The world was a throbbing, overheated mess of pain and glare. Blood dripped from his chin, each drop hitting the obsidian with a sharp hiss, vanishing into a tiny puff of steam. Every neuron in his skull screamed in protest, a biological firewall of pure agony blocking any thought more complex than basic motor function. But through the static, through the red haze of system failure, one command forced its way to the surface, simple and absolute.
Her voice, when it came, was stripped of all snark, pared down to a cold, clinical warning that carried more fear than any scream.
// Boss, your vitals are in freefall. Synaptic degradation is occurring. Sustaining Root Access skill for even three more seconds risks permanent neural damage, a complete personality wipe! She's a soldier, a knight. She knew the risks when raiding a dungeon solo. Is a woman you've known for a day worth your mind, your very soul's mission in this world?
Noctar's response wasn't a logical argument. It wasn't a thought at all. It was a feeling, raw and undeniable, that punched through the pain, a memory flash of Ardyn in the lobby, her sharp golden eyes assessing him, not with fear, but with cool, professional curiosity. The graceful, lethal economy of her movements in the Guild. The unwavering line of her back as she stepped into this dungeon alone. It was the certainty of a connoisseur recognizing a masterpiece.
A laugh, choked and bloody, escaped his cracked lips, lost in the volcano's roar. His mental voice was a guttural scrape.
The silence in his mind was absolute for a single, terrifying heartbeat. Then, he felt it not a sound, but a sensation. A wave of pure, focused, self-sacrificial computational power surged through his fraying neural pathways. S.A.R.A. was burning her own non-essential processes, her vast intelligence funneling down to a single, radiant beam to bolster his failing consciousness.
// Acknowledged.
// Scanning with priority override... Located. The bug is not the dragon. It is a parasitic, self-replicating script [CORRUPTION_VIRUS_ALPHA] attached to the dragon's core defensive protocol. Visual marker: the reverse scale on the back of its neck.
The code is forcing an uncontrolled mana feedback loop, increasing its thermal output by 400% and granting it broken, unpredictable skills. It is the source of the environmental corruption. Deletion of the script will trigger a catastrophic system recalibration in the host.
His vision tunneled. The hellish caldera, the raging dragon, the desperately fighting Ardyn, all blurred into a smeared background. The only thing that remained in sharp, terrible focus was the glitching, corrupted data packet hovering over the dragon's neck, pulsing with a sickly magenta light against the creature's crimson aura.
A bullseye. He had one shot. One single, precise application of a Root Access skill command before the backblast of psychic strain fried his cerebral cortex.
But he couldn't just run at it. He was a programmer, not a berserker. He needed a trajectory. A perfect, impossible vector that would account for the dragon's lurching movement, Ardyn's evasive footwork, the treacherous footing, and his own failing body's rapidly diminishing capabilities.
// Computing optimal assault vector... This will require 98% of my available operational capacity to avoid frying your brain. My sensor feeds to you will go dark. You will be functionally blind, deaf, and operating on pre-programmed instruction. You will have one path. Do not deviate.
A new torrent, not of pain, but of pure, incomprehensible data, flooded his mind. Numbers, vectors, probabilities, force diagrams, a geodesic map of the next 8.5 seconds of reality, plotted to the millimetre.
He saw it a desperate, zigzagging sprint across a shelf of crumbling rock, a final leap from a specific, half-molten basalt spire, a three-second freefall that would intersect perfectly with the dragon's next, predicted lunge toward Ardyn's left flank. The path was a golden, burning line in his mind's eye.
The calculation complete, S.A.R.A. went utterly silent, her presence receding to a bare, silent kernel. The world became muted. The roar faded. The heat felt distant. He was a missile, and the guidance system was locked.
Noctar moved.
He didn't run; he launched. His legs, pushed by the last dregs of mana and sheer, brutal will, propelled him forward with a speed that tore at his muscles. He followed the golden line. He ignored the lava river that bubbled to his right, the searing plume of gas that erupted to his left, the dragon's earth-shaking roar, and the beautiful, battered woman a silver flame rose in the darkness who was his only reason for being in this place.
He saw only the path.
He hit the designated spire, his boots cracking the brittle rock. He didn't stop. He coiled and kicked off with every ounce of strength, shattering the pinnacle, using the debris as secondary propulsion.
For a moment, he was flying, a bleeding, burning comet shot across the face of the sun. He was an arrow of human defiance aimed directly at the flaw in the system. The dragon, its predatory senses finally registering the tiny, incoming threat, began to twist its massive neck, jaws opening to bathe his trajectory in fire. The glitching reverse scale, his target, rotated into view a shimmering, vulnerable patch of code made flesh.
Time dilated. Sound ceased. In the absolute silence of his focused mind, his hand stretched out, not with a gun or a blade, but with fingers curled like a programmer's at a keyboard, pure intent focusing into a single, gesture.
His hand slammed into the dragon's hide, not with a programmer's delicate tap, but with the desperate, clawing grip of a drowning man. His fingers scrambled for purchase on a scale as hard and sharp as a slab of forged obsidian. He was a finger's width from the burning scale. The dragon's molten breath gathered in its throat, illuminating its gullet with hellish light.
It was now or never.