The Singer's black tears cut tracks through the pearlescent sheen of her skin. Her song had shifted from a siren's call to a raw, keening dirge that made the very air vibrate with sorrow. Kaito felt it seep into him, not as a compulsion, but as a shared burden. He saw the ghost of the vibrant spirit she had been, now drowned in a grief so profound it had become a physical poison.
"He is gone," she wept, her voice cracking. "The light in the deep is gone. The great song of the city is silent. All that is left is this… quiet. I am just making it bigger. Sharing the quiet."
[Sage, she's not the source. She's a symptom. The corruption has weaponized her grief.]
[Analysis: Correct. The entity's core purpose—to sing for the Coral-King—has been inverted. Her song now propagates the existential despair that annihilated her master. Neutralizing her will not cleanse the corruption; it will only sever its primary broadcast mechanism.]
Kaito knew then that he couldn't fight her. He had to heal her. But how do you heal a concept? How do you mend a broken song?
He remembered the Dryad's gift. He carefully reached into his tunic and pulled out the simple white flower. The moment it was exposed to the foul air of the inlet, it began to glow with a soft, persistent green light. It was reacting to the presence of pure life, even here, buried under an ocean of despair.
The Singer flinched, her black eyes widening. "What is that?" she hissed, recoiling from the light as if it were a physical blow. "That… noise! It hurts!"
It wasn't noise. It was the opposite of her song. It was the sound of a forest fighting to live, of roots digging deep and leaves reaching for the sun. It was the sound of defiance.
"It's a reminder," Kaito said, his voice quiet but firm, cutting through her weeping. "It's a song from a forest that refused to be silenced. Just like you used to be."
He took a step forward, holding the flower out like a shield. The gentle green light pushed back against the oppressive gloom of the inlet.
"You were his Singer," Kaito pressed, tapping into the simple, direct logic that guided him. "Your job was to sing for him. Not his funeral song. His life song."
He didn't know the Coral-King's song. But he didn't need to. He understood purpose. He focused on the Leviathan Staff, on the concept of Flight he had absorbed—a memory of boundless freedom in the deep, dark currents. He didn't try to mimic a melody. Instead, he pushed that feeling outwards, not as a sound, but as a wave of pure, axiomatic truth: the concept of soaring, of being unbound.
It was a clumsy, wordless lullaby played with the notes of a forgotten god's power.
The effect was instantaneous. The Singer's mournful hum stuttered. She clutched her head, a tremor running through her form. The black tears flowed faster, but now they were tinged with a faint, struggling silver.
"I… I can't remember…" she gasped. "The light… it's so far…"
"Then don't remember the end," Kaito said, taking another step, the flower's light intensifying. "Remember the beginning."
He pushed harder with the concept, flooding the space between them with the sheer, unadulterated joy of existence that was the core of the Flight concept. It was an antidote to her despair.
A single, clear, silver note broke from her lips. It was weak, trembling, but it was pure. It was a note of greeting, of dawn breaking over a calm sea.
The black water in the inlet rippled.
The Singer looked up, her eyes wide with a shock that was entirely her own. For a moment, the absolute blackness in them receded, revealing a glimpse of stunned, hopeful blue.
She had remembered a single note of her true song.
The battle was not over. The corrupted pool still festered, and her form was still fragile. But the first crack of light had appeared in the darkness. Kaito had not fought a monster. He had reminded a lost spirit of its name. And in the echoing silence after that single, pure note, the real work of healing the sunken city could finally begin.
----
CH66.5 The First Note
The single, silver note hung in the corrupted air of the inlet, a shard of perfect beauty in a world of rot. For a moment, the oppressive song of despair was completely silenced, as if the sea itself had drawn a shocked breath.
The Singer stared at Kaito, her form trembling. The glimpse of stunned blue in her eyes was quickly swallowed again by the encroaching blackness, but the fracture remained. A web of fine, silver cracks now spread from the corners of her eyes, fighting the tide of void within her.
"I... I can feel it," she whispered, her voice a ragged mix of her own and the corruption's echo. "The quiet is... less." She looked down at her hands, where the black, viscous tears were now streaked with struggling threads of light. "It hurts less."
Kaito kept the Dryad's flower held steady, its soft green glow a bastion against the gloom. He didn't understand the complex magic of souls or songs, but he understood cause and effect. He had provided a counter-stimulus—a memory of freedom and a symbol of defiant life—and it was having an effect.
[The entity's core spiritual signature is attempting to reassert dominance. The foreign despair is a parasitic entity, not a native part of her. Your intervention has given her a focal point for resistance.]
He wasn't fighting her. He was giving her a weapon to fight with.
"The song you're singing now isn't yours," Kaito said, his voice low and certain. He took a cautious step closer, the sand crunching under his boot. "It's the sickness. Your song is the one that just came out. The clean one."
The Singer flinched, wrapping her arms around herself. The beautiful, haunting melody of despair tried to rise again in her throat, a reflexive defense, but it caught. It was choked by that one, lingering silver note that refused to fade from the air.
"It is so heavy," she cried, the black tears flowing anew. "The silence at the bottom of the black water... it pulls at me. It wants me to be quiet, too."
"Then don't look down," Kaito said, the simplicity of his logic a stark contrast to the spiritual war raging before him. "Look at the flower."
He held it out further. Its light seemed to pulse in time with the weakening beats of her true spirit.
This was not a battle of power, but of endurance. He had started the process, but the Singer had to find the strength to finish it. He was a crutch, a lifeline. He could remind her of the surface, but she had to be the one to claw her way back from the depths.
He settled onto the sand, cross-legged, placing the staff across his lap. He wasn't leaving. He would sit in this blighted inlet, a silent, unyielding anchor of stability, for as long as it took. He would hold the flower until its light faded or until her song was her own again. The fate of the sunken city, and the tormented spirit who was its last voice, now hung on a single, fragile note and the patience of a lonely god.