The Titan buckled under him, a continent of bone trying to shake loose a single point of refusal. Noctis held fast. Crimson talons of aura bit into the Titan's chest plating as his wings mantled against the gale, feathers flashing bloodlight. Around him, three Bloodfang Reapers cut their orbits into luminous rings—scythes of essence that traced spirals through the night. In his hands, two more Reapers—manifested as long crimson greatswords—crossed above Twilight Reaver, the relic blade singing a low hymn that braided sanctity with hunger.
Beneath the armor plate, something throbbed. His Omen Eyes IV opened further, irises flowering with golden-crimson sigils. The world resolved into layers—bone shelves, marrow conduits, load-bearing ribs fused in triads, every seam a vein of weakness. He saw how pressure radiated from each joint, how the smallest incision could cascade into collapse.
He drove the relic sword to the hilt.
Bone screamed.
The Titan reared back, tearing a canyon through the dunes with its heel. A sand storm rose in a ring around its feet, climbing the night like a curtain. Far away on the city's walls, the people swayed as the shock reached them. Soldiers clutched crenellations. Priests clung to poles. Children hid behind their elders and peeked with wide eyes at the crimson speck that crawled across a god of bone.
"Down," Noctis murmured. Not a plea. A verdict.
He wrenched Twilight Reaver free and carved upward. The three orbiting Reapers dove in precise arcs to meet the cut, scissoring into the seam his Omen Eyes had drawn. A slice became a crack. A crack became a seven-spoked fracture racing from sternum to shoulder.
The Titan smashed both hands together.
The sky buckled. The clap caved the air; a black ripple crashed outward and shoved Noctis into the chest ridgeline. He planted his feet, Stonehide Carapace IV rippling beneath his skin, turning the brute force into meaningless shivers. He sprang. Wings beat once. He cleared the second clap and soared up the Titan's throat, flipping to land on the collar spines.
Chains burst from under the skin of the world.
Rib-serpents arced from the sand—dozens, then hundreds—each a spine braided to a predator's jaw. They lunged for his wings and ankles, seeking to pin him—to hold him until the Titan's palm came down like a falling keep.
"Break."
Colossus Step IV detonated beneath him. He stamped, and the collar ridge answered like a drum. Shock rippled through the Titan's upper body and down into the desert. Chains shattered mid-lunge, raining splinters. The palm that was falling met empty air; he was already cutting left, feet skimming a ridge of fused scapula.
"Burn."
He cast his hand; a halo of crimson condensed and burst.
Blood Flood IV crashed sideways along the Titan's shoulder. It didn't splash—it dug, a gouging tide that chewed through bone and marrow, exposing the ductwork of pale channels underneath. The three orbiting Reapers fell into the trench and scythed along it, widening the wound into a gutter that bled dust and smoke. Inside, load ribs flexed, tenuous and overtaxed.
The Titan grabbed for him again, fingers like towers. Noctis slid, let the shadow of the hand pass, then knifed upward with both manifested Reaper blades. His Omen Eyes traced the three-bar socket where the finger's spine met the knuckle plate. He struck there. Twice. Thrice.
The finger exploded at the joint. A white plume of fragments flowered outward.
Roars from the city. They didn't know his name in every house, but they knew what they were seeing: a single will rewriting the sky.
The Titan adjusted. Wings of bone unfurled—vast scaffolds of spurs and rods that snapped open along the spine. Their first beat stirred cyclones from the desert, a wall of wind that hammered the capital's far gates. Noctis crouched to anchor himself—and then the Titan twisted. Its shoulder rolled, seeking to fling him from purchase.
Noctis went with it.
He sprinted the curve of the shoulder into the hollow at the back of the arm and dropped, sliding down into the trench he had carved. The orbiting Reapers kept pace, carving ahead of him, cutting footholds with every pass. He hit the elbow cup and leapt to the triceps ridge, then ran against the lean—sideways along a vertical plane—because gravity was a conversation he refused to lose.
The Titan drove that arm into the ground like a piledriver.
"Mine."
He thrust Twilight Reaver point-down and flicked one wrist; a crimson tether snapped from the blade's hilt into his palm, snapping taut as the world inverted. He swung beneath the arm, body parallel to sand, then released at the apex and launched toward the Titan's back.
Wraith Step IV flickered. Space peeled away in a whisper and closed again above the spine crown.
He landed among lances like a field of ivory pikes. The wind from those new, enormous wings threatened to peel him off. He met it with Gale Spiral IV, dragging the gale into a tunnel that pinned the airflow and used it. The spiral narrowed behind him, a translucent auger punching into the Titan's wake. He stepped forward through the eye of that storm and slashed.
The spine-crown's third lance snapped two-thirds of the way up. A gout of marrow-smoke vented. Noctis's Omen Eyes widened; inside that vent, conduits flickered gold, the sight-line to a deeper channel.
"Open."
Exsanguinate IV lanced downward—a silent crimson spear. It struck the conduit and burst along the line, detonating marrow nodes in a chain far beneath the visible plate. Plates along the Titan's back rippled, bulged, then settled wrong. The gigantic wings faltered for a heartbeat, beating out of rhythm.
He seized the heartbeat.
"Fall."
Ruinquake Slam IV through the heel of his palm—into bone, into the load of the wings, into the rhythm. Shock ran through the Titan like a thrown boulder through a cathedral bell. The colossus pitched. Its next wingbeat came late; it stumbled. Knees plowed trenches. Sand geysers rose and blew away like smoke.
Noctis rode the sway, ran a figure eight across two spines, and dove toward the left scapular notch. His orbiting Reapers converged on point, three scarlet commas in the night. He drove his two crimson greatswords into the notch's lip and hauled; the Reapers scissored the lip free, a plate as wide as a house tumbling away into the dark.
Inside, the Titan wasn't hollow. It was organized. A forest of brace ribs, truss ribs, anchor ribs; veining like a city's aqueduct system. Omen Eyes traced the stress map—golden threads tightening along the left side as the right wing overcompensated.
There.
He plunged, wings tucked, shoulders grazing marrow branches as he threaded down. The Titan roared, a horrible mulled thunder, and clenched. Plates slammed together. Braces twisted to shear him.
Noctis flicked a finger; the orbiting Reapers widened to a ring around him and spun until they blurred. The whir became a wall.
Crimson Arsenal IV—a blizzard of spectral blades—answered the ring, populating the gap with a storm of longknives and pikes. Plates crashed; the knives punched spacers into the seams; the pikes braced the braces open. The ring of Reapers ground through whatever closed. He dropped clean through and landed in a cradle of ribbed lattice ten body-lengths inside the shoulder root.
He could feel the Bone-Masked One here. Not the body, but the will—threaded into the construct like a puppeteer woven into his own strings. The presence flexed, trying to flood this pocket with bone. The lattice tried to grow teeth and swallow him.
"Rot."
Chalice of Apostasy IV pulsed out of him, an inversion of hymn into hunger. Where it passed, marrow browned; nascent bone curdled. The swallow-stomach paused, shuddered, and began to collapse instead of close. He sprinted, cutting as he ran—two crimson greatswords ringing the way; the orbiting Reapers grinding the edges so they could not regrow.
Outside, the Titan gathered itself from the stumble. It tore its buried fist from the dune and hammered the ground; the city wavered again on its foundations. Garrison drums pounded from the inner keep. Lights flickered across the palace ridge like a chain of gold beetles.
On the highest balcony, Seraphyne gripped the rail with both hands and leaned forward into the desert wind. Noctis was too far to see, too quick to follow—just a streak of red that kept appearing at joints, at plates, at the places where the Titan hurt most. The crowd around her whispered prayers that had no words in them.
Noctis burst from the shoulder pit onto the outer plate again, riding a fountain of bone dust. He didn't pause. The Titan tried to backhand him off. He stepped in—Ghost Vein IV—and the hand passed through him like a phantom through smoke. He stepped out on the other side and left a line of glittering weakness across the back of the Titan's palm.
Bolt Cascade IV walked along that line, each step a lightning stamp. The palm's plates convulsed; fingers locked half-closed, then snapped back open in a spasm.
"Sever."
Flame Nova IV roared across the wrist from below while Frostburst IV fell like a crown from above. The thermal shock rang the Titan's joints. The orbiting Reapers dove like hawks, blades together, and split the midline seam.
The left hand fell off at the wrist.
It didn't tumble; the Titan threw it like a comet at the city.
Noctis's wings snapped open. He left the Titan and streaked after, the world strobing between beats. The severed hand turned in the air, clawing for purchase that wasn't there, a house-sized fist spinning toward towers and torchlight.
He beat it there.
Aegis of the Dawn IV blossomed from one palm—gold-white, quiet, absolute. The flying bone crashed into the shield and shattered to powder in a cone above the outer wall, drifting down in snow that made children gasp when it touched their faces like ash that wasn't hot.
Gasps turned to cheers. Noctis didn't hear them; he was already turning, folding his wings, and knifing back toward the Titan's sternum like a thrown spear.
The Titan adapted. It hunched, and from the gaps of its chest, barbed ribs fired outward like a volley of ballista bolts. A forest of lances filled the sky. To an army, it would have been annihilation.
To Noctis, it was a map.
Omen Eyes IV lit a river of gaps between trajectories—three vectors, then two, then a door that would close a heartbeat after it opened. He rolled through it, felt a thorn rasp along the Stonehide skin of his neck, and arrived under the jaw, where the mandible plate hinged into the throat collar.
"Open your mouth," he said, and drove Twilight Reaver upward.
The relic blade bit into the hinge and sang. The three orbiting Reapers struck the same point, then slid to either side and sawed. The hinge cracked; the jaw fell half-open on a ruined angle. A breath like a tomb's winter washed over him—cold and old and hungry.
Inside the mouth, a forest of teeth clenched and unfolded like shutters. He saw the throat-sleeve behind, a chute of cross-banded ribs that would grind him if he went straight.
So he didn't.
He spun and ran across the lower mandible instead, cutting teeth as he passed. The Titan snapped shut and almost took his foot. He shoved Ruinquake Slam through the lower jaw as it closed; the shock misaligned the bite and the top teeth scissored through the bottom row, shearing themselves off like broken fenceposts.
The Titan reeled, head canted. Noctis used the tilt as ramp. He ran up the skull dome, sliced two anchor laths over the brow where Omen Eyes showed stress knots, and launched again, this time toward the wing root on the right.
The Titan met him with a new trick.
The wing root opened like a camera iris, and a cyclone of bone dust jetted outward—grit and needles. The storm ate sight and sound. In the white-out, the Titan whipped the wing like a whip, trying to snare him with spars.
Gale Spiral IV spun back to life around him, but he didn't try to part the storm; he used it. He set the spiral to drink the cyclone, turned the storm into his engine, and when the wing's spar passed through the edge of that vortex, he stepped onto it.
He sprinted along the spar inward, knife-edge to sky, weightless for three steps. Inside, bone struts crisscrossed to reinforce the wing's web. His Omen Eyes made the mess into a simple sketch: cut these three; the rest must follow.
He cut them—left, right, middle—his Reaper swords ringing in perfect thirds. The orbiting Reapers followed, widening each cut. The wing's inner framework sighed. The next beat of that wing faltered, then tore with a bright, awful sound like silk the size of a plaza ripping all at once.
The Titan lurched as the right wing lost lift. It heaved the left to compensate and launched itself into a crooked hop that gathered enough air to rise two body-heights above the dunes, stuttering like a thrown bridge.
Enough.
Noctis rose on a column of heated air, then fell with it, gathering momentum from the weight of his will. He landed between the Titan's shoulder blades and planted Twilight Reaver to the hilt.
"Down."
Blood Flood IV poured again, not as a wave but as a weight that hammered through every seam his Omen Eyes had traced. The current sank into the architecture of the colossus. Gold threads popped, one by one, like harp strings snapping under a bad hand. The Titan's geometry groaned as if it remembered being dirt.
It landed crooked. One knee dug. One heel slid. The world thundered with the fall.
The city's roar chased the thunder.
Noctis drew out the relic blade and breathed. The breath steamed in the desert night like winter in spring. He lifted his gaze and met the Titan's—no pupils there, only a cluster of fused skulls around an empty dark where a face might have been.
Within that dark, a white oval—mask within a mask—flickered. The Bone-Masked One's presence tightened. Rage. Calculation. The sense of a second plan waking.
A lattice of ribs began to rise behind Noctis, fast as growing bamboo. He pivoted. The lattice curled like fingers into a cage.
"Not for me."
He danced backward through the ribs as they closed, leaving a kazuya of spectral knives hanging in his wake—Crimson Arsenal IV—so that when the cage snapped shut, it impaled itself on a hundred waiting points and locked open like a crown of broken thorns.
He stepped past the ruin and hurled a spear of lightning into the Titan's left hip—Bolt Cascade IV—which skipped along the hip ring and blew out a brace at the far thigh. The Titan's attempt to rise collapsed halfway; it settled again onto one knee.
"See me," Noctis said—not a shout. The desert could hear him anyway.
He opened his wings in full.
Crimson light bathed the dunes, reflected in ten thousand grains of sand. His orbiting Reapers widened their circles until they sketched a halo the size of a plaza, scythes humming at a pitch too low to be sound. In his hands, the Reaper greatswords crossed over Twilight Reaver again. In his eyes, the golden spirals of Omen sight burned like a twin dawn.
If the Bone-Masked One had lungs, it would have drawn a breath. If it had a spine, it would have felt what spines feel when they kneel by themselves.
It chose to rage instead. Plates shifted against plates; anchor ribs drove deeper. The colossus dragged itself, one-kneed, toward the capital like an executioner with a broken leg, wings battering the dark.
"Good," Noctis said. "Come."
He ran to meet it.
They collided where the dunes began to give way to stony flats. The Titan swung with the stump of its left arm; he slid under the arc, buried a Reaper blade in the hip seam, and used the planted sword as a pole to vault to the next anchor. The orbiting Reapers followed his trajectory and bit where his Omen Eyes told them to—an inverse of instinct, a choreography of destruction. Plate by plate, rib by rib, he took the giant apart in pieces the size of houses, the size of song.
At the wall, the saints stood with their hands at their hearts. Not in fear. In vow. Their eyes burned red with holy shadow, and they whispered a single word that was not quite prayer and not quite oath.
"Sovereign."
From the palace balcony, Seraphyne did not speak at all. A hand covered her mouth; the other gripped the rail hard enough to blanch the knuckles. Her eyes were very bright.
The colossus kept coming, and the sovereign kept cutting, and in the space between those two certainties the night learned a new shape.
The Titan tried one last trick. It forced marrow through the chest vents and bloomed new ribs across its own wounds, a frantic graft that half-worked. In the instant of regrowth, the structure went soft, transitioning from cured to pliant bone.
Noctis smiled, small and cruel.
Exsanguinate IV walked the line of the transplant and lit the soft marrow from within. It didn't explode. It caved. The chest plate folded over the heart-cave like pastry collapsing into itself.
The Titan sagged forward onto both hands to keep from face-planting into the flats. Noctis ran up the left radius, cut the last tendons at the elbow—with one Reaper sword, with the other, with Twilight Reaver—and stepped onto the back of the shoulder as the arm failed. He stood above the cavern that led inward and looked down into the place where all the golden lines converged.
"Open," he said again, and the night obliged.
The three orbiting Reapers plunged as one spear into the seam. The seam yawned. The sovereign fell with them, wings furled to knives.
The city saw him vanish into the giant's back and did not make a sound for the span of two heartbeats.
Then the cheering started again and rolled along the walls like fire along a fuse.
Noctis did not hear it. Inside the Titan, the air tasted like old graves and salted iron. Bone guardians unfolded from the walls like mantis-kilns, their joints grinding. He walked between them without slowing. His Omen Eyes made their plate-work into riddles solved in a glance. The Reapers cut the answers.
Somewhere ahead, deeper than bone, the Bone-Masked One's will burned like a cold star.
"Hide," Noctis whispered to it. "It will teach me where not to look."
He stepped off a beam into the heartward shaft and let the weight of his aura pull him down.
The Titan shuddered around its sovereign intruder. The desert shook under both of them.
The world had not learned yet how this story ended, but it had learned who would write it.