The fog drew closer, thick as wool.
Illusions multiplied—dozens of spectral stags charging from every direction, streets bending at impossible angles, buildings tilting as if about to collapse. Torches burned with strange colors, their flames elongating or shrinking at odds with the wind.
Noctis focused on the Echoframe's lock.
His world narrowed to the slim outline that marked the true Mist Stag. Everything else—phantoms, distorted architecture, echoes of sound—became background noise. He moved with a practiced economy, slashing away illusions that came too close, carving a space where he could still stand upright.
Then the stag struck.
Antlers lashed through the mist, shimmering with a spectral radiance that made the air itself vibrate. Noctis blocked twice, steel ringing under the impact. The third strike slipped past his guard, slicing across his shoulder.
Pain flared white-hot.
He hit the stone hard, shoulder screaming, breath knocked from his lungs. Blood ran down his arm in a hot stream, soaking into his sleeve and glove. The impact rattled his teeth and blurred his vision for a heartbeat.
He forced himself back up.
Breath tight, lungs burning, he planted his boots and lifted his sword once more. Each heartbeat felt slower, heavier. He could feel the emptiness of the plaza around him, the absence of voices that had, moments ago, answered his orders.
If I fail here, everyone dies.
The thought came without drama, without self-pity—just a statement of fact. Behind him, the cathedral held the last cluster of frightened lives. In front of him, the Mist Stag pawed the ground, antlers humming with destructive potential.
Just one life—mine—against all those gone.
The stag lowered its head and charged.
Noctis watched its pattern, counting the cycles of its advance: three strides, warp, two more, antlers flare, impact. His Echoframe registered a spike in energy—Spectral Antler Strike charging again. The fog around its head flickered, illusions distorting more violently in a radius around it.
He gambled everything on timing.
He did not move at the first lunge, nor the second. He waited until the antlers brightened to their peak, until the fog around them shivered in a distinct pattern he recognized from earlier strikes.
Then he stepped sideways and in.
His sword swung in a tight, brutal arc, aimed not at where the stag appeared in the illusions, but where the Echoframe insisted its true neck would be.
Steel met flesh.
The blade bit deep, carving through spectral distortion and into something solid. The Mist Stag's momentum carried it forward even as its legs collapsed. Its antlers skimmed past Noctis, close enough for him to feel the cold burn of their energy against his cheek.
The creature crashed to the ground.
There was no drawn-out death scream. One moment it was there, a towering, night-bending presence. The next, its body hit the cobblestones with a dull, final weight—and then dissolved, illusions evaporating like breath in cold air.
The fog tore apart.
Illusory streets snapped back into their proper shapes. Buildings straightened. Torches returned to normal size and color. The sky above, still copper-tinted and clouded, felt brutally clear by comparison.
What remained was ruin.
The plaza lay strewn with bodies, barricades splintered, lamps broken and burned out. The cathedral doors were scarred, but still standing. The people inside were alive—for now—because the thing that had tried to erase them had been stopped at the last possible moment.
Noctis stood alone.
His anger drained away, leaving a heavy, hollow acceptance in its place. The price of this victory had been obscene. Hundreds of defenders gone. Carefully shaped squads torn apart in minutes. Runners, lamp carriers, medics, swordmasters—people who had trusted him and paid with their lives.
He did not feel triumph.
He felt exhaustion, and the quiet, unshakable understanding that survival in a place like this would always be soaked in suffering—that winning did not mean walking away unscarred, only walking away at all.
When the last traces of the Mist Stag dispersed, his body finally gave out.
Heat swamped his limbs. His legs trembled, then buckled. The sword slipped from his grasp, clattering against stone. He sank to his knees, then toppled sideways, cheek pressing against cool rock.
The world blurred at the edges.
The sounds of the square—cries, rustling, shifting stone—receded, as if someone were closing a door on them. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, then to a pinpoint of light, then to blackness.
He woke into silence.
At first there was nothing: no feeling of stone under his hands, no scent of smoke, no weight of armor on his shoulders. Just a muted, gray softness that hung around him like a fog with no cold.
Slowly, shapes coalesced.
Cobblestones formed under his boots, their edges slightly blurred. Buildings rose around him—familiar in outline, but lacking detail at first. Lantern posts appeared along the streets, their glass panes glowing with faint, pale light. The air felt still, neither warm nor cold.
He stood in a town that felt like an echo.
It resembled the city he had just fought to defend, but cleaner, emptier, stripped of damage. The castle towered in the center, its walls unscarred, its gilded doors reflecting a pale, diffuse glow instead of firelight.
No people walked these streets.
No patrols, no merchants, no children. No injured being carried to safety, no soldiers at their posts. Even the ever-present tension of impending attack was gone.
Noctis recognized what this was.
Not reality. A constructed space, drawn from his memories and shaped by the dream seed's rules—a liminal zone between one trial and whatever came next.
He looked at the castle.
Images flickered in his mind: the king on his throne, the war councils, the ball where recruits struggled with etiquette. His role as butler and swordmaster. The sense of importance, of responsibility, of being needed at every moment.
Here, in the emptiness, that importance felt like a costume.
No king sat on the throne inside. No orders awaited him. The city was a set, the people performances. The illusion of a world that mattered peeled back, leaving only the question of what, if anything, was real.
None of it matters here, he thought.
He took a slow breath.
Faces came back to him: lamp crews shouting as they lit magnesium rods, swordmasters standing in front of civilians, medics dragging the wounded inside the cathedral. He saw the ones who fell under illusions, who vanished into fog without even a body left behind in the real plaza.
He wanted to feel grief, to let it wash over him in one shattering wave.
Instead, his instincts did what they always did under pressure: they contained. Emotion pressed against the walls of his composure, but did not burst through. The void itself seemed to mute feeling, turning sharp pain into a dull weight.
Were they even real? he wondered. Did their suffering matter, or was it just the dream testing my will?
He lifted his arm, calling up the Echoframe.
The interface responded instantly, a crisp overlay in this otherwise soft, indistinct world.
SYSTEM: You have survived the dream.
Reward calculation in progress…
Reward: Core Integrity +5%
Memory Synthesis: Completed
You may rest and grow.
Noctis felt something shift within him.
It was not physical—not a healing of wounds or a sudden surge of strength in his muscles. It was deeper, at the level the Echoframe called his core. Threads of tension tightened into something more resilient, like cracks being filled with stronger material.
He sensed his reflexes aligning more efficiently, his thoughts snapping into focus more quickly. Memories of the Mist Stag's patterns, of how illusions bent, of where discipline had frayed—all of it settled into a clearer, more usable form.
Each dream left scars.
But each also left a layer of reinforcement, as if survival forged him into something gradually less breakable.