CHAPTER 1568: STORY 1568: THE SHATTERED ECHO

Sound bled back into the world in gasps and stammers, as if the battlefield itself had forgotten how to breathe. The survivors clung to it, each scrape of steel, each ragged breath, each sob a victory against the abyss.

Kael’s fused blade hummed faintly as it struck the ground again, its dull thunder weak but real. The scarred woman’s spear sang sparks once more, and she laughed through blood, her voice hoarse but triumphant. “Hear it? We dragged noise back from its grave.”

The widow added her broken wail, uneven and raw, and the farmer struck his chest in jagged rhythm. Together they rebuilt their storm—scarred rhythm reforged with fragments of silence itself.

The boy’s glow pulsed, faint but steady, his chant no longer smooth or jagged but fractured with pauses. Sound, then silence. Breath, then gap. A rhythm born not just of scars, but of interruptions.

The fissure seethed, its shadow twisting violently. The Unborn’s voice returned like a blade scraping bone:

“You dare fracture silence? You dare wound emptiness itself? Then let me show you what bleeds when silence shatters.”

The ground split. From the fissure rose not echoes, not ash-born shadows, but echoes of their own sounds.

Kael’s roar came back to him, but wrong—deepened, hollow, stripped of fury. The scarred woman’s laugh returned twisted, brittle as glass. The widow’s scream howled back shrill, inhuman. The farmer’s chest-beat resounded like a war drum struck by unseen hands.

Every sound they had clawed back was now turned against them.

The widow fell to her knees, covering her ears. “It’s me—it’s my scream—make it stop!”

The scarred woman struck her spear wildly, trying to drown out her broken laugh, but each blow only returned louder, sharper, multiplied.

Kael staggered as his roar came back in waves, each echo striking through his chest, shaking his blade. His scars seemed to burn with it.

The boy convulsed, torn between chant and shattered echo. His glow flickered with each stolen sound, his breaths stuttering as though he was suffocating on voices that were his and not his.

Elara clutched him tighter, her own whisper trembling. “Don’t listen. Don’t breathe their voices. Breathe ours—broken, but living.”

Kael clenched his jaw, lifting his blade. “These aren’t ours. They’re corpses of sound.” He struck the ground deliberately off-rhythm, his blade biting jagged into stone. The sound cracked—its echo stuttering, breaking apart.

The scarred woman followed, forcing her spear into dissonant strikes, cutting her stolen laugh into shards. The farmer shifted his rhythm, pounding erratic, refusing pattern. The widow, trembling, screamed again—this time not to match but to drown the twisted mimicry of her own voice.

The battlefield filled with shattered echoes colliding, breaking, unraveling. The boy gasped, his chant aligning not with the echoes but with the fractures between them. His glow pulsed uneven, but stronger, weaving silence and sound into jagged defiance.

The fissure shrieked, its shadows convulsing. “You scar even echoes? You poison silence itself? Then I will give you no sound, no void—only the shattering of your own flesh!”

The battlefield buckled as silence and sound warred, their broken storm tearing at the very ground.

And still—the boy’s uneven glow held.