---
The desert cold was a slap in the face after the oppressive, psychic heat of the ritual chamber. Jack and Lissa ran, boots scraping on gravel, the echoes of the cultists' disoriented screams fading behind them, swallowed by the vast, silent darkness. Above, the cracked moon still bled its violet light, but the beam from Anchor Point Kether was gone. One thread in the tapestry had been snipped.
They found Elsa and Morbius at the rendezvous point, a narrow wash a half-mile from the mine. Elsa was scanning the ridge with night-vision binoculars, her posture tense. Morbius was packing the last of his devices, the air smelling faintly of ozone and scorched electronics.
"Status?" Elsa asked without turning.
"Primary dampener is active. The focal point is scrambled. They're in chaos," Jack reported, his breathing steadying. Lissa leaned against a boulder, catching her breath, her face etched with the strain of the empathic assault and the frantic escape.
"Perimeter disruptors deployed and triggered," Morbius said. "Sonic and subsonic frequencies designed to induce paranoia and mild auditory hallucinations. They will not trust their own senses for hours, possibly days. An excellent psychological multiplier to your physical sabotage."
"Good," Elsa said, finally lowering the binoculars. "No organized pursuit yet. Just panic in the hole. The message was delivered." She turned to Jack, and for the first time, he saw something other than grim determination in her eyes—a flicker of professional approval. "Sabotage, not slaughter. It's cleaner. Smarter."
"It doesn't feel clean," Lissa murmured, wrapping her arms around herself. "It feels… cruel. Their minds…"
"They were singing a song to end the world, Lissa," Morbius said, his voice devoid of judgment, merely stating a fact. "We introduced a note of sanity. The cognitive dissonance is a necessary byproduct. It is preferable to killing them."
Jack knew Morbius was right, but he also felt the weight of Lissa's empathy. They hadn't left corpses, but they had left broken people. The beast within was satisfied with the successful hunt, the territory marked. The man felt the chill of the moral calculus.
"We need to move," Elsa said, shouldering her pack. "They'll eventually rally, or the central network will notice the anchor has gone silent and send reinforcements. We need to be gone before dawn."
The trek back to the hidden jet was made in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts, listening to the desert and the strange, heavy silence from the mine. The mission was a tactical success. But as the jet's engines whined to life and they climbed back into the violet-stained sky, Jack felt the victory was fragile, isolated. They had swatted one fly on a gargantuan, global beast.
---
Back in the Los Angeles library, with the dawn's weak light struggling against the permanent twilight of the cracked moon, they debriefed. The data from the surveillance nodes Elsa had planted began streaming in—audio snippets, thermal logs of the cultists' frantic, disordered movements.
"The disruption is holding," Morbius reported, analyzing the feed on a large monitor. "No coherent ritual activity. Communications are frantic, laced with accusations of betrayal and failure. The 'discord' is propagating."
Lissa, who had been sitting quietly with a cup of tea, suddenly stiffened. Her cup clattered in its saucer. Her eyes lost focus, gazing at something far beyond the room's walls.
"Lissa?" Jack was at her side instantly.
"They're… adjusting," she whispered, her voice thin. "The Chorus. It's like… when you lose one instrument, the conductor changes the arrangement. The note from Phoenix is gone, but the song… it's adapting. Getting darker. More focused." She winced, pressing her fingers to her temples. "They're not just trying to pull you in anymore, Jack. They're starting to trace the discord back to its source. To us."
The room went cold. Elsa's head snapped up from the monitor. "How?"
"The connection you used," Morbius deduced, his brow furrowed. "When you channeled the ritual's power through Lissa to find the flaw. And again in the chamber, when she pushed that subtle suggestion. You created a two-way link. Faint, but… detectable. Like a residual scent on the wind. Now that they've felt a direct attack on their harmony, they are analyzing the 'taste' of that attack."
Jack's jaw tightened. In using Lissa's spark as a weapon, they had inadvertently left a psychic signature. They were no longer anonymous hunters. They were now a specific counter-harmony, a rogue melody the Chorus would seek to eliminate.
"Can they find this location?" Elsa asked, her hand drifting to the hilt of a silver-bladed short sword at her hip.
"Not precisely. Not yet," Lissa said, forcing her eyes open. They were haunted. "It's a direction. A feeling. But if we strike again… if we create another point of discord, the triangulation will get sharper. We're painting a target on ourselves."
"Then we don't strike again," Jack said, but the words tasted like ash. Retreat was not an option. The ritual continued. The moon was still broken.
"We must," Morbius countered. "A single point of failure can be isolated, repaired. To break a chorus, you need multiple, simultaneous points of discord. You must make the conductor believe the entire orchestra is rebelling."
An idea, cold and sharp, formed in Jack's mind. He looked at the roadmap, at the list of global cells. "We can't hit them all. We're not an army. But we don't have to be."
He stood, walking to the map of the world they had pinned to the wall, the known cult sites marked with crimson pins. "We hit two more. Rapid succession. Before they can fully adapt to the first. We use the same method: infiltration, sabotage, the dampener. But we change the signature."
"How?" Elsa asked.
"We don't use Lissa's empathy inside the chambers," Jack said, his gaze landing on Morbius and Elsa. "You two take the lead on the next one. Purely technological, sonic disruption. A different 'flavor' of attack. For the third…" He paused, the beast within stirring with a dark, cunning logic. "I go alone. No tech. No subtlety. I let the beast… disrupt. A purely primal, lycanthropic signature. Three different attacks, on three different anchors, in a short timeframe. They won't be looking for one source. They'll think they have a full-scale, multi-faceted rebellion on their hands. It will shatter their confidence completely."
The audacity of the plan hung in the air. It was a gamble of staggering proportions. It required splitting their already tiny force, executing flawlessly under extreme pressure, and Jack willingly walking into a nest of Darkhold cultists alone, relying on controlled chaos.
"It's a good strategy," Elsa said after a long moment, a hunter's respect in her voice. "Divide their attention, confuse their intelligence. The next viable targets for speed would be the anchor in the Louisiana bayou and the one in the Norwegian fjords. Morbius and I can handle the bayou. The environment suits stealth and technology. The fjords…" She looked at Jack. "That's remote, isolated, likely heavily fortified. A harder target for a solo infiltration."
"All the better," Jack said. "A brutal, obvious assault in a stronghold sends a louder message." He looked at Lissa. "But you stay here. Behind every ward we can muster. You are our early warning system, our link to the ritual's mood. And you are the signature they are most attuned to now. You must go silent, psychically. A black hole."
The protest was clear on Lissa's face—the fear of being left behind, of being just a passive victim again. But the hard logic was undeniable. She was their vulnerability. "I can do that," she said, her voice firming with resolve. "I can build a wall. But, Jack… going alone…"
"I won't be alone," he said, and for a fleeting second, his eyes held the feral gleam of the creature that shared his soul. "The beast and I… we understand sabotage."
The plan was set. There was no time for lengthy preparation. Speed was the new weapon. Elsa and Morbius began packing a different set of gear for the humid, tangled warfare of the bayous. Jack's preparation was internal. He sat in a corner of the library, eyes closed, not fighting the fracture within him, but examining it. For the fjord mission, he would need not the fragile symbiosis of a hero, but the terrifying, focused unpredictability of the monster as a weapon. He had to become the perfect discordant note—a howl of pure, anarchic instinct in the midst of their ordered chant.
As Elsa and Morbius departed for the airport, their parting words were terse. "Good hunting," Elsa said.
"Do not get captured," Morbius added, his usual clinical tone edged with concern. "A live specimen of your lineage would be their ultimate prize."
Jack merely nodded.
He waited until night fell again, the violet moon rising once more over a city growing numb to its horror. He dressed in dark, durable clothing, armed himself only with a few silver throwing knives—tools, not primary weapons. The primary weapon was within.
Lissa stood by the reinforced door as he made to leave. She didn't hug him. She placed a hand on his chest, over his heart. "Bring the noise," she said, a faint, fierce smile touching her lips.
He covered her hand with his own for a moment, a silent promise. Then he turned and vanished into the Los Angeles night, a shadow moving towards a private airfield and a long flight north.
He was no longer just hunting the Chorus.
He was on his way to become the scream that would tear it apart.
To Be Continue...