Dragon Raja 5; Chapter 249: For Your Majesty (64)

Dragon Raja 5

The entire research station rolled over, falling along with the shattered ice like boulders. Caesar only had time to shout to Jiude Mai on the roof, “Go!”

She was the only one who had a chance to evacuate. Perhaps with her incredible ninja skills, she could jump onto some huge ice floe and wait for rescue at the last moment before the ice shelf collapsed.

But Jude Mai did not leave. Instead, she looked at Caesar and jumped off the roof.

Before Caesar was swallowed by the surging water, he couldn’t help but feel curious. This fragile alliance didn’t seem to be enough to make Jude Mai risk her life to save him. Could it be that this cold and beautiful Japanese girl had feelings for him?

The station pierced through the tens-meter-thick ice shelf and sank into the icy sea. Its sturdy aluminum alloy frame held up, but the seawater instantly filled every inch of the station.

The cold sea water rushed into Caesar’s lungs, and his consciousness instantly became blurred. His lungs felt a tearing pain, but he also had the illusion of warmth. He strangely remembered his mother bathing him when he was a child.

That time he accidentally choked on water and cried for a long time. He stopped crying only after his mother promised to teach him how to swim so that he would never choke on water again.

Unfortunately, this was the icy sea, not the warm bathtub in his mother’s room. Although he was a good swimmer and could have crossed the English Channel, he still could died from choking on water.

Suddenly, someone hugged him tightly from behind and put a mask over his mouth. Compressed air rushed in, and the symptoms of hypoxia were immediately relieved. Caesar coughed violently a few times and spit out some seawater, and suddenly realized that the person hugging him was a girl.

Ninja training can remove every inch of fat from Mai Jude’s body, but a girl is still a girl, and no matter how strong her body is, it is still soft.

Jude Mai lit the flashlight and shone it on her own face first, to tell Caesar that she was not an enemy. Her other hand was holding a compressed air bottle.

Caesar suddenly remembered that they had found a complete set of frogman equipment during their search of the research station, but it was so old that the air in the cylinders had long since leaked out. He thought that Mai Jude had been a bit more cautious and secretly filled one of the cylinders with compressed air. Since the research station had frogman equipment, there should also be a compressed air machine. But she had neither told Caesar nor Finger, nor had she prepared two extra cylinders. The only explanation was that this was part of her plan to escape. With this set of equipment, she could easily swim under the ice for half an hour, or even an hour, without Caesar and Finger being able to catch up with her, or even notice her escape.

As for why she considered running away, Caesar didn’t bother to think about it. At least at the critical moment of life and death, this fragile alliance, like the carbide skeleton of the scientific research station, held on once again.

Caesar was hugged again, this time not by Jude Mai but by Finger. His eyes were wide and his cheeks puffed out, clearly suffocating and on the verge of passing out. It was hard to imagine how he’d escaped from the basement; perhaps neither heaven nor hell would accept such a scoundrel. Caesar handed him the mask, and Finger, like a hungry ghost seeing cake, practically devoured it. Only when Jude Mai finally gave up did she snatch the mask back.

Three people, one air tank and one mask. Given their breath-holding abilities, they could take turns using it without dying. However, the air originally intended for one person, divided among three people, could only hold out for a dozen minutes.

They still couldn’t escape the clutches of death. If they couldn’t find the crack in the ice, they would still perish. The greatest danger of ice diving is that if you can’t find the hole to dive into, the ocean becomes a maze from which you can never escape. Above you is the impenetrable ice sheet, and you will become nothing more than a floating corpse beneath it. The crack in the ice shelf was as wide as a river, but they were carried along by the current for a while, and now all around was pitch black. Jiude Mai shone upwards, revealing a thick layer of ice that stretched as far as the eye could see.

The last time they were lucky enough to encounter a school of Arctic cod, and followed the fish to find a crack in the ice where they could breathe, but this time they were unlikely to be so lucky.

As the three of them stared blankly at each other, Jude Mai suddenly became alert and shone her flashlight behind her. A bloody half-snake was being pushed forward by the current, its digestive tract faintly visible. The scene was both nauseating and terrifying. They hadn’t strayed far from the battlefield between the Leviathan and the snakes. The monsters’ battlefield spanned a vast expanse of ocean, stretching for kilometers, even dozens of kilometers in radius. They could reappear at any moment.

The snake’s corpse floated away, but Mai Jude’s eyes grew even more terrified. She slowly glanced down at her feet. Caesar also felt the powerful current surge upward from below. Besides the significant temperature difference between the upper and lower layers of the water, this vertical current was rare. Either there was an underwater volcano below, or something incredibly large was rising at high speed. There was only one other object of this size nearby!

A strong light suddenly enveloped the three of them, and what rose up with the beam of light was not Leviathan, but a huge black battleship.

An Astute-class nuclear attack submarine painted with the insignia of the British Royal Navy!

It flashed continuously, which was the navigation light language, “HMS Nautilus nuclear submarine of the British Royal Navy, welcome aboard, Mr. César Gattuso.” Directly above it, the buoyancy tank used for maritime rescue was slowly rising.

“I promised your father that I would bring you back to Rome alive, but this submarine is the property of the British Royal Navy. Please obey the rules of the ship.”

The three men, wrapped in thick towels, sat shivering in the captain’s cabin of the Nautilus submarine. After being immersed in the icy sea for too long, their bodies were severely hypothermic, and even Jude Mai looked haggard and miserable.

Although the other party stated directly that they were the reinforcements invited by Pompey’s father, it seemed meaningless to maintain their momentum when they were rescued like a drowned chicken by such a majestic warship.     

The so-called other party was a captain in a dark blue navy uniform, carrying the rank of colonel. Surprisingly, the submarine’s commander was a tall and straight-figured woman. Despite her frosty expression, she could even be described as a middle-aged beauty.