She paused, the chilling frost in her eyes deepening into an absolute zero stare. "It either holds the ultimate secrets my grandmother left behind, or it holds the final, stabilized formula for the Obsidian Augments they've spent decades trying to perfect."
Either one of those prizes.
Either one was enough to make Obsidian Sun risk total exposure.
And either one was enough to make her walk straight into the fire.
Jasper swallowed hard, his face turning pale. "Even so, you cannot risk your own life!"
Serena looked up at him. "If Project Zero-Transit docks in seventy-two hours and we sit here doing nothing, Obsidian Sun will successfully relocate their latest biological specimens, their raw data, and their mutated test subjects."
And if that happened...
The consequences would be apocalyptic.
The Obsidian Augments were the most vile, catastrophic creations Obsidian Sun had ever engineered.
They had seen the prototypes in Severia.
Monsters stripped of their humanity, stripped of their ability to feel pain, twisted into
biological weapons that didn't even understand the concept of death.
If a perfected batch of those nightmares was unleashed upon the world...
It would ignite an international bloodbath.
The comms line with The Federal Oversight Task Force remained open.
The federal agents had fallen into a grim, horrifying silence.
Everyone knew Serena was right.
The invitation was a death trap.
But it
also the closest anyone had ever gotten to the beating heart of Obsidian Sun in history.
If they let this opportunity slip away, Project Zero-Transit would vanish back into the lawless oceans, and they might never find it again.
Serena looked around the room. "The Raven thinks he's baiting me. But I intend to bait him."
She was going to find out exactly what her grandmother had buried.
She was going to find out exactly how many abominations Obsidian Sun had manufactured using her grandmother's genius.
And she was going to drag that ghost ship out of the shadows and sink it to the bottom of the sea.
Nicholas hadn't interrupted her once.
He stood right beside her, holding her hand.
His grip had only grown tighter and tighter.
From the exact second he read "Aria's Key" on the screen, his gaze had turned into
a terrifying, suffocating void.
Only now did he speak, his voice a
low, lethal rumble. "They aren't
stupid enough to believe you wet
actually bring the genuine data into Wartecliffe Harbor
Serena looked up at him.
Nicholas's striking eyes were violently dark, swirling with an overpowering, almost desperate terrer for her safety "Which means they don't just want the physical Key."
"They want you, Serena."
Nicholas rubbed his thumb rhythmically across the back of her hand, fighting to suppress the
violent tempest of er tearing
through his chest. "They want to use your mind to bridge the gaps your grandmother intentionally left blank."
His words were far more brutal and unvarnished than the digital invitation.
Obsidian Sun wanted Aria's Key.
But they needed Serena Lancaster.
Because Serena wasn't just Aria's granddaughter.
She had inherited her grandmother's god-tier medical genius. She had already proven in Severia that she could decode and weaponize Aria's fragmented theories.
To Obsidian Sun...
Serena herself was the ultimate, irreplaceable "Key."
Serena didn't deny it.
She simply lowered her eyes, staring at the black raven burning on the monitor.
Ever since she returned from Severia, it was obvious that Obsidian Sun's crosshairs had locked permanently onto her.
They wanted the research.
And they wanted her alive.
Because her acupuncture techniques had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Aria's original hypothesis was flawless.
And right now, Serena was the only human being on earth capable of finishing what her grandmother started.
She wasn't going to hide.
She never planned to.
Because from the very beginning of this war, she had fully intended to step onto the chessboard.
She would be the bait.
And she would slaughter the snakes when they came out of the dark.