Chapter 377: Racing Against Time

"I’ll go in myself!"

Without hesitating another second, Jason gritted his teeth and dove headfirst off the dropship.

As an enhanced operative with genetic modifications, his physical coordination, reaction time, and agility were far superior to regular personnel, making him the obvious candidate for the mission.

"The Commander went in himself!" Marcus shouted, his voice laced with panic. He waved his arm, leading a squad of heavily armed operators who plunged into the water after him with a series of heavy splashes.

Standard Federation power armor was exceptionally heavy. Even after generations of design refinements and weight-saving composites, a full combat suit still weighed around 100 kilograms.

The moment an operator hit the water, they would sink like a stone. To counter this, specialized inflatable buoyancy bladders were mounted to the rear of the armor.

The suit’s integrated computer dynamically adjusted internal air pressure to maintain neutral buoyancy, functioning much like the ballast tanks of a submarine.

Naturally, there was an operating depth limit; diving too deep risked catastrophic hull failure under the crushing hydrostatic pressure.

Twin underwater micro-thrusters mounted on the armor’s back flared to life, acting as compact water-jets that propelled Jason smoothly through the sea.

He darted toward the laboratory entrance like a massive, armored predator. The tactical nuclear strike had blown a ragged fissure through the outer bulkhead, leaving a jagged submerged corridor visible amidst the debris.

Suddenly, a fist-sized green sphere coalesced in the water beside his visor, startling him. Jason flinched, instinctively veering off course. Taking a closer look, he realized it was Elara rather than an active nanite marker, and he exhaled a long breath of relief.

He cursed under his breath, keeping his comms muted; right now, he didn’t dare upset her. She had a childish temper, and if she took offense, their only guide would vanish.

Elara appeared thrilled by the commotion, happily looping around Jason’s helmet.

Earlier, Jason had briefly considered asking Elara to dismantle the internal terminals and retrieve the data cores for him. But her cognitive faculties were still at the level of a toddler.

Complex, nuanced communication was painfully slow; it would take ten to fifteen minutes just to convey the basic instructions, and she completely lacked the fine motor control to manipulate delicate electronics.

Spending that much time negotiating would waste their only tactical window. He had no choice but to bite the bullet and handle the breach himself.

Reaching the jagged breach in the facility’s outer hull, Jason spotted several bright green algal clusters clinging to the fractured metal. Over the span of seconds, they had expanded from microscopic specks into clusters the size of rice grains.

These were the danger markers placed by Elara. Their distinct fluorescent hue made them impossible to miss, warning him of the deadly threat within: touch them, and you die.

Witnessing the terrifying reality of exponential replication firsthand sent a chill down his spine. He couldn’t afford to waste a single second. Without hesitating, he squeezed his armored frame through the opening.

Navigating a cramped underwater ruin in heavy power armor was agonizingly clumsy. The inflated buoyancy bladders on his back acted like thick, puffy layers of winter insulation, increasing his profile and severely restricting his mobility in tight corners.

Ahead of him, a Federation survey drone sat anchored against the wreckage, its high-intensity floodlights illuminating the murky interior and providing a welcome sense of clarity.

Noticing the tactical squad closing in behind him, Jason shouted over the encrypted team channel: "Hold your positions outside! In an environment infested with self-replicating nanites, having more boots on the ground only multiplies the vectors of failure! I will handle this alone!"

"Keep those searchlights trained through the breach!"

"Sir, wait—" an operator began, his tone conflicted.

"That is a direct order!"

Cutting the transmission, Jason swam deeper into the flooded facility without looking back.

Instantly, his precognitive survival instincts spiked violently. It felt as though he were walking along the edge of a bottomless cliff, where a single misstep meant complete obliteration.

The water was thick with floating silt and pulverized coral dust that had yet to settle. Jason’s breath rasped heavily inside his sealed helmet. Every nerve ending in his body was on high alert.

His focus narrowed to a razor’s edge. In his mind’s eye, the surrounding space was saturated with red flags of mortal danger. Yet, through that suffocating maze of lethal threats, an agonizingly narrow safe corridor remained, provided he navigated it with absolute perfection.

This raw, primal adrenaline...

It transported him back more than a century to his days as an elite special forces operative. It was a terrifying cocktail of lethal risk and absolute focus.

His mind ran at its physiological processing limit, his eyes tracking every movement of the floating particles, calculating fluid dynamics and the subtle shifts in the water’s current.

Because the thick armor insulated him from physical contact, he couldn’t rely on tactile sensations to gauge the currents, forcing him to be even more cautious with every micro-thrust.

The concentration of dissolved metal in this chamber is relatively low, and Elara is actively suppressing the perimeter. That must be dampening their replication rate. Yes, that has to be it...

The blast door is right ahead. Once I clear that threshold, the primary data consoles should be inside!

Just as he aligned his trajectory, an unseen thermal updraft surged through the corridor. Jason’s frame lurched to the side, narrowly clearing a floating green spore.

He tried to compensate, but the abrupt, violent maneuver churned the surrounding water. The bulky buoyancy bladders caught the backwash, and the suit’s neural-linked servomotors amplified his movements beyond what he intended. The resulting hydrodynamic displacement pushed far past his calculations.

A microscopic green speck, barely visible to the naked eye, brushed against the outer layer of his rear buoyancy pack.

In an instant, an iridescent green sphere flared into existence directly in front of his visor. It was Elara, her form fragmenting and reassembling in rapid, chaotic pulses. She was trying to warn him.

She didn’t need to. Jason’s survival instincts had already triggered a deafening alarm in his skull.

It felt like plunging into an icy, bottomless abyss.

Deadly. Absolute.

He immediately felt the structural failure begin. A sudden shudder ripped through his harness as the starboard bladder ruptured, venting a massive stream of pressurized gas with a violent hiss.

A second later, the suit’s automated diagnostic suite chimed, flashing an amber Level-2 integrity alert across his heads-up display.

Cold sweat drenched Jason’s brow. He knew better than anyone that the threat they were facing could not be quantified by a standard military diagnostic.

This wasn’t a minor system failure; it was a lethal gray-goo infection.

"Contamination confirmed!"

In that split second, hesitation meant death. Jason took one final, massive breath of scrubbed air, initiated the manual override sequence, and triggered the emergency release.

With a sharp mechanical thud, the explosive bolts sheared, ejecting him forward out of the suit.

Beneath the heavy power armor, he wore an advanced tactile bodysuit—a hermetically sealed, skin-tight emergency flight uniform. Standard armor was formidable, but when catastrophic damage occurred, this rapid-ejection system served as the pilot’s final line of defense.

Elara drifted over curiously. This was the first time she had ever seen a human without their bulky metallic shell. Childlike and naive, she hovered nearby, completely unable to comprehend why Jason had shed his shell.

Stripped of his suit, Jason lost his primary life support and the acoustic comms array.

Holding his breath, he spun around in the zero-gravity environment. A vibrant patch of green algae was already clinging to the torn fabric of the discarded buoyancy pack. The moment the nanites established contact with the pack’s underlying titanium frame, their growth rate exploded.

Within seconds, the cluster expanded from the size of a pea to the size of a clenched fist, accelerating with every microsecond!

Damn it! I got tagged anyway... Trying to dodge invisible microscopic machines in water is a nightmare!

I have no armor left. If a single nanite touches my bodysuit, I’m a dead man.

Jason held his breath, watching a stream of bubbles escape from the ruptured life-support tanks of the discarded armor. The churning water currents threatened to scatter the contaminated particulate in every direction.

Suppression markers were multiplying rapidly along the armor’s hull. Forcing himself to remain steady, Jason carefully maneuvered around the glowing green danger zones.

He quickly stripped the essential mission gear from the armor’s external utility hardpoints: a high-output tactical laser cutter, a helmet-mounted searchlight, and a compact magnetic rail-pistol.

These tools were designed with quick-release latches and came free instantly. The remaining heavy components had to be abandoned.

Inverting his discarded helmet, he positioned it over the venting life-support valve, capturing a pocket of trapped breathing gas like an improvised diving bell. Securing the makeshift reservoir, he kicked his legs and propelled himself through the shattered blast door into the main laboratory.

Every fraction of a second was now a matter of life and death.