Chapter 87 The Sacrifice Play
Aurora:
The news about the dock came in just after midnight.
Rylan’s voice over the secure line was flat, stripped of all emotion. That was how I knew it was bad. "Dock facility was hit. Seven hostiles, classified as rogues. Tried to plant charges on the yacht and the submersible pod. We stopped them. All hostiles down. No losses on our side. But Jax is hurt."
Levi’s face didn’t change. "How?"
"Took a blade meant for me. It was laced with some kind of magic. The old mark on his back… it lit up like a live wire when the magic touched him. He’s burning up. We’re bringing him back now."
Levi put the comm down. The silence in the room was heavy. Rogues. It was a joke.
The Council was sending proxy forces now, testing our defenses on the mainland, trying to cripple our mobility.
And they were using weapons designed to exploit our known weaknesses. Jax’s compulsion sigil was a vulnerability they had filed away, and now they were using it.
Jax was carried in an hour later, unconscious, his skin fever-hot. The scar on his back, the soul-thorn Agnes had weakened, was an angry, pulsing purple against his skin.
Agnes worked on him immediately, her hands glowing with a cool green light as she fought the invasive magic.
We weren’t just hiding anymore. We were under siege from every direction: financially, environmentally, and now militarily through cut-outs. They were probing, applying pressure, looking for a crack.
Levi called a council at dawn. Me, Agnes, Lucas, Rylan, and Caelum. Jax was stable but unconscious on a cot in the corner, a living reminder of the cost.
"We cannot remain purely reactive," Levi stated. His voice was calm, but it was the calm of a blade being sharpened. "They will keep sending probes. They will keep poisoning the air. They will tighten the financial noose until we choke. We need to strike back. Not at the Council itself. That’s impossible. But at the tool they are using to hurt us."
"The sorcerer ship," Lucas said, pulling up a holographic display. "It's the source of the resonance scan and the ambient poison. It sits just outside the ward boundary, a mobile command and magical operations center. If we can disable it, we cut off their eyes and their environmental attack in one move."
"How?" Rylan asked. "It's warded. A direct assault would be suicide, and they'd see us coming from miles away. We can't get close."
"We don't need to get close," Levi said. He turned his gaze to me. "We need to hit it with a magic it can't filter. A focused, overwhelming pulse of raw, aligned energy. Something powerful enough to overload its sensors, fry its spell matrices, and knock out the sorcerers inside."
I felt a cold weight settle in my stomach.
Lucas nodded slowly, catching on. "A psychic EMP. But the power requirement… our own mages don't have that kind of output. Not without a big ritual we don't have time for."
"Correct," Levi said, his eyes still on me. "But there is a power source they have already tagged. One that is, by its very nature, disruptive to their ordered magic. A signature they are specifically tuned to detect."
"No," Agnes said, the word sharp. "Levi, you cannot ask this. It is too dangerous."
"Explain the danger," I said. My voice sounded distant.
Agnes turned to me, her face lined with worry. "The plan would be to use you as a conduit. To take the resonance tag they placed on you, the very thing that lets them track you and amplify it. Not hide it. To flood it with your own Luna power, turning their tracker into a beacon. Then to focus that beacon into a single, brutal pulse aimed directly at their ship."
"It would make you completely visible," Lucas added quietly. "For those few seconds, you would be the brightest magical signature on the planet to anyone looking. You would be announcing your exact location to the entire Council. There would be no doubt, no hiding after."
"And the backlash?" I asked.
"Unknown," Agnes admitted. "You would be channeling an immense amount of power through a mark that is, fundamentally, an invasive scar. It could damage your connection to your own abilities permanently. It could burn you out. It could… break something inside."
I looked at Levi. His face was a mask, but I saw the tension in his jaw. He was asking me to turn myself into a weapon.
A one-shot weapon that might not survive its own use.
"It would work?" I asked.
Lucas manipulated the hologram. "Theoretical models suggest a high chances of success. Their ship's defenses are designed to filter out known attack signatures and diffuse ambient magic. They are not built to handle a concentrated burst of the very energy they were sent to find. It should overload their systems, possibly causing catastrophic feedback in their spellwork. The poisoning effect would stop. The ship would be blind and adrift."
I looked over at Jax, breathing raggedly on the cot. I thought of the dead fish in the inlet, the birds falling from the sky. I thought of the twins, waking up crying from the nightmares caused by a sickened land. I thought of the noose tightening, day by day.
They were all watching me.
Rylan’s hard stare.
Lucas’s analytical concern.
Agnes’s deep fear.
Caelum’s solemn patience.
Levi’s expectant, grim resolve.
I turned from them and walked to the window. I looked out at the sea, grey and calm under the morning sky. Somewhere out there, just over the horizon, was the ship that was slowly killing our home.
I wasn’t a soldier. I was a mother. A former journalist. A woman who had just learned she had power. But I was also the reason they were here. The anomaly. The asset.
I faced them again. I looked at Levi’s grim face, then at Agnes’s worried one. My voice, when it came out, was quiet. It didn’t shake.
"Tell me what to do."