After the battle, he stood over the fallen giant.
Its body sprawled across the torn meadow like a toppled storm, a broken piece of sky dragged down to earth. Muscles lay piled in thick, twisted cords, each one as tough and dense as tempered metal. Threads of silver fat marbled the flesh, gleaming under the strange light. Deep red veins, thick as ropes, ran across its body in branching lines. Even dead, the creature radiated a brutal kind of majesty—a reminder that this world did not breed small things.
Hunger twisted through him.
Not the dull, empty ache he had carried through so many trials, when eating was just a way to keep moving. This was sharper, more insistent. It felt human. His mouth watered. His stomach clenched and growled, pulling his thoughts toward the carcass.
He moved closer and set to work.
With careful cuts and brutal pulls, he tore a long strip of meat from the giant's side. The flesh resisted like rubber at first, then gave way in thick, wet shreds. The smell that rose from the exposed tissue was wild and heavy—rich iron, warm blood, a faint mineral tang from whatever strange energies had shaped this creature.
He built a small fire nearby, piling twisted branches and chunks of dried, glowing moss into a tight cone. The moss caught easily. Sparks ran through it like veins of light until flame bloomed, low and steady. He held the strip of meat over the crackling heat on a makeshift spit. Fat began to melt, dripping into the coals with soft hisses. Smoke curled upward, thick and fragrant. It wrapped around him, clinging to his clothes, curling into his lungs.
The scent was… inviting.
It was nothing like the thin, bitter meals he had forced down in ruined cities or the cold rations of desperate days. This smelled dense and complicated, layered with notes he did not have words for. Something deep in him responded, an old memory of warmth and satisfaction he could not quite see.
He took a bite, bracing for bitterness, for the chalky sting of poison, for anything that might turn this into another punishment.
The taste stunned him.
Flavor surged across his tongue—rich and deep, almost too intense. The meat was firm but not tough, juices flooding his mouth with warmth. There was a smoky sweetness at the edges, a salty core, and something else: a strange, bright spark that felt like lightning made safe to swallow. Each chew released new layers—like biting into the heart of storms and forests at once.
"It's… delicious," he whispered.
A soft pulse ran through his mind.
10% emotions, the Echoframe murmured, its voice sliding through his thoughts like a quiet ripple.
With each mouthful, something shifted inside him. It was as if eating did more than feed his muscles. Tiny jolts of feeling sparked in his chest—small flashes of joy at the taste, relief that this act of survival could also be pleasure. Faint, blurry images stirred at the edges of his memory: hands around a bowl; steam rising into a familiar face; laughter that shook his shoulders; the solid comfort of being full and safe, even if only for a night.
He could not grip those memories fully, but their echoes warmed him.
Noctis felt himself changing.
He was still the survivor, still the one who weighed every choice against death and necessity. But something else was taking root under that armor. Eating no longer felt like fueling a weapon. It felt like feeding a living person. One bite at a time, the space between "staying alive" and "being alive" narrowed.
Time slipped by.
Days, weeks—this world did not mark them in any way he recognized. The sky changed color often, but not in cycles he could measure. He roamed through vast wilderness, crossing places that felt like overlapping dreams. He slept under trees that glowed softly from within, their leaves shimmering like lanterns in a wind that never entirely stopped. He dove into rivers that crackled with raw energy, currents tingling against his skin like the touch of a storm. He climbed slopes tinted in impossible blues and molten golds, where dust glimmered like powdered stars.
Sometimes, he would walk for what felt like hours and find himself in a place that seemed to belong to another world entirely—a forest turning into a glass desert at its edges, a cliff opening over a sea of slow-moving clouds, a plain split into floating plates of earth drifting just above the ground. Worlds felt stacked together, bleeding into one another. Time stretched thin in some places, so that a moment in a clearing seemed to last an entire day. In others, it compressed, and he would lose hours in what felt like a few breaths.
Inside, his heart stirred with new feeling.
The beauty around him no longer registered only as information to be mapped and survived. Wonder moved in him—quiet at first, then stronger. He found himself stopping simply to look. To watch the way light moved over a distant range. To notice how the wind combed through a field of strange flowers until they rippled like the surface of a metallic sea.
Loneliness, which had once been a heavy block in his chest, softened. It became curiosity about who else might have walked here, who might be watching from unseen places. The fierce, defiant joy that had kept him alive in impossible situations shifted into something simpler: the raw thrill of existing in a place that should have killed him a hundred times over, but hadn't.
One evening, a curved moon hung low in the sky, its surface marked with luminous rivers. Planets burned cobalt above it, their light painting the land in cool shades. Noctis climbed.
The mountain before him was taller than any he had faced in this world. The rocks were sharp and unforgiving. The air thinned with each step, growing colder and drier. Wind clawed at him, pulling at his clothes and hair with invisible fingers, trying to peel him from the slope. His hands cracked against jagged stone. Muscles burned with each pull and push. His lungs scraped for air.
It hurt.
But when he reached the final rise and stood at the top, the pain dissolved under the sight that awaited him.
The "mountain" ahead filled the entire horizon.
At first glance, it looked like a monstrous ridge of stone—a vast spine lined with frozen waterfalls and cliffs that scraped the belly of the sky. Jagged crystals jutted from its face in glowing lines, marking paths of power or old scars.
But the closer he looked, the more wrong it seemed.
The shape was too regular. Too balanced in its vastness. The "ridges" curved in smooth, deliberate arcs. The crystal lines followed patterns that felt more like veins than random mineral growth. Shadows moved across it in a way that did not match the wind.