The Echohound hurtled through slipspace like a comet with a purpose. Inside, the atmosphere was tight with unspoken tension. Kael stood near the observation deck, staring at the stars, his thoughts wrapped around what he had seen inside Nullith Prime. The Shard now embedded in his wrist pulsed like a living wound—warm, erratic, as if it had a heartbeat of its own.
Lira joined him silently.
"You're changing," she said after a moment.
Kael didn't look at her. "We all are."
"No. You're not just evolving—you're… unravelling into something new."
Kael flexed his fingers, the Shard's energy tracing ethereal glyphs into the air. "Every time I absorb one of these, it's like I'm remembering something I never lived."
"And you think that's a good thing?"
"No," Kael whispered. "But it might be necessary."
Elsewhere on the ship, Rax was calibrating the pulse-cannons when the alarms went red.
Breach.
At first, the system couldn't even define where. It wasn't a spatial intrusion—it was narrative.
A paragraph appeared on the wall like ink bleeding from invisible veins:
> "It moved like silence dipped in oil. It bled metaphors and breathed motifs. It was the Cadence's secret weapon—an assassin written between lines."
Kael and Lira arrived at the control room just as the power dipped. Every screen flickered with stanzas and broken rhymes. Nira clutched her head.
"He's… he's not a person. He's a poem. A murder-verse."
The lights snapped off.
When they came back on, he was there.
Standing in the center of the room was a tall figure wrapped in long, flowing ink-cloaks. His face was a mess of scribbled calligraphy—eyes formed by quotation marks, a mouth shaped like a jagged em-dash.
Kael instinctively raised his weapon.
The assassin tilted his head. "Ah. The Protagonist."
"Who are you?"
"I am Versik, the Death That Rhymes."
He moved, and the room split.
One slash—and Rax was thrown into a wall, armor sizzling with acidic rhyme.
Kael lunged, Vakya's energy bursting from his fist, forming a shield of crystalline syntax. Their attacks collided mid-air—form against formless, intention against interpretation.
"You can't win," Kael grunted. "You're just words!"
"Words," Versik hissed, "are the building blocks of reality."
The fight tore through the ship. Each step Versik took rewrote the surroundings. Hallways turned into verses. Bulkheads rearranged themselves into metaphors. Kael found himself caught in a loop—every turn bringing him back to the same corridor.
"He's restructuring the narrative logic!" Nira screamed through the coms.
"How do we stop him?"
"You don't fight a poem with fists. You counter it with revision."
In the armory, Lira found Kael.
"We need to rewrite him."
Kael's eyes narrowed. "How?"
"Vakya. You've been integrating it. Use it not just to destroy—but to edit."
Kael nodded slowly, stepping into the corridor where Versik waited, now pacing like a panther trapped in a stanza.
"You survived Nullith Prime," Versik said, voice soft and rhythmic. "But you will not survive me."
"I don't need to."
Kael's body lit up with glowing script. Symbols flowed over his skin like armor forged from ancient dialects.
"I just need to turn the page."
He raised his hands, and the air trembled.
The Battle of Verse and Voice began.
Versik unleashed lines so sharp they sliced steel. Kael countered with clauses and seals pulled from Vakya's system core.
Strike.
"Your story ends—"
Block.
"—when rhythm bends—"
Slash.
"—to one who sins—"
Parry.
"—with broken pens!"
Kael pushed forward, each word he spoke reshaping Versik's form. The assassin faltered, his body glitching between couplets and corrupted haiku.
Lira and Rax joined in, surrounding the assassin with energy fields that fed into Kael's syntactic loop. Together, they formed a Rebinding Ring—a construct meant to imprison rogue narratives.
Versik screamed, "You cannot bind a song that has no melody!"
But Kael wasn't aiming for melody.
He aimed for intention.
He raised his hand and whispered:
"Vakya: Revision Code 01. Reclassify enemy entry as redacted."
Versik's body began to unravel, each word fading into whitespace.
"No—wait—I was—meant—for—"
And with a final poof of punctuation, he vanished.
The lights stabilized. The ship returned to its original layout.
Kael dropped to one knee, breathing hard.
Nira checked the systems. "He's gone. The code erased itself."
Rax exhaled. "What in all the stars was that?"
"A weapon," Kael said. "The Cadence is done playing subtle. They're rewriting assassins from unused verses."
Lira put a hand on his shoulder. "Then we need to write faster."
Later that night, as the others slept, Kael stood alone on the observation deck.
The stars stretched before him—still beautiful, still cold.
In the Shard embedded in his wrist, he saw reflections—not of the universe, but of what it could become.
He whispered to the void, "If you're listening, Author… I'm not your pawn anymore."
Behind him, Vakya's system hummed.
> "Acknowledged: Protagonist trajectory unlocked."
Kael looked up.
Time to find the next Shard.
Time to write his ending.