Chapter 3: The Pirate's Cipher

The weight of their new mission was immense. Finding the Sunken Pearl, one of three remaining lost Seals, was like searching for a single, specific grain of sand on all the beaches of the world. The War Room became the permanent home of the team. For weeks, they worked, sleeping in shifts, fueled by caffeine and the cold dread of the ticking clock.

Rory led the global data-mining operation. She cross-referenced thousands of myths, legends, and historical records. The "Sunken Pearl" appeared in Spanish galleon manifests, ancient Polynesian chants, and British naval logs, each account contradictory, placing the artifact in a different ocean, in a different century. The trail was a labyrinth of lies and dead ends.

Leo worked alongside her. His Dominion, once a blunt instrument of force, was now a surgical tool. Rory would project images of ancient texts or artifacts onto a screen, and Leo would scan them with his Golden Eyes, sensing for the faintest echo of draconic power.

"This one's a fake," he would say, dismissing a 17th-century text. "The story is real, but the writer never saw the Pearl. He's just repeating a legend."

"This one," he'd say, pointing to a battered, salt-stained ship's log, "this one is different. The writer touched it. The memory of its power is still clinging to the words."

Guided by Leo's unique perception, Rory was able to discard ninety-nine percent of the false leads. The one true thread they found was a strange one: a series of recurring, coded entries in the logs of several 18th-century pirates and privateers, all revolving around a legendary treasure known only as the "Heart of the Sea," belonging to the infamous pirate captain, Calico Jack.

"Why would a common pirate have a Seal?" Caesar questioned.

"He wasn't a common pirate," Rory said, pulling up a deeply encrypted file from the college's 'Black Archives'—the hidden history of powerful hybrids. The file for "Calico" Jack Rackham appeared. He was listed as a rogue hybrid of unknown lineage, but immense power, who had vanished after faking his own capture and execution. "He wasn't just a pirate," Rory said. "He was a king of his own, building a secret empire. The college has been trying to find his legendary treasure island for two hundred years."

The final piece of the puzzle was a cipher, hidden in the public display of Calico Jack's last known letter at a maritime museum in Nassau. It was a simple substitution cipher that had baffled historians for centuries. But they weren't historians.

"The key to the cipher isn't a word," Leo realized, seeing the faint energy patterns woven through the writing. "It's a star chart. The one that was in the sky on the night he supposedly 'stole' the Pearl."

Rory input the celestial data. The cipher unscrambled, revealing not a map, but a set of coordinates. A location in the heart of the Caribbean's Bermuda Triangle, an area where satellites malfunctioned and ships were known to vanish. The location of Calico Jack's hidden fortress.

They had found the location of the Sunken Pearl.

But as Rory confirmed the coordinates, a priority alert flashed on her screen.

"Oh no," she whispered.

"What is it?" Caesar demanded.

"It's from our listening post monitoring the Winter Clan's communications," she said, her face pale. "They've been quiet for months. But an hour ago, a single, coded message was sent to all their active cells. It was just two words."

She brought the translated message up on the main screen.

"Calico. Found."

The race had already begun. Their rivals were on the move.

"Get the Valkyrie," Caesar commanded, his voice cold and hard. "Now. We are not losing another Seal."

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