The Atlantic Trench was a weight that felt like the hand of a silent god pressing down on the Aethelgard. Inside the laboratory, the red emergency lights pulsed like a failing heart, casting long, distorted shadows against the banks of humming machinery. The air was thin, tasting of recycled oxygen and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. Alessandro remained motionless, his hand still fused to the Mirror Tank by the industrial resin and the dried salt of his own exertion. He had become a biological bridge, his nervous system stretched thin across the gap between the ship’s hull and the woman drifting in the saline abyss.
He wasn't seeing the lab anymore. Through the Anchor Protocol, his consciousness had been dragged into a grey, echoing void—the 19th Ledger’s hive mind. It was a graveyard
