The chamber of saints lay in ruin, coffins shattered into dust, hymn-fire guttering in broken shards along the floor. Noctis stood among the wreckage, breath steady but shallow. His veins glowed faintly crimson-gold, essence boiling with the blood he had stolen from sixteen holy prisoners. Silence filled the sanctum, heavy and wrong, like the pause between heartbeats.
The pause ended.
Chains ripped themselves free of the walls. They wove together in the air, forging a lattice of radiance. From it descended a figure armored in fire, two wings spread wide, each feather etched in scripture. Its face was not flesh but light, a burning mask that erased the darkness around it. Every step it took melted stone, every breath sang with judgment.
An Angel of Judgment had awakened.
Its voice struck like a verdict hammered into iron:
"APOSTATE."
The word itself made the floor tremble. Dust rained from the ceiling. Noctis raised his Reapers as the angel's blade of light appeared in its hand.
The swing was not fast. It was absolute.
[Skill: Orbiting Arsenal III — Activated]
His three spectral weapons spun into motion, scythe, guan dao, and sword-form slicing out in a storm. The light-blade struck, and the clash detonated. Heat slammed through him, essence buckling. The Arsenal shrieked under the weight, their trails of blood-light bent and warped.
Noctis staggered back, boots grinding across tiles. Pain lanced down his arm where the force bled through his defenses. He snarled and pivoted, sending the guan dao forward in a spiral thrust.
[Doctrine: Spear — Helix Bore]
The weapon drilled toward the angel's chest, sparks screaming from the air itself. The Omen Eye marked a seam in the plating. He struck true—
—and the weakness vanished. His point slid harmlessly across radiant armor.
The angel didn't flinch. Its wing flicked outward.
The blow caught him across the forearm. Pain tore a line of fire through flesh and bone. Blood sprayed. His sword hand faltered.
The angel's light seared deeper into him, carving a gash from wrist to elbow.
Noctis snarled through his teeth, yanking himself back, blood dripping down his claws. He flexed his fingers and felt bones grinding. The wound was deep.
The angel advanced, blade raised. Its wings caught the lightless air of the sanctum and filled it with radiance. The pressure of its presence alone burned the inside of his lungs.
Noctis blurred.
[Skill: Ghost Vein II — Activated]
His body dissolved into mist, reappearing at the angel's flank. His twin Bloodfang Reapers hammered down together, each aimed at a flickering seam traced by the Omen Eye.
Steel struck plating. Sparks. No damage.
The Omen Eye's runes spasmed, showing weakness after weakness, each one collapsing into nothing before he could pierce it. The angel's divinity warped reality itself. Truth would not stay still long enough for his blades to cut it.
The angel turned its head toward him. Its blank mask glowed.
Light erupted.
The blast smashed into Noctis and hurled him into the wall. Stone fractured around his body. He slid down, armor cracked and smoking. His left arm hung limp, blood dripping from torn flesh.
He forced himself to stand. His silence was heavier than the angel's words.
The Omen Eye burned hotter. Weak points flickered across the angel's body—at the shoulder joint, along the wing base, under the sternum. They blinked in and out like stars swallowed by dawn.
He moved.
[Doctrine: Tempo Ledger — Cadence Step]
Each stride was exact, every footfall timed to slip past lances of light and whips of chain. The angel's blade descended again. He cut across its path, twin swords flashing in arcs of crimson.
One blade bit shallow, cutting along the edge of its armor. The second missed entirely as the weakness winked out.
The angel retaliated. A wing slammed into him like a wall. His ribs cracked. He spat blood as he tumbled across the chamber.
He pushed himself up, coughing, vision swimming. His forearm throbbed, blood soaking through his gauntlet. His chest screamed where bone had given way. The angel stepped toward him, its wings spreading, blade glowing brighter.
Noctis lifted his hand.
[Skill: Blood Lance — Activated]
[Skill: Shadow Volley — Activated]
Spears of blood tore through the air. Arrows of shadow hissed from the darkness, converging on the angel's core.
Its wings folded in. Radiance hardened. The projectiles struck and disintegrated, nothing left but ash on the floor.
The angel did not slow.
Noctis clenched his jaw. He forced his body into motion. The guan dao whirled back into his grip, spiraling with energy.
[Doctrine: Spear — Rotational Bore]
He lunged, drilling upward, aiming for the flickering weakness at the angel's side.
The angel's blade came down.
Light met steel. The guan dao shattered across the strike, fragments bursting into sparks. The blow carved through his guard and bit into his forearm again. Flesh tore. Bone cracked.
Blood sprayed across the floor. His arm nearly split open from wrist to elbow.
Noctis roared, staggering back, clutching the wound. His claws dripped red.
The angel raised its blade for the killing stroke.
Noctis vanished.
[Skill: Wraith Step — Activated]
He reappeared at the edge of the chamber, body flickering, breathing ragged. His left arm dangled useless, blood soaking down his side. His chest was cracked, ribs grinding with every breath. His armor smoked.
The angel's wings filled the chamber with light. Its blank face turned toward him.
Noctis gripped Sanguinastra with his good arm. The relic pulsed, its resonance bleeding into the chains around the chamber. His Omen Eye flared again, burning lines into the angel's body. Weaknesses flickered. Vanished. Returned.
None of them stayed.
The angel's blade lifted once more, glowing so bright the chamber began to melt.
Noctis bared his fangs, eyes blazing gold-crimson. His silence pressed harder than the angel's judgment.
The chamber erupted in light and blood as they clashed again.
The angel came down the corridor like a falling verdict, light pushing the dark ahead of it into a thin, retreating skin. The floor softened to glass beneath its steps. Pillars sweated radiance and ran in bright streams down their own faces.
Noctis moved first.
[Skill: Orbiting Arsenal III — Activated]
Scythe, guan dao, and sword-form Reaper whipped around him in a hard spiral, trimming the incoming light into sparks. He broke left through a broken arch as the angel's blade fell. The strike erased the doorway and half the wall; hot wind threw him end over end.
He hit stone, rolled, and rose into a sprint.
[Doctrine: Tempo Ledger — Cadence Step]
[Skill: Ghost Vein II — Activated]
He threaded a collapsing corridor at perfect tempo, body slipping into mist wherever a blast should have taken his head, reforming just long enough to plant a foot, push, and vanish again. The angel did not chase so much as appear wherever he wanted it to be; every appearance carried a sheet of white fire that sloughed masonry from the ceiling like meat from bone.
Sanctified guardians woke to the noise. Ward-knights dropped from chains with shields already raised. Golems tore themselves out of buttresses and came on in a slow, inevitable march, each step sinking an inch into melting stone.
Noctis didn't slow. He angled through them like a blade.
[Skill: Blood Lance — Activated]
[Skill: Shadow Volley — Activated]
Thick red spears and thin black needles hammered through knight visors and golem joints, punching cores free in stuttering bursts of light. He took what he needed without breaking stride: a hand through a helm, fingers closing on a pulsing shard; a twist; a swallow. Essence hit his veins still warm, buying him one more turn, one more step.
The angel's shadow fell over him. He didn't look back. He cut a corner—then the world burst.
The blast took the wall and most of the ceiling. Stone turned to dust midair. Noctis felt the pressure first—a hard shove through the sternum—and then the light bit. Heat drilled in from his left, deep and clean. For a heartbeat he watched his own forearm slow in the air, fingers still closing on a phantom grip. It hit the floor with a sound like a wet rag.
His left arm was gone at the elbow.
He didn't scream. He ran.
Blood sheeted down his side, hot enough to burn as it came. Armor charred and curled back from the stump. His balance tried to fail; Cadence Step kept his feet finding the exact line that wouldn't kill him in the next step or the one after that.
[Doctrine: Assassin — Assassin's Surge]
A narrow bridge of stone spanned a shaft choked with chains. He took it at a dead sprint. Lances of light strafed the span, cutting it into uneven teeth behind him. He leapt the last five meters, landed on a frieze that was already peeling off the wall, and kicked through into a servant tunnel that hadn't seen a living foot in centuries.
Steam rose off his skin. Every breath tasted like copper and ash. The stump pumped. He pressed it against the wall and left a long, red smear without meaning to.
The tunnel spat him into a low nave ribbed with prayer-bars. Ward-knights were waiting—six of them, shields up, maces low, moving in a tight box to deny him angles. Behind them, a golem widened a hole in the wall with both hands and shouldered through.
Noctis dropped his shoulder and went directly at the box.
[Doctrine: Sword — Crescent Cut]
[Doctrine: Sword — Silent Sever]
One sword smashed the top edge of the lead shield down, the second slipped across the exposed throat of the knight behind it and came out the back of his neck. He pivoted, let the scythe in orbit take a knee, and stepped into the gap as the formation folded inward.
[Skill: Exsanguinate II — Activated]
He clenched the fingers of his remaining hand. Blood detonated inside the pack. Shields buckled. Two went down on their own blades. He was already with the third, jaw open, fangs in the seam at the neck. Faith-light hissed against his tongue and throat as he tore essence from the spine and swallowed without stopping.
His stump itched. Then it throbbed.
The golem came through the wall with both arms, swinging a block of stone like a hammer. He slid under it, let the guan dao scream forward—
[Doctrine: Spear — Rotational Bore]
—chewed the core out of its chest, and tore the glowing lump free with his claw. He bit it like fruit. Heat hit him hard; the world tilted. Beneath the roar he felt his grid seize the fuel and start building with it: bone knitting, vessels crawling forward, a pale sprout of new radius shoving through cooked flesh.
The angel arrived.
The nave brightened from dusk to noon in a breath. Everything threw long, hard shadows away from the same point. Noctis vanished into one, body sloughing to smoke as the blade passed where his chest had been. The strike went through three pillars and the outer wall; daylight—cold, blind, wrong daylight from some other shaft—poured in through a wound cut into the labyrinth.
He reformed against the far ribs, new forearm still a slick length of soft bone and raw meat, hand spiking out finger buds that clenched and opened without orders. It hurt. Pain meant he was not dead. He pushed off the wall and ran again.
The angel turned the nave into a kiln. Bars of prayer sagged and dripped. The spilled light sought him like water seeking a low place.
He tried to buy seconds.
[Relic Trait: Warding Bane — Applied]
Sanguinastra's edge shaved scripture from the walls as he passed, tearing wards into curls; their failure stole pressure from the air. Chains along the ceiling lost so much sanctity they fell. Knights under them broke. He forced the corridor to be a place that could still have shadows.
The angel refused.
Its wings beat once. A gale of heat shredded the fallen chains to dust. Noctis took the turn ahead of it and dropped into a cloister that circled a sunken yard full of broken statuary.
Golems were already climbing out of the yard.
He didn't break stride. He crossed the cloister on the inside line, boots slapping a rhythm his body could keep even with blood leaving him in a steady stream. He slashed once at a statue's arm as it climbed; it fell back into its brothers and turned the yard into a rubble grinder.
[Skill: Shadow Volley — Activated]
A storm of black fletching hissed into the pit. Weak cores winked out under the hail. Others burned the arrows aside, throwing sparks of night; that was fine—the sparks clung for half a second, and he used that half second to be elsewhere.
Light raked the cloister. He slid under it and left his hair behind. The smell of burned marrow rose and made him dizzy. The new hand clenched and unclenched in ugly, wet pulses.
He cut through a library: books welded into a single amber mass, shelves warped into waves. The angel's presence turned the air into a hard, bright syrup that clung to his skin and pulled at his knees. He forced himself forward anyway.
A knight lunged from the door with a spear of condensed prayer. It pushed itself halfway through his flank before his mind registered contact. He turned, chopped the shaft, and dragged the knight in by the throat, teeth finding the gap at the jaw. He drank until the spear dissolved inside him and fell out as light.
The floor heaved. The angel came through the wall again, blade first.
Noctis jumped backward through the hole the spear had left in him. The strike turned the library into a sun; every book in the room became a line of smoke and then nothing. He was a shape in that fire for a moment and then he wasn't.
He hit a stairwell going down and took it three steps at a time. The stump was a hand again. It was ugly, pink and slick and too small, but it was a hand. He flexed it once and it cramped.
The angel's blade slashed down the shaft like a guillotine. He grabbed a chain, let his body fall out of the plane of the cut by inches, and heard the air scream where his torso had been.
He dropped into a hall full of hanging cages. Bones hung in some; scripture in others. The cages began to shake as he passed, as if the cages had noticed him, as if the bones had.
Ward-knights poured in from both ends. The angel's light made the bars glow; then it made them run.
Noctis went straight, cut left, went up a rung ladder that wasn't meant to hold weight, crossed a beam that wasn't meant to be a bridge, and dropped into a chapel that had its altar reversed—raised like a gallows.
The altar exploded.
He went down under the blow and came up on one knee, eyes full of white. The angel's silhouette walked through brightness without shadows. He couldn't see a seam. The Omen Eye burned anyway. It marked three. They winked out before his breath ended.
He shot on instinct.
[Skill: Blood Lance — Activated]
[Skill: Shadow Volley — Activated]
The angel didn't raise a guard. The projectiles reached the skin of its light and sublimated. The heat rolled back and pushed him. He planted the new hand against the floor. It skidded, then held.
He needed distance. He needed bodies.
He crashed through a side door into a cloaca of drains and maintenance halls. The angel's blade came in behind him and planed off a corner of the world; the shockwave lifted him and dashed him down, but the walls here were thicker, and the maze ran in his favor.
He ran that maze hard, killing anything that moved. Rats made of glyphs. Priests' ghosts pinned to their own names. Half-made guardians that unfolded from grates and died half-made when his sword kissed their cores. He swallowed everything. The new hand filled out. The arm lost the worst of its tremor.
The light dimmed behind him for a hundred heartbeats.
It brightened again.
The angel had chosen a shorter path. It cut a diagonal through the masonry and met him at a T-junction. He tried to slide under the strike. The edge caught the trailing plates of his cuirass and peeled them off him like wet bark, taking a slab of skin with it. He slammed chest-first into a wall and saw darkness crawl across the edges of his vision.
He stood anyway. He had to. He set his feet on the line Cadence taught him and watched the blade come again.
He let it pass on purpose this time—close enough to heat the spit off his teeth—and put the guan dao into the angel's ribs with everything his spine had left.
The point bit.
A finger's width. Then slid free as the glow hardened again.
That was all he got: proof that under the light, something could still be made to notice being stabbed.
He broke contact and fell back into shadow as the strike came down that would have ended him. The floor turned to a bright, smooth plain. His boots didn't find purchase; he slid half the hall length before he caught the lip of a broken drain with new fingers and held.
He was breathing too hard now. Each inhale rasped over char in his throat. Each exhale rasped back.
He turned his head, spat thick red onto the floor, and pushed himself up.
The angel followed, steady and unhurried, like a butcher walking to a block that had no legs.
He ran again.
He didn't have pride left. Pride was a luxury you had when something wasn't actively trying to cut you out of history. He had tempo. He had tricks. He had a body that would do what it was told until it didn't.
The labyrinth closed and opened around him like a lung. He rode the breath it gave. He bought seconds with blood and turned those seconds into turns, and those turns into halls that had mobs in them, and those mobs into meat he could put in the hole where his arm had been.
By the time he dove through a shattered colonnade into a long processional with light pouring at the far end, the hand on his left was whole again, raw and sensitive, the nails new and pale.
It shook when he clenched it. It still clenched.
The angel stepped into the processional and raised its blade.
Noctis planted his feet, brought his Arsenal in tight, and met it, because there was no more room to run.
The corridor became sound and heat and sprayed stone. He held. He bled. He did not die.
Not yet.
The halls stank of molten stone. Prayer etched into the walls melted into rivulets, words dissolving into shapeless light. Every corner glowed with the shimmer of heat, every corridor a kiln waiting to close its jaws.
Noctis moved through the choking haze like a shadow that refused to vanish. His steps were ragged, his left arm raw and tender, still pink where new flesh had grown. Blood dripped freely from cuts across his ribs, steaming before it hit the floor. He refused to slow.
The angel followed.
Its wings swept once, and the world obeyed. White fire erupted down the corridor, eating stone, eating air, eating even shadow. The temperature spiked so suddenly that the marrow inside Noctis's bones ached.
[Skill: Ghost Vein II — Activated]
His body dissolved into smoke, sliding past a wall of burning scripture. He reformed behind a pillar just as it burst into slag. The angel's blade cleaved the air behind him, and heat skinned his back. The stink of scorched flesh filled his nose.
He stumbled, caught himself, and forced his Arsenal to circle tighter.
[Skill: Orbiting Arsenal III — Activated]
The guan dao whirled, intercepting a rain of burning debris. The scythe hooked through a half-formed knight, its torso dissolving as Noctis devoured it mid-motion. A sword-form Reaper tore across a sanctified golem's chest, carving deep until a core tumbled out. Noctis grabbed it, crushed it in his claw, and drank.
The essence steadied his legs. It didn't stop the pain.
The angel's voice struck again, a hammer that broke bone without touching him.
"APOSTATE."
The sound itself drove him to his knees. He slammed the guan dao's butt into the floor to keep himself upright. The blade of light came down—
[Doctrine: Tempo Ledger — Pace Lock]
The rhythm of the strike bent. A half-beat hesitation. Noctis shoved himself sideways into a slide. The blade missed his skull and instead split the floor for thirty meters, molten stone spraying like blood.
He rolled, came up on one knee, and shot.
[Skill: Blood Lance — Activated]
[Skill: Shadow Volley — Activated]
The projectiles streaked toward a flickering seam at the angel's abdomen, glowing in his Omen Eye. They struck. For a breath, it looked like they would pierce. Then the weakness blinked out. The lances dissolved, the arrows evaporated. Nothing remained but sparks.
The angel stepped forward through the storm.
Noctis turned to run, forcing his battered body to move. He leapt over collapsed stone, slid under a chain, and cut down another knight with a one-handed slash. He barely had time to devour its core before the angel's blade descended again.
This time, he was too slow.
The strike caught him low, slicing through armor and flesh. A spear of burning light drove into his abdomen and out his back. His breath left him in a harsh bark. His claws raked against the blade instinctively, scraping sparks from its surface.
For a moment, he was pinned like a moth to a board.
Pain exploded through him, white and endless. His vision narrowed to a tunnel. His essence bled out of him in steaming coils.
He snarled. His silence broke into a ragged roar.
[Skill: Exsanguinate II — Activated]
Blood detonated outward from his wound, bursting against the angel's chest. It staggered back one step, pulling the blade free. The sudden absence of steel was its own agony—his body collapsing inward around the hole.
Noctis fell to one knee, clutching the wound with his claw. Blood gushed between his fingers, soaking his chest, spattering the floor. His vision swam red and black.
The angel raised its blade to finish him.
Noctis forced his legs under him.
[Doctrine: Assassin — Assassin's Surge]
He vanished into a blur, reappearing at the flank of a sanctified golem that had lumbered into the hall. His claw tore its core free, his fangs sank into it, and he drank like a dying man at a river.
Iron and faith burned down his throat. Essence surged into his Grid, weaving threads of flesh, forcing muscle to twitch and coil. The hole in his abdomen spasmed, tissue crawling to fill it. It didn't close—it couldn't, not yet—but it slowed the bleeding enough to move.
The angel struck again, carving a pillar in two. Noctis leapt back, boots skidding across molten stone. His back hit the wall, hard enough to drive another scream from his lungs. He spat blood, forced himself upright, and launched his guan dao in a savage arc.
[Doctrine: Spear — Rotational Bore]
The drill strike slammed against the angel's wing joint, sparks screaming as it ground against divine plating. The weakness flickered—and was gone. The blade slid off as if striking glass.
The angel's counterstrike split the air. Noctis twisted, but the edge grazed across his back. Flesh parted. A line of fire carved from shoulder to spine. Blood sprayed across the wall, sizzling on molten stone.
He staggered forward, half-falling, one hand pressed against the open wound at his abdomen, the other clutching his weapon. His Arsenal reeled around him, battered but unbroken.
The angel strode after him, implacable, radiant, the blade in its hand glowing brighter with every step.
Noctis's silence held. His fangs bared. His body bled from too many wounds to count, but his eyes burned hotter.
He turned and ran again, deeper into the burning labyrinth.