The trail Victor had left was an insultingly obvious taunt, a lazy, thick stream of black magic residue that only amplified Lu Yuan's Alpha fury. The trail led them through the deserted avenues of the city's historical quarter, terminating at the ruins of St. Jude's Cathedral—a colossal, cavernous structure long abandoned after a devastating fire two decades prior. Its Gothic spires clawed at the night sky like skeletal fingers, and its immense interior was nothing but a haunting shell of collapsed stonework and fragmented religious icons.
Lilith and Lu Yuan moved through the colossal, arched doors together, their synchronized entry less an alliance and more a convergence of two equally formidable forces. Lu Yuan's heavy, protective presence radiated outward, challenging the darkness, while Lilith's essence flowed through the shadows, assessing the environment with supernatural speed and detail.
"The air is saturated," Lilith noted, her voice a low, chilling whisper that traveled easily in the vast space. "Not with residual magic, but with active wards. Simple enough to detect, complex enough to be deadly."
The center of the ruined nave was Victor's stage. A large, complex circle had been etched into the cracked marble floor, surrounded by a ring of blackened, ancient bones and strange, pulsing crimson crystals. The air here was heavy, the scent of belladonna and sulfur overwhelming. But Victor himself was absent. He had set the scene, calculated their arrival, and vanished again.
Lilith immediately moved towards the circle, her academic curiosity overpowering her tactical caution. "These symbols… they are Atlantean. Pre-Covenant. He's not attempting a simple magical acquisition. He's preparing a sacrifice of unprecedented scale."
Lu Yuan stayed at the perimeter, his eyes glowing faintly gold as he scanned the rafters and the shattered rose window for traps. His instinct screamed of a deeper danger than simple runes. He despised the blatant ritualism, the theatrical display of dark power that Victor embodied.
"He intends to lure out a greater power to feed this mechanism," Lu Yuan growled, moving to inspect the bones. "These are not human. Werewolf. And ancient. They predate the formation of the city itself. He's mocking my oath."
Lilith paused, momentarily distracted from the arcane script by the cold realization in Lu Yuan's tone. The fact that Victor was using ancient Werewolf remains for his ritual showed a chilling, personal knowledge of the Alpha's deepest duty.
"He is a sorcerer with a profound, targeted malice for both our species," Lilith conceded, her hand hovering over one of the pulsing crystals. "These crystals are not drawing energy from the earth; they are siphoning the ambient magic from the surrounding human population. Slow, subtle. A feast of a thousand souls for a single, powerful act."
The forced cooperation demanded a rapid-fire exchange of knowledge. Lu Yuan, despite his clan's traditional disdain for the arcane arts, possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of all threats to the Covenant. Lilith, with her centuries of deep study into the origins of the Bloodlines, understood the magical language of the symbols.
"This central glyph," Lilith traced the symbol mentally, projecting the image into Lu Yuan's mind—a shocking, intimate violation of his thoughts that he barely flinched at, too focused on the danger. "It doesn't call for raw power. It calls for integration. He wants to combine the Key's power with the essence of a living Vampire and a living Werewolf to create a permanent, unstable nexus between our world and his realm."
"His realm?" Lu Yuan's massive form tensed, radiating disbelief.
"Victor is a rogue; he serves no one. He seeks to create a host for the entity he worships—a primal being that exists outside the dimensions protected by the Covenant. He intends to use the chaos of our conflict as a screen, and the Key as the bait," Lilith explained, synthesizing decades of fragmented research in seconds.
Lu Yuan slammed his fist into a nearby granite pillar in frustration. The sound reverberated like a thunderclap, sending plumes of dust cascading from the ceiling. "He is planning a cataclysm! We should have destroyed that fragment when we had the chance!"
"Destruction is impossible. The Key cannot be unmade, only sealed," Lilith corrected, her tone sharp. "But we must locate the next fragment. This ritual is designed to attract it here."
As they spoke, a low, resonant frequency began to hum from the center of the ritual circle. The crimson crystals pulsed faster, and the scent of death intensified. The ritual was initiating, drawing the next piece of the Nocturne Key towards this unholy nexus.
"It's drawing the fragment here now," Lu Yuan warned, his eyes snapping to the east window. "I can feel the gravitational pull of the magic."
A fresh wave of rage and frustration—the combined effect of being manipulated, nearly defeated in the alley, and facing an existential threat—broke Lu Yuan's self-control. His muscles swelled visibly beneath his tactical gear; his eyes flared into pure, blinding gold. He stepped onto the ritual circle, his immense form radiating primal power.
"I will break this seal now," Lu Yuan declared, his voice a distorted, echoing growl that was half-man, half-wolf. He crouched, focusing the pure, unadulterated moonlight energy that coursed through his Alpha veins into a single point on the marble floor.
"Stop, Alpha! You will trigger the counter-ward!" Lilith screamed, but it was too late.
Lu Yuan plunged his amplified fist into the center of the Atlantean glyph. The marble floor, cursed and fortified by Victor's magic, cracked open with a sound of grinding, protesting stone.
The backlash was instantaneous and violent. The crimson crystals exploded outward in a blinding, painful flash of black fire. The blast wave hit Lu Yuan, throwing him backward across the nave and tearing open the tough skin on his arms.
Simultaneously, the main ceiling—the precarious, fire-damaged Gothic vault spanning the width of the church—began to destabilize and fall.
Lu Yuan struggled to rise, momentarily stunned by the magical blow. The enormous stone arch was collapsing directly towards him, an avalanche of granite and mortar that would crush him completely, even in his partially transformed state.
Lilith, reacting with speed that defied the laws of space and time, unleashed her own power—a wave of raw, destructive telekinesis. It wasn't the surgical mental strike she had used in the alley; this was a force born of ancient panic and absolute necessity.
She didn't stop the ceiling. She shattered it.
The sound was deafening, a catastrophic explosion of stone dust and debris. The archway didn't fall; it was pulverized, the resulting cloud of dust and fragments channeled away from Lu Yuan by Lilith's precise mental control.
She dropped her telekinetic hold, her entire body rigid, trembling from the sheer expenditure of raw power. She had just prevented the death of her most hated rival—the Alpha who had just tried to sabotage her.
Silence descended, broken only by the settling dust and the heavy, ragged breathing of Lu Yuan, who stood amidst the ruins, protected but stunned. His eyes, still blazing gold, locked onto Lilith's frozen figure.
The realization hit them both with the force of the collapsed ceiling.
Lu Yuan had just unleashed enough power to break a millennia-old magical seal. Lilith had just commanded enough psychic force to shatter a cathedral ceiling and sculpt the debris cloud. Separately, they were lethal. Together, their uncontrolled power was apocalyptic.
And yet, neither had managed to stop Victor.
Lu Yuan walked slowly toward her, ignoring his bleeding wounds. "We are the two strongest beings in this city. You fight like a strategist who sees the final move. I fight like a war engine that fears nothing. And yet, this rogue sorcerer is manipulating us both."
Lilith met his gaze, the ruby red in her eyes shining with cold, shared understanding. "He is using our rivalry as his shield, Alpha. Your duty to the Covenant and my need for the Key are his primary tools. We cannot defeat him while we are fighting each other."
The tension was still present, heavy and dangerous, but the dynamic had shifted from enmity to a grudging, absolute necessity. The raw display of their combined might had broken through the final layer of their hostility.
Lu Yuan reached out his hand, not in a handshake, but offering the shard—the piece of the Nocturne Key he had risked his life to keep from her. "The next fragment is coming. We need Victor's location, not the Key's. Your methods are better for extraction. Use it."
Lilith took the shard. Her cold fingers brushed against his hot palm, a fleeting moment of contact that sealed their unspoken agreement. The Eternal Covenant had many rules, but the survival of the races superseded all else.
In the shattered ruins of the cathedral, the ancient, fragile Covenant had cracked, giving way to a forbidden, fragile alliance.