The cavern held its breath after the healer fell.
It should have been loud—stone settling, dust raining, the echo of battle still vibrating in the ribs of the earth—but the silence that arrived was heavier than noise. It was the silence of a mechanism losing its keystone. The hymn that had been stitching the battlefield together vanished, and what remained was not emptiness, but a sudden absence of order.
Noctis stood over the place where the healer's radiance had collapsed. His posture was unsteady, not from fear, but from the sheer amount of blood his body had lost. He could feel it on his skin and inside his armor—warmth sliding, pooling, cooling. His breath came in hard pulls that scraped his lungs, and each inhale brought the smell of scorched stone and sanctified residue that still clung to the air like ash.
The Faith-Eater pull inside him did not stop immediately.
It continued out of habit, a hunger that had been forced open and now had to be restrained the way one restrained a wound that kept reopening. Strands of pale structure—what had once been the healer's coherent output—still drifted in the air like thin threads of mist. As Noctis drew breath, those threads curved toward him. They did not fly. They were not dragged violently. They simply yielded, as if the world had decided where they belonged.
The Grid tightened around the intake.
Not smoothly.
With strain.
Crimson lines overlapped more densely than they should have, and pressure built behind his eyes in a low, grinding ache that warned him the system was close to a threshold it had never been designed to approach. But the immediate effect was undeniable: the lingering sanctified corrosion in his wounds stopped behaving like a rule and became simply another foreign substance to be processed.
Heat ran through his torso.
Not the pleasant warmth of healing, but the aggressive heat of reconstruction—blood turning into structure, structure turning into function. The torn edges of his chest began to knit. Threads formed first—fine crimson filaments bridging gaps—then thickened into cord-like lines that pulled flesh together. The sensation was sharp, almost electrical, the body rebuilding at unnatural speed.
His severed side did not return in a neat, painless miracle. It came back in stages.
First the deep stability: pressure on his spine eased as missing weight returned. Then the gross structure: shoulder forming, muscle anchoring, the crude shape of an arm growing from the reconstructed joint like a root forced to sprout in seconds. Finally the finer details—tendon, nerve, bone's smooth alignment—locking into place with a series of small internal shifts that made his jaw clench.
He flexed the new hand once.
The fingers opened and closed. They were pale at first, not from weakness, but from rapid formation, the blood not yet fully darkened to its usual tone. The claws were there immediately, hardened like obsidian tips grown out of necessity rather than ornament.
Stronger.
He felt it in the way the joints settled, in the way the aura clung to the new limb with more certainty than it had held the old one. Whatever he had taken from the healer had not simply repaired him. It had reinforced him.
A low growl rose in his throat before he could stop it.
Not rage—readiness.
He lifted his gaze.
The frontliner stood across the rubble field where the cavern had been cut open. Its shield was cracked, its radiance scarred and uneven from the grind of attrition and the loss of support. But it was still standing. Still coherent. Still lethal.
And now it had seen what mattered.
It saw the healer's absence. It saw Noctis upright again with a rebuilt arm. It saw the pale threadwork in Noctis's spirals, the wrongness of sanctity pulled into shadow and made obedient.
The angel's posture changed.
Its wings flexed once, not for flight but for balance. Its shield rose a fraction higher. Its sword dipped, then lifted, and light began to gather along the steel in a way that was different from the earlier condensed Tier Eight blow.
This was not the same authority as the catastrophic cleave.
This was craft.
Runes ignited along the blade, not bursting outward in spectacle but crawling like living script, locking themselves into place. They spread to the cavern walls in sympathetic response, glyphs answering glyphs. Radiant chains began to snake through cracks in the stone as if the earth itself had been given a command.
Noctis felt the change instantly.
The pressure was tighter than before—less like a wave, more like a net being thrown.
If it landed cleanly, it would not merely wound him. It would define him again, pin him inside a sanctified rule that regeneration could not ignore.
His spirals pulsed a warning. The Grid did not speak. It compressed, and that compression translated into one brutal certainty:
Do not take this head-on.
Noctis moved first.
Not because he feared the angel, but because he respected the new method. He beat his wings once and turned into the tunnels that branched out from the ruined cavern like veins. He did not choose the widest path. He chose the one with the most turns—the one that would force a shield to become awkward and force a sword to lose its clean arc.
Behind him, the angel screamed.
Not with a human throat, but with radiance erupting in a surge that shook dust from the ceiling. It plunged after him, sword blazing, shield leading, chains and glyphs dragging along the stone as if the catacombs themselves were being rewritten in pursuit.
The corridor narrowed.
Noctis ran.
His boots hit stone in hard, fast rhythm, but he was not sprinting like a mortal. He moved like a predator in a burrow—fast, low, and angled, using the walls for leverage. His wings were half-folded to fit, scraping stone in sparks when he cut too tight. Each scrape left faint crimson smears where blood-essence coated rock.
He did not look back.
He did not need to.
The sound of pursuit was enough: shield scraping, stone breaking, sanctity cracking through the corridor's ribs like ice expanding in a seam.
Noctis widened his aura.
Not as a dome. As a release.
The air behind him became violent.
Blood-essence hardened into jagged darts and tore backward down the corridor in swarming volleys. Shadow followed—dense, forked trajectories that split mid-flight, designed not to kill but to force a defender to spend attention and structure. Bolts of heat and cold and shock layered over it, detonating against stone to produce concussive blasts that turned dust into choking clouds.
The corridor became a storm.
Projectiles screamed. Stone exploded. Frost flashed across walls, then shattered under heat. Lightning crackled along damp seams in the rock, turning the narrow passage into a cage of snapping light.
The angel charged straight into it.
It did not dodge like a mortal. It pushed.
Its shield took the brunt. Impacts hammered it again and again, cracks webbing wider with each strike. Arrows splintered against radiance. Bolts tore at its wings. Blades rang off its sword and left luminous scars. Dust and debris collapsed from above, bouncing off its shoulders, breaking apart against the sanctified barrier around it.
Still it came.
Rage was not the right word for what drove it. Angels did not rage like men. But something in its output had become hotter, more aggressive, as if the loss of the healer had removed restraint. Light flared from every fresh fracture, sealing cracks before they could spread. The act cost it energy. You could see that cost in the way the radiance no longer returned fully smooth after each seal—each repair slightly rougher, each flare slightly more desperate.
Noctis heard the strain and smiled without humor.
"Good," he breathed, voice low as he ran. "Burn yourself empty."
He drove deeper, using turns and debris-choked lanes to keep the angel's advance slow. He collapsed sections of corridor behind him by striking support points with concentrated force, making the ceiling fall in heavy slabs. The angel shoved through, shield-first, smashing stone aside as if it were brittle wood.
Noctis did not try to bury it completely.
He only needed to make it spend.
His objective was ahead, not behind.
The place where the mid-range angel had fallen lay deeper in the catacombs—a chamber broken open by earlier collapse. Its residue still clung there. Not fully dissipated. Not yet reclaimed by the world. He could feel it faintly through the Grid's sensitivity, a dull pull like scent on the air.
If he reached it first, he could take what remained.
If he took it first, the balance of this last fight would tilt.
He entered the broken chamber at speed, sliding over rubble and landing hard enough to scatter grit. The mid-range angel's remains lay where they had fallen—wings ruined, coherence faded to faint outlines, the last traces of structured radiance pooling like thin mist that refused to rise.
Noctis did not kneel to admire it.
He seized it with both hands and drew it close.
The act was grim, functional, and immediate. He pulled whatever coherence remained into his spirals the way a predator took marrow from bone: not for celebration, but because the body required it.
The Faith-Eater pull latched on instinctively, and for a second the Grid convulsed under the sudden intake. Pressure spiked behind his eyes. Crimson and pale threads tightened and overlapped, and he felt the system strain as it tried to register new structure while still stabilizing from the healer's devour.
He forced control.
He did not drink greedily. He drew steadily, limiting the flow so the Grid would not buckle. The process hurt. Not in the way wounds hurt—this was internal strain, the discomfort of a structure being forced to hold too much at once.
Behind him, the corridor screamed.
The frontliner hit the chamber like a battering ram.
It burst through falling stone, shield leading, sword blazing with runes that crawled across the air itself. Dust erupted around it. The floor cracked under its landing.
Its gaze locked onto Noctis immediately.
It saw the remains in his hands. It saw the pale threads intensifying around his spirals as he pulled the last coherence into himself.
The angel's output surged.
Chains of radiant script snapped outward, lashing across the chamber. Glyphs flared along the walls, trying to seal exits, trying to define the room as sanctified ground again.
Noctis did not finish the intake cleanly.
He finished it enough.
He released the remains, letting what was left collapse into inert fragments, and launched upward through the cracked ceiling in a single violent beat of his wings. Stone shattered as he tore through. Dust rained down in sheets behind him.
He burst into a higher passage, then another, then out into open air.
Night desert wind hit him like cold water. Sand scattered under his wings. Above, the sky was wide and indifferent, stars sharp and distant.
Behind him, the catacombs erupted.
The frontliner exploded upward through the broken ground as if the earth could not hold it. It rose with shield raised, sword runes blazing, radiance bright enough to cast long pale streaks across the dunes.
Noctis hovered in the open, blood still wet on his armor, new arm flexing once as he steadied his balance.
He could feel the recent intake settling into place. Not as a neat list of upgrades, not as a tidy report, but as changes in his body: a new familiarity with projectile rhythm, a deeper instinct for ranged pressure, a sharper resistance to sanctified binding.
His spirals pulsed, crimson threaded with pale.
The angel faced him, alone now.
The desert held both of them in silence, sand shifting under wind.
Noctis's mouth curled, not into comedy, but into something predatory and calm.
"Then it's just you and me," he said.
The desert night split open as the frontliner raised its blade. The runes etched into the steel burned white-hot, radiance spilling across the sky like a second sun.
Glyphs cracked into the dunes. The air itself screamed.
"Judgment Break!"
A column of sanctified force surged outward, brighter than dawn, thick enough to vaporize stone. The shockwave swept the horizon, turning dunes into glass.
Noctis was caught in the center.
His spirals flared, but he did not dodge. The beam swallowed him whole. The earth split, sand burned into molten rivers, and rubble exploded outward for leagues.
When the light faded, a crater stretched across the desert.
The angel hovered above it, panting, wings trembling. Its shield cracked further, its sword guttering with residual light. It peered into the crater.
Dust settled.
From the broken stone below, a laugh rose. Low. Certain.
Noctis stood in the ruins, cloak torn, dust falling from his armor. His chest bore no wound. His arm was whole. His spirals pulsed steady, crimson-white threading across his body.
He rolled his shoulders once, as if loosening them after a stretch. Then he smiled — wide, fanged, eyes burning with joy.
"Tier VIII," he said. "And nothing."
The angel's wings faltered. Its expression, once divine wrath, cracked into disbelief.
Noctis raised his arms slightly, mockingly inviting another strike. "Come on. Burn me again. Do it."
The angel trembled. Fear entered its glow. Its blade dimmed as hesitation bled into its aura.
Then it turned.
Wings flared as it tried to retreat across the dunes.
Noctis's laughter followed, sharp as blades. "Running? Now?"
He beat his wings once. The sand exploded beneath him as he launched, spirals igniting.
Blood Spears screamed from his aura, inverted holy light condensed into crimson lances. They tore across the desert night, striking the angel's shield. Cracks webbed further.
He followed with a Crimson Volley, a spread of sanctified arrows that shattered into piercing lines of bloodlight. The angel reeled, each impact driving it lower.
"Don't look away from me," Noctis mocked. "You lit the desert for me. Let's see how long your wings can carry you."
The angel screamed and twisted, shield raised, but its retreat faltered.
"Radiant Barrage."
His spirals erupted in a storm of blood-forged projectiles, sanctified inversions detonating in waves. The barrage slammed into the angel's left wing. Bone cracked, feathers tore, ichor sprayed golden across the sky.
The wing tore apart.
The angel plummeted, spiraling down into the sand. It crashed hard, the ground shaking with its weight.
Noctis descended slow, savoring the moment. He folded his wings back at the last instant, landing lightly in the dust beside its broken form.
The angel struggled, trying to rise, shield dragging into the sand. Its sword guttered weakly.
Noctis blurred forward. His arms wrapped around it from behind.
It froze — the pressure of his spirals crushing down like chains.
He leaned close, fangs brushing its throat. His voice was a whisper in its ear. "Your sanctity is mine now."
And he bit.
Fangs pierced deep, golden blood bursting into his mouth. Sanctity screamed, holy ichor burning as his Faith-Eater Dominion roared to life.
The angel writhed, shield flailing, but his grip was unbreakable. He drank, pulling ichor down in torrents, spirals blazing brighter with every swallow.
The desert rang with its scream, then with his laughter.
The desert night echoed with the sound of breaking sanctity.
Pinned in the sand, the frontliner angel writhed, its shield shattered and sword cracked. Its once-impenetrable glow flickered like a dying lantern. Noctis's arms coiled around its torso like steel bands, claws hooked tight across its chest. His fangs sank deeper into its throat, ichor bursting golden into his mouth with every pull.
The angel shrieked, wings flapping against the ground, scattering dunes into whirlwinds. Its body twisted and bucked, every muscle straining, but the Sovereign's grip never faltered.
"Crawl then," Noctis snarled between swallows, ichor painting his jaw. "Crawl like the vermin you hunted me as."
The angel did. With every thrash it tried to dig its claws into the sand, dragging itself forward in pathetic, desperate scrapes. Golden trails streaked the desert floor where its sanctified hands carved furrows.
Noctis's laughter broke the night, harsh and triumphant. "You chased me through your catacombs, through your light and your hymns. Now look at you. Gasping. Dragging yourself through dirt."
He pressed his weight harder, wings flaring wide to anchor himself. The angel's shield fell from its grasp, sliding uselessly into the sand. Its sword guttered and went dark. Only its claws remained, scrabbling at the earth as though it could escape him through will alone.
But every heartbeat brought less resistance. Every scream thinned into a rasp. The ichor ran slower, its sanctity dwindling. Its body sagged in his arms, wings twitching weakly.
Noctis drank without pause, spirals burning bright enough to sear the sand beneath him.
The angel gasped once more, a hollow sound of disbelief and despair. Then its body convulsed, trembled, and finally went still.
The desert fell quiet.
Noctis did not release. He continued to drink, long after the light had left its form. He drew every drop of sanctified ichor, every shred of essence, until only bones remained. The flesh and blood dissolved into him, sanctity broken and consumed.
When the last thread of ichor vanished, he tore his fangs free. What remained of the angel's skeleton glowed faintly, marrow humming with residual sanctity. With a flick of his claw, he bound the bones in crimson threads and folded them into his Blood Storage.
Now they joined the others — bones of bishops, archbishops, inquisitor-generals, cardinals. Remains of holy orders spanning centuries, trophies and materials for his forge.
But these bones were different. Greater. Purer.
Almost worthy.
He wiped the blood from his mouth, spirals pulsing violently. Then the Grid exploded inside him.
Tier VIII Angel Devoured. Blood Grid Surge Unleashed.
Blood Grid Expansion
Essence Gains
+62,000 Blood Essence
+47,500 Faith Essence
+12,800 Soul Essence
+20 Apex Essence
Skill Evolutions
Exsanguinate VII → VIII (Divine Cataclysm): drains divine ichor instantly, converts excess into AoE shockwave.
Crimson Fangs VI → VII (Annihilation Bite): fangs pierce all sanctified defenses; each bite now destroys sanctified marrow at the source.
Bloodstorm V → VI (Heaven-Rend Tempest): AoE storm expands to battlefield scale, inverts sanctity within its range.
Vein Expansion
Faith-Eater Vein Stage III → Stage IV (Sovereign's Dominion): sanctity no longer merely inverted — it bows to command. Noctis can now redirect holy energy into constructs, barriers, or weapons of his choosing.
New Doctrinal Skills Acquired
Hymn Rupture I: disrupts divine chants/prayers in a radius, silencing enemy casters.
Spear of Cataclysm I: inverted divine spear, empowered to pierce through Tier VIII wards.
Rain of Consecration I (Blood Inversion): AoE sanctified arrow storm, inverted to tear through holy battalions.
Passive Upgrades
Holy Resistance VIII → IX: baseline resistance expanded. Noctis now endures Tier IX sanctity without damage. Only Tier X judgment or divine sovereign-class techniques remain a threat.
Regeneration Efficiency: tripled under Blood Renewal II and Crimson Mend II.
Noctis staggered once as the power settled, then steadied himself, chest rising with a deep inhale. He flexed his new strength — the ichor burned through his veins, not as fire, but as fuel. His spirals pulsed with command, sanctity itself bowing at their edges.
He smiled, fangs dripping.
"Tier VIII wasn't enough. Even your bones belong to me now."
The desert wind howled around him, carrying his laughter into the night.