The first strike came like a lightning storm woven into a blade.
The Choral Blade moved with inhuman grace, every swing of his weapon singing with divine resonance. His Fatesong—Ignis Canticle, Third Verse—manifested as arcs of golden fire, slicing the air with blistering precision. He was poetry in motion.
Aeren was not.
He stumbled, parried poorly, and barely avoided being cut in half. Each time their blades met, the Dissonant Blade shrieked in protest, shuddering against the perfect harmony of its opponent.
"You're not trained," the Choral Blade said mid-swing, his voice a mixture of pity and judgment. "You're just a mistake made flesh."
Aeren clenched his jaw. "Maybe."
He let the soldier's blade strike true—cutting into his shoulder—and used the pain.
The Entropy Codex surged.
Symbols flashed in his mind, and suddenly he could see the pattern behind the Choral Blade's song. It wasn't divine—it was designed. Predictable. Repeating.
And now, corruptible.
Aeren raised his sword and whispered something he didn't understand:
> "Collapse."
The air around the Choral Blade warped. The harmony in his movement twisted into a jarring, broken rhythm. His next step staggered. His flame sputtered. His song began to unravel.
"No—what have you done?!"
Aeren moved.
One clean cut through the center of the blade—not steel, but through the song itself.
The Choral Blade dropped, screaming, his voice ripped away mid-chant. His song was silenced. Permanently.
The other four descended immediately, their expressions no longer patient or calm.
"You killed Brother Vance."
Aeren's arm was limp and burned. His body screamed with pain. But the Codex pulsed, hungry.
"I didn't kill him," Aeren said. "I answered him."
The second Choral Blade attacked. This one's song was a Sanctus Aria—healing and light.
But the Codex whispered again.
> "Assimilate. Adjust. Mirror."
Aeren raised his hand—not the blade—and for the first time, a fragmented Fatesong formed around him. It was warped, half-broken, but it pulsed with unfamiliar warmth.
The Choral Blade hesitated.
"You… can't mimic the Aria. That's impossible."
Aeren smiled, blood on his lips.
"Maybe for you."
He didn't win that fight by force.
He won it by corrupting the healer's song, then using a jagged reflection of it to mend his own wounds. The Codex had begun to learn.
Two Blades fell that day. The remaining fled, wounded and shaken—not just by Aeren's strength, but by the realization:
He wasn't just a silencer.
He was a composer.
---
Back in Altheris, Veylor stood before the Mirror of Sorrow, watching the echoes of battle fade.
"Codex bearer… you've begun composing dissonance," he murmured.
He turned to the chained god-corpse behind him, stitched with divine wires and sealed runes.
"It's time we awaken the Echo Knight."