The Titan lurched forward, gouging fresh canyons into the desert with every staggering crawl. Each palm dug trenches that vomited sand skyward in choking geysers. Ribs scraped dunes into rubble. The city of Ashara trembled on its foundations, walls shivering as if they were nothing more than pots set atop a table during an earthquake.
Noctis fell through the inner shaft of the construct, wings furled tight, orbiting Reapers diving with him like hunting hawks. Inside, the bone groaned like a hull under storm. Omen Eyes burned golden threads into his sight, each stress seam singing with imminent fracture. The Bone-Masked One's will throbbed from the Titan's marrow—cold, relentless, trying to knit wounds faster than he could tear them open.
"You built yourself a fortress," Noctis murmured, voice cutting the silence as he plunged. "But fortresses don't bend. They break."
He struck the lower chest cavity like a hammer. [Skill: Ruinquake Slam IV] detonated through the Titan's rib lattice. Shockwaves pulsed outward, turning walls into vibrating strings. Dozens of braces collapsed, snapping like reeds. The Titan convulsed. Its entire chest heaved open and dropped two spans lower, ribs shearing.
Outside, the colossus roared and staggered another step toward Ashara. Its scream rattled the palace windows. Seraphyne's hands clutched the balcony rail until the wood splintered under her nails. Below her, citizens dropped to their knees, sobbing prayers—unsure if they begged for salvation or braced for doom.
Noctis spread his wings. Juggernaut's Dominion IV unfurled.
The chamber couldn't contain it. His aura exploded outward, a tidal wave of pressure that collapsed ribs around him like they were reeds in a flood. Every bone seam Omen Eyes had marked shattered. Shockwaves leapt from the Titan's chest cavity into its arms and spine, racing outward.
Outside, the effect was apocalyptic.
The Titan convulsed as if struck by a god's hammer. Its chest imploded inward by a span; the recoil rippled up through its spine. Vertebrae exploded in sequence, launching bone shards into the desert like siege shot. Its wings stuttered mid-beat. The colossus fell forward onto both hands.
The ground shook so violently that the city's outer wall cracked from parapet to foundation. Tiles jumped from roofs. Merchants' stalls collapsed inward. Horses panicked in their tethers.
Yet amid the panic, one truth became clear: the Titan had stumbled away from the city. It had been driven down, redirected, its massive frame forced onto its elbows in the dunes rather than onto Ashara's walls.
On the balcony, Seraphyne gasped, hand at her lips. Her heart pounded against her ribs. "He… forced it back."
In the streets, whispers rose through the panic. The crimson-winged figure was seen bursting from the Titan's chest again, wreathed in a corona of gold and red. Orbiting Reapers carved arcs of crimson light into the night sky, while Twilight Reaver blazed black in his hands.
"He's fighting it."
"He's winning!"
"The Twilight King…!"
The cries spread until they drowned the priests' wails. Hope took root in the tremor of fear.
The Titan tried to rise again. Broken ribs regenerated into scaffolds, forced into alignment by the Bone-Masked One's will. Chains of marrow lashed across its cracked sternum like stitches. It pushed itself upright, even as its chest collapsed inward with every breath.
Noctis would not allow it.
[Skill: Blood Flood IV] surged outward again, this time channeled downward. Crimson energy poured through the Titan's chest cavity into the ground. The desert floor itself convulsed. Shockwaves tore outward in rings, blasting dunes into dust. Sand became ash where the crimson tide touched.
The Titan reeled, one knee giving. Its massive head dipped. The mask within its skull glare turned toward the capital as though still determined to crush it.
Noctis appeared before its eye. [Skill: Wraith Step IV] flickered him into place, Twilight Reaver drawn back over his shoulder.
"Look at me."
He slashed. The relic blade cut across the fused mask, scoring a deep crimson line across its surface. The Bone-Masked One screamed in fury.
Chains erupted from the Titan's shoulders, snapping upward like whips to lash Noctis. He extended one palm.
[Skill: Aegis of the Dawn IV] — a radiant shield of inverted sanctity — flared into existence. The chains snapped against it and dissolved into dust.
"You would drag me down with your chains." Noctis's aura surged, burning like a crown of red fire. His orbiting Reapers tightened their circle, humming like a war drum. "But my Dominion is weight itself."
He dove, slammed his palms into the Titan's sternum.
[Skill: Juggernaut's Dominion — Full Release]
The desert erupted.
A shockwave so massive that it lit the night like a dawn ripped outward. The Titan's entire upper body cracked, fractures racing from sternum to clavicle to jaw. Its wings flailed out of sync, one breaking entirely at the joint. Its roar became a howl of collapse.
And Ashara trembled. Walls buckled but held. Towers swayed but stood. The kingdom shook in terror—and in awe.
Noctis hovered above the collapsing Titan chest, wings outspread, aura heavier than mountains. His voice rolled like thunder across the desert.
"You will not touch my people."
The Titan fell forward, chest smashing into the dunes. A shockwave swallowed half the desert. But the capital still stood.
Noctis landed lightly on the cracked sternum, three orbiting Reapers circling him in a triumphant crown. Twilight Reaver rested on his shoulder, its edge glowing like an ember of judgment.
The Bone-Masked One stirred within, voice rasping through the fractured mask. "Sovereign… you chain yourself… to them…"
Noctis smiled thinly. "No. They chain themselves to me."
The Titan groaned, bones cracking louder than thunder, as the battle dragged into its next phase.
The Titan dragged itself upright, ribs splintering as marrow forced them into grotesque repair. Its chest cavity burned with fractures; its wings flailed out of rhythm, one broken, the other half-torn but still generating storms across the desert.
Noctis hovered above, orbiting Reapers whirling in red arcs around him, Twilight Reaver pulsing black-red in his hand. His Omen Eyes spiraled golden lines across the construct's body, revealing weakness like ink bleeding across parchment—fractures racing from sternum to spine, fissures glowing across hip and shoulder joints.
"You are unstable," Noctis said, his voice cutting like iron. "Every step you take is one closer to collapse."
The Titan swung its shattered arm. Bone fragments rained like spears. Noctis vanished in a whisper of shadow—[Wraith Step IV]—and reappeared on the opposite shoulder. His two crimson Reaper swords carved precise lines into the scapular seam. Shards exploded outward as Twilight Reaver drove deep into the joint.
The Titan bellowed, ribs splitting into barbed lances that fired outward in a storm.
Noctis raised a palm. [Faith Spell — Radiant Shroud IV] bloomed in a dome of golden light, every spike shattering against it. Then he inverted the hymn.
[Chalice of Apostasy IV] pulsed outward. Bone blackened on contact. Regeneration collapsed into dust. Segments of ribbing withered and fell apart.
"You cannot rebuild faster than I can destroy," Noctis told it, his words flat and final.
He leapt from the collar ridge, orbiting Reapers diving with him, widening the trench he had carved in its sternum. The Titan staggered, knees dipping into the dunes. Its torso listed as balance faltered.
A wing snapped wide to counter, but Omen Eyes traced a glowing seam at its root. Noctis thrust one Reaper sword into the joint.
"That wing is finished."
[Exsanguinate IV] detonated crimson ruptures along the joint. The wing collapsed inward, torn free of lift. The colossus pitched sideways, plowing trenches through the desert floor. Sand avalanched toward the city in a wall of dust.
Noctis swept Twilight Reaver. [Faith Spell — Tempest Wall IV] surged outward, a barrier of stormlight that split the avalanche sideways. Sand divided harmlessly, flowing past the capital's walls.
From the balconies, people gasped. Then, when they saw the avalanche diverted and the Titan reeling, their fear cracked into cries of awe.
The Bone-Masked One hissed through the Titan's voice, every syllable bone grating against bone. "You waste power defending them. That is weakness."
Noctis landed upon the Titan's sternum, wings spread, three orbiting Reapers forming a crown of blades around him. His aura pressed down, a weight the desert itself bent beneath.
"No," he said. "It is sovereignty. They live because I stand here. That is strength."
He slammed both palms against the Titan's chest.
[Juggernaut's Dominion IV — Shock Release]
Shockwaves cascaded through the colossus. Vertebrae snapped in sequence, ribs splintered in showers of fragments, the sternum caved inward another span. The Titan howled and collapsed onto one knee, head buried in the sand.
Ashara shook with the impact, towers swaying, walls trembling. But still they held.
"Stay down," Noctis commanded, his voice cold and steady. "This city is not yours to touch."
The Titan tried to rise again, dragging marrow into its wounds, fumbling for strength it no longer possessed. Omen Eyes burned golden through the fractures, painting every weakness.
Noctis lifted Twilight Reaver high. "Your chains are breaking. And I will break the rest."
The night quivered, waiting for the next blow.
The Titan forced itself upright, shaking dunes from its shattered frame. Its mask glared hollow and cold, fractures glowing faintly with marrow-fire as the Bone-Masked One's will pulsed through it. The colossus braced on its elbows and then spread its ruined wings. Broken struts groaned, splintered spars jutted out at unnatural angles, yet still they beat. Windstorms rose with each stroke, tearing dunes into cyclones that whirled toward the capital.
Noctis stood on its chest, wings mantled wide. The three orbiting Reapers spun in widening arcs, crimson blades catching the moonlight, while the two manifested swords in his hands burned with sharp edges of essence. Twilight Reaver gleamed black-red, steady as judgment. His Omen Eyes glowed like suns of gold and crimson, threading seams of weakness across the Titan's body.
"You can still rise," Noctis said, voice low and absolute. "Then I will strike you down again."
The Titan's wings beat once more. The desert exploded into air. Sand lifted in sheets, blotting the horizon until the world became a storm. The colossus forced its frame into the air, dragging itself up with sheer will.
Noctis leapt, wings unfurling, and followed it skyward. The desert winds slammed into him but broke against the density of his aura. Juggernaut's Dominion pressed outward, a sovereign weight that refused to yield.
The Titan climbed, a monstrosity of bone and marrow forcing its ruinous wings to carry it higher and higher. Noctis rose alongside, the red streak of his aura trailing through the cyclone.
From the city below, Ashara's people looked upward in horror. Their king had vanished into the sky to fight a colossus that blotted out the moon. Their walls shook with the winds of the Titan's ascent. The priests clutched their relics, whispering prayers that faltered into silence as crimson light flared overhead.
Noctis's hands tightened on his swords. His voice carried through the storm. "The sky does not belong to you."
[Faith Spell — Tempest Invocation IV]
Lightning erupted from his aura, arcing through the storm clouds the Titan's wings had raised. Forks of white-gold lanced across the night, striking the colossus's torso and exploding marrow plates.
The Titan convulsed, trying to swat him from the air with one massive arm. Noctis darted sideways, wings beating once, and flickered behind the Titan's shoulder with [Wraith Step IV]. His orbiting Reapers dove, scything into the wing joints Omen Eyes traced in gold fire.
Bone splintered, marrow tendons snapping like overstretched cords. One wing faltered mid-beat, dragging the Titan sideways in the air.
"You are falling already," Noctis said, his words cutting through the wind. "I will make certain of it."
He raised Twilight Reaver above his head, its blade humming with inverted sanctity. The relic drew lightning into itself, feeding on the storm.
[Faith Spell — Stormbreaker IV]
He plunged the relic down onto the Titan's spine. A column of lightning cascaded through the construct's body, detonating marrow nodes along its back. The colossus howled, flailing in the sky, its movements ragged and uneven.
The Titan whipped its tail of fused vertebrae, a whip of jagged spines tearing through the air. Noctis braced, crossed both Reaper swords, and caught the blow. The impact cracked the air like thunder, shockwaves rattling the desert far below.
Omen Eyes spiraled golden at the tail's root. He shifted his grip, whispered coldly: "This joint is weak. I will tear it."
He struck.
[Exsanguinate IV] raced along the tail's marrow seam, detonating in chain reaction. Vertebrae exploded, the Titan's tail disintegrating into fragments that spiraled down like meteors toward the dunes.
The Titan screamed and lurched sideways, one wing dragging it down, balance broken.
Noctis pressed forward, orbiting Reapers scything through the night, carving deep into the Titan's torso as he dove. He struck again and again, widening the fractures Omen Eyes revealed. Lightning followed his strikes, faith and blood interwoven in each blow.
The Titan reeled in the sky, a giant of bone struggling to remain aloft. Its frame cracked audibly, marrow pouring like smoke from its wounds. The Bone-Masked One's voice rasped through the hollow mask: "You are bound… to this fight… to this body… to their faith…"
Noctis's eyes burned crimson-gold. "No. I am bound to nothing."
His aura surged outward, sovereign weight shaking the storm itself. "It is you who are chained—to failure."
He dove once more, driving Twilight Reaver into the Titan's chest, and the sky lit as if a second dawn had been born.
The Titan's wings faltered, shuddering with every desperate beat. Cracks ran from its spine down through its chest, each one glowing faintly gold in Noctis's Omen Eyes. The fractures were widening with every moment. Its strength was unraveling, and deep inside the construct, something pulsed like a second heart.
Noctis hovered above the sternum, wings spread wide. The three orbiting Reapers traced crimson spirals around him, their edges humming with hunger. His relic blade, Twilight Reaver, burned black-red with inverted sanctity, while the two Reaper greatswords in his hands dripped marrow dust from their last strikes.
"You are breaking apart," Noctis said, his tone steady, cutting through the storm. "The core that sustains you is all that remains. And I will take it."
The Titan thrashed in response, sweeping its remaining arm upward. Noctis's Omen Eyes traced the marrow seams even before the limb moved. He vanished with [Wraith Step IV], reappearing just above the Titan's fractured sternum. With a single downward thrust, he drove Twilight Reaver into the glowing fissure.
The blade sank deep, splitting the rib plates open with a scream of bone. Marrow smoke poured from the wound, white and acrid, stinging the air. The Titan groaned, staggering mid-flight.
Noctis didn't hesitate. He folded his wings and dove into the wound.
Inside, the Titan's chest cavity was a cathedral of ribs and marrow-veins. Bone struts arched above him, ribs crossed and fused into lattices, marrow pumping like black blood through glowing conduits. The air was thick with the Bone-Masked One's will, pressing against him like a suffocating fog.
The guardians appeared at once—constructs of marrow and skull, mantis-limbed creatures that unfolded from the walls. Their jaws opened in silent screams as they lunged.
Noctis's three orbiting Reapers blurred forward, their arcs cutting perfect paths through the guardians' necks and limbs. He spun with both greatswords, severing two at the waist in a single sweep. Their bodies collapsed into shards of bone, dissolving into crimson mist as [Ashen Devour IV] pulled their essence into him.
[System Notice: Blood Essence +500][System Notice: Soul Essence +200][System Notice: Wraith Essence +100]
The Grid drank, and his aura thickened further.
He walked deeper. Omen Eyes lit the marrow conduits, tracing their flow inward. Every line converged toward a single source—down, below the heart cavity, in a pit of fused vertebrae and skulls.
"Your core is exposed," Noctis murmured, his voice echoing coldly across the bone chamber. "I will cut it out."
The guardians swarmed again, more this time, crawling from the ribs and marrow veins in a tide of clattering limbs.
Noctis swept his wings wide. [Blood Flood IV] pulsed outward in a crimson wave, detonating across the chamber. Bone fragments burst apart, marrow smoke consumed the air. Those that survived the flood staggered, and Noctis finished them with precise thrusts of his Reaper swords, each one guided by the golden spirals in his sight.
Every corpse dissolved into mist, feeding the Grid.
[System Notice: Blood Essence +1,000][System Notice: Soul Essence +300][System Notice: Wraith Essence +200]
The Titan screamed, its voice a grinding avalanche, as if aware its insides were being torn apart. Its body lurched mid-flight, one wing collapsing, and the colossus began to tilt toward the desert below.
From the city of Ashara, the people watched in horror and awe. The giant of bone was falling, its chest glowing red where their king had disappeared inside. Priests cried out warnings of destruction. Soldiers clutched their spears tighter, whispering that if the Twilight King was still within, he would not die.
Noctis advanced through the collapsing corridors of ribs. His aura pressed outward, forcing marrow conduits to rupture as he passed. Sparks of crimson lightning trailed his steps. Twilight Reaver burned in his hand, humming louder as it neared the core.
Finally, he entered the heart chamber.
It was a hollow sphere of fused vertebrae, its walls lined with skulls that leered down at him, jaws locked in eternal screams. At the center floated a single construct of marrow crystal, glowing with white fire. Within it pulsed the Bone-Masked One's presence, a condensed shard of will and power.
The mask itself hung suspended before the core, its hollow eyes locked on Noctis. "This body is endless. Break me, and I will rise again."
Noctis lifted Twilight Reaver, its edge dripping crimson light. His voice was calm, every word a verdict. "No. This is where you end."
The guardians screamed and lunged, their limbs scraping the chamber walls. Noctis's orbiting Reapers dove as one, cutting a path clean through them. He followed, wings beating once as he surged toward the core.
Twilight Reaver came down.
The blade struck the marrow crystal with a sound like shattering glass. Light erupted, flooding the chamber in a wave of white-gold fire. Bone screamed as the Titan convulsed around him, its body trembling in the sky.
The colossus staggered, wings flailing out of sync. Below, the people of Ashara cried out as the Titan's shadow swept across the city.
Inside, Noctis drove his blade deeper, his aura pressing outward until the marrow crystal began to crack under the weight of his Dominion.
"You will not rise again," he told it, his words clear and final. "You will break here, and you will remain broken."
The mask screamed. The chamber shook. The Titan began to fall.
The marrow-heart cracked.
Lines of light raced across the crystal core, fine as hair and bright as dawn. The chamber—a hollow sphere of fused vertebrae and skulls—echoed with a thousand toothy screams that were not sound but memory. The Titan lurched in the sky, wings beating out of rhythm, gravity stealing inches from every stroke.
Noctis pressed his palm to the crystal and felt the will inside it: cold, stubborn, reaching for more marrow to knit, for more rib to wedge, for more chain to pull tight. His Omen Eyes IV spiraled brighter, tracing stress veins through the core like gold flowing under ice. Every fracture was a sentence. Every seam, a promise he meant to collect.
"You are at your limit," he said, clear and steady. "Yield, or break."
The mask hanging before the core—white and fissured, brows swept long as a bird of prey—answered with a hiss that flayed the air. "You cannot end what was never born. We are built. We are assembled. We return."
"You return to me," Noctis replied. "And you end here."
He wrenched Twilight Reaver free from the crystal with a crack that shook the chamber and stepped back onto a brace rail. The three Bloodfang Reapers in orbit tightened into a whirling crown, their crimson scythes dragging red comets through the marrow smoke. In his hands, the two manifested Reaper greatswords bled light along their edges, while the relic blade in his primary hand thrummed with inverted sanctity, drinking the glow that leaked from the core.
Bone guardians unfolded from the walls like mantis-kilns again—thicker carapace, longer blades, skull-faced and silent. They rushed. Noctis's Omen Eyes drew golden sigils across each body—knee locks, shoulder hinges, the thin ridge behind the crownplate where their bindings were weakest.
"Stand aside," he told them. "You were made for delay. You will not delay me."
He stepped into them.
The orbiting Reapers minced the first rank into sand and powder. One manifested sword took a guardian's foreleg at the knee, the other hooked high behind a crownplate and split the skull down to the jaw hinge. [Chalice of Apostasy IV] pulsed once—an inverted hymn that erased regeneration wherever it touched—and a dozen half-healed plates blackened and dropped away. [Blood Flood IV] followed as a scouring tide through the narrow walkway, scraping bone growth from the rails until the path ahead ran clean.
The mask's presence pressed harder, a descending weight as cold as an unlit tomb. Ribs inside the chamber began to grow toward Noctis—scissor-pairs eager to close, to cage, to grind. He didn't hurry. He cut and passed. He passed and cut. Every move was deliberate, the prose of it as spare as his voice. The Reapers were punctuation, carving commas through the closing ribs so they could never become a period.
"You rely on numbers," Noctis said, slicing a guardian across the hinge and stepping through the falling body. "This," he raised Twilight Reaver to the core's surface, "will be decided by one blow after another."
He placed the relic's edge to the cracking crystal and spoke, low and final: "Open."
[Crimson Arsenal IV] blossomed at his back, filling the chamber with spectral spears and longknives, pikes and cleavers—an armory of red ghosts that drove themselves into braces and locks. The inner walls stuttered as each spectral blade pinned a moving piece in place. The chamber tried to close; a hundred phantom weapons refused it.
Noctis set his feet on the rail, lifted the relic higher, and drew lightning to the steel.
[Faith Spell — Cathedral Sunfire IV]
Golden-white radiance gathered along Twilight Reaver's edge like a dawn pressed into a line. The light ran down the blade, pooled at the point, and became a pure, focused beam that burned without heat and struck without sound. He drove that light into the marrow-heart and pushed.
The core flared—resistance by reflex. Ribs closed around his arms like dogs' jaws. Stonehide Carapace IV rose under his skin; the bite broke its own teeth. Behind him, the Titan's whole body shuddered. Outside, the sky flared as if some hidden sun had been pulled behind thin cloth.
"You will not take the heart," the mask spat, voice fraying. "You have no right to this marrow."
Noctis met the hollow eyes. "Everything that rises in my kingdom answers to me. Even you."
He bore down.
Cracks multiplied. Omen Eyes blazed like twin stars, pouring their golden geometry into his hands. The line of Sunfire knifed into the crystal, found a seam it could not have found without those spirals, and lodged like a wedge. The crystal screamed. Light fired through a dozen hairlines at once.
The Titan lost altitude.
Far below, the dunes fell away as the colossus began a long, forced descent, its wings too broken to hold its arrogance aloft. On Ashara's walls, men staggered and clutched their spears. Children wept and then hushed when their mothers knelt, eyes fixed on the red star buried in the giant's chest.
"Now," Noctis said, and reaped.
He broke the beam, spun, and shoved Ruinquake Slam IV through the rail beneath his feet. Shock boomed through the chamber, up through braces, down through the spine. The spectral armory of Crimson Arsenal sang as every phantom spear and pike shuddered and drove deeper, pinning, pinning, pinning—until the chamber could not flex at all.
He reversed, slammed Twilight Reaver back into the wedge he had cut, and this time he lifted his voice, not louder, only heavier:
"Break."
The heart split.
The crystal flowered inward like glass collapsing, its shards reversing into dust even as they fell. The mask flew back, yanked on strings that no longer existed. A single gout of white marrow-light blew outward, as clean as an unplayed note, and struck Noctis square in the chest.
It should have burned. It should have erased. It entered him, and the Grid drank.
Lines of system text cascaded across his sight—his Twilight Sovereignty brightening as if someone had opened a window in a dark room; nodes buzzing alive; long-quiet traits waking with a hum like deep bees. The three orbiting Reapers keened. The two in his hands vibrated to the wrist bones. Twilight Reaver's hymn rose a note.
Outside, the Titan collapsed another span. Its spine buckled at mid-back with a sound like a tree line breaking in a storm. The colossus pitched forward, sand geysering from its impact, the horizon juddering for miles.
Inside, the mask flailed upright, white face cracked into a lattice that made its empty eyes look wider. A thread of the Bone-Masked One's will clung to it like frost that refused to melt.
"There are others," it hissed. "Already rising. Beyond your sand. Beyond your saints. Beyond your dusk."
"Then I will reach them," Noctis said. "In order."
He flicked his left wrist. One orbiting Reaper snapped out of its ring and became a straight crimson sword in the air—a flying guillotine with an edge finer than breath. It cut across the mask's brow ridge, taking a clean, quiet slice.
Lines spidered across the white face. A beat later, the whole thing fractured and fell apart, mask shattering into a drift of chalky petals that never touched the rail. Ashen Devour IV pulled them into mist before gravity could find them.
The chamber went suddenly still. No breath. No scissoring ribs. No mutter of marrow.
Only the slow collapsing thunder of a giant dying around a sovereign.
Noctis steadied his stance as the chamber canted. He dismissed the spectral arsenal; phantom spears winked out in red flickers, freeing the braces to slump. He turned his face upward, mapped the shortest path to the torn sternum in Omen gold, and spread his wings.
"Your war is finished," he told the empty rail. "Mine continues."
He rose through the throat of the chamber, the three Reapers returning to their orbit with obedient hunger. Guardians on distant ledges folded where they stood, bereft of will, and fell like husks to the slanting floor. He passed through them and did not look back.
The colossus hit the desert in earnest.
The impact threw dunes like surf. The outer wall of Ashara shivered as if remembering childhood. People who had knelt raised their faces to the falling storm and saw him emerge from the ruin—a dark figure cut in red light, wings wide, orbiting blades drawing a corona behind him like a saint painted with knives.
He hovered above the collapsing sternum and watched the Titan's last breath leave it in a plume of pale dust. For a heartbeat, the world was only wind and the tick of settling bone.
Then he turned away from the corpse and toward the city.
"You are safe," he said, voice carrying on a wind that bowed tents and flags. "The threat is broken."
On the balcony, Seraphyne gripped the rail as if it were the only steady thing in the world. She did not answer. She didn't need to. The crowd did it for her—cheers cracking into sobs, sobs hardening into cheers, a tide that rose and washed through streets like water seeking its level.
Noctis's eyes dimmed back to their normal gold-crimson burn. His aura settled from mountain to merely storm. The Grid's afterglow whispered across his senses like pages turning in a book only he could read.
He lifted Twilight Reaver in a small acknowledgment to the walls. The relic's edge shimmered once, like a candle flame steadying after a gust.
Behind him, the carcass of the Titan sank into itself, bones grinding down to chalk under their own impossible weight.
The Judgment was complete.