Noctis moved, not toward the backliner, but around it, circling wide enough to make the triangle of containment shift. The frontliner tried to keep pressure on him. The mid-range attacker tried to cut off the arc. The backliner adjusted its chant to keep the floor-script under Noctis's feet.
The more they adjusted, the more the floor heated.
The chamber began to smell like scorched stone.
Noctis took a shield slam and let it throw him into a new lane, closer to the wall. The spear followed; he caught it and yanked hard, forcing the mid-range attacker to step farther than it wanted. An arrow fired at point-blank range; Noctis twisted and took it in the shoulder rather than the throat. Pain flared. Smoke rose. Blood ran down his arm.
He used the blood.
It splattered against the wall and soaked into old carved scripture. His aura pressed into it reflexively, marking the stone. The sanctified script under the blood dimmed slightly, confused by the conflicting imprint.
The backliner's chant faltered for a single beat as the wall-script reacted.
Noctis took that beat and lunged—not at the backliner directly, but at the floor between them. He struck the marble with the curved blade, driving his pressure into the crack lines already forming. The floor split wider, a jagged seam opening as the stone finally gave under layered stress.
The backliner shifted back half a step to avoid the seam.
That half step mattered.
Its chant continued, but the angle changed. The restoration wave reached the frontliner a fraction late. The frontliner's shield took a strike during that delay, and light fractured more deeply than before.
For the first time, one of them did not recover instantly.
Noctis felt it and pressed.
He drove into the shield again, not trying to bypass it, but to keep it working. Every moment the shield had to hold was a moment the chant had to feed it, and every moment the chant fed it was a moment the environment took more stress.
The mid-range attacker thrust from the side. Noctis caught the spear with his jagged blade, locked it, and twisted hard enough to force the angel to lean. He then struck the spear itself with the curved blade, scraping along its length to tear at its coherence. The spear flickered.
The mid-range attacker responded by shifting to bow form and firing at close range. Noctis took one arrow in the ribs. Another grazed his hip. Each hit burned deeper than flesh.
He did not scream. He did not waste breath on rage.
He used the pain to narrow his mind further.
This was the point where a lesser creature would gamble on a single killing blow.
Noctis chose a different gamble.
He stopped trying to outfight them and started trying to separate them.
He moved abruptly into the seam he had created, stepping onto the cracked marble and forcing his weight onto it. The floor gave slightly. The backliner's chant flared to stabilize the ground, pouring sanctified reinforcement into the stone.
Noctis waited for that reinforcement to lock.
Then he struck the floor again—harder—driving his pressure into the newly reinforced seam. Sanctification and impact collided. The reinforcement did not absorb the force cleanly; it amplified the fracture.
The seam split violently.
A section of the floor collapsed inward, dropping into a lower corridor beneath the chamber. Stone roared as it fell, dust erupting upward in a thick cloud.
The mid-range attacker was closest to the seam.
It dropped with the collapsing stone, falling into the lower corridor in a cascade of debris. Its wings flared, trying to stabilize. Its radiance brightened, trying to lift. But the corridor below was narrow, and debris clogged the space.
For the first time, the triangle broke.
The frontliner turned, shield shifting toward the collapse. The backliner's chant surged to restore coherence and stabilize the chamber, and in doing so it had to split its attention between two planes.
Noctis moved.
He did not chase the falling angel. He exploited the one moment where the frontliner's attention shifted. He slipped around the shield's edge, struck the frontliner's side with the jagged blade, and tore a deeper fracture through its radiance than before. Light ripped, and the frontliner's form flickered violently.
The backliner tried to heal it.
The heal wave reached—but it reached weaker, split by the need to stabilize the collapse below.
Noctis pressed his palm into the frontliner's flickering core and applied extraction—not fully, not greedily, but enough to rip structured faith out of the angel's form.
The effect was immediate.
The frontliner's radiance dimmed sharply. Its sword lost brightness. Its shield's coherence wavered.
The angel recoiled, shield slamming into Noctis's chest as it tried to create distance. The impact cracked ribs this time. Pain flashed hot. Blood surged into his mouth. He swallowed it back and maintained stance.
The backliner's chant rose higher, more urgent.
Chains erupted again, snapping around Noctis's legs.
He shredded them.
But the act cost him a fraction of speed. The sword fell again. Noctis caught it, and the burn in his claws was worse now. Sanctified force bit into the edges of his aura.
He felt the Grid tighten again, a deeper pulse this time—not warning, but structural strain. Too much holy input at once. Too much forced adaptation. The lattice inside him compressed, lines overlapping more tightly than they should.
Noctis did not have time to stabilize fully.
The mid-range attacker reappeared.
It burst up from the collapse through a gap in the debris, wings flaring, spear reforming mid-ascent. It looked different now—its radiance dusted with grit, its coherence slightly disrupted. It thrust immediately, spear aimed for Noctis's throat.
Noctis twisted and took the spear through the side of his abdomen instead.
The pain was catastrophic.
Not because the spear pierced flesh—he had endured worse—but because the sanctified edge burned into the core of his aura and stayed there for a breath too long. Smoke rose from the wound as essence was seared and peeled away.
Noctis grabbed the spear shaft with both hands and yanked, tearing it free.
Blood poured.
He felt his body weaken for the first time in the fight. Not collapse, but a subtle loss of fine control. His balance shifted half an inch slower than it should. His breath caught too long before the next inhale.
The angels sensed it.
They tightened formation again, frontliner and mid-range pressing from two sides, backliner chanting to bind and restore. The triangle reformed—imperfectly, with the ground still unstable and debris still falling—but close enough to regain their rhythm.
The next minute was brutal.
Shield slam, sword drop, spear thrust, arrow shot, chain bind, heal wave—each cycle repeated with surgical consistency. Noctis bled more with every exchange. His wounds burned instead of closing. His aura had to work harder to keep him whole.
He stopped trying to answer every strike with a strike.
He began answering strikes with positioning.
He took a shield slam and let it carry him toward the wall again, where blood-marked scripture had dimmed. He took an arrow to the shoulder and used the turn to slip past a floor trap. He caught the spear and let it drag him into a narrow lane of rubble where the frontliner's shield could not swing as freely.
The backliner responded by lighting more script, trying to shape the terrain to suit them.
That shaping further stressed the chamber.
A beam overhead cracked and dropped, slamming into the floor with a roar. Dust exploded upward. The mid-range attacker stumbled as debris struck its wing. It recovered instantly—too disciplined to be thrown off—but the recovery cost it a fraction of timing.
Noctis used that fraction.
He surged toward the mid-range angel, not to kill it, but to force it to spend. He struck its weapon repeatedly, scraping at the spear's coherence, forcing it to re-form. Each re-form was a cost. Each cost demanded the backliner's chant to compensate.
The backliner's output intensified.
Its wings—if they could be called wings—spread wide. Light thickened around it. The chant shifted into a denser cadence, and the chamber responded with a new layer of glyphs that ignited higher on the walls, not just in the floor.
Noctis felt the change immediately.
This was a higher-order binding—less about chains and more about jurisdiction. The light did not aim to restrain his limbs. It aimed to define his presence. To narrow what he was allowed to be.
The pressure hit like a hammer in the mind.
Noctis's vision blurred at the edges. His aura compressed involuntarily. The Grid pulsed hard enough that it felt like a physical blow, its lattice tightening to avoid collapse.
Noctis tasted blood again—more than before.
He did not have the luxury of a long fight now. Not because he would die immediately, but because the Grid inside him would reach a threshold where stabilization would become impossible mid-combat.
He needed a break in the pattern.
He needed to remove the backliner's control.
He could not reach it cleanly.
The shield and spear would stop him every time.
So he made the chamber do it for him.
Noctis stepped backward into the unstable seam and then slammed both blood-forged weapons into the floor at once, driving his aura downward in a concentrated spike. The stone screamed. The floor split again, wider, deeper, and a chunk of the chamber collapsed toward the backliner's position.
The backliner reacted immediately, chant surging to reinforce the ground.
That reinforcement demanded an enormous amount of sanctified output.
Noctis seized the moment and inverted his approach: instead of resisting the sanctity, he pulled at it. Not devouring the whole wave—too dangerous—but stripping at the structure that held it coherent.
The Grid responded with a violent pulse.
The Faith-Eater pathway inside the lattice brightened. For a heartbeat, structured faith stopped being pressure and became intake.
The backliner's reinforcement faltered.
The floor, half-held and half-broken, gave anyway.
The backliner dropped a full step as its footing shifted, forced into a bracing stance. Its chant broke for the first time—not ended, but interrupted. The restoration wave toward the frontliner and mid-range attacker weakened.
Noctis moved.
He did not sprint in a straight line. He moved like a predator through brush, cutting angles, using debris, stepping where floor traps had just dimmed from overload. He slipped past the shield's edge as the frontliner adjusted to cover the backliner, and he took the spear's thrust along his arm rather than his spine.
Pain exploded. He kept moving.
He reached the backliner's perimeter.
Radiant glyphs flared beneath his feet. Chains erupted. He tore through them mid-step. The chant surged into his face like wind, trying to push him back.
Noctis reached out and put his hand on the backliner's radiance.
Not a strike. Contact.
He applied extraction.
The sensation was different from the clergy remains he had eaten earlier. This was structured enforcement, concentrated and alive. It resisted harder. It tried to define him. It tried to mark him as unclean.
The Grid pulsed in protest, then tightened.
Noctis forced his aura into a narrow blade and pushed it through the backliner's coherence, ripping out a core of structured faith.
The backliner's radiance dimmed.
Its chant faltered again.
The floor glyphs dimmed with it.
The frontliner slammed into Noctis from the side, shield-first, knocking him away from the backliner. He hit the wall hard enough to crack stone. The sword followed, cutting across his ribs. Smoke rose from the wound. Blood poured.
Noctis slid down the wall for a fraction of a second, breath ragged.
The angels closed.
Shield, spear, chant—pattern reasserting.
But the backliner's output was weaker now.
The healing wave that reached the frontliner came slower. The chains that erupted under Noctis's feet formed thinner, easier to shred. The floor glyphs lit unevenly.
Noctis pushed himself upright.
His body shook with blood loss. His aura flickered at the edges. The Grid inside him pulsed like a strained muscle, its lattice compressed and hot, warning through pain rather than language.
He steadied his breath again.
Attrition was working.
Now he had to survive long enough for it to matter.
He moved back into the rubble lane, forcing the shield to fight in constrained space. The spear thrust; he let it graze him and used the graze to step inside its reach. The sword dropped; he caught it on crossed blades and twisted, forcing the frontliner to lean. He struck the shield rim again, ripping more coherence from it.
Light cracked.
The frontliner's shield finally showed a deep fracture that did not immediately heal.
The backliner tried to restore it.
The restoration wave reached, thinner than before.
Noctis took the moment and drove his jagged blade into the fracture—not to pierce, but to hook. He yanked hard and tore a strip of radiance free from the shield like fabric ripped from a frame.
The shield's surface dimmed.
The frontliner's stance faltered.
The spear struck Noctis's side; he took it, gritting his teeth against the searing burn, and then slammed his curved blade into the mid-range angel's weapon arm, ripping coherence from its spear as it tried to withdraw.
The spear flickered and collapsed into bow form unintentionally.
The mid-range angel lost half a beat.
Noctis used that half beat to strike its torso with a heavy, sweeping cut, tearing radiance in a line across it.
The mid-range angel staggered.
The backliner surged restoration toward it.
Noctis stepped into that wave and stripped at its edges again, stealing a fraction of structure.
The Grid pulsed, hot, strained, but it held.
The chamber trembled again.
Another ceiling section collapsed. Dust filled the air. Light cut through it in hard beams. Shadows twisted at the edges of those beams, not magical, just the natural result of broken architecture and uneven illumination.
Noctis fought inside that unevenness.
He stopped trying to keep the fight centered.
He dragged it.
He shifted left, then right, then into debris, then out, forcing the angels to keep moving, forcing the backliner to keep re-laying glyphs, forcing the mid-range attacker to keep re-forming weapons, forcing the frontliner to keep holding a shield that was no longer perfect.
The longer it went, the more the angels' perfection began to show micro-errors.
Not mistakes of skill.
Mistakes of timing, born of resource strain.
The backliner's chant grew slightly harsher, its cadence tightening to compensate for weakened output. The mid-range attacker's arrows lost a fraction of cohesion, their edges less clean. The frontliner's shield no longer absorbed impacts without visible flicker.
Noctis's body was worse.
Blood soaked his armor. His leg dragged slightly. His breathing was heavy. The burns in his wounds spread slowly, eating at aura that had to keep repairing itself.
But he was still thinking clearly.
That was the difference.
He found his moment when the backliner attempted a major re-bind.
Glyphs flared bright across the floor, a wide net meant to lock Noctis into place long enough for the shield and spear to finish him. The net was larger than before—expensive.
Noctis did not shred it immediately.
He stepped into it on purpose, letting the chains snap around his ankles and wrists. The pressure tightened, trying to lock his stance.
The angels surged.
Shield forward. Spear thrust. Sword falling.
Noctis waited until the exact moment the backliner committed fully to maintaining the bind.
Then he pulled.
Not at the chains.
At the chant itself.
The Grid flared violently. The Faith-Eater pathway lit and latched onto the structured faith feeding the bind. It was dangerous. It was too much intake at once.
Pain tore through Noctis's skull as the Grid tightened, compressing.
But the bind weakened.
Chains dimmed.
The backliner's radiance flickered sharply.
Noctis ripped free and surged forward with everything he had left.
He did not go for the frontliner. He did not go for the mid-range attacker. He went for the backliner again, because without it the system broke.
The spear caught him in the ribs as he passed. He felt the burn spread. He did not stop. The shield slammed into his shoulder and deflected him half a step. He used the deflection to angle in, closing distance.
He grabbed the backliner's radiance with both hands.
This time he did not strip a fraction.
He tore.
The Grid howled, not with sound but with pressure, as it recorded intake beyond safe thresholds. Crimson lines inside him flashed and overlapped. The lattice compressed further.
Noctis forced the extraction anyway.
The backliner's radiance collapsed.
Its chant stopped.
The floor glyphs died instantly.
The healing waves cut off mid-flow.
The chamber fell into a different silence—a silence not of peace but of systems failing.
The frontliner reacted immediately, surging in a desperate attempt to fill the missing role. Its shield flared brighter as it tried to reassert control. The mid-range attacker switched to bow and fired rapid shots, trying to create distance and end the opening.
Noctis was shaking.
His hands trembled from blood loss and system strain. His aura flickered. The Grid inside him burned hot, compressed, unstable.
But the angels' coordination was broken.
That was enough.
Noctis turned fully into offense for the first time in minutes.
He stepped into the frontliner's shield, took a sword cut across his forearm, and drove his jagged blade into the shield fracture again. He hooked and tore, ripping the shield's surface open. Radiance splintered, and for the first time the frontliner had no perfect wall between itself and him.
Noctis struck the exposed core with the curved blade, not delicately, not for preservation—just enough to collapse coherence.
The frontliner's radiance dimmed sharply.
It staggered.
The mid-range attacker thrust with spear again, trying to rescue it. Noctis caught the spear, yanked hard, and dragged the mid-range angel into the same debris lane where movement was constrained. He struck its torso, tearing radiance further. The mid-range angel tried to withdraw, but without the backliner's stabilizing glyphs, its footing slipped on cracked marble.
It fell to one knee.
Noctis seized the moment and applied extraction to the mid-range angel's core.
The intake was smaller than the backliner's, but still heavy. The Grid flared and tightened again. Pain flashed behind Noctis's eyes.
The mid-range angel's radiance collapsed in layers.
Its weapon dimmed and fell inert.
Noctis did not stand and admire it. He let it go, turning immediately back to the frontliner, which had recovered enough to raise its sword and shield remnants again.
The frontliner struck with brute force now, no longer perfectly coordinated, just violent and determined. The blade fell and fell again. Noctis caught it, redirected it, let it carve burns into him when he could not avoid it.
He answered with sustained pressure, stripping radiance with each contact. The frontliner's light dimmed in increments. It tried to flare brighter, but without reinforcement, the flare burned itself out quickly.
Noctis felt his own limit approaching.
The Grid was compressed to a point that felt unnatural. It was holding too much. Holy intake, faith structure, burned essence, blood doctrine—everything stacked and straining.
If he pushed extraction too hard again, he risked a failure cascade.
So he did not.
He ended the frontliner the way he had ended archbishops: by draining what animated it rather than shattering what remained.
He locked his hands on its core and pulled steadily, controlled, refusing greed.
The frontliner's radiance dimmed, flickered, and collapsed.
The chamber's holy pressure fell away in a wave.
Noctis released the remains and staggered backward, breathing hard, blood pouring, vision narrowing at the edges.
The catacombs around him did not immediately reassert wards.
They could not.
So much sanctification had been torn out that the architecture itself no longer knew what to do with the absence.
Noctis stood amid dust and shattered marble, arms shaking, armor soaked, smoke rising from burns that still chewed at aura.
The Grid inside him pulsed violently, still compressing, still trying to reconcile what it had taken.
He did not have time to sort it here.
He did not have the stability to go deeper.
He forced one step forward, then another, moving away from the ruined chamber and toward the upper passages, because staying in the broken sanctified hall while his lattice threatened to buckle was an invitation to collapse.
Blood dripped in a steady trail behind him.
His breath was ragged but controlled.
The catacombs remained dim, their wards unresponsive, their chains dead.
And inside him, the Grid tightened around itself, holding contradiction with a kind of stubborn refusal that felt less like control and more like a structure preparing—without permission—to change.
He kept walking.