Zachary's voice cracked through the comm as he spotted my movements on the monitor, finally betraying a hint of panic. "Carter, what are you doing with that cutting torch? Put it down!"

Even though he was an outsider to this line of work, he knew exactly what that cable meant.

I pressed the plasma cutter's nozzle firmly against the main load-bearing cable and spoke slowly and coldly through the comm, my voice cutting through 300 meters of icy seawater.

"Summer, Zachary... Did you forget that the lifeline of this old diving bell is all out here? Since you love the deep sea so much, and since you think livestreaming down here is so entertaining, why don't you stay down here forever and enjoy the scenery with me?"

The comms instantly erupted into chaos.

Summer's shrill scream tore through the speaker, her voice cracking from sheer terror. "Carter! Don't you dare! This is a live broadcast! Millions of people are watching! If you do anything crazy, you'll be a murderer! You'll go to prison!"

I let out a bitter laugh, feeling the increasingly violent spasms in my lungs. "Prison? You're already trying to kill me, and you think I'm afraid of prison time? In my current state, even if I took you both out, it would just be written off as an accident caused by deep-sea psychosis. That's the cause of death you already picked out for me, isn't it?"

I let out a bitter laugh, feeling the increasingly violent spasms in my lungs. "Carter, stop trying to scare us! The diving bell's glass is military-grade bulletproof, and that cheap torch of yours can't cut through it! Get away from there right now, or I'll kill you when I get back up!"

"Who said anything about cutting the glass?" I said as I stared through the porthole like I was looking at a couple of corpses, my eyes ice-cold.

"What I'm cutting is your lifeline: the cable!"

The instant I finished speaking, I slammed the cutting torch to maximum power without hesitation.

They both shouted, "No!"

"Carter! Honey! I was wrong! Please don't cut it! I'll open the door! I'll open it right now!" Summer finally realized things were spiraling out of control as she wailed through the comm, frantically pounding on the inner hatch.

She had forgotten that Zachary had welded the door shut with a blowtorch, and there was no way to pry it open in time.

Zachary broke down, too, screaming, "Stop! I don't want to be a director anymore! Carter, I'll give you all the money back! Just stop!"

Under the searing heat of the plasma flame, the load-bearing cable began to melt and snap rapidly.

A loud crack echoed, and the warm yellow lights inside the diving bell went out instantly as all the communication cables and oxygen lines were severed at once.

Accompanied by Summer's utterly desperate screams and Zachary's hysterical curses, the heavy diving bell, now stripped of both the mother ship's support and its buoyancy, plummeted rapidly into the pitch-black abyss of the trench below.

The static in my earpiece cut off abruptly, and the world fell into deathly silence.

The massive underwater current stirred by the plummeting diving bell violently flung me backward. I tumbled wildly through the freezing water, and my helmet slammed hard against a rock, leaving me dizzy and disoriented.

[Warning! Emergency Oxygen Remaining: 0 minutes 40 seconds!]

The piercing electronic voice screamed in my ear as the red warning lights inside my helmet flashed frantically.

Large black spots began spreading across my vision, and my limbs had grown so stiff from severe oxygen deprivation and the freezing deep-sea temperatures that they barely responded. My lungs felt like they were being carved up by countless dull knives, and every instinctive attempt to breathe only drew in foul, blood-tinged air.

'Am I going to die? No! I won't let that happen!'

I bit down hard on my tongue, using the searing pain to force myself into a moment of clarity. I had not seen those two bastards dragged to hell yet, and I had not taken back what was rightfully mine. There was no way I was dying at the bottom of the ocean like this!

With great difficulty, I reached into the innermost pocket of my dive suit. Inside was a strange, faintly glowing mineral I had accidentally discovered and collected from an underwater fissure while repairing the high-pressure pipeline earlier.

Based on years of professional experience, I knew it had to be the 'deep-sea core energy sample' that the national research team had been desperately searching for over the past decade.

I read the display.

[Oxygen Remaining: 0 minutes 20 seconds].

'Stay calm! Think about the terrain here!' I frantically searched through my memories of diving in this area hundreds of times in my past life.

I remembered that about 150 meters from the repair site, embedded in the wall of a trench, was an early-model international deep-sea geological probe abandoned ten years ago.

Although the probe had lost power, it had an independent emergency decompression chamber inside. If I could manually smash open the airlock, the residual chemical oxygen generators and sealed air inside would be enough to keep one person alive for several hours.

It would take only seconds on land to travel 150 meters, but at 300 meters below the surface and with my oxygen about to run out, it was an impossible chasm to cross.

Even so, I had no other choice.

I grabbed the still-active plasma cutting torch in my hand, cranked it to maximum power, and aimed it behind me.

The powerful plasma stream created enormous thrust through the water.

Using the cutting torch like a makeshift thruster, I rocketed forward like a torpedo through the pitch-black depths in a blind, desperate sprint. The water pressure crushed against my eyeballs, my eardrums buzzed violently, and my consciousness teetered on the edge of darkness.

[Oxygen Remaining: 0 minutes 05 seconds.]

[Oxygen Remaining: 0 minutes 01 seconds.]

The countdown hit zero, and I expelled the last breath from my chest. My lungs completely collapsed, and my vision plunged into total darkness. Just when I thought I was about to relive my past life and be swallowed by the deep sea, my left hand, still encased in its heavy metal glove, suddenly touched a cold metal shell covered in seaweed!

I actually found the probe!

Survival instinct unleashed superhuman strength within me. Using every last ounce of energy, I felt for the manual emergency airlock wheel on the probe's exterior, slammed it with all my might, then gripped the wheel tightly and used my full body weight to wrench it down.

The airlock let out a dull mechanical groan, and a crack appeared. I tumbled through the gap into the narrow decompression chamber and yanked the hatch shut behind me with my remaining strength.

When the probe's ancient emergency life-support system detected the pressure change, it miraculously activated. Heavy-duty pumps frantically drained seawater from the chamber, and the chemical oxygen panels on the walls cracked open, releasing stale oxygen that reeked of rust.

I collapsed onto the chamber floor, ripped off my mask, and gulped down air in greedy, desperate gasps. As I coughed violently, spitting up blood-tinged foam, I glanced at the black box on my helmet.

Seeing that its recording light was still blinking, a bone-chilling smile curved across my lips.

After resting for a full ten minutes and regaining some of my strength, I forced myself to crawl over to the probe's control panel and found a red button.

It was the highest-level 'SOS' distress beacon on the international emergency channel. Without hesitation, I pressed it.