Chapter 154: His Crumbling Plan

Three weeks.

The original six-week survival plan just shattered into a million useless pieces.

Mastering the fifth Gift of Anchor Blood and the sixth Gift of Devourer in twenty-one days was mathematically impossible.

Raziel had to drop that objective right now.

He needed to focus entirely on defending the academy against the Silencer and rescuing the Oracle from the Inquisition before Mordecai burned her alive at Three Crosses.

Raziel turned around and faced his team.

Zorya, Lucian, Lara, Caius, and Gideon stood in the workshop and waited for his report.

“Mordecai arrives in three weeks,” Raziel stated. “He brings the Silencer and he brings Mirael in chains.”

Lucian kicked a wooden chair across the room.

CRASH!

The chair hit the brick wall and splintered into pieces.

Lucian ran his hands through his hair and paced across the dusty floor, the arrogant noble finally recognized they were completely outmatched.

Raziel ignored the outburst and walked over to the large wooden table.

He grabbed a secure red communication crystal and channeled his mana into the jagged edges.

He sent a direct message to Paladin Kiera in the capital and demanded an immediate update on Mirael’s status.

He waited twenty-four agonizing hours for the reply.

The crystal finally hummed the next night while Raziel sat in the basement with the team.

“The safehouse was attacked two nights ago,” Kiera’s voice came through the stone.

“Mordecai sent his elite Inquisitors. I fought them in the street, but they outnumbered me and they took her. I am sorry.”

Raziel gripped the edge of the wooden table.

Kiera survived the ambush with heavy physical injuries, but Mirael belonged to the Elector now.

Arawn spoke from his own crystal a minute later to confirm the disaster.

“Mordecai accelerated his march,” Arawn reported from the capital. “He discovered Seraphina’s vial was a fake. He suspects internal agents operate inside St. Celeste, and he comes to execute a total purge.”

The pressure crushed the team in the East Basement.

The reality of a three-week death sentence broke their morale piece by piece.

Lara sat in the far corner of the room and hugged her knees to her chest. Deep dark circles hung under her eyes and her hands shook with constant tremors.

She kept her empathic net active over the entire academy perimeter to serve as their early warning system, and the mental strain destroyed her physical body.

She did not sleep and she barely ate.

Gideon sat on a wooden stool and stared at his boots.

The boy woke up screaming in the dormitories every single night.

He suffered brutal nightmares about Mordecai’s torture methods.

Caius stood by the brick wall and maintained absolute calm.

He did not offer any tactical advice because he believed the war was already lost.

Zorya ignored the panic in the room.

She worked day and night at her desk and surrounded herself with thick stacks of translation parchment.

She needed to build a counter-measure against the Silencer artifact before it erased the foundation of the building.

She formulated a tactical theory.

The Silencer emitted a frequency that killed Pantheon runes.

An auto-modifying Architectural Rune could adapt to that specific frequency and neutralize the attack.

But she needed to test the theory on a real Pantheon rune.

She refused to test it on the academy walls because a failure would cause permanent structural damage to the building and bury them alive.

She found a physical solution.

She placed a fist-sized chunk of gray granite on her desk.

It was a broken piece of Lithos.

The stone snapped off the guardian’s arm during the fight on Level -5 days ago, and tiny silver runes still pulsed on the rocky surface.

Raziel walked over to her desk and looked at the heavy stone.

“If this works, I can create a shield that blocks the Silencer’s frequency,” Zorya said.

She held her charcoal pencil over the rock and her ink-stained fingers trembled.

“And if it does not work?” Raziel asked.

“Then this fragment dies, and we will know exactly how Mordecai will kill us.”

Zorya looked at Raziel, and her brown eyes showed zero hesitation.

“It is science, Raziel. Sometimes the answer is the one you do not want.”

Zorya channeled her unchained mana and activated a simulated destructive frequency over the stone on her desk.

She pushed the hostile magic straight into the granite.

The fragment reacted right away.

SCREECH!

The stone emitted a high-pitched mineral noise.

It was the horrible sound of broken glass scratching against solid iron.

Raziel gritted his teeth and covered his ears to block the noise.

The tiny silver runes on the granite flickered and fought the invasive magic.

The silver light faded and started to die under the intense pressure.

The ancient magic recognized a lethal threat and tried to retreat into the core of the rock.

Zorya pushed her auto-modifying Architectural Rune into the stone.

The new geometric lines wrapped around the failing silver magic and bonded with the ancient syntax.

The architectural rune analyzed the destructive frequency in real time and shifted its own shape to absorb the incoming damage.

Zorya wiped sweat from her chin and forced more mana into her drawing to sustain the shield.

The silver runes reignited.

The light looked weak and damaged, but the ancient magic survived the assault.

The screeching noise stopped and the stone settled back onto the desk with a dull thud.

“It works,” Zorya whispered and dropped her pencil onto the wood.

“Did it neutralize the frequency?” Raziel asked.

“Halfway,” Zorya answered and pointed at the dim silver light on the stone.

“It protects but it does not neutralize the attack completely. The Silencer will still damage the runes. It will just kill them slower.”

“How much slower?” Raziel pressed her for the exact math.

“Hours instead of seconds,” Zorya answered.

Raziel processed the numbers in his head.

Hours.

He needed hours to confront Mordecai and destroy the black artifact with his own hands.

Hours could be enough to save St. Celeste and rescue the Oracle.

Or they could run out of time and burn on the pyres at Three Crosses.

He turned around and looked at the rest of the team in the workshop.

He needed to pull them out of their panic and give them a target.

“We have our shield,” Raziel announced to the room.

“Zorya will paint that exact architectural rune across the main gates and the courtyard walls. We will force Mordecai into a siege.”

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