Books lay everywhere—torn pages like fallen leaves, broken spines scattered across the floor. Shelves had toppled, their contents reduced to nests and mulch. The air smelled of old paper, damp plaster, and the faint sourness of mold. Light from a cracked ceiling window fell in narrow beams, cutting through the dust and outlining drifting motes.
Something watched him.
The Whisper Wyrm waited behind the shelves.
It was slender, almost thread-like, its length coiled along a broken ceiling beam. Its scales were so pale and thin that they seemed to flicker in and out of existence, nearly invisible against the wood and shadow. A curtain of ragged pages—torn from books and stuck together with some sticky secretion—hung down in front of its face, hiding its eyes and mouth. At a glance, it looked like nothing more than debris left hanging from the roof.
When prey entered its territory, it did not charge.
It sang.
The sound it emitted was barely a hum—so soft that most would not hear it, only feel it. A vibration at the base of the skull. A weight behind the eyes. It caused fatigue to seep in, creeping like fog through the mind. Thoughts grew slow. Memories blurred at the edges. Details slipped away. If the victim lingered, the Wyrm's body would uncoil in silence, wrap around their neck or limbs, and tighten in gentle, rhythmic pulses, pressing sleep door by door onto their nerves until they stopped fighting.
Noctis stepped between the overturned shelves.
His boots nudged scattered pages. They rasped softly, the sound dry and brittle. As he scanned the rows of broken bookcases, a tiredness slid along his spine. His eyelids felt just a little heavier. His shoulders relaxed when he did not tell them to. It felt, disturbingly, like the last seconds before a well-deserved sleep—except he knew he did not deserve any such thing in this place.
He forced his hand into a fist and slammed it lightly against a supporting beam.
The sharp pain cut through the fog. The hum sharpened in his awareness, no longer vague but a distinct vibration in the air. The instant he reacted, the Whisper Wyrm darted.
It shot from behind the curtain of pages, aiming straight for the hollow just above his collarbone.
But Noctis was ready.
He counted his breaths. One. Two. Three. He called on the Echoframe, not as a source of power but as a focusing lens. His awareness tightened around the faint sound, tracking its origin, its rhythm. He let his body sag once, feigning a heavier exhaustion, leaning against a busted table as if he were about to sink to the floor.
The Wyrm adjusted.
This time it went low, sliding along a fallen shelf, wrapping around his leg instead of his neck, intending to drag him down and finish the job from there.
He caught its tail.
Fingers closed around cold, slick scales. The creature writhed, trying to slip loose, but he had already spun his knife into position. In a tight, practiced curve, he drove the blade up and under its jaw, piercing the thin armor where it was weakest.
The hum broke.
It went from a steady, mind-numbing vibration to a sharp, dying screech that existed more in his bones than in his ears. The Wyrm convulsed, trying to wrap higher, trying to pull him to the ground, but he pinned its slender body with his knee and shoulder. Two sharp motions of his knife—precise, economical—severed it in key joints. The coils slackened, then sagged away.
The echo that drifted from its cooling body was faint.
A weak pulse brushed his mind, barely a ripple in the vastness of his core.
ECHO GAINED: Drowsiness Resist +0.4%
Reward: Minimal boost. Core reduces mental fatigue fractionally.
He stood in the library's dim light, feeling the lingering heaviness in his limbs recede just a little faster than it would have before. Barely noticeable—but real.
Noctis scanned the shelves once more.
No more movement. No more hum. Just the quiet of a place that had already seen enough endings. He checked his own body—bruises, a sleepy ache behind the eyes, but nothing critical.
"Little gain for such a long hunt," he thought, not bitter, merely observing.
Still, every small resistance counted in the end. The next time a hum like that tried to soften his thoughts, it would find less ground.
Monster Six: The Shade Wisp
Night deepened.
In a hollow haberdashery—once a place of hats and thread and idle chatter—Noctis encountered the Shade Wisp.
Dust-coated mannequins stood like frozen people in the gloom, some toppled, some still upright with cracked, empty faces. Shelves held only scraps of fabric eaten by time. A single lantern flame flickered on his belt, casting long shadows that swayed along the walls.
The Shade Wisp moved within those shadows.
Delicate and smoky, it drifted through the air like a ribbon of dark silk, curling and unfurling in slow, graceful loops. If someone glanced quickly, they might have thought it a trick of the light, or smoke from a long-dead fire. It never stayed in one form long enough to be pinned down, avoiding direct attacks simply by not being fully present in any one spot.
Its danger was not in claws or teeth.
It stole heat instead, sipping warmth from exposed skin, leaving numbness behind. It dimmed lamp light, turning bright flames into weak embers. Worst of all, it whispered.
Those whispers slid into his ear without moving air.
Memories spoken back to him in a voice that sounded almost like his own: lost comrades calling his name; Magi accusing him of leaving; Rob laughing and then choking on his last breath. Broken plans replayed, each failure underlined. The Wisp did not invent fears—it draped him in ones he already carried, making them feel freshly sharp.
Noctis waited.
He stood still in the center of the shop, shoulders relaxed, blade low. His eyes followed the subtle darkening and lightening of corners as the Wisp passed—near the ceiling, then along the floor, then brushing the edges of his shadow. He ignored the whispers as best he could, letting them slide past his awareness like rain slipping off a cloak.
He used the Echoframe again, centering himself.
Breath in. Breath out. Mark the rhythm of the Wisp's passes, its tendency to circle narrower each time, curious about why he did not flinch as others might. When it passed close enough that he felt a distinct chill trail along his arm, he moved.
From the base of one of his artifacts, he unspooled a thin silver thread.
It gleamed faintly, bright even in the half-dark, carrying a quiet energy of its own. When the Shade Wisp swooped past, trying to brush across his chest and pull more warmth from his core, he snapped his wrist.
The thread sliced through the air.
Where silver met smoke, the Wisp shivered. Its form distorted violently, half of it trying to flee one way while the other half was dragged another. It let out a faint sigh—almost like someone giving up after too long a struggle—and then dispersed. Its body thinned, blurred, and finally dissolved into nothing more than a slight chill that faded quickly.
The echo he drew from it was minuscule.
Barely more than the air displaced by his own motion.
ECHO GAINED: Fear Resist +0.3%
Reward: Nearly forgettable, but less fear in future battles.
Less fear, less paralysis when whispers came. Not immunity, but another layer of armor in places no physical shield could reach.
Noctis cleaned his blade with a strip of cloth.
He catalogued each monster in his mind: the Glasslimb Lurker, the Ember Sigil, the Vilebound Orphan, and now the Dusk Mite, the Whisper Wyrm, the Shade Wisp. Each had taught him something. Each had left a faint mark in his core.
He checked his Echoframe.
The slight gains clustered there like tiny sparks—almost imperceptible on their own, but together, they built the foundation for survival against worse things waiting in the dark corners of this dead city.
He stepped back into the street.
The ruins around him fell silent—no growls, no screams, no whispers—only the hush that followed a survivor's hunt. Every echo, however small, was another line in the story he was carving into this forsaken world.
Night in the ruined city weighed heavily on him.
Fatigue clawed at his mind and muscles. He had been fighting for days—moving, hunting, learning. His actions had become almost mechanical in their precision: a machine carved by persistence, every echo and every lesson sharpened into tactical muscle memory. But tonight, as the wind died and dust in the plazas began to swirl in slow, unnatural patterns, something shifted.
Something felt wrong.