For the first time in the battle, the angels' radiance did not fill the chamber unquestioned. It receded slightly under his presence, forced to spend effort simply to remain coherent.
The frontliner struck anyway.
It came in with shield and blade, condensed radiance still lethal. Noctis moved without announcing the motion, slipping to the side with a short distortion of space that spared him from the strike's center. His reaper rose in a one-armed arc and slammed into the shield's edge.
The impact cracked the shield further.
Light burst outward in shards—and some of those shards did not fly away. They curved, drawn into Noctis's spirals as if gravity had changed.
The healer tried to bind him.
Chains erupted from floor glyphs, tighter and stronger than before. Noctis shredded them, but the important part happened simultaneously: the glyphs dimmed too quickly. The healer's chant was producing output, but the Faith-Eater's pull was stripping the structure faster than it could stabilize.
The healer adjusted at once.
Its hymn tightened, no longer spilling into the room. The radiance became internal, routed directly into the frontliner's shield and sword. The light did not bloom outward anymore; it burned inward, condensed so the siphon had less to grab.
Noctis felt the difference immediately.
The Faith-Eater still worked, but it was no longer a flood. It became friction, a grinding pull that scraped at condensed sanctity instead of ripping through open radiance. He could still drain them, but now he had to do it through contact and pressure rather than ambient consumption.
The fight shifted shape.
The angels pressed forward with raw physical force instead of radiant waves. The frontliner's shield slammed into him like a battering ram, and the healer's chant reinforced the impact rather than lighting traps across the floor. Noctis caught the sword on his reaper, sparks of red and pale flaring as sanctity and blood clashed in a tight, brutal exchange.
His cracked ribs screamed. Blood sprayed from his torn chest.
The frontliner did not slow.
The next sword drop came in tighter, aiming for the wound and the missing arm side as if it knew exactly where his balance was compromised. Noctis turned his hips and took the strike across the edge of his reaper, letting it slide rather than bite. Even so, sanctity kissed his aura and burned, and he felt the Grid clamp down to keep the contact from becoming infection again.
The healer's chains returned—fewer now, denser, stronger, anchored to condensed chant. They latched onto his ankle and held half a second longer than they should have, radiance biting into his aura like hooks. He tore free, but it cost him momentum, and the shield slammed him in the same instant.
Noctis flew back three steps and hit broken stone.
He caught himself, staggered, and forced his stance to settle despite missing weight on his left side. His breath came ragged. His spirals flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed, as if struggling to decide whether to burn hot or conserve.
The Faith-Eater pull remained steady.
Not a feast now.
A siege.
Noctis wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled through it.
"Adapt all you like," he said. "You're still going to run out before I do."
It was a lie on the surface.
He was already near a limit.
His body could handle catastrophic injury, but not endless sanctified pressure layered onto it. His Grid could hold contradiction, but not indefinitely under Tier Eight strikes. If the fight stayed perfect, he would eventually collapse—not from being overpowered, but from being bled out in a place that denied easy recovery.
So he changed the terms again.
He stopped giving them clean exchanges.
Noctis began moving through the ruined cavern, not retreating blindly but choosing terrain that punished shield-and-sword dominance. He stepped over fractured slabs and between toppled statues, using broken architecture to narrow the frontliner's swing arcs. He forced the shield to turn, to re-angle, to work harder.
Each time the frontliner adjusted, Noctis struck the shield's weak points—the cracks he had already carved—scraping coherence away in thin strips. Each strip of stolen light fed his spirals. The Faith-Eater pathway did not roar; it drank steadily.
The healer reacted by tightening reinforcement and increasing condensed output into the shield.
Noctis welcomed it.
Condensed sanctity was harder to strip, but every reinforcement required fuel. Every second of sustained Tier Eight density demanded continuous feed. If he could keep forcing them to spend, the healer would eventually face a choice: sustain the frontliner's weapon, or preserve itself.
Noctis made sure that choice arrived faster.
He took risks.
He let the shield slam him once to get inside the sword's line. He let the blade graze his side to keep pressure on the healer's chant. He used his blood not for show, but as territory—spilling it onto stone where it could dampen glyph scripts and disrupt sanctified anchoring.
The healer noticed and shifted chant patterns, avoiding floor glyphs where blood had soaked in.
Noctis noticed that too.
He led them toward a section of the cavern where the ceiling had cracked earlier from the Tier Eight strike. Dust fell there in steady streams, and the stone above vibrated faintly like a stressed rib.
He took a shield slam and rolled with it, stepping into that dust-fall zone. The sword came down. He caught it and twisted, forcing the frontliner to lean forward and step under the stressed section.
The healer pushed reinforcement harder.
Sanctity condensed into the frontliner to stabilize the position.
The ceiling crack widened.
A slab fell.
Not huge, but heavy enough that it smashed into the frontliner's shoulder and shield rim, throwing the angel off balance for a fraction of timing. It recovered instantly—Tier Seven discipline still perfect—but the recovery cost it a micro-delay in weapon alignment.
Noctis hit the shield crack during that delay.
His reaper's edge bit into the fracture, and he tore a strip of light free like cloth ripped from a seam. The shield flashed, sputtered, and dimmed.
The healer surged restoration and reinforcement at the same time.
Noctis's Faith-Eater pull latched onto the surge and stripped the edge of it, drawing sanctity into his spirals. He felt the Grid tighten as it recorded more faith structure, but he also felt the immediate benefit: the healer's surge weakened mid-flow.
The frontliner raised the sword again.
Light condensed.
The air warped.
Noctis's stomach tightened. He recognized the pre-strike signature now: Tier Eight density compressing into a killing arc.
He could not take another direct hit like the last.
He moved before the sword fell.
This time he didn't step sideways. He stepped through—closing distance so tightly that the sword's full arc could not be brought down without cutting the healer behind.
The frontliner hesitated for the first time, a fraction of tactical pause.
Noctis used that fraction to strike the sword's edge with his reaper—not to block the strike, but to scrape along the condensed radiance and peel off a sliver of its structure. The sword's glow flickered.
The healer tightened chant harder to maintain condensation.
Noctis felt resistance spike.
The Faith-Eater pathway ground against condensed sanctity like teeth against stone.
He bared his fangs.
If they wanted to play compression, he could play compression too.
Noctis stopped trying to drain broadly and focused his pull into a narrow, targeted bite at the healer's chant line. Not the shield. Not the sword. The conduit itself.
The effect was immediate.
The healer's chant stuttered, a syllable collapsing into static as the structured faith that carried it was stripped mid-formation. The sword's glow dimmed a hair. The shield's reinforcement faltered.
Noctis struck the shield again.
The crack widened.
The frontliner slammed him with the shield in response. Noctis felt bone shift again in his chest. Blood poured from the torn edge of his left torso and spattered the frontliner's shield face.
Blood touched condensed sanctity.
For a breath, the shield's surface confused itself, radiance stuttering where his blood marked it.
Noctis hit that stutter with everything he had in one arm.
The reaper slammed into the shield crack. The crack spread outward, branching like lightning across glass. Light burst out—and this time, it burst out in a way the healer could not immediately catch.
Noctis's spirals drank the shards.
The frontliner stumbled half a step.
The healer moved instinctively to reinforce.
Noctis did not let it.
He surged toward the healer, not in a straight line but with a short distortion, crossing the distance before floor glyphs could form. The healer's radiance flared defensively, trying to bind him with condensed chains.
Noctis tore through them and grabbed the healer's radiance at the core.
Contact.
The Grid pulsed hard.
This was dangerous. The healer's sanctity was denser than the bishops' remnants had been, more alive, more coherent. Stripping it too quickly could overload the Grid's provisional registers and force a structural failure.
Noctis pulled anyway—controlled, but ruthless.
The healer's radiance dimmed.
Its chant cracked.
For the first time, its output stopped feeling infinite.
The frontliner hit Noctis from the side, shield-first, launching him away from the healer before he could finish the drain. Noctis slammed into a broken pillar and cracked it in half. Dust exploded. His vision blurred. He tasted blood and swallowed it.
But the healer was weaker now.
Its glow flickered as it tried to restore itself while also feeding the frontliner.
And the frontliner's shield crack was too wide to ignore.
Noctis rose, shaking.
He forced breath into his lungs and re-centered despite missing half his balance. His spirals burned low and furious. The Faith-Eater pathway stayed open, feeding steadily.
The angels advanced again—shield and sword in front, healer behind.
They were still dangerous.
Still coordinated.
But their perfection had hairline fractures now.
Noctis began to exploit them methodically.
He didn't chase kills. He chased spend.
He hit the shield crack, forced reinforcement. He scraped the sword edge, forced condensation. He lunged toward the healer, forced defensive output. Every forced output fed his siphon. Every siphon fed his spirals. Every stolen fragment reduced the angels' available coherence.
Minutes passed like that—brutal, grinding, slow.
The cavern became more ruined. Stone fell in chunks. Wards that had survived earlier phases sputtered and died under conflicting dominion. Dust hung in thick layers, turning light into hazy beams.
Noctis's blood trail widened.
His chest wound refused to fully stabilize without the missing arm's regrowth, and regrowth still demanded time and uninterrupted focus—two things this fight would not allow. He was fighting one-handed, half-open, burning, and bleeding.
But he was still thinking.
And the healer was beginning to strain.
Noctis saw it not in expression—angels didn't show expression the way mortals did—but in output behavior. The healer's chant cadence tightened more often. Its reinforcement pulses came in shorter bursts instead of smooth streams. Its defensive flares lingered longer than they should have after each contact, as if it needed extra time to re-stabilize.
Noctis smiled again, teeth red.
There it is.
The frontliner raised its sword for another Tier Eight strike.
The healer fed it.
Noctis felt the condensed radiance spike. The air warped. The blade's glow tightened into a sharp, killing line.
Noctis did not try to dodge this time.
He stepped into the moment the healer committed reinforcement and bit down with the Faith-Eater pull as hard as he dared without snapping the Grid's constraints.
The healer's chant buckled.
The sword's glow flickered.
The frontliner began the swing anyway—momentum too committed to stop.
Noctis slipped just enough.
The strike carved the cavern wall instead of his body, exploding stone into a cloud that blinded even angelic radiance for a heartbeat.
Noctis used the heartbeat.
He lunged through the dust and drove his reaper into the healer's core again, one-handed grip shaking with blood loss and strain, and pulled.
The healer's radiance dimmed sharply.
Its chant broke mid-syllable.
Floor glyphs died.
Shield reinforcement stopped.
The frontliner turned too late.
Noctis ripped free and slammed his reaper into the shield crack with the last clean strength he could summon.
The shield shattered.
Not into fragments of metal—into torn sheets of radiance that collapsed and evaporated, leaving the frontliner's core exposed for the first time since Tier Eight escalation began.
The frontliner's sword burned brighter in reflexive response, trying to compensate for the loss of defense.
Noctis didn't give it time.
He drove forward and pressed his palm into the frontliner's exposed radiance, letting the Faith-Eater pathway latch on fully.
The Grid pulsed like a heart under strain.
Noctis pulled—steady, controlled, refusing greed, refusing overload.
The frontliner's light dimmed.
The sword's glow flickered.
The healer tried to restore it, but its chant was broken and struggling, its output no longer able to stabilize both itself and the frontliner at once.
Noctis continued pulling.
Light bled into his spirals in thin streams, not exploding, not flaring—just being taken.
The frontliner's radiance collapsed inward.
It staggered.
Its sword lost condensation, glow unraveling into unstable flicker. The Tier Eight authority vanished like a breath released.
Noctis shoved the frontliner away and turned back toward the healer.
The healer was retreating—still upright, still dangerous, but visibly strained now in output behavior, glow fluctuating as it tried to reform chant structure.
Noctis took a step forward and nearly fell.
His leg trembled. His vision swam. The Grid inside him pulsed with compressed contradiction, hot and unstable from the amount of structured faith it had absorbed. His blood loss was catastrophic. His left side was still missing, torn open, and though sanctified denial was gone, regeneration had not had time to rebuild the limb.
He forced another step.
The healer raised its hands and tried to form condensed chains again.
Noctis tore them apart without ceremony.
He reached the healer.
He grabbed its radiance.
And for a moment—just a moment—he felt the Grid's warning spike into something sharper: if he pulled too hard now, the system could fracture under load. The structure inside him was not built yet to unify blood, abyssal residue, and living sanctity cleanly. It was holding through compression and stubborn rewriting.
Noctis pulled anyway.
Not greedily.
Decisively.
The healer's glow dimmed to a thin outline.
Its chant failed completely.
The cavern's sanctified pressure collapsed in a wave.
The remaining angel's coherence broke and scattered into inert fragments of pale residue that faded too quickly to be gathered cleanly, leaving scorched stone and an absence where authority had been.
Noctis released it and staggered back.
He stood alone in the ruined cavern, blood pouring, spirals flickering, the Grid burning hot inside him with more contradiction than it had ever held at once.
His knees wanted to buckle.
He forced them to stay locked.
His missing arm did not regrow yet. The wound still gaped. Blood still fell in heavy drops, hitting stone with dull taps.
But the sanctified burn was gone.
The angels' perfection was gone.
And the Grid inside him continued to compress, rewriting itself under the weight of what it had taken, holding together by refusal rather than comfort.
Noctis took one breath.
Then another.
And started walking, because if he stopped moving in a place that had just been carved open by Tier Eight authority, he would give the world time to notice what had happened under the mountain.
The cavern shook with radiant hymn and shattering stone. The healer's chant rose higher, the frontliner's shield pulsed brighter — their synergy weaving into a single strike that would bury him.
Noctis's spirals pulsed. He felt the rhythm, the way their sanctity climbed. Execution, he thought. They mean to finish me before I adapt.
He laughed, blood streaming from his torn chest. "Not happening."
His spirals flared outward in a violent cone. "Blood Veil V!"
Crimson haze burst across the chamber, distorting vision. The frontliner's glow fractured into blurred shards. Its stance faltered, shield dipped.
Noctis moved, wings beating, body a crimson blur. He streaked past the staggered frontliner and crashed down upon the healer.
Its hymn faltered the moment his shadow engulfed it.
Noctis dropped his reaper. His claws clamped around its neck, pulling its radiant body back against him. His fangs sank deep into its throat.
Sanctity burst against his bite like molten fire. Blood spewed, white-hot, searing his mouth, burning through his throat.
He did not let go.
The angel screamed, wings thrashing, voice breaking into a half-chant, half-cry. Its hands clawed at his arm, its light lashing his skin.
Noctis snarled, the taste of sanctity blazing through him. His spirals convulsed in warning. It's fighting me… I need more.
"Devil Transformation."
His spirals split wide, shadows bursting outward. His horns pushed through, claws lengthened, wings blackened with dripping essence. His body stretched, shadow and blood fusing.
Strength surged into him, timer burning from the instant it locked.
With devil's strength, his grip became unbreakable. His bite crushed deeper into the healer's neck, shattering resistance. Radiance exploded outward — and broke.
The angel convulsed harder, ichor pouring in torrents down his throat. Every swallow fed his spirals with sanctity that screamed as it inverted.
Then his Grid ignited.
Noctis's body jerked as power cascaded.
Exsanguinate flared in his veins. The familiar siphon sharpened, deepened, twisted into something new. He felt the sanctity that once resisted him yield instead, folding into his blood.
Exsanguinate… it's changing.
His fangs burned, lengthened, hardened. Crimson Fangs pulsed with threads of light, turning sharper, hungrier. His bite was no longer just bloodshed — it was sanctity-breaking.
The healer writhed in his grasp, but every thrash only forced more ichor down his throat. His spirals pulsed brighter, devouring the radiance inside.
Doctrines split wide. Chalice of Apostasy roared in his Grid, no longer just warping healing into harm — but reflecting it, twisting it, feeding it back as sustenance. He felt it rise another tier, its inversion complete.
Your healing is mine now.
The Faith-Eater Vein throbbed. Stage I had been hunger. Stage II burned like a forge — not just consuming, but reshaping sanctity into weapons. He felt new circuits open, threads of radiant glyphs folding into his Grid, made corrupt and crimson.
Then the new spells bloomed.
Crimson Mend lit across his spirals, the sensation of knitting flesh with blood and radiance combined. Not just sealing wounds — converting sanctity into restoration. His chest wound throbbed and eased, not healed fully, but no longer burning raw.
Blood Renewal surged next. His Grid whispered promises of regeneration tied to spilled blood, faster with every foe that bled around him.
Sanctuary Break pulsed violently. He felt the inversion twist inside him, an AoE surge that could heal allies while ripping enemies apart with corrosive backlash.
Choir Silence flared like a blade — suppression, a hymn-crushing aura. His Grid hummed with the power to choke chants, break prayers, silence faith itself.
All at once, his Grid blazed with sanctity inverted. Light that should have burned him now obeyed.
The healer beneath him spasmed, voice breaking into broken cries. Its glow sputtered, drained, devoured.
Noctis tore free from its neck with a snarl, blood dripping from his fangs, spirals screaming with new strength. His devil form burned, timer ticking, aura expanded.
The angel twitched once more, then collapsed limp beneath him.
Noctis stood over the body, chest torn, one arm gone, shadows dripping from his devil form. And yet he felt stronger than at any point in the battle. His spirals roared, crimson-white, burning with holy inversion.
He looked up through blood-streaked hair.
The frontliner landed among the rubble, sword blazing brighter than ever, shield raised, its glow incandescent with fury.
Only one remained.