The Blood Of Vampire: Chapter 13 - Kael's Malice and the Northern Trap
The mountains gave way to the Northern farmlands, where small villages nestled in the valleys—human life, warm and vulnerable.
Ryn stopped abruptly, pulling Jatex into the shadow of a ridge. "It's a trap, but not Kael's. This is Hendry's signature."
Below them lay the small, peaceful village of Oakhaven. But Ryn's geomantic sight, honed by her years as a surveyor, saw the terrible truth: Oakhaven was ringed by hidden pylons connected to a massive, unstable Aethyr capacitor buried beneath the village well.
"General Commander Vorlag set this up," Ryn whispered, her face pale. "If we use a Shadow-Blood event—a Siphon, a Leap, anything large—the capacitor will overload. It will be a clean, geomantic accident. The entire village will be wiped out."
It was the ultimate moral trap: The Serpent's First Strike. Hendry wasn't trying to capture Jatex; he was trying to force Jatex to commit mass murder to ensure his own survival, thereby confirming his identity as a heartless monster.
The Thirst roared a cynical proposal: Sacrifice the village. The energy spike will stabilize your Weave for a month.
Jatex clenched his jaw, the taste of the Siphon of Grief turning to ash in his mouth. He couldn't Siphon his own pain here; the raw energy would trigger the capacitor. He couldn't fight Vorlag's soldiers without the village paying the price.
He looked at the peaceful, unsuspecting human lives below. He thought of Aeliana—the purity of her final, desperate choice.
He made his decision.
Jatex executed a unique, agonizing move: a Reversal Siphon. He didn't consume his grief. He consumed the Thirst itself—forcing the predatory spiritual intelligence to temporarily eat its own power, driving it back into its cage, the Sanguine Stain.
The spiritual cost was immediate and profound. Jatex's body went rigid, his spiritual architecture threatening to tear apart from the internal vacuum.
"We move now," Jatex rasped, the effort nearly paralyzing him. He was a dead man walking, having willingly embraced spiritual starvation to save the village.
They slipped around the perimeter, silent as ghosts. As they passed the edge of the geomantic circle, Jatex used the last fraction of his contained power to focus on the capacitor. He didn't explode it; he used a fine Shadow-Blood Weave to subtly shunt the geomantic energy into the deep earth, disabling the trap silently and non-lethally.
Hendry's plan had failed. Jatex was a monster that refused to act like one.