The alarm was a shrill, piercing background noise. The floor beneath his feet shook violently, while the metal structure groaned, twisted, and fractured with a teeth-grinding screech.
Icy seawater, reeking of engine oil and rusted metal, surged in from all directions in an instant!
Cold metal sank its fangs deep into his thigh and waist. The excruciating pain made his vision black out, and warm blood immediately spread through the icy seawater.
"My life ends here!"
Despair seeped into his marrow like the freezing waters of this lightless deep sea.
His teeth chattered uncontrollably, half from the bone-piercing cold and half from the inescapable terror buried deep within his soul.
He futilely hammered his fists against the immovable hatch. The faint pain of shattered knuckles seemed utterly insignificant beneath the enormous shadow of death.
Beyond the warped, cracked observation window lay absolute nothingness.
Eternal darkness. Eternal silence.
Fifteen hundred meters!
Water pressure terrifying enough to crush a main battle tank into a thin sheet of iron!
He could even "hear"—no, "feel"—that invisible, terrifying pressure from all directions tightening bit by bit through the deformed bulkheads, squeezing this fragile metal cage and squeezing him along with it.
Deep in his mind, the image of that body's fate was incomparably clear: like a grape effortlessly crushed by a giant's fingers, flesh, bones, and organs would be pulverized into an indistinguishable scarlet pulp in one ten-thousandth of a second, then completely scattered and swallowed by the cold, merciless currents, finally vanishing into this eternal graveyard beyond even sunlight's reach.
He would die without a body left behind, and no one would even know the exact resting place of "Crossbones," Brock Rumlow.
A laughable, silent full stop.
That thought hurt worse than his wounds and chilled him more deeply than the seawater.
I refuse!