The catacombs shook with the weight of wings.
One hundred and fifty angels filled the vaults where the popes had burned their marrow to ash. They landed in ranks, shields locked, blades raised, wings spread to catch the hymn pouring from their backlines. Light soaked into the stone until every surface glowed pale, until the bones of the buried clergy rattled against their coffins.
Noctis stood alone. Six wings unfurled, halo blazing arcs of white-blue fire behind nine horns. The Twilight Reaver burned in his grip, the Bloodfang Reapers spinning fast in crimson orbit. His veins glowed with crimson and sanctity both, aura pressing hard against the weight of hymn.
The host advanced.
Shields crashed into place, steel slamming steel until the air cracked. Spears leveled. Blades rose. The front line surged forward like a wall of iron and light.
Noctis met them head-on.
The first shield rim smashed against his chest. The impact jarred his ribs, hymn biting deeper than steel. He twisted with the blow, slid the edge down his torso, and brought the Reaver up in a red arc that split the carrier open from hip to throat. Blood sprayed across his gauntlet. The man collapsed in two halves, but the formation swallowed the gap before his body hit the ground.
The Reapers screamed in their orbit, slicing into the second file. Feathers tore loose, burning as they scattered into the dust. A spear thrust for his belly—he seized the haft, yanked, and dragged the angel off balance into the sweep of a scythe. The body split at the waist, entrails spilling across the marble floor.
The next three spears stabbed together. Noctis stepped through shadow-vein. Dominion Step IX split the world and spat him out behind them. His phantom double slashed once before fading, cutting two throats clean. He was already turning, claws tearing the third angel's helm in half, marrow hissing against his fingers.
The backline sang louder. Hymn-light surged through the front ranks. The corpses twitched, wounds closed, cracked bones knit. Those he had crippled rose to their feet, faces calm, blades still steady.
Noctis's lip curled. He drove the Reaver through a breastplate, dragged it sideways until ribs cracked apart, and ripped the body free to block a strike aimed for his wing. The sword bit into the corpse instead. Noctis hurled the dead man into the healer line, scattering their rhythm for a heartbeat.
He used it.
His wings flared, burning crimson and white-blue. Dawnfire Wreath II erupted in a sweep that ignited feathers and seared marrow. Fifteen angels screamed as the sanctity-flame ate them alive. Their bodies collapsed in heaps of ash and broken bone. The hymn staggered, faltered, cracked—but caught again, voices braiding tighter.
The floor shook.
Tier IX holy arts ignited at once.
Blades blazed brighter than the Reaver, spears hummed hot enough to crack air, shields radiated sanctity like suns. The strike came as one wall of light, timed with inhuman precision.
It hit him everywhere.
The Bastion flared, his veins glowing white-blue, but the hymn ripped through. His chest split open across the sternum, sanctity carving meat to bone. His right wing snapped, feathers burning in a halo of sparks. The heat punched into his marrow until his vision swam.
He roared, sound tearing stone from the walls.
The halo spun bright arcs from his skull. Halo Severance II blasted outward, blades of light cutting through the formation. A dozen angels fell headless, their corpses twitching on the ground. The Reaper orbitals screamed, carving through kneecaps, splitting ankles, dragging bodies down into their fellows. Noctis surged forward, claws ripping a shield in half, the Reaver hacking a helm clean down to collarbone.
The floor slicked with ichor. Feathers drifted like snow. Steel screeched as lines re-formed.
They pressed him harder.
Shields shoved his body back a step, hymn beating against his marrow. Spears darted for his ribs, wings, throat. He caught one on his forearm, letting it carve meat open to bone, and dragged it forward, dragging the angel off balance into his Reaver's path. The blade split him from shoulder to hip. Blood sprayed into the air, hot and bitter.
Pain sharpened him. His grin bared his fangs.
The chamber collapsed in chunks. A column groaned, then split, marble crashing into the melee. Dust roared across the battlefield, choking vision, blinding eyes. Noctis moved faster in the haze, stepping through shadow and marrow, appearing behind shield-bearers and cutting their spines before they could turn. The Reapers traced circles in the air, leaving red halos that scythed bodies down in arcs of gore.
He heard bones crunch under boots, feathers hiss as they caught fire, hymns turn ragged with strain.
Still they pressed.
The backline never faltered. Healers sang, light poured, wounds sealed. Even those he left mangled rose again to fight. The attrition was deliberate. They weren't trying to kill him quickly. They were grinding him down.
Good.
He welcomed it.
The Reaver spun in his hands, hacking a shield apart. He plunged his claws through the gap, grabbed the angel's throat, and ripped it free with marrow still glowing. He crushed it in his hand, blood running down his wrist, then hurled the corpse into the choir. Their hymn cracked as the body slammed into them.
He followed, wings driving him forward, flame trailing. Oblivion Flame gushed from his hand, a tidal wave of black fire that devoured sanctity itself. The choir shrieked as their robes burned, their voices broke. Five fell, their bodies eaten by flame that left nothing but drifting ash.
The hymn staggered.
The host adjusted.
Lines closed tighter, shields locking, healers pouring everything they had into the breach. Their formation became a box, walls pressing from every side, spears thrusting in rhythm with the hymn.
They tried to trap him.
Light burned around him like water, every inch of his skin wet with sanctity. Cuts opened across his chest, his arm, his wings. He bled steady now, blood pattering onto marble with each strike. His marrow ached with the press of hymn.
He answered with savagery.
The Reaver hacked a shield in two, his scythes took kneecaps, his claws ripped a helm free and crushed the skull inside. He shoved bodies into spears, turned corpses into weapons, carved space open with every breath. He kicked one angel so hard its ribs snapped like twigs, then cut its legs out from under it as it fell.
Blood painted his armor. Ash coated his wings.
The host bled, but they did not break.
Hours passed in chaos.
Stone fell until the catacombs became rubble. Dust filled lungs. Every breath was iron and chalk. Every clash was steel on steel, claw on plate, hymn on marrow. Noctis's body smoked with burns. Cuts bled down his flanks. One wing dragged where feathers had been seared away.
He killed without pause. A hundred corpses lay scattered, their blood running in streams down broken marble. Still they pressed, still they sang, still they fought as one body.
Noctis laughed, blood dripping from his mouth. "More!"
They obliged.
The backline chanters lifted their voices higher, sanctity pouring like rivers. The remaining host burned brighter. Blades hummed hotter, shields glowed sharper, wings flared wider. They slammed him backward, spears piercing his leg, swords hacking across his chest. He roared, seized a spear haft, and broke it over his knee before shoving the jagged end through its owner's skull.
The floor beneath him collapsed. He burst upward instead of falling, wings beating hard, claws tearing through rubble. Marble split above. Light poured down.
He ripped a hole through the ceiling and tore into open sky.
The host followed, wings bursting into the night. Feathers scattered across the air, glowing faint in moonlight. Hymns roared into the heavens, blades leveled at him.
Noctis rose high, halo blazing arcs of crimson and white-blue fire, wings spread wide despite their damage. His body bled freely, cuts smoking, marrow screaming. But his grin never faltered.
The Floating Temples loomed below, their aura still pressing faint sanctity into the air. Beyond them, the sky was clean, free of holy ground. The host pursued, hymns echoing across the sea.
Noctis hovered, blood dripping into the void beneath. His claws flexed, the Reaver burned, the Reapers spun.
"Now," he whispered, his voice low and savage.
The angels surged.
And he dove to meet them.
They came like a tide and the tide had teeth.
The hymn pressed the air until the world felt like one great lung full of light. Shields locked, spears rose in perfect geometry, and the first rank hit him like a wall. The rim of a shield slammed his ribs and something bright found a place under his skin. Heat burned along the seam of his chest and a white-hot crack ran through the bone. He tasted it — not metal but pure, dry light — and the taste made his mouth go cold.
"That hurts," he said, as if to himself. "You will pay for that."
He paid with the Reaver. The blade swept, red and clean, and a man unmade himself into two pieces under its arc. Blood spattered his gauntlet. The Reapers cut wider and left ribbons of feather and cloth that fell like snow. The formation ate the dead and kept moving; there were always hands to lift a shield and another throat to sing.
He felt the hymn try to set his heartbeat. It threaded into his marrow and wanted to make the rhythm its own. He let it push and then set his pulse slower, heavier. He was not singing with them. He would make them sing with blood.
A spear jabbed for his belly. He stepped through the lattice of motion; there was nothing there, because he had made the place empty. The phantom double he left slashed a throat on his way out, and he was already behind, claws in a throat and teeth at a collarbone. Flesh gave; hymn went raw and thin for a second.
The healers behind them sang like two rivers braided together. Light flowed across the front line in threads and the wounded knitted their flesh as if the cuts had been nothing. "Damn healing," Noctis muttered, wiping blood from the Reaver with the back of his hand. "It won't change anything. You will all die."
He drove his heel into a shield and let it pivot, taking a weight off his wing as another spear came in. A feather seared and fell, tiny embers drifting away. The pain hit his wing like a hot stone. "That one bit deeper," he said through his teeth. "I'll remember you."
They learned. The front line shifted when he attacked, corners tightening. They didn't move like men; they moved like a machine that had been taught the same motion so many times it now thought itself alive. He kept cutting them anyway. He found the seams in practice: where a healer's braid met the weight of a shield, where a spear's timing made a rhythm and that rhythm had a backbeat that could be broken.
He broke it. He reached for ankles and knees with the Reapers, took away support. He struck at hinge sockets — shoulders, hips, where leather met bone — and bodies folded into the gaps he made. The hymn faltered. Where the hymn faltered, death found purchase.
They reformed. The healers re-stitched torn chords and the corpses rose again if the ritual had time. He punched a dead man's body into the healer line and the hymn flinched as a body slammed into melody. He saw in the faces of the chanters, the way their jaws moved like people who had been singing since they were children, and he thought: I will cut that mouth.
His hands were a map of fresh damage, one new strip of scar each swing. The right wing took the worst of it; feathers blackened and blew away like ash. He could feel the loss in the joint, a ragged soreness, but there was no place for complaint. Complaints waste breath. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted iron and kept cutting.
They pressed a Tier IX strike through — not a single blast but a chord of light that found the seam where wing met shoulder. It landed and heat poured into him as if someone had set his marrow on a brand. He heard the bone crack in the wing like a plank snapping. He grunted. "Good," he breathed. "That will be on your head."
He took a spear through the thigh and knew by the angle that the spear-bearer had expected him to flinch left. He didn't flinch. He sank his claws into an armored throat and pulled until the body tipped forward and the spearhead went with it. Blood sprayed across a priest's robe. The cloth took the stain like a prayer. The priest's hymn faltered. He smiled and moved.
The catacombs filled with dust as the ceiling gave in places. He drove the Reaver down a corridor that had become a funnel and the world narrowed to the width between two shields. That's where he liked to work: narrow, hot, where a blade cut everything or nothing. He edged through a seam in the defense and found three throats arranged in a line. He took them in a single sweep, edge catching collarbones, blades eating bone. The hymn broke for half a breath and that half-breath was the pocket where he survived.
Healers drifted rhythm like currents. The first choir hummed with a softer tone; the second choir had a harder thread. He could taste the difference when the light hit him, like different metals on his tongue. He pushed toward the softer one first, the easier note. He meant to starve the verse.
"Sing loud," he said to no one as a band of chanters raised their voices. "Sing until you are hoarse. I like to hear what I break."
Someone tried to flank him with a disciplined wedge. It hissed along his ribs, a blade scraping like a file. He rolled, took the edge against his shoulder instead, and let their own speed work against them. He reversed, the Reaver slitting the leader's throat and then using the dead man's weight to tear open the spacing that formed behind him. Men fell into that hole like dice into a hole and then the second line came and he pushed again, relentless.
He felt time dissolve into hits and breaths. He stopped measuring minutes and started counting wounds. One hundred, one hundred fifty, two hundred—he lost track somewhere after the first hundred. His marrow kept the tally, like a ledger under his skin. It told him when to let a blow land and when to drag a shield to make a gap. It stored hunger and gave him judgment.
When he took the upper arm of a paladin in both hands and snapped it backward, the hymn in that section of the host stalled. Two men fell right behind the arm like a wave that had lost its leading stone. That pattern spread; a seam opened. He went through it and a dozen feathers fell in a bright shower. They left bloody streaks on the chamber floor.
Healers worked faster, their hands a blur. They pried a broken leg back into place and the boot rose to hit him as if nothing had happened. He cursed, showed his teeth, and stepped into the chord of their spell. He drove the Reaver down into the middle of the healer line and the notes splintered like glass. The priests screamed and their hymn tore into jagged pieces of sound.
Every time he cut a healer's hymn, the front line thinned a beat after. That beat was a wound he could widen. He widened it until the bearers of the shields had to flap their arms to catch their footing. He saw one of them, a young thing with a throat that still trembled from song, and he thought, sharp and clean: you're sung into other people's mouths. I'll take your voice in my hands.
He did. He bit the boy's throat as it rose to sing again and felt the wet sweetness of holy blood. It filled his mouth with heat and the boy kneed, breath leaving like a popped bubble. The hymn behind ebbed and flagged. He spat the taste away and turned back to the blade-work.
At some point a pillar split and fell and the whole center of the catacomb became a congregation of bodies. He was in the middle of it and then he wasn't—Dominion Step IX dropped him behind the priests—he felt the Reaver bite through leather and bone, shoulder sliding out of a socket, and then a healer's hands were on him again, stitching with light. He cursed and tore the hands away with teeth and claws. The stitching unmade and the body it had made lurch-broke into songless ruin. That songless ruin bought him a little more time.
Hours glided like stones. The hymns never stopped, they only changed timbre as voices wore thin. They gathered themselves and kept singing. The more they kept singing, the heavier the light became. It sat on his shoulders like hands that squeezed. He welcomed the squeeze because it showed where the pressure was and pressure is a thing you learn to split. It makes problems.
He cut them until his right wing was a rag of blackened quills. Pain throbbed there, dragged his focus to the joint. He snapped a spear in half with his jaw and tasted iron in the seam. He could have wrapped his fist and howled, called for Domination in a voice that would have meant something from his throne. Instead he breathed—one, two—and did what a man has to do when every other option is a lie: he used his blood.
A gush from a fallen angel landed slick across his palm, warm and slick, and the Grid took it without asking. Instinct, ruthless and old, fed him through the mouth and into marrow. It healed a notch in his side and knit edges that hymn had pressed open. He felt the bone click back in place like a foreign clock. It was not enough but it was something. He would have to buy more time.
That's what he thought as he vaulted through another seam. That's what he said aloud when a formation tried to box his flight.
"Box me," he said, voice low and dry. "I'll find the door."
They made the box like a trap; they assumed their geometry would not fail. Men and women and angels, disciplined, the lines clean as blades. They thought they were teaching him a lesson by limiting his movement. He smiled, a quick baring of teeth that tasted of ash. He drove his scythes through the hinge and the box opened like a jaw and he walked through it as if through a door.
The host flowed to close the gap. They were good. They were honest servants of the hymn. He loved them for the honesty even while he cut them. A blow took across his cheek that left a white-hot line. He felt the tear in his skin and cursed, satisfied. It meant the fight touched him. If it could touch him, he could touch it back.
He found the healers again—the backband that kept the choir running. They were smaller in the sky, bright and careless like sparks, but their songs braided into ropes and those ropes lifted shields and mended halves. He angled toward them. The formation cracked where the steadiest voice had been stripped. He dove a path, and the Reaver found the first singer's throat. He bit and tore and the hymn that had been braided into strength frayed into a rag.
The healers' hands moved faster then, and the hymn regained its edge. They braided again another thread, and the host stiffened to defend the sound. He'd done his work and now the host tried to press him out of the sky and back toward the temples where the stone loved their hymn. He didn't want to be pushed back into the ground that sang for them. He wanted air and room and a place to cut with speed.
He took the room. He dove like a spear and left a wake of flame and blood, dawnfire braided through black, and the angels fell in ribbons. Feathers sheared off in bright sheets; wings folded back done. You could see the sound go when a chanter died—space opened where their voice had been, and the whole formation moved to fill it. He gorged on that movement. He punched holes and the holes multiplied into slaughter.
When the last great chunk of wall fell and the ceiling opened to sky, he pulled himself free through the wreck and let sunlight hit him like a shout. The smell of the sea filled his nose and felt almost obscene after the dust. He hung in the open and the host rose after him, armor and muscle and hymn still singing. They were fewer than before, because he had broken ranks and taken toll. There was a ragged ring of them chasing, trying to keep him from air, from range.
He wanted them. He wanted their heads. He wanted to hear their hymn die clean and quietly under his teeth.
"Come on," he said, half-laughing, half-snarled. "Sing your last for me."
They came, and he met them with the blade. Feathers, wings, blood, hymn—every piece of them he ground into his work. The sky took them and made the sound smaller. It did not matter. The noise inside his bones was more than enough.
He kept cutting until the air tasted like iron cold and the last echo of the temple's hymn had been stretched thin to nothing. He did not think about winning. He thought about the next cut, because that is all a man like him can ever be sure of. He breathed and the Reaver sang and the Reapers spun and the blood kept coming and he kept the song inside him different from theirs.
When his laugh finally left him for lack of breath, it was a small, flat sound. He looked down at the decks and the scattered bodies and let his shoulders ease a fraction. He had pulled them from the stone and forced them into the sky where the hymn had less purchase. That was the plan and it had worked.
He wiped blood on his gauntlet and said nothing grand, only the small truth he could feel in his marrow.
"Keep singing," he said, quiet.
Then he dove again.
The open air carried the hymn farther, thinner, stretched across the sea. The sound didn't have the same weight it had in the catacombs, but it pressed all the same. One hundred and thirty voices still sang in one body.
Noctis's six wings beat against the wind. Three were ragged, feathers seared and torn, blackened quills dragging blood. His chest smoked where sanctity had split him. He licked blood from his lips, halo burning arcs behind him, eyes locked on the angels swarming the sky.
They spread into wedges, arcs, circles, every formation drilled into them across centuries. Healers floated behind in neat columns, hands raised, light spilling from their fingers into the lines in front. He felt their song more than heard it: clean, steady, infuriating.
"Still healing? Damn parasites," Noctis muttered. "It won't save you."
He dove.
The first wedge braced, shields lifted, spears leveled. Their discipline was flawless—exactly what he wanted. The Reaver smashed down through shields, sparks and blood spraying in the air. His claws tore a throat free, feathers exploding around him. The Reapers screamed wide, cutting three more from the sky. Their wings folded, bodies tumbling down like burning cinders.
The hymn wavered. Healers sang louder. Wounds knit. Bodies twitched back upright.
Noctis snarled. "Patch them up. I'll tear them apart again."
Spears stabbed into his flank, sanctity burning under his ribs. He hissed, caught one shaft in his hand, snapped it, and shoved the jagged end through its owner's skull. Blood sprayed across his face. Another blade cut his leg. He kicked the angel back with such force its spine bent the wrong way before it fell.
He broke through the wedge. The healers were ahead now—glowing, steady, their eyes blank with duty.
He folded his wings and fell into them like a hammer.
The Reaver carved through the first priest, cleaving him in two at the waist. Blood burst across the others, breaking their hymn. The Reapers cut wider, severing arms and wings, light scattering into sparks. He smashed one chanter's head into another's chest until bone cracked.
"Sing louder!" he shouted, blood dripping down his jaw. "I want to hear it when I rip your throats out!"
They tried. Hymn surged, thick and desperate. But their song cracked under the blood pouring from their own mouths. One by one their voices broke as his blade found them.
The host collapsed inward. Shields slammed, spears jabbed, bodies piled to keep him from tearing the healers apart. He laughed, feral and breathless, slamming his claws into a shield and ripping it open like parchment. His fangs bared as he tore through another throat.
Pain scorched his back. A Tier IX strike punched through his wing-root, sanctity tearing meat from bone. His vision went white for a breath. He coughed blood, spat it into the angel's face, then ripped its head off with one hand.
"That one hurt! You'll pay for it."
He hurled the head into the healer line. It struck a chanter in the chest, breaking their song. He tore through the gap with the Reaver, body soaked, feathers falling like fire. The hymn wavered again.
They tried to box him in. Arcs of wings closed above and below, blades flashing. Spears stabbed in rhythm, perfect timing.
He snarled. "You'll cage me again? Fine. I'll carve the door myself."
He tore into the walls. The Reaver cut left, claws ripped right, the Reapers sliced low, severing ankles. Blood poured into the air in sprays, mixing with feathers and ash. He shoved bodies into spears, forced the box open in gore.
The healers were closer now. He fixed his crimson gaze on them. His halo burned brighter, arcs cutting faint white-blue scars into the air.
The hymn cracked.
He pushed through, body scorched, bleeding, still laughing.
"You healers die first. Then the rest of you can fall with them."
And he dove again, a storm of wings and steel.