The mountain did not breathe.
It shuddered.
Spire Peak, once mistaken for a range of stone, had revealed itself to be nothing but titan corpses driven into the earth like nails through a coffin lid. Their ribs had been bridges, their spines towers, their skulls the cliffs where shepherds had once tied their goats. All of it was marrow fossilized, calcified into mountainscape. And now, with the Sovereign standing at the center, the marrow cores reignited.
One by one, eyes lit.
Not eyes of flesh, not sockets of men. Cavities the size of citadels burned white as marrow-fires reignited in their depths. Plates cracked. Ribs shifted. Entire cliffs tilted as torsos tore free. The groaning of their rise was louder than any storm Noctis had ever heard. The air became a choir of collapsing stone and bone as 102 colossi remembered motion.
Noctis stood at the center, halo burning gold behind his head. Four wings stretched wide: dragon wings ember-red below, blood wings veined crimson-black above. His skin gleamed with its crimson-gold sheen, his veins glowing faintly beneath, devil and dragon and abyss all braided into one lattice.
He tilted his head back. His gaze ran up a titan as tall as mountains, its skull splitting sky, its fists as wide as keeps. He did not flinch.
Orbiting Arsenal unfolded.
Fifteen Bloodfangs snapped into place around him in a perfect circle, a spinning constellation of red-gold knives humming with marrow resonance. Two longer blades remained in his hands, their edges jagged with sigils that pulsed like veins alive.
Seventeen in total.
He smiled, fangs glinting. "Begin."
The titans roared.
The sound was not mortal. It was seismic. Valleys cracked, avalanches triggered, rivers reversed flow. Shepherd villages at the foothills collapsed into powder. The roar turned the sky to a trembling sheet of sound, shredding clouds to ribbons.
Noctis moved.
He launched upward with one wingbeat, marrow gale tearing the peak's crown into shards behind him. A fist descended — a mass of bone and ward-script like a citadel falling from heaven. He didn't dodge. Predator's Stance took the blow.
Impact thundered. The air itself convulsed. But his stance drank the strike, marrow lattice swallowing the force and spitting it back in three cones. The titan's forearm fractured in clean lines, marrow fire sputtering as cracks ran to the elbow.
Noctis blurred up the arm, each step drilling blood anchors into bone, leaving spirals burning like brands. The titan tried to swat him with its free hand. He gestured. Seven orbitals snapped out, streaking crimson arcs. They carved fingers to stumps, drilled the palm into a sieve, and pinned the wrist against its own ribs.
Noctis vaulted to the shoulder. Both blades fused in his grip, lengthening, curving. The Bloodfang Reaper Scythe came alive, its crescent edge shimmering with abyssal hunger.
He swung once.
The titan's neck gave way like split marble. Its skull toppled, slamming into the mountainside and shattering into a cascade of boulders. The avalanche carried entire pine forests down into valleys, erasing paths carved for generations.
Noctis rode the fall halfway, then sprang from the crumbling jaw onto the chest of another titan rising behind it.
The second titan swung a hand the size of a fortress gate. Noctis stepped into it, braced his scythe crossguard against the blow. Predator's Stance erupted again, shockwaves blasting back through the titan's forearm. The bone split to ivory dust, raining fragments onto the battlefield below.
He slashed low, carving a rib from sternum to spine. The titan reeled, torso folding inward like a broken bridge. Noctis leapt, wings slapping outward — the strike alone cracked another titan's jaw fifty meters away.
The Spire itself began to break.
Entire ridges collapsed. Scree poured down slopes like water. Plateaus tilted and slid into the void.
Noctis did not slow.
He called the orbitals into formation, fifteen blades weaving into a crown. They spun, then lanced outward as projectiles. They drilled titan knees, carved joints, pinned limbs into mountainsides. Each strike detonated marrow light from inside, toppling colossi in staggered waves.
A titan roared, raising a club made from its own fused femurs. The weapon swung like a falling tower. Noctis twirled the scythe in one hand, deflected the strike with a flick — the club sheared into splinters, bone dust scattering into a storm.
He lunged forward.
Scythe edge cut a clavicle, split an arm, and followed through into a neck. The titan crumpled sideways into a canyon, the impact creating a dust storm that swallowed half the horizon.
He pivoted mid-air, caught another titan's chin with a slash, then rode the recoil into a leap toward a third. The Reaper scythe lengthened with his swing, its edge humming, slicing an entire jawbone into a rain of shards.
He landed on the titan's shoulder, pressed a claw into its marrow-scripted plate. The blood anchors fired. He vaulted upward, wings folding, then unfolded again.
From his arc he looked down on the battlefield.
One hundred and two titans, cores blazing, wards glowing across their ribs and skulls. They moved in unison now, a hundred war-engines risen from silence.
And one man with seventeen blades, halo burning brighter than any sun.
Noctis grinned. His eyes glowed crimson-gold.
"More."
He dove.
The Spire Peak was no longer a mountain. It was a battlefield unraveling under its own weight.
Cliffs leaned and toppled. Avalanches cascaded in layered waves. Canyons split wider under the heel-stamps of colossi whose steps were cathedrals collapsing in sequence. The ground itself seemed to rebel at the notion that more than a hundred titans could move at once.
But they moved.
One hundred and two titans, each the size of the Bone Titan he had once brought down, their cores now glowing with marrow fire, their ribcages and skulls inscribed with ward-script that burned like braziers. They lumbered, swung, roared — their movements reshaping the geography of the Spire.
And one man answered them all.
Noctis.
He was not a man to their eyes. His four wings spread in layered arcs — dragon wings embered like volcanic fire, blood wings scarlet and veined black with abyssal light. His halo spun behind his head, golden ring wreathed in marrow sigils, shadows coiling like serpents within its glow. His body gleamed with a crimson-gold sheen over pale flesh, every movement pulsing with the force of dragon, devil, and abyss bound together.
Orbiting Arsenal spun into brilliance.
Fifteen Bloodfangs traced concentric rings around him, orbitals glowing with a red-gold light that painted the battlefield in streaks. Two longer blades stayed in his hands, their edges jagged with abyssal etching. Seventeen blades total — a constellation waiting to be named.
The titans roared and swung.
He answered with motion.
The orbitals broke formation. In a breath they became a storm — blades streaking in spirals, figure-eights, crosses, nets. Each traced marrow-sigil trails through the sky, weaving a burning lattice. One drilled a titan's eye socket, erupting marrow fire outward. Another cut across a knee joint, severing ligaments the size of bridges. Five converged in a crown, then spread in sudden scatter, shaving armor plates from ribs like knives peeling fruit.
The first rank of titans stumbled, howled, collapsed against each other.
Noctis dove among them.
Hack and slash — not words, but rhythm.
His scythe split into twin Bloodfangs again, blades short and wicked. He darted between ankles thicker than towers, wings folding and snapping open in bursts. A slash across one Achilles tendon sprayed bone dust; a pivot carried him up a shin where anchors fired from his heels. He vaulted, slammed a wing against a knee cap — crack — then twisted, both blades carving upward through marrow script carved into thighbone.
He did not stop to finish. Another titan's hand swept down like a collapsing building. He pivoted mid-air, orbitals shrieking to intercept. Five blades scored the palm, carving squares that fell away in glowing chunks. Noctis used the exposed bones as steps, anchoring into them as he vaulted higher.
A shoulder became a platform. He landed, pivoted, hacked once — neck half-severed. Another Bloodfang scythe cut the rest of the way through. A head fell, rolling down the slope like a siege engine gone mad. The impact of its fall sent tremors through the valley.
Noctis was already gone.
He dashed across ribcages like bridges, weaving through a crowd of giants. Hack — slash — pivot — wing slap — anchor — hack — slash. Each motion chained to the next, weaving his body into the war like a thread binding chaos. He cut one titan's throat, stepped off its jaw, and swung his left blade into the arm of another mid-punch. The strike cleaved halfway; Predator's Stance detonated the rest, shockwaves tearing the arm free in a hail of marrow shards.
The orbitals whirled as his second set of hands.
Behind him, ten blades became a shield, intercepting bone projectiles hurled like catapults. To his left, three carved a rib into spears, then drove them through the chest of another. Ahead, two orbitals curved in scissor pattern and took a titan's wrist at the joint.
The mountain screamed as the weight of collapsing titans carved trenches through its spine.
Avalanches thundered down, swallowing entire ridges. A glacier cracked and slid from its perch, crashing into a ravine with a roar that drowned even the titans' bellow. Dust clouds rose so thick they became new storms.
Noctis moved through it without pause.
He landed on one shoulder, then sprinted the ridge of its arm to vault onto another's skull. The twin Bloodfangs locked again, scythe reforming in his grip. He dragged it in a long arc — the titan's head peeled away, marrow light spraying like a geyser. He vaulted, wings snapping open, halo blazing brighter.
Blood Wave.
The scythe carved a crescent across the air. Red light surged outward in a wall that crashed into the ranks ahead. Titans staggered backward, ribs caving in from the impact, knees buckling. The wave carried half a dozen colossi into each other, toppling them in a domino chain that crushed entire ridges beneath.
He laughed as he moved, not cruel, but sharp with the joy of violence unrestrained.
The constellation of knives shifted again. Fifteen orbitals spun into a spiral, then compressed into a spear. He pointed. The spear of blades lanced forward, drilling through the chest of a titan at the rear of the formation. The impact tore through it, exploding out its back in a bloom of bone and light.
Noctis dashed after his own strike, body a streak of crimson-gold lightning weaving between ankles, knees, ribs, fists. He cut upward, wings flaring, blades flashing in arcs that dismembered giants mid-swing. Every strike chained into the next. Hack. Slash. Pivot. Spin. Anchor. Leap. Blood. Light.
The titans fell in waves. The Spire Peak cracked and screamed under the war.
And Noctis smiled, fangs bared, eyes burning crimson-gold.
This was only the beginning.
The mountain learned a new sound.
It wasn't the break and slide of cliffs or the shatter of ribs pried from ridgelines. It wasn't the bass thunder of fists the size of temples punching air into walls. It was a joining, a consonance struck across a hundred throats that had never known words and yet remembered the grammar of command.
Ward-script lit across rib-bridges and sternum plates in coordinated fire. Light ran like water along sutures and spine-towers. A pulse formed—then another—then a hundred, braided into a single beat that forced the sky to hold its breath.
Noctis felt it in his bones first, then in his halo. The ring behind his head rang like struck metal, sigils flaring white-gold and black-red in alternating bands. Four wings flared to their full span without command, blood feathers and dragon membranes tasting the threat the way a blade tastes pressure.
One hundred and two titans inhaled together.
They put their hands out as one, palms forward, fingers spread, cores blazing through the tunnels of their arms.
The hymn arrived.
It wasn't sound. Sound rode on it the way gulls ride a storm front, but the thing itself was intention made dense. It said: be still. It said: unmake. It said: bow.
Noctis bared his fangs.
His feet set into a stance that was less posture than predicate. Predator's Stance anchored him to the idea of the mountain. Crimson Bulwark plated over him in layered scales—shoulders, chest, hips, thighs—each plate locking to the next with a chime like knives tapping crystal. His halo brightened until it cut shadows off the sides of boulders.
"Blinding Inversion."
He lifted one claw and wrote a small curve in the air. The curve caught the hymn like a net catches a river, hissed, and turned inside out. Light ran backward along the titans' ward-threads; the command they had made to the world found a door where a wall had been and stepped through it into nothing.
The mountain exhaled like a struck animal.
A dozen colossi staggered as the certainty drained from their cores. Six fell to one knee at the shock of no longer being choir.
Noctis moved into the pause.
Orbiting Arsenal scattered and converged at once: fifteen knives left his crown in three spirals, crossed each other at precise nodes, and re-formed as a saw-toothed band around a single titan's throat. He yanked. The band tightened. The head parted like a struck bell, rolling and carving terraces that future scholars would misread as ritual architecture.
He was already elsewhere, twin Bloodfangs in a cross guard to receive a hammering palm. The impact shook the range; Predator's Stance gulped force and returned it in triple cones that walked neatly from wrist to elbow to shoulder, each step leaving fractures like frost lines on glass. He slid under the arm, cut the axilla where ward-ink pooled, and drove upward along the curl of a rib. Bone opened. Light bled.
The hymn tried again, this time focused—ten leaders drawing script into geometry over their chests, cores burning through glyphs deep enough to have been carved in their marrow when the world was young.
Noctis's halo tilted, sigils counter-rotating.
"Eclipse Binding."
Shadow coalesced. Not absence—presence that made room by insisting on itself. It fell in black ropes across clavicles and knee hinges, bit into iliac crests and anchored there with hooks shaped like runes. Titans who had begun to rise found their own bones cuffed by night.
He ran on them.
He used their arms for ladders and their shoulders for springboards. He stepped around a fist in mid-flight because his blood anchors dug into air and reminded it how to hold him. He raked a wing across a jaw and let marrow gale do the rest; teeth spalled in a glitter-storm, the maxilla cracking with a sad tick at the end like a clock that knows it's done working.
Hack left. Slash right. Pivot on a collar ridge. Back-cut the occipital. Anchor. Leap. Turn your hips. Two orbitals behind you become spears—yes, drive them through that scapula. Now scythe—now short blades again—now scythe wider because you want the whole world to know a circle is a weapon.
"Blood Wave."
He wrote it across the front rank, a crimson crescent that looked gentle until it touched bone and the valley buckled. The first four titans took it in the chest and went backward as if tapped by a god's forefinger. The fifth turned to help and became a shield for six, seven, eight; all nine slid in one grinding shriek that took half a hillside and crushed a spine-tower into a sculpture of failure.
The hymn returned, fewer voices but angrier, rewritten for blood.
Fine.
"World-Rend Tempest."
He drew the cut in the air and the world agreed to be two pieces for a moment. Wards screamed and blew like parchment in a furnace blast. The gap snapped closed with a sound that drowned every roar, and when it did, everything in that plane lost a thin slice of itself that turned to red mist and ideas.
The Spire tried to find new shapes to be. It chose "ruin" and then committed.
Noctis smiled into the avalanche wind, fangs bared, eyes bright.
"Again."
He dove with all seventeen knives, and the mountain learned what it means when a single will knows how to sing and cut at once.
They started to think.
Not like men—never like men. But the cores conversed in light, the way lightning forks talk to each other across the bellies of storms. The titans clustered. Ward light braided. The ones in front locked their forearm plates together and grew ribs between them; the ones behind lowered their skulls so crown crests overlapped like scales.
A wall rose.
It marched.
Noctis met it with joy.
He dropped to the slope, boots punching craters into memory-soft rock, and sprinted straight at the advancing line as if polite lanes had been painted for him through their ankles. Orbitals widened into three rings and nested like gears. With a twitch they bit the wall at three heights: knee, hip, shoulder. The bite was not a cut. It was a decision that teeth belong in meat.
Marrow shrieked.
The wall leaned. He slipped under an elbow, slid on bone dust, leapt over a rivulet of light that was a core bleeding without knowing how. A rib tried to impale him; he turned his hip, took it on Bulwark plate, and let the marrow shock rebound through his stance into the rib's neighbor. Both cracked along old fault lines that remembered stone ages.
He climbed a shin like a mast.
Halfway up, a hand the size of a courtyard clapped at him. He planted the Reaper's heel, vaulted, and felt the slap pass beneath him, a hurricane of hot air and ward sparks. He came down on the wrist, toes finding tendon grooves, and drove both blades (short again, because he wanted angle) into the seam. He twisted. Ligaments that had never been named by men unzipped.
The hand fell away from the forearm like a door from rotten hinges.
He ran the radius, left blade shaving it for marrow, right blade hooking into an old chisel mark and tearing it wider. At the elbow he reversed grip and dropped, the Reaper re-fusing in his palms mid-fall; he let gravity load the cut and met a throat with a farmhand's economy.
Head. Gone.
The world bucked. For a second he surfed a cataract of bone and scree, boots cutting switchbacks through boulder-foam. A shadow rolled over him: a club descended, longer than a street and wider than a keep.
He stepped into it and raised his forearms.
Predator's Stance drank murder and fed it failure. The club split from midshaft to tip, halves yawning away like gates too polite to deny a king his passage. Noctis slipped between them and carved the bearer's deltoid out of habit.
Something brightened on the horizon.
Ward-leaders—he could taste it in the way the pressure changed. Ten—no, twelve—cores flared hotter, clean white at the heart with a skin of pale gold. He saw their chest plates: hex-sigils nested in hex-sigils, divine geometry insistent enough to bill itself as fact.
He aimed himself at them and moved, a streak of crimson-gold and shadow.
They made a phalanx around the tallest spine. They linked elbows and grew bone between them until the wall was a palisade. They lowered their heads until the ridge-crests made a parapet.
They began a weather.
Air thickened. Snow that hadn't fallen here in years started falling sideways. Pebbles rose like startled fish and hung for a moment, then chose a different down than everyone remembered. Light bent, not around a mass but around a mood.
Noctis's halo brightened and the shadows coiling inside it hissed.
"Bulwark."
Plates locked across him in quick clicks, like an armorer humming while he worked. He accelerated into their weather as if it were rain and he had never cared about the concept of wet. The first plate of the parapet tried to spit him out; his left hand cut the spit and his right wrote a rebuttal on the spitter's face that ended with no more face.
He caught a crest ridge with an anchor, swung, and let both feet hammer a sternum. The blow went through, past force, into the place where instructions live; the instruction that said hold failed; ribs obeyed a new order: open.
He lashed the Reaper in a flat arc, trailing Blood Wave across the parapet. The wave kissed ridges and made them into confetti. The ward-leaders behind the parapet took a unanimous involuntary step back that uprooted a ledge three villages once used to watch storms.
"World-Rend Tempest."
He put the cross-cut into their weather. Clouds went away without leaving. Pressure equalized in a hurry and everything that had been relying on the unequalization had to pick a different hobby. The phalanx shuddered. One leader's hex-sigil shattered in measured triangles that caught the light and did tricks with it as they fell.
He took the one whose sigil had died and treated him with the courtesy due a priest whose god has left the room. The Reaper's hook around the neck, a jerk, a kneedown, a pull through the spine that wrote a new history of this ridge.
Everything moved faster.
Not time—Noctis.
He stopped counting blades, cuts, or strides. He made combinations long enough to lay over landscapes. Slash the wrist left, pivot, wing slap into jaw, anchor to air and step, scythe low at the knee, slide into the wake of that giant's fall and let it sling you toward his neighbor's ribs, cut three verticals like temple doors, and just when his hand comes—Bulwark the palm, turn his push into your step, let Predator answer up his arm and into his shoulder, now Exsanguinate into the cavity you opened, drink the hymn out of him like wine.
A new roar rose from the lower slopes—reinforcement from within the Spire, titans forcing themselves out of deeper burial. The range groaned. He looked down and saw skulls like cliff faces yawning, ribs like viaducts lifting, valleys spilling bone dust like volcanic plumes.
He lifted one hand.
The orbitals scattered high and formed three crowns, each with five knives spinning in counter-rotation. He pointed at three trouble clusters without glancing.
"Go."
They descended in calm spirals and made decisions for those clusters that ended with the correct amount of silence.
He was laughing without sound now, lips peeled, eyes bright. Not cruelty. Exultation. At last, a thing large enough to make his strength feel like music—loud enough to need a conductor.
He raised the Reaper and called cadence.
The Spire tried to keep up and failed beautifully.