The ascent from thirty-five thousand meters beneath the ocean was a journey through the upright geography of a reborn world.
In conventional naval operations, bringing a fleet of surface vessels, submarines, and a three-hundred-meter hospital barge up from the hadal deep pit would have needed days of staged pressure drop stops. If a hull climbed too rapidly through the steep deep water pressure gradients, cold air gas dissolved in human and animal tissues would instantly boil into the bloodstream, causing fatal blood gas embolisms.
Yet the Pacific Fleet climbed at a breathtaking thirty-five knots.
Leading the convoy through the dark water was Echo.
The twenty-five-meter Celestial Tide-Serpent glided at the vanguard, his four feathery auroral wings unfurled to their full forty-foot span. Around his shimmering white-gold and midnight sapphire body, Echo projected his newly unlocked Diamond S-Rank ability: Dimensional Water-Fold.
Echo didn’t merely pull the water. He folded the metric map points of the ocean column into a nonstop, upward-flowing geodesic slipstream.
Inside this three-hundred-yard-wide space-folding hall, the external deep water pressure of three hundred tons of pressure was decoupled from the fleet’s hulls. The three warships, the cutter Trident-Prime, and the massive hospital barge Solace-04 rode within a smooth, weightless cushion of calm water. It climbed like an elevator rising through the depths of the Earth.
