"We're already locked inside the same tin can thousands of feet down," Tony Stark said, strolling casually into the forward observation deck. "I'd say that officially makes us comrades-in-arms, wouldn't you, Mr. Gen?"
Having cleared the air after the previous night's tense standoff, Tony acted as if the entire espionage incident had never happened. He approached the Execution Bureau's core unit with an easy, confident swagger.
"Care to share the unredacted mission files now?" Tony continued, leaning against a bulkhead. "More importantly... how are we tracking him down here? Satellites don't penetrate thousands of meters of saltwater."
Chisei Gen stood rigid before the main sonar display, his sharp eyes fixed on the murky abyss outside. His expression was tight with deep, unresolved worry, and he offered no verbal reply. Yasha and Sakura stood flanking him like stone statues, projecting an aura of cold, aristocratic indifference.
Seeing the diplomatic atmosphere freeze over once more, Crow sighed, scratching the back of his neck with a wry grin before stepping in.
"That old bastard Herzog stole one of our Execution Bureau's customized submersibles," Crow explained smoothly, tapping a tablet. "Every deep-sea craft in the Eight Families' fleet has a hardwired acoustic transponder baked into the keel. So relax, Stark. We won't lose the scent."
Crow turned and strolled casually toward the helm to check the heading. Hearing this, the Avengers members in the cabin let out a collective breath and took their seats along the reinforced benches.
CREAK—BOOM!
Without a second of warning, the massive hull of the submarine violently shuddered. The deck tilted at a sharp fifteen-degree angle, throwing loose equipment across the deckplates.
"What the hell was that?!" Scott Lang yelled, scrambling back to his feet as red auxiliary lights bathed the compartment.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. sonar operators rapidly worked their consoles, desperately trying to isolate the source of the shockwave.
"It's the seabed," Chisei Gen announced, his voice dropping into a grave register as he stared through the optical telemetry feed. "The oceanic floor is vibrating violently. We've just hit the epicenter of a massive undersea rupture."
"Just our damn luck!" Scott muttered, running a hand through his hair as he eyed the creaking titanium hull. "We're trapped at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean during a localized cataclysm. If this hull breaches, we won't even have time to scream!"
Having spent his career dealing with mundane heists, Scott Lang was rapidly losing his composure under the suffocating reality of deep-sea claustrophobia.
"Take a breath, Scott," Bruce Banner said gently, placing a steady, calming hand on the younger man's shoulder. "Paradoxically, in a deep-sea seismic event, open water at this depth is actually the safest place to be. There are no collapsing structures or falling bedrock."
Dr. Banner's scientific assessment was flawless. For the passengers inside the reinforced submarine, the massive displacement of water only caused the hull to sway, inducing little more than motion sickness.
But for the island nation of Japan resting directly above the trench... it was an apocalyptic catastrophe.
Across the densely populated coastal cities of Yokohama, Chiba, and Kawasaki, the sea level suddenly receded by hundreds of meters, exposing miles of glistening mudflats and flopping fish.
Seconds later, the horizon turned pitch-black.
A towering wall of dark water—exceeding forty meters in height—rose violently from the sea, blocking out the morning sky.
Terror. Panic. Total societal collapse.
In the coastal streets, millions of residents realized too late what was racing toward them. Screams of raw, primal desperation tore through the air as crowds surged inland in a blind, stampeding frenzy.
"Rinka! Where are you?!" a mother shrieked, clawing through the mob. "Please, someone help me find my daughter!"
"Get out of the damn way, you bastard!"
"Move your car! Move the car!!"
"Hey! That's my bicycle, let go!"
Cries, frantic curses, and wails of agony intertwined into a terrifying symphony of human despair. Traffic gridlocked instantly as hundreds of vehicles collided at intersections. Drivers abandoned their cars, joining the frantic torrent of fleeing civilians.
People were violently shoved to the asphalt and trampled underfoot, their faint groans drowned out by the thunderous roar of the approaching ocean. Looting erupted as the fringe of society abandoned all reason under the immediate threat of death. The bustling, neon-drenched avenues of the Kanto region devolved into a living nightmare within minutes, exposing the raw, desperate fragility of human civilization.
CRASH!!!
The titanic black wave slammed into the coastline, obliterating sea walls, crushing high-rise foundations, and swallowing whole city blocks in an instant.
[Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) — Tokyo Headquarters]
Piercing red alarms blared continuously through the operations floor. The entire technical staff was in a state of complete, paralyzed confusion.
The agency had issued zero advance warnings for a tsunami of this unprecedented scale—a catastrophic, unforgivable failure of national defense.
The red hotline from the Prime Minister's Cabinet was screaming off the hook.
"Director Kobayashi!" a minister's voice bellowed through the speaker, trembling with fury. "A forty-meter wave just flattened Yokohama and your agency didn't sound a single siren! If you value your life, you will explain this immediately, or you can face a military tribunal before sundown!"
"Hai! Hai!!" Director Fukuta Kobayashi bowed repeatedly to the receiver, sweating profusely.
The moment he slammed the phone down, his submissive demeanor vanished, replaced by volcanic rage. He stormed directly into the Earthquake and Volcano Department.
SLAP!
A sharp strike echoed across the command room as Kobayashi backhanded Ryoji Okita, the department chief, sending the man's glasses clattering across the floor.
"Okita! What on earth is your department doing?!" Kobayashi roared, his face turning purple. "Is everyone under your command brain-dead?! A national-level extinction event hits our coast, and your monitors read dead zero! Do you have any idea what the Cabinet just said to me?!"
Venting all the terror and humiliation he had absorbed from the government, Kobayashi finally dragged a ragged breath into his lungs.
Wiping his split lip, Okita picked up his glasses and wordlessly handed a freshly printed seismic report to his superior.
"Look at the telemetry yourself, Director," Okita whispered, his voice trembling.
Kobayashi snatched the paper, his eyes scanning the digital graphs. "What is this...? The epicenter is right off Tokyo Bay... but there was zero tectonic buildup? How is that possible?!"
As the head of the JMA, Kobayashi was a seasoned geophysicist. He knew that tectonic earthquakes never achieve maximum destructive force in an instant; fault lines require measurable friction and compression before slipping.
Yet the ocean floor logs showed that the crust had remained completely, geologically stable.
"You're telling me... this tsunami wasn't caused by a tectonic earthquake at all?" Kobayashi stammered, the color draining from his face.
An unnatural, invisible force had displaced millions of tons of seawater in a single microsecond.
'Damn it all...' Kobayashi thought, cold sweat drenching his collar. An unknown, supernatural anomaly was infinitely more terrifying than a natural disaster.
Rushing back to his desk, Kobayashi dialed the Cabinet directly. At the very least, this anomalous data proved the disaster was completely beyond the operational scope of the Meteorological Agency.
The massive surge had completely submerged Japan's southern coastal corridor into an ocean of debris.
With zero evacuation warning, less than ten percent of the coastal population had managed to reach high ground.
The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and urban Search and Rescue teams mobilized rapidly, deploying hovercraft and shallow-draft boats into the flooded ruins. Yet despite their elite training, the scene that greeted them shattered their sanity.
Thousands of pale corpses drifted in the receding, muddy seawater, tangled in downed power lines and crushed concrete. Vehicles rested upside down inside second-story living rooms.
Lifeless bodies hung from shattered streetlights and collapsed billboards like macabre ornaments.
"Why... why did this have to happen?!"
Fukuda, a young search-and-rescue recruit, collapsed to his knees in the mud, clutching his helmet as he wept uncontrollably before a row of drowned civilians.
The veteran team captain stepped forward, his eyes hollowed by grief, and forcefully hauled the young officer back to his feet.
"Stand up, Fukuda!" the captain barked, though his own voice cracked with suppressed emotion. "We don't have the luxury of breaking down. Our mission is to recover our people... We cannot leave them to rot in the mud."
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Give me powerstones.
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