Echoes of the Golden Cup, Blood-Tempered Blade

"When the golden cup smashes into your forehead, remember every drop of wine mixed with blood. That's the furnace that tempers a blade."

The Oletania Empire: bloodline is the right to rule.

Sixteen-year-old Edwin is at a duke's banquet when his biological father cracks his brow with the family's golden cup. As red wine and blood stream into his eyes, he hears the nobles laughing: "A bastard born of a lowly maid, and you think you deserve the Sterling name?"

In a freezing alley, on the verge of death, a bloodstained shard of the golden cup is pressed into his palm.

The curse of blood and metal awakens.

After ten years in hiding, the Rust District forges a monster known by the codename Echo. He can hear metal's cries, tear apart tempered-steel armor with his bare hands, and twist the capital's proudest bell tower until it collapses like a skeleton.

His old enemies still sit in the golden hall: his hypocritical biological father, a marquis who drinks human blood with a smile, and his beautiful, venomous stepmother... They think the tainted blood has long since run dry.

Until, at a grand banquet, the lights go out.

The shattered floor becomes a cage, and the chandeliers burst into a rain of swords hanging overhead.

Edwin strides forward through the screams, fills an identical golden cup with poisoned wine, and presses it to his enemy's lips:

"Choose. Tell me who ordered you to kill my mother, or drink Sterling's 'glory' to the last drop."

The ancient crack along the cup's rim reflects the scar on his brow, a wound that will never heal.

The bloodstained shard is both a key and a shackle.

When the furnace heart begins beating beneath the capital, the golden cup's echoes are only just beginning...