"Damn it, what the hell is going on?!"
Inside the second carriage, beside the main engine unit, Train Chief Liu Changhe watched the maintenance crew rush about in panic, cold sweat streaming down his forehead.
"A bunch of useless idiots! How did you memorize the maintenance manual during routine inspections? And now you're telling me the source energy transmission array has locked up?" Liu Changhe roared at the maintenance team leader, his eyes bloodshot.
The maintenance team leader looked utterly despairing, his hands flying across a row of alchemical control consoles flashing with harsh red light. "Chief Liu, this isn't a standard mechanical failure! It was the source energy shockwave from that Deep-Sea Leviathan earlier. The core matrix has completely short-circuited. Forcing a restart could burn out the matrix entirely. If that happens, we're truly finished!"
"Then manually reprogram the matrix!"
"There's no time! Reprogramming a hybrid alchemical matrix of this level might take two or three hours, but we don't have that much time!" The team leader gestured helplessly at his ankles already submerged in seawater and said in near-collapse, "The drainage valves here have malfunctioned too. Within half an hour, the entire engine unit will be flooded!"
"Half an hour..."
Once the engine room was completely flooded, the entire Northern Lights would become a massive iron coffin sinking into the deep sea.
Liu Changhe closed his eyes in despair, then looked once more at the two figures who had been standing to one side from the very beginning and asked hopefully, "Captain Duan, how long until support arrives?"
They were senior defense agents dispatched by Deep Blue Defense, a subsidiary of Universal Heavy Industries, and both were ability users.
"I've already informed headquarters of the situation here. Rescue personnel will arrive within fifteen minutes."
Level-three defense agent Duan