Chương 35: 16.Breathing Underwater, Counting Down 16-1

The door to Sublevel 7 slid open and the first thing that hit me was a smell I immediately hated. Not disinfectant. Not machine oil. And not Karl's signature brand of "industrial violence hammered into metal." Damp. Faint, but real enough to crawl under your skin. Like something that had no business existing on this miserable planet had been forcibly relocated underground, sealed behind steel panels and pressure doors, and left to slowly ferment.

The moisture carried traces of salt and chemicals, plus something else—cold and faintly organic. Like something that had soaked too long in deep water and was finally remembering how to surface. I stopped in the doorway and read the wall placard. EXTREME ENVIRONMENT OPERATIONS ZONE / DEEP-PRESSURE SIMULATION BAY COMPLEX Perfect. The Federal system had apparently decided to destroy my faith in existence via an entirely new method today. The duty NCO escorting me slotted his ID tag into the side panel.

The second inner lock gave a heavy clunk. He didn't go in—just stepped aside to clear the path.

"Colonel Renard is waiting inside." I nodded, took two steps forward, then couldn't help turning back.

"Quick question—will today's session require writing a will?" The NCO looked at me, expression completely blank.

"If required, Colonel Renard will notify you in advance." … Beautiful response. Zero comfort value. Zero sense of humor. I was starting to appreciate the service culture in this sector. I walked in. The space was massive—ceiling considerably higher than standard training areas, with pressure conduits running overhead in absurd diameters, condensation beading along the steel beams. The lighting was cold, reflecting off the metal floor with a brightness that belonged equally to an operating theater and a morgue.

Further in stood a colossal cylindrical simulation chamber. Dark grey casing, layered pressure seals. It looked like a deep-sea coffin designed specifically for containing people. The transparent observation window on the side was dark—nothing visible inside. Below the chamber, thick pressure lines and circulation conduits hummed at a low frequency, like some large organism breathing in its sleep. Then I saw Renard.

He stood in front of the chamber wearing dark operational fatigues under a Federal Environmental Operations Officer's long coat. His skin was unhealthily pale—not Mira's kind of cold, but the pallor of someone who hadn't seen real sunlight in years. Faint, irregular old scars marked his neck and the backs of his hands, like something adhesive from the depths had touched him, wrapped around him, left its marks. His eyes were very light. Light enough that at first glance you could almost mistake them for empty.

If Karl was a walking industrial accident and Mira was a precise, venomous ballistic disaster, then Renard felt like— A dead man who'd learned to breathe again and come back to teach. I came to attention and saluted.

"Private First Class Hoshino Shimo, reporting." Renard looked at me. No sizing up. No assessment. More like confirming: if I put this one in the water, will she float back up too fast.

"Hoshino." His voice was low—not rough, but flat in a way that suggested prolonged soaking in cold water.

"You did well in tactical analysis yesterday." I blinked. Huh. Word travels fast around here. Is this a training facility or a premium gossip farm?

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"That sounds like today is going to be considerably worse."

"It will be," he said. …Good. I appreciate this kind of time-efficient honesty. Renard skipped any preamble and turned toward the equipment rack beside the chamber.

"Suit up." The rack held a light deep-pressure operations suit—not a fully sealed heavy dive rig, but a layered exoskeleton built for mobility. Pressure compensation plates at shoulders, chest, and knees. Compact circulation module on the back. Low-profile half-mask rebreather. Beside it: magnetic anchors, cutting line, demonstration plastique blocks, and several slender timed breaching pins that looked like oversized needle cases designed by someone with a very specific sense of menace.

As I started suiting up, I couldn't help asking:"Sir, can I confirm something first?" The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Ask."

"Is today's session going to involve putting me somewhere very dark, very cold, very wet, and very inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old?" Renard fastened the pressure strap on my forearm with clean, efficient movements. His tone didn't shift.

"Not putting." He glanced at me.

"Delivering." … Thank you. Very precise word choice. Are you planning to include a ribbon when I'm dead? Once I was suited up, he led me to the briefing area beside the chamber. The wall lit up, projecting a three-dimensional model of an underwater facility. It looked like a small forward supply station, half-buried in deep-sea floor or liquid methane lakebed—sensor arrays, double-layer pressure hull, power wells, communications mast, and several transfer conduits running outward.

I stared at the model for a few seconds.

"This what we're blowing up today?" Renard stood in front of the projection with a slender pointer, not answering immediately.

"Behind-the-lines sabotage," he said.

"Most recruits only remember the last two words." The pointer touched the central power well.

"They see a power well, they want to blow it." Moved to the main hull section.

"They see the main body, they want to blow it." Moved to the communications mast.

"They see a mast, they want to blow it." He lowered the pointer and looked at me.

"And you?" Honestly, my first instinct had also been the power well. Natural. Intuitive. Exactly what a protagonist does in movies. But if Renard was asking, that answer was probably about as smart as walking around with PLEASE HIT ME tattooed on my forehead. I forced myself to look longer. The power well was obvious. So was the main hull.

What wasn't obvious were the pressure-balance conduits in the facility's lower section, the environmental control hub, and the auxiliary pump cluster connected to the side compartments.

"…Depends on the objective," I said. Renard didn't nod. Didn't shake his head.

"Explain." I pointed to the projection.

"If the goal is just destruction, hitting the main power well is fastest."

"But if the goal is to prevent the people inside from responding in time—or from containing the damage—then you don't hit the most visible target first." I indicated the lower lateral section.

"Here. Pressure-balance manifold. Here, auxiliary pump cluster. And this environmental exchange hub."

"Reasoning," Renard said evenly.

"Because the moment the main power well blows, everyone knows they're under attack," I said.

"Alarms sound, compartment sealing procedures initiate, backup teams deploy. The whole facility enters we still have a chance to save this mode." I paused, studying the model.

"But if you compromise pressure balance and environmental control first, early on it just looks like equipment failure. People try to repair before they think about fighting. By the time they realize it's not a malfunction, their internal rhythm is already broken." Renard watched me, eyes still that same pale flat.

"Continue." I didn't know if it was residual effects from yesterday's tactical class or just too many days of getting beaten into new ways of thinking—but looking at that facility cross-section, I wasn't asking what looks impressive anymore. I was asking what's most insidious.

"If you wanted to be really ugly about it," I said, "you don't touch the main structure first. Cut communications, then hit the pump systems. Let sections slowly flood or depressurize, force the duty teams to scatter. While they're running damage control, patching, trying to diagnose what's failing—that's when you deliver the second strike." Something moved in Renard's expression. Not his face. His eyes. Like something that had been lying motionless on the seafloor had turned slightly to regard me.

"What's the second strike?" I looked at the projection and answered faster than I expected.

"Escape routes," I said.

"Or backup power." Renard nodded. Barely. But real.

"Good," he said.

"First thing you learn today: sabotage isn't about making things explode." He reduced the projection until the entire facility hung in the air like a dissected heart.

"It's about making a system lose order at the exact moment it most wants to maintain it." Something went cold at the back of my neck when that landed. Because it didn't sound like a lesson in demolitions. It sounded like a lesson in how to kill a world. Renard raised the pointer again, touching several locations in sequence.

"Blowing the power well is attack."

"Cutting communications is isolation."

"Breaking pressure balance makes the space betray the people inside it."

"Compromising backup systems makes procedures betray them."

"Sealing escape routes makes hope betray them." He turned his head toward me.

"By the end, the explosion is just notification." …Fuck. Looking at that expressionless face, I suddenly found Karl's fists downright humane by comparison.

"Sir," I said, with complete sincerity, "are you aware that when you talk like this, you sound exactly like some kind of highly educated deep-sea malevolent entity?" Renard looked at me for one second.

"That means you're paying attention."

"No, it means I'm starting to worry about Federal instructor recruitment standards."

"You're too late to worry about that." … Fair point. Next, he led me into the simulation chamber. The door closing wasn't a bang. It was the deep, dense thud of heavy metal engaging with heavy metal—the kind of sound that meant something permanent. The moment it sealed, the outside world was simply gone. Interior lighting was minimal—guide strips running along floor and walls. In the center, a semi-open operations platform. Three switchable pressure compartments along the sides.

At the far end, a massive liquid simulation pool, walls made of reinforced transparent material, the water inside unnaturally black—like someone had poured night itself in there by the barrel. Standing just inside the door, I had a genuine moment where I wanted to turn around and leave. Not because of the water. Because the silence in here felt like something that swallowed people. Renard moved to the control console, voice steady.

"I'm not teaching you to blow things up today." I blinked.

"Sorry?" He looked at me.

"Today I'm teaching you not to rush to blow things up." … That was somehow more alarming than today we're blowing things up. Renard entered a sequence on the terminal. A section of chamber wall lit up with a mission brief: Objective: Enemy frontline underwater communications / supply transfer station Conditions: Single-person infiltration, communications restricted, oxygen allocation 27 minutes Mission: Render target non-operational within 90 minutes. Failure must appear as internal accident for minimum 30 minutes.

Reading through it, my first reaction wasn't this is too hard. It was: This isn't a demolitions class. This was—"This is a framing class," I said before I could stop myself. Renard looked at me.

"Good," he said evenly.

"Second thing you learn today: truly valuable destruction isn't loud." He brought up the facility's internal schematic on the far side of the pool.

"It's making the enemy not know when they started dying." I couldn't help drawing a breath. The content of this class was disgusting in the most refined possible way. Renard began distributing tools. Three low-yield breaching pins. One set of conduit adhesive cutters. One signal-delay patch. One micro-interference core disguised as a pressure sensor malfunction. Looking at everything laid out on that table, I felt all my previous concepts of demolitions expert quietly collapse.

Apparently the high-end version didn't involve spectacle. No walls of fire. No walking away from explosions in slow motion. You left tiny, precise errors inside the enemy's infrastructure and walked out quietly. Then you let them do the rest—compartment sealing procedures, misdiagnosis, failed repairs, delayed responses—walking their own facility into its grave one step at a time. Renard handed me the first breaching pin.

"The objective isn't performance," he said.

"The objective is for them to die still thinking they had a chance to fix it." …Right. This class had officially graduated from dangerous to source of lasting psychological damage. The moment practical work began, chamber lighting dropped another level.