The air here was thick, as if it had been poured rather than breathed. Colors bled into one another in slow swirls: shades that lived between violet and pure black, threaded with veins of molten gold. It was like standing inside a void that was trying very hard to remember what light had felt like.
Before him, a jagged ravine split the ground—half bone, half half-living stone.
The edges were lined with thorn-like protrusions of hardened marrow and broken crystal. From its depths rose thin tendrils of dark mist that curled and twisted, never quite dispersing. The entire area felt like a scar in the universe, a place where reality had been forced open and never fully healed.
Across that ravine, something began to form.
He felt it before he saw it: a pressure against his mind, a familiar wrongness that scraped at the inside of his skull. It was the shape of malice and contradiction, a presence built from hatred and impossible rules.
The memory of the Existence—the enemy from his billion-cycle trial—pulled itself together out of the shadows.
It rose slowly, as if fighting against the world's structure itself. Joints creaked, not like bones, but like rusted laws bending under strain. Limbs unfolded: too many, too long, arranged at angles that refused to settle into human or animal shape. Each one looked like a river of raw decay given bones and purpose.
Its "face" was worse.
It was a mask stitched from agony and victory both. Eyes spun in its head like whirlpools, drawing in sense and throwing it back out twisted. Seams of scar tissue crisscrossed its features, each line a record of arguments written in suffering: win, lose, die, repeat. Its mouth opened impossibly wide, and what lay beyond was not a throat but a horizon full of teeth—rows and rows stretching into infinity, eager to swallow down anything that dared think it could survive.
Fear surged up.
Old, sharp, and immediate. Not just fear of death, but the specific terror he had known at the end of the Gate's trial, when everything had come down to one last fight against something that had killed him thousands of times before. His muscles remembered that tension. His lungs remembered the taste of that air. His skin remembered the feel of being almost erased.
Even with Ragna's presence now only a distant echo—like a huge hand resting lightly, very lightly, on his shoulder—Noctis stood alone.
Alone under a sky filled with cold, uncaring stars.
Alone at the edge of a ravine that split sanity from madness.
Alone beneath the crushing will of a force that had ended countless others long before him and would be delighted to do so again.
Without warning, the monster lunged.
Space warped around its claws. Each swipe did more than cut the air; it carved rifts in where things were supposed to exist. Lines of reality bent and snapped in its wake, leaving brief, jagged scars before stitching themselves back together. The ground beneath Noctis' feet buckled. He threw himself aside, boots slipping on uneven stone, heart hammering so loudly in his ears it sounded like distant thunder rolling through his skull.
He fell back on everything he had learned.
Leaps, rolls, sudden changes of direction. Using momentum instead of fighting it. Counterattacks aimed at joints and weak angles. A billion deaths and all their lessons lived inside his muscles now, written into the quick twitch of his nerves, the subtle shifts of his weight. His body knew how to survive even when his mind was three breaths behind.
Yet something was wrong.
Each movement landed cleanly, but felt hollow, as if a crucial piece were missing. He could not call up the fire that used to surge at the edge of fear. The Unknown Core sat in his chest like a dim stone—quiet, cold, unresponsive. No burning, no pressure, no echo of the power he had once wielded in desperation.
He attacked anyway.
He drove his fists and feet and every bit of force he could muster into the creature's warped hide. His blows connected with satisfying impact, but slid off as if striking oiled glass. The monster's body flowed around each strike—smoke wrapped in metal, constantly reshaping. Places that had been solid an instant before turned fluid, spreading the force away before it could bite.
Nothing as simple as raw strength seemed capable of hurting it.
The monster laughed.
The sound was bright and cutting, like metal scraping across a mirror. "You survived oblivion once, boy," it said, voice thick with old pain and twisted pride. "But this is no real battle. Here, you are nothing. A shadow with no weight."
The words hit harder than the claws.
Noctis felt himself slipping. His body ached in deep, familiar ways. Each bruise, each cut, each burn layered on top of countless others he had already endured. His will buckled at the edges, thoughts fracturing under pressure. Every fresh injury whispered the same truth back to him: he was incomplete.
Too much had been cut away.
His emotions—the core of his strength, the fuel that had once turned fear into action and despair into defiance—had been stripped and scattered during his fight to survive the Gate and all that followed. What remained were fragments, pieces that did not yet fit together.
The creature moved in for the kill.
Its claws lifted slowly, savoring the moment. They hung above him, ready to rip him apart and erase what little remained. The air itself seemed to tremble. The world felt like it was holding its breath, waiting to see if this would be the end of the last survivor who had carried "Unknown" inside him.
Then everything stopped.
The claws froze mid-descent. Dust hung in the air without falling. The echo of the monster's last step stretched out, never quite finishing. Time felt as though it had paused mid-breath, the universe leaning between one heartbeat and the next.
From the distant edges of reality, a voice rolled in.
Ragna's voice—threaded through starlight and shadow, carrying the weight of a power that had once shaken galaxies and now focused itself on a single boy. It filled the space without pushing anything aside, simply becoming the background against which everything else existed.
"Why do you not wield the Unknown's gift, Noctis?" Ragna asked.
There was no anger in the question. Only a rough mix of sorrow and pride, as if watching a child try to lift a blade he was born to hold but not yet grown enough to control.
Noctis coughed.
His chest burned. His voice came out raw and thin, but not broken. "I can't," he said. "It's sealed. My humanity, my feelings—they're missing. I only have pieces."
Silence followed.
Not the empty kind. The deep, heavy silence of a mind considering many things at once. Even the monster remained still, caught mid-movement, its hunger stalled between mockery and a new, unwilling curiosity.
Then Ragna laughed.
It was loud and unexpected, rolling through the frozen moment with such force that the monster actually flinched, its twisted face twitching under a power it could neither see nor touch.
"Then I will lend you my hand," Ragna said, "if only for a single heartbeat."