The chamber had become a wreck of split marble and shattered coffins, but it still felt small under the pressure of three Tier Seven presences working in concert. Noctis's chest rose and fell hard enough to pull at broken ribs. His spirals burned like heated metal under the skin, brightening in spasms every time a fresh wave of sanctified force tried to compress his aura into submission.
Across from him, the angels held formation without speaking.
Their light was cracked in places—fine fractures and brief flickers where his cuts had bitten into coherence—but none of those fractures had spread far enough to become failure. They stood with the steadiness of a machine that did not understand fear and did not require emotion to coordinate.
Noctis lifted both reapers. Blood slid from his claws and ran down the weapon edges in thin, trembling lines before dripping to the floor. He did not posture. He did not threaten. His body was already past the point where pride mattered. What remained was decision.
He drew a breath low into his abdomen and opened his aura.
Crimson pressure spilled outward like a flood released from a dam. The air thickened immediately, not with smoke but with blood-essence so dense it robbed the chamber of sharp edges. The world blurred, muffled, and grew heavy. Light dulled within it. Shadows deepened. For a heartbeat, the angels' radiance did not vanish, but it lost certainty, forced to glow through something that resisted it.
Noctis moved into that moment.
His reapers carved wide arcs through the crimson haze, the blades leaving trails that lingered half a second longer than they should have, as though the blood itself remembered the shape of the cut. Each swing was broad enough to threaten all three at once, forcing them to hold position rather than step freely.
The response came immediately from the backliner.
The chanter's voice rose—steady, cold, and absolute—and the haze split. Radiance did not merely shine through it. It divided it into lanes, carving channels of clarity through Noctis's domain and restoring the angels' sight and rhythm.
Noctis tightened his spirals instead of widening them.
He compressed the haze into motion.
The blood-thick air became a vortex. It did not drift anymore. It turned. It screamed across stone in a spiraling pull that lifted dust and loose fragments of coffin-lids into its rotation. Within that rotation, blood hardened into edges—countless thin blades forming and collapsing, forming and collapsing—shredding whatever they contacted.
The storm slammed into the frontliner's shield first.
The radiant barrier held, but it did not hold cleanly. The surface began to crack deeper than before. Light sputtered at the edges and bled into red-tinged distortion where Noctis's pressure chewed into it. The mid-range angel tried to reposition, weapon shifting as it moved, but the storm caught its wings and tore glowing strands free. Even the chanter's robe-like radiance split and fluttered as the vortex slashed through it, forcing the chant to tighten to keep coherence.
Noctis pressed into the instability.
He did not let the storm do all the work. He layered force into the chamber itself, driving his aura down into the floor and hammering it with a controlled shock. The catacombs responded with violence. Marble split. Old supports groaned. Coffins along the walls cracked open, gold bands snapping apart and scattering like broken rings. The ground's fracture lines raced outward in jagged webs.
The angels adjusted again, feet shifting to find stable purchase as the room tried to become rubble beneath them.
The mid-ranger retaliated with a spear thrust meant to end Noctis's momentum. Noctis turned into it, not away, forcing the weapon to scrape along his reaper rather than bite deep. The contact burned, sanctified heat biting into his aura even through the metal. He answered by turning the air itself into a cutting pressure, a shrieking gale that tore into the mid-ranger's wings and shoved it backward across broken stone.
Fire followed the wind.
Not a clean flame, not a bright blaze—crimson heat that rode the gale like grit, turning it into a storm of burning ash that ate at radiance the way corrosion ate at metal.
The backliner threw protection into the formation, chant shifting to form a stabilizing layer—less healing, more shielding—trying to keep the storm from turning their cracks into breaks.
Noctis inverted the space around them.
He did not "cast" anything. He asserted a rule: sanctified output would not behave as it expected. For a breath, the angels' radiance dimmed and hesitated as their own power felt like it was slipping, like the floor beneath them had tilted. Restoration slowed. The shield's reinforcement wavered. The backliner's chant caught in its own cadence, forced to rethread the hymn through a hostile medium.
For the first time, the backliner's glow showed a fracture that did not immediately close.
Noctis staggered.
He was still paying for everything.
His chest was torn open in multiple places, the burns refusing to seal. His thigh shook with each step where sanctified injury had damaged more than muscle. His ribs were cracked enough that every deep breath stabbed. Blood ran freely now, soaking into his armor and dripping in steady trails.
But the angels were bleeding light.
The frontliner's shield had begun to burn red at the edges where his storm had chewed into it. The mid-ranger's wings were no longer clean. They were ragged, cut, and uneven. The backliner's chant trembled—not failing, but stressed, forced to compensate harder every time their formation took damage.
Noctis tightened his grip on both reapers until the metal bit into his palms.
"This is how you kill gods," he rasped, voice rough with blood and smoke.
The tomb answered with a deeper groan as the storm continued to grind through stone.
And then the angels changed.
Not in panic, not in rage, but in method.
The frontliner stepped forward and expanded its shield's radiance outward, not to push but to catch. The remnants of Noctis's orbiting blades—blood-forged edges he had been using to intercept and pressure—slammed into the shield and stuck. The barrier did not splinter the way it had earlier. The backliner's chant fed directly into it, reinforcing it in real time. Noctis felt the difference through impact: the shield had become a conduit, not a surface.
The mid-ranger circled, spear reformed and steady again, and it began striking in the same rhythm as the shield.
Every time Noctis blocked the spear, the shield slammed into his guard and stole his footing. Every time he braced for the shield, the spear threaded through the shifting gap and cut into his side. The coordination tightened into a pattern that punished response itself.
The backliner escalated again.
Glyphs spread beyond the floor. They climbed the walls and crawled onto the ceiling, lines of radiant script weaving into a domed net that controlled space rather than simply trapping steps. The dome absorbed crimson haze instead of being drowned by it. It parted fire and wind instead of being torn. It turned the chamber into a regulated environment—the angels' environment.
Noctis's storm tore at it, but the dome redistributed damage, passing stress along its script like a chain passing a load.
"You're learning," Noctis muttered, breath heavy.
He did not mean it as admiration. He meant it as recognition of threat.
The frontliner struck.
Noctis crossed his reapers and caught the sword, sparks and blood flaring as sanctified weight hammered down. The spear slid past his guard and carved a fresh wound into his thigh, burning deep. The dome responded with chains, binding his arms again from above this time, tightening from multiple angles.
He broke them by forcing his aura outward in a violent pulse, but the shield was already moving, and the next slam drove him into the wall hard enough to crack stone. Blood sprayed from his mouth. His vision swam.
The angels closed tighter.
One pinned. One pierced. One controlled.
Noctis tasted the truth of it: this was not a fight of strength. It was a fight against perfection. A system built to deny him the kind of chaos he thrived in.
If he stayed inside their dome, they would bury him here—not quickly, but inevitably.
So he stopped trying to win inside it.
He refused the chamber.
Blood surged along his spine and erupted outward, not as mist this time but as structured extension—wings shaped from dense crimson essence, each beat of them throwing pressure hard enough to crack glyphs overhead. He drove upward in a single violent ascent that shattered part of the dome and blew dust and debris outward like a shockwave.
The tomb split further beneath the force.
He burst into a higher passage where the ceiling arched wider, then into a cavernous section carved for something grander than bishops and coffins—a vaulted chamber where ruined statues lay toppled and broken arches stood like the ribs of a dead cathedral.
The angels followed immediately.
The frontliner rose with shield raised, sword burning brighter as it accelerated. The mid-ranger shifted into bow form and fired as it climbed, arrows streaking after Noctis like spears of judgment. The backliner remained lower for a breath, chant rising to extend its glyph-net upward through the broken passage, trying to bind him even in flight while feeding radiance into the other two.
Noctis banked hard, wings cutting arcs through dusty air.
Arrows chased him. He felt one pass close enough to burn the edge of his wing structure. Another grazed his ribs and tore a new smoking wound into his side.
He answered by throwing blood-forged blades outward—not named, not displayed, simply formed and released. They spun around him in a tight orbit, intercepting arrows mid-flight and shattering them into dim fragments. When the frontliner closed, several blades slammed into its shield and left new cracks that did not heal instantly.
Noctis turned mid-flight and released another storm.
Crimson wind tore through the wider cavern now, not constrained by the small tomb. The mid-ranger's wings took the brunt. Radiance ripped free in strands. The frontliner's shield cracked deeper under sustained pressure. The backliner's chant faltered briefly as the storm's edge clipped its protective output.
Noctis dove.
He did not dive at the shield. He did not dive at the spear. He dove toward the backliner, because that was the heart of their perfection. He struck low and fast, forcing the backliner to heal itself rather than feed the others.
The backliner's radiance tightened around its own structure, sealing tears rather than extending support. For a breath, the frontliner's shield reinforcement weakened.
Noctis saw it.
Not as a visual crack, but as a slight delay in the shield's response. A fraction of timing.
Attrition.
He bared his fangs, blood dripping down his chin, and made a decision: bleed them all at once.
He drowned the cavern floor in crimson haze again, thick enough to cling to broken statues and swirl around shattered columns. Then he ignited it with corrosive heat, forcing the backliner to choose: bind him or restore them, stabilize the dome-net or heal the fractures.
It chose all of it.
And that choice strained it.
The mid-ranger's wings shredded further under the mixed storm. The frontliner's shield dimmed unevenly, glowing faint in sections where reinforcement could not reach fast enough. The backliner's chant grew strained, the cadence tightening and hardening as it forced coherence through overload.
Noctis was worse.
His blood loss was becoming systemic. His movements had lost a fraction of precision. His breath hitched too long between inhales. His spirals flickered, dimmed, flared again, refusing to die even as they threatened instability.
But the cracks in their perfection were spreading.
Slowly, steadily, one of them would fail first.
The mid-ranger failed before it could decide to stop.
A cry tore from it—not a human sound, but a resonance of structure breaking. Its wings collapsed mid-beat, radiance disintegrating into fragments that scattered like ash. Noctis's reaper carved across its chest in a heavy sweep, and the storm poured through the cut as if the wound had become a channel.
Light shattered outward.
The angel fell.
It hit the broken stone below in a spray of dim fragments that faded too quickly to be gathered cleanly, leaving only scorched marks and an absence where coherence had been.
Noctis did not pause. He did not watch it die. He turned immediately and pushed deeper into the ruined cavern, dragging the remaining two after him, because separation mattered more than pride.
For a heartbeat, he thought their pursuit would remain rigid, predictable.
Then the frontliner stopped.
It lowered its shield.
Not as surrender, not as weakness, but as choice.
It brought the sword into both hands, and the radiance along the edge changed. The light did not flare outward. It folded inward, condensing, tightening, compressing until the blade's glow became almost solid. The air around it warped, as if the weapon had begun to impose a rule on space itself.
Noctis's spirals dimmed for a fraction of a second, then flared hard as his Grid pulsed a sharp, warning compression.
"That's not Tier Seven," he muttered, voice low and raw.
The frontliner charged.
The sword came down like a pillar of judgment, not merely striking stone but erasing it. Marble vaporized in its path. A line of the cavern split open as though a seam in reality had been cut and forced apart.
Noctis crossed both reapers and beat his blood wings hard, bracing.
The impact was catastrophic.
It drove through his guard, through his aura, through the stabilizing logic of his Grid. Blood exploded from his chest and mouth. The ground split beneath his feet into a jagged chasm, and his knees hit stone as the force finally found a point to anchor itself.
For a moment, he could not breathe.
His vision narrowed to a tunnel. The sound of the cavern became distant, muffled by the roaring pressure in his skull. His spirals flickered wildly, struggling to maintain coherence after absorbing a strike that carried higher authority than the fight had demanded until now.
He tried to rise. His body refused for a beat.
Blood poured from the fresh wound across his chest, the edges smoking with sanctified burn. His reapers trembled in his hands.
Across from him, the frontliner lifted its blade again.
The glow along the edge burned hotter still, compressing further, preparing a second strike that promised not attrition but execution.
The healer remained behind it, chant tightening to reinforce the escalation, the dome-net beginning to re-form in the wider space.
Noctis forced breath into his lungs, shallow and painful, and pushed one foot under him.
The fight had changed.
And if he stayed in the rhythm they wanted, the next blow would end him.
The sword came down a second time.
No warning. No widening flare of light that gave him a fraction of rhythm to anticipate. The frontliner's radiance had collapsed inward so tightly that the blade looked almost calm until it moved, and then the air itself split as if space had been cut open and forced to admit it could be harmed.
Noctis felt the strike before he saw it. The pressure hit the Grid first—an abrupt, violent compression that made every crimson line inside him seize at once. His spirals shrieked in warning, not as sound but as sensation: the system recognized a higher-order authority shaping the world around it.
He did not try to tank it.
He moved.
He tore his body sideways through a short step of warped distance, slipping just out of the strike's dead center. The motion was not graceful. It was the last possible misalignment of flesh with execution.
The blade still struck.
The cavern did not shake. It broke. Stone did not crack like masonry; it separated like paper being torn cleanly. The cut traveled through the rock and into whatever lay above. The mountain mass over the catacombs recoiled as though its weight had been insulted. Far beyond the cathedral ruin, ridges shifted and buckled. The ground split open in a scar that ran outward through buried corridors and dead chambers, reaching toward the desert like a wound drawn by a god's fingernail.
And yet, the center of that catastrophic line was not the mountain.
It was Noctis.
The edge of the strike caught him as he passed.
It did not slice like steel. It erased, clean and indifferent. The left side of his torso vanished in a single searing instant. His arm went with it. Shoulder, muscle, bone—gone so completely that his body had no time to register it as injury. It was simply absence, a sudden emptiness where weight and balance had been.
Then pain arrived.
It slammed into him late and overwhelming, ripping breath out of his lungs. He hit the fractured stone hard enough to bounce once, leaving a smear of blood that looked too dark against the pale glow still hanging in the air.
Blood poured in torrents.
Not a controlled spill. Not a steady bleed he could manage. It rushed from the severed edge of his body with violent urgency, as though the rest of him were trying to evacuate itself.
But the blood was not the worst part.
The wound burned.
The light that had cut him did not leave when the blade lifted. It clung. It crawled along torn flesh and exposed bone with a cold, sanctified persistence that mocked the idea of regeneration. It was not flame, not poison, not curse in the usual sense. It was authority embedded in injury. It told his body, you are not permitted to close.
The Grid pulsed in immediate alarm.
Crimson lines flashed and tried to route healing around the damage. The response met resistance that did not behave like resistance—it behaved like a rule. The wound refused to be overwritten. His blood tried to knit. The sanctity prevented it. The more he forced regeneration, the more the holy burn deepened and spread, eating at essence as if it had teeth.
Noctis pushed himself upright.
The movement cost him. His balance was wrong. His center was shifted. The missing arm changed everything: weight, momentum, the way his stance wanted to settle. Blood ran down his side in thick sheets. His spirals flickered wildly, struggling to stabilize under catastrophic loss and the ongoing sanctified denial.
Across the shattered cavern, the frontliner lifted the sword again.
Radiance condensed along the blade's edge, drawing tighter, brighter, colder. The healer's chant rose behind it—lower than before, more contained, feeding directly into the frontliner's condensed output instead of flooding the room.
Noctis bared his fangs through blood and pain.
"You'll regret not finishing it," he said, voice hoarse but steady.
He did not mean it as bravado. He meant it as prophecy.
The frontliner stepped forward.
The next strike would land before he could take three breaths.
Noctis forced his mind into stillness and looked inward.
The Grid screamed warnings with every pulse. Essence drain had become extreme. Wound stacking was critical. Structural strain rose in thick waves, because the Grid was attempting to reconcile too many simultaneous demands: survive, heal, resist sanctity, maintain dominion, and do all of it with a body that had been forcibly rewritten.
A pale thread coiled among the crimson in the Grid's lattice.
It had been there since the bishops and archbishops. Since the catacombs began feeding him structured faith instead of raw light. It was not a complete doctrine, not a perfected vein, but it was there—an unfinished path that responded to sanctity like hunger.
Faith-Eater.
Deeper still, another option pulsed with darker certainty, a transformation that would give him brute advantage at a cost he could not fully predict here. It was a form that devoured resource the way fire devoured air. It would turn the fight into slaughter—until it ended, and left him empty in a hostile chamber.
Noctis did the math without counting.
Two angels remained. One was now striking at Tier Eight intensity. The other was the reason that intensity could be sustained. If he released a timed transformation and failed to finish both before the cost came due, he would die in the last moments of exhaustion.
Not yet.
He chose the path that did not end quickly.
He tore the Faith-Eater thread open.
It did not feel like gaining power. It felt like changing relationship. The sanctity clinging to his wound sputtered as if it had been deprived of context. The holy burn tried to continue eating, and then suddenly it found itself being pulled—not resisted, not inverted, but consumed.
The lingering light in his torn chest dimmed. The infection of sanctity collapsed in patches, its authority breaking into fragments that the Grid immediately registered and dragged inward. The wound did not close. His arm did not regrow in an instant. But the denial ended. The holy rule attached to his flesh stopped asserting itself with perfect confidence.
Noctis exhaled through clenched teeth.
His chest still gaped. Blood still poured. But the burning stopped spreading. The pain changed from holy corrosion to physical injury—something his body understood how to endure.
Across from him, the angels faltered.
Not from fear, not from shock, but from functional disruption. The healer's chant cracked mid-verse as output that should have radiated outward was suddenly being siphoned toward Noctis's spirals. The frontliner's sword flickered—not because its power failed, but because some portion of its radiance was being stripped away at the edges and pulled into the Grid's hunger.
Noctis raised his remaining hand.
A reaper formed in his grip, its edge darker than before, laced with thin pale threads that looked wrong on blood-forged steel. It was not holy. It was stolen sanctity, stripped of allegiance and made into material.
"You call yourselves light," Noctis said, voice low with blood. "From this moment, your light belongs to me."
The Faith-Eater pathway burned brighter.