Cold, viscous, all-pervasive.
Four thousand two hundred meters.
Deep within a fracture zone at the edge of the Mariana Trench, the pressure was enough to crush an ordinary submarine into a twisted lump of scrap metal.
Absolute Darkness, like congealed ink, swallowed all light—and sound.
Only the faint friction of water currents and the distant, muffled "gollum" of Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vents, like an ancient behemoth belching, occasionally tore through the eternal silence.
Cold seawater seeped into every atom, carrying a strange fishy reek of sulfur and metal.
Rumlow floated in this eternal realm of darkness, faintly twisting his neck covered in thick dark scales.
With every breath, seawater flowed into the gill slits split open along the sides of his neck, covered in dense Bone Spikes. It passed through a complex, astonishingly efficient biological filtration membrane within his body before silently discharging metabolic waste.
This body, forged from the fury of Hulk's blood, the ancient resilience of Godzilla cells, and the ruthless cunning brought by Green Goblin Serum, felt a bizarre, fish-in-water comfort in this forbidden realm of humanity.
His eyes, already mutated into reptilian vertical pupils, flashed with a mingled halo of ghostly green and dusky gold in the Absolute Darkness, like Ghost Fire lurking in the abyss.
Those eyes clearly captured everything around him.
The faintest disturbance in the current, the trail left by a hagfish gliding over the silt in the distance, even farther away, the sound of blind shrimp stirring the water near the Hydrothermal Vents... all of it became incomparably clear moving images projected onto his highly developed, mutated cerebral cortex.
His hands—or rather, the savage creations that had replaced them—opened and closed unconsciously before him.
Several curved bone blades over half a meter long extended from his thick forearm bones. Even in the