The pressure of the deep ocean was the first thing Namor felt as the silver-grey mist of the Sefirah Castle dissolved from his vision. One moment, he was sitting at a long table above the clouds with a billionaire and a king; the next, he was back on his throne of carved whale bone in the heart of Talokan.
The water around him felt more vibrant. Every vibration in the current, from the shifting of tectonic plates miles below to the rhythmic pulsing of the bioluminescent plants in the city square, hit his senses with the force of a tidal wave.
He sat perfectly still, his hand gripping the cold vibranium of his spear. He checked the bioluminescent coral clock embedded in the wall of the throne room. Exactly fifteen minutes had passed. To his royal guard, he had merely closed his eyes for a moment of divine contemplation.
But as Namor stood up, the water rippled around him with an intensity that made the guards stumble. He felt the Beta-Level High-Speed Regeneration anchoring to his soul. The old scars on his chest from centuries of skirmishes just vanished, leaving skin as smooth and hard as polished jade. He felt as though he could swim through the core of the earth and come out the other side without breaking a sweat.
"K'uk'ulkan?"
Namora stepped forward, her hand hovering over her weapon. She looked at her King and froze. Namor looked younger as if the last three hundred years of aging had been violently erased. His eyes glowed with a golden clarity.
"Summon Attuma," Namor commanded, his voice vibrating through the water like a sonar ping. "And the Council of Elders. The world above has changed, and Talokan must rise to meet it."
Within minutes, the inner sanctum was filled. Attuma, the fiercest warlord of the deep, entered with his usual heavy tread, but he stopped short when he saw Namor.
"My King," Attuma grunted, his eyes narrowing. "You look... different. Has the surface air changed you?"
"The surface has provided a key, Attuma," Namor said, gesturing for his two most loyal generals to approach the throne. "The era of hiding in the dark is ending. But to lead our people for the next five centuries, you must be more than mere warriors. You must become eternal."
Namor explained the concept of the Anchor—the dual blessing of the Super Soldier strength and beta level regeneration. He didn't bother with scientific explanations; to the Talokanil, this was the divine grace of the Feathered Serpent.
"Touch my spear," Namor ordered. "And repeat the words I speak. Do not think. Do not analyze. Only obey."
Namora and Attuma exchanged a confused glance. They were used to blood oaths and ritual combat, but what Namor was asking sounded like the strange superstitions of the surface-dwellers. Nevertheless, they stepped forward, each placing a hand on the cool metal of the King's weapon.
"The Fool that doesn't belong to this era..." Namor began.
Attuma's lip curled. "The... Fool? My King, is this a joke?"
"Speak the words, Attuma, or I will find a general who will," Namor hissed.
The chamber echoed with the rhythmic chanting of the Sefirah Honorifics. Attuma sounded like he was swallowing stones as he muttered about the King of Yellow and Black who handles good luck, while Namora's voice was a hesitant whisper. To any observer, it looked like a high-stakes cult initiation at the bottom of the Atlantic.
As the final line—We pray for the mercy of your gaze—was spoken, the water in the room seemed to flash white.
Attuma roared as his body was forcibly restructured. The knotted muscles of his shoulders became denser, his bone structure reinforcing itself to withstand pressures that would crush a submarine. The grey streaks in his hair vanished.
Namora gasped as the fatigue of a century of guarding the borders evaporated. She looked at her hands, which now possessed the strength to crush vibranium.
"I feel... I feel like a god," Attuma whispered, flexing his massive arms.
"You feel like a soldier of the Talokan," Namor corrected. "And you will stay this way for five hundred years."
The Council of Elders arrived next, their faces pale with fear. They had heard the rumors of Namor's "new light."
"Elders," Namor addressed them, pointing to the glowing vibranium vents that powered their city. "The surface world is developing sensors that can pierce the deep. Our isolation is a paper shield. Therefore, I have moved the 'Heart of the Sea' to a place where no human, no machine, and no god can find it."
He revealed the Pocket Dimension—the Void Vault. With a wave of his hand, he demonstrated the storage of a massive crate of processed vibranium. The crate simply vanished into a ripple of grey fog.
"This is the Void of K'uk'ulkan," Namor declared. "It is an airless, timeless vacuum outside of this world. Our true wealth—the vibranium that makes us gods—will be stored there. Even if the surface world invades these waters, they will find nothing but empty trenches. We have moved our soul into the Void."
The Elders whispered among themselves, terrified yet awed. Namor was becoming the Architect of their reality.
"We are going public," Namor announced, and the room erupted in chaos.
"The surface dwellers will hunt us!" one Elder cried. "They will bring their bombs and their greed!"
Namor silenced them with a single strike of his spear against the floor. "They will not hunt what they cannot touch. We are not joining the surface world as a colony. We are joining the Earth Federation as its most powerful founding member. We represent seventy percent of this planet—the blue parts they have never conquered."
He leaned in, his voice dripping with calculated political venom. "We will tell them that we hid because of the corruption of their old world—the 'Hydra' that infected their governments. We will say we could not trust a race that poisons its own air and betrays its own kin. But now, with a new Federation built by my peers—Stark of the Land and T'Challa of the Hidden Forest—we are stepping out to claim our seat. We will offer them the resources of the sea, but only on our terms. We are not hiding anymore. We are colonizing the future."
Finally, Namor turned back to Attuma. "Bring me the hundred. The elite of the elite. The warriors who will be the spearhead of Talokan."
In the Great Temple of the Abyss, a hundred warriors gathered. They were the fiercest hunters of the deep, men and women who rode orcas and wrestled giant squids. T'Challa had used a white room; Namor used a temple of bone and fire.
He had them surround him in the water, each touching his arms, his shoulders, or the shaft of his spear.
"You will repeat the Honorifics," Namor commanded. "If you falter, you die. If you succeed, you become the immortal guard of K'uk'ulkan."
The sight was absurd and terrifying. A hundred blue-skinned warriors, underwater, chanting in unison about The Mysterious Ruler above the gray fog. Namor stood at the center, looking like a dark messiah.
The energy transfer was a physical shockwave. A hundred heartbeats synced into one. A hundred bodies became Super-Soldiers. They gained a predatory telepathy among themselves, a unified will.
"You are the Centurions of the Abyss," Namor told them as they knelt in the water. "The surface world has Captain America. We have a hundred of him. And we are just getting started."
Namor looked at his transformed kingdom. The Elders were pacified by the immortality of the royal line; the military was empowered by the Super-Soldier anchors; and the wealth was hidden in the Void.
"Prepare the royal ship," Namor told Namora. "We head to the Umbrella Hive. T'Challa and Stark are waiting. We have a treaty to sign and a broken soldier to mend. The Land and the Sea are finally united under the Fool."
As he swam toward his vessel, his wings fluttering with a strength he had never known, Namor realized that for the first time in his long life, he wasn't afraid of the future. He was the one creating it.