Sovereign?"

"Warm the guns," Renan whispered. "We have a knight to unseat."