Charlotte's response was not another broadcast. It was an act of war.
A coordinated attack hit three of the Spire's remote harmonic relay towers—the infrastructure that stabilized the Chord across the continent and carried their broadcast. The attacks weren't with explosives, but with focused null-field projectors, the very technology born from the corrupted entropy. They didn't destroy the towers; they unmade sections of them, leaving smooth, featureless voids in the metal and crystal. The towers went silent.
The Chord in the Blight Basin wavered. The moss's song faltered. The careful harmonics guiding the detoxification stuttered into dissonance.
"She's cutting the song off at the knees," Lysander growled, coordinating a defense. "She knows she can't fight the idea, so she's attacking its voice."
Roxana's Guardians mobilized, not to hunt Charlotte, but to protect the remaining relays. It was a defensive, draining game. For every tower they fortified, Charlotte's unseen agents could target another.
Regina, from the Spire, delivered the hard fact. "Our broadcast reach is reduced by sixty percent. Stability in outlying sectors is degrading. If she severs the main Spire conduit, the Chord could fragment into localized, potentially chaotic resonances."
Sage stood in the weakening song of the Basin, the once-confident moss now looking unsure. Charlotte was proving a brutal point: a beautiful song was fragile. A silent, controlled zone was defensible.
He looked at the humming resonator at the center of their camp, the one tying them to the Spire's heart. "We're thinking like a broadcast network," he said. "A central source. She's attacking the source. But a song… a real song… doesn't live in one throat."
He remembered the Choir in the Spire shaft, how the song became stronger when it was shared, when it lived in many voices.
"We need to decentralize the Chord. We need to turn every healed place, every harmonic orchard, into its own source. Its own little heart. So if one is cut, the others keep singing."
It was the final evolution: from a single controlled note, to a central choir, to a distributed chorus across the land. The immune system becoming the nervous system becoming the body itself.