Power washed through Noctis.
It came like a tide rising from below rather than crashing down from above—warm, wild, and steady. It filled the hollow spaces inside him without bursting them, seeping into cracks that had been left by trauma and absence. The Unknown Core, dormant and cold until now, answered with the faintest glow, like embers stirred by a new wind. Memory—not of specific events, but of what it felt like to be whole—brushed his ribs.
Time thickened.
Each fraction of a second stretched long enough for him to see it. To feel it. The world turned slow and heavy, giving him space to move where there had been none.
Noctis reached inward.
Power surged up to meet him—strange and raw, without a natural shape. Until now, it had always erupted in chaotic bursts or lain unresponsive. This time, under Ragna's guidance and the strain of his own need, he managed to grasp it. To mold it.
A small globe formed in his hand.
It was simple, no elaborate symbols or flames, just a sphere of pure Unknown. It glowed with a shifting, pearly light that refused to choose a color. Its surface rippled slowly, as if reflecting realities that did not yet exist. It hummed softly—a quiet song that his bones recognized as the true voice of the core inside him.
Across from him, the monster's confident grin faltered.
Its single, warped expression twisted into a frown. It felt the shift. Felt the rule of this place begin to tilt.
Noctis, hardly aware of the exact steps his mind and power had taken, moved.
He threw the sphere with everything he had, not just in muscle, but in intention. He poured into it his pain, his scars, his reluctant mercy for something so twisted, and the borrowed strength of Ragna's memory looking over his shoulder.
The orb struck the monster in the center of its impossible chest.
There was no explosion.
No flash of fire. No shockwave flattening the landscape. Instead, something quieter and infinitely more terrifying unfolded.
Uncertainty ate the creature.
The sphere opened without sound, more like a pupil widening than a blossom or a wound. The Unknown did not burn the monster or tear it apart in chunks. It simply unmade it—as if someone had decided that this thing should never have existed in the first place and began erasing it from the universe's sentence.
Piece by piece, it vanished.
Not as flesh and bone, but as concept. Its eyes dissolved first, not into liquid or smoke, but into fine dust that never landed. Its voice broke into fragments of sound—half-screams, half-laughter—that warped into broken notes and scattered like shards of a shattered song.
For a heartbeat, reality itself twisted.
Noctis glimpsed cycles collapsing in on themselves, folding like paper. He saw deaths he remembered and deaths he did not, turning into seeds. Those seeds became blooms of light and shadow, opening and closing. For an instant, he saw a face older than time, watching all of it, blinking once in recognition before fading.
Then it was gone.
No trace. No corpse. No lingering energy. Just absence—deep, clean, and absolute. The ravine felt wider for a moment, as if space had relaxed now that something that never fit had been removed.
Noctis dropped to his knees.
His breath tore in and out of his lungs. His muscles trembled, not only from the fight, but from channeling something that brushed the edges of what minds were meant to hold. The Unknown within him beat harder now, a second heart pounding against his sternum in time with his own. It was awake—and watching.
Ragna's laugh returned, softer this time.
"Extraordinary, child," the beast said. "Even that small taste is enough to wake stars from sleep. But listen carefully: those beings you saw in my memories, the ones cut into my walls—the Sovereigns—they are not like the rest."
The name left an echo.
"They are the ones who defeated me before," Ragna continued. "Their power is born from the void, as yours is, but twisted in ways no measure can hold. Be careful, Noctis. Their shadows fall across every path you walk in this universe."
Noctis bowed his head.
The weight that settled over his chest was not crushing. It was heavy in the way responsibility is heavy—solid, undeniable. "Thank you, Ragna," he said quietly. "For the warning, and for helping me. I will be careful. I won't take your trust lightly."
Ragna's amusement carried a note of old grief.
"Not a bad ending," the beast rumbled. "You've learned more than most manage in lifetimes. But your work isn't done."
The star at Ragna's core brightened somewhere beyond the vision, casting long rays through distant bone and flesh.
"This light—the one you touched—has kept me alive beyond my time. But nothing lives forever, child. Not you. Not me. Your task now is simple and hardest of all: finish what has begun. Use your gift to let me go."
Noctis hesitated.
Ragna had been the first true voice that had reached out to him in this reshaped existence. The first ally who had seen him as more than a weapon or a mistake. The first teacher who had named him with respect. Ending him felt like breaking the foundation of the universe he had only just started to understand.
"I… don't want to," Noctis whispered. "You're the first. The greatest thing I've met."
But Ragna's great eye softened in his memory.
Determination, not despair, burned there. "Sometimes mercy arrives where no one wants to offer it," he said. "Sometimes the last lesson is the one that hurts the most. If you cannot move your hand alone, I will guide it."
The star flared.
Noctis felt a gentle pressure touch his thoughts—not forcing his will, only steadying it. A hand on his back, not pushing, just reminding him he could take the step. His hand rose, shaking not from fear of power, but from the meaning of what he was about to do.
A sphere of Unknown formed again.
Smaller this time. Calmer. Its light was soft, its surface smooth. It hummed with acceptance instead of defiance.
He pressed it to the star.
The world around him shook—not in chaos, but in release. Structures of bone and crystal groaned, not as they cracked, but as they relaxed after holding tension for too long.
Ragna sighed.
The sound carried oceans crashing against cliffs and mountains finally giving way to time. "Farewell, child. You carry terror and hope in equal measure. One day, you will know why this path chose you. Go, and be lord not of my death, but of all that still waits to wake."
Light surged once—brilliant, cleansing—then softened.
The titanic form of the beast did not rot or crumble. It faded. Its bulk turned into a spray of newborn stars that rose slowly, floating outward into the dark. The living mountain beneath Noctis' feet sank gently, as if laying itself down to rest in the arms of a universe that had finally been allowed to let it go.
When the shaking stopped, Noctis stood alone.
For a long moment, there was no sound. No thunder of a giant heart. No whisper of internal winds. The silence that followed did not feel empty. It felt like the stillness after a promise is made and before it is kept.
The world shook once more.
Not from Ragna now, but from something new. The last traces of the divine beast's presence dissolved. In that clearing of space, another presence arrived—quiet, immense, like a note being written into fresh paper.
"You have earned your rewards, Noctis."
The "voice" was not words in the air, but a chord humming through the very matter around him, through his bones, through the remnants of light drifting in the dark.
Before him, something took shape.
The kin—Ragna's true successor. The next divine beast. just an egg a big one at that
Something inside Noctis answered.
It was not words. It was an immediate recognition, like hearing a familiar song from another lifetime. Bond formed in the space between them—born from shared burden, from the weight of Ragna's last request, and from the mutual hunger to give meaning to everything that had been lost.