He lands, more gently than he expects, with the last shivers of the Obsidian Oracle's darkness still buzzing in his nerves.
For a moment, Noctis cannot breathe—not out of fear, not because his wounds hurt more here, but because of what he sees.
He stands on a ledge jutting from the side of a vast, broken cliff, overlooking a landscape that looks more like a painting torn open than a normal world. Every ruin he has known, every echo of violence, feels small and distant in the face of this view.
Mountains hang in the sky.
Great peaks float, unmoored from any ground, their green slopes carved with rivers of shimmering water that wrap around their sides like ribbons. Gigantic iron chains pierce those mountains at odd angles, stretching from one floating mass to another. They creak softly as they sway—not under weight, but under some unseen cosmic tension.
Waterfalls spill off every edge.
Too many to count, they fall and fall until they dissolve into fine mist. The mist catches the raw red light of a sun sinking low in the sky, splitting it into arcs of color. Rainbows hover in midair, curving through open space with nothing to land on, suspended between sky and empty air.
The sky itself bleeds color.
Crimson near the sinking sun, shifting into violet and indigo along the horizon. Sunbeams pierce that haze in straight, bright shafts, descending like judgment on the suspended peaks. White clouds twist into shapes he almost recognizes—monsters he has fought, beasts from dreams, faces he once knew—but they never stay coherent long enough to hurt. For a flicker of an instant, he almost smiles. The memory of battles here feels distant, like a story told about someone else.
High above, dragons wheel in slow circles around the highest chains.
Their wings catch the last light, scattering it across metallic scales in shades of bronze, obsidian, and pale blue. They move with no urgency, no hunger directed at him, simply existing—free, magnificent, and deeply alien.
Below, a lake stretches out like a fallen fragment of sky.
Its surface mirrors everything above with impossible clarity. The reflection of mountains, chains, waterfalls, and dragons is crisp enough that he feels as if he could fall into it instead of onto it. Looking at it, he has the sense that the water does not simply reflect this world, but holds another—deeper, stranger, more dangerous—just beneath its surface.
Noctis releases a long, quiet breath.
For a heartbeat or two, he does nothing but stare, letting awe seep through the cracks of his numbness. Something inside, frozen for too long, twitches at the sight.
So this is what waits in the worlds I haven't seen yet, he thinks. It's… almost beautiful. Beautiful enough that it could hurt, if he lets himself feel it.
He crouches and touches the stone beneath his boots. It feels solid and cool, rough against his fingertips. He does not trust it, not entirely. The chainbound peaks, the mirror-lake, the crimson sky—they feel too deliberate, too perfectly arranged to wake a dead man's sense of wonder.
Don't be fooled, he warns himself. Beauty is armor. Worlds like this don't show their teeth until you're already inside their jaws.
But he does not reach for his weapon immediately. Does not open the interface. For once, he gives himself a tiny pause—a stolen moment—to listen to the rush of distant waterfalls, to the low beat of dragon wings high overhead. The place feels alive, not just in the way monsters and traps do, but in the way of entire ecosystems breathing together.
For a rare moment, he lets himself feel not happiness, but longing.
For something this vast. This strange. This untouched by his scars. The emotion is so old and so unfamiliar that it unsettles him more than any threat could.
If this is a trap, he thinks, I'll enjoy the scenery before it closes its jaws.
Noctis lets his senses drift a little longer, letting the beauty wash over the exhaustion etched into his bones. Then, like a blade slicing neatly through quiet, the Echoframe's voice breaks in.
[Warning: Dimensional restriction detected. Multiple hostile rules active. Survival status: diminished.]
Lines of text snap into place at the edge of his vision.
[Notice—until you earn the right to move freely within this world, 80% of your movement and core functions will be suppressed. Energy output, reaction speed, and all system abilities degraded.]
His heartbeat stutters once, then kicks hard, a spike of dread cutting clean through the awe. The words echo inside his skull—restrictions, hostile rules, suppressed abilities—each one another invisible chain thrown around his body.
Slowed. Bound. Half-blind and dulled in a world that looks like a promise but reads like a cage.
The breathtaking sky loses some of its color at the edges. The red light and violet haze smear with resentment. The weightlessness he felt while staring at floating mountains collapses into a heavy sense of gravity, thick and unforgiving. His limbs suddenly feel as if they've been wrapped in cold, wet cloth, every movement taxed.
Cursed world, he thinks, jaw clenched so tight he can taste blood behind his teeth. Should have expected it. Stunning view, dragons posing in the sky, perfect reflections in the water—no world this beautiful comes without a catch.
Every hook is prettier when it's meant to drag you deeper in.
He straightens slowly, feeling the suppression knead into his muscles and core. Whatever this new place is, it will not let him be a tourist. It will demand the same thing every world has demanded of him: adaptation, endurance, and the refusal to bow.
Noctis flexed his fingers and felt them drag through the air like they were moving underwater.
They responded, but sluggishly, each curl and release slowed by an invisible weight. It was worse than any clean wound. Wounds were honest—they hurt, they bled, they healed or they didn't. This was different. This was the dull ache of impotence, the humiliating sense of being turned into half-prey, half-joke, with teeth dulled just enough that hope could still see them and mock him for believing they might work.
A low snarl crawled up his throat, half-voiced, half-breathed.
"Eighty percent, huh?" he muttered. "Guess I'll have to survive with the disappointing twenty I've been using so far."
He tried to laugh at his own line, but the sound came out wrong—bitter and dry, scraping along the floor of his chest like rusted gears turning for the first time in years. The emptiness inside him wasn't comforting, but it was familiar. A hollow place he could clamp his jaw around. He knew how to live with this kind of nothing.
Just perfect, he thought. The system breaks my legs. The world wraps me in chains and pretty ribbons. And I get to watch it all in slow motion.
He glanced once at the floating mountains and dragon-haunted sky, then away. At least the view's decent, he told himself. Good scenery for my dramatic crawl.
A sigh slipped out of him, more curse than relief.
Underneath the sarcasm and fatigue, though, something small still burned—an ember of resolve that refused to go out.
If this world wants to break me, it's going to have to work for it. Chains or not, I'll find the weak spot. I always do.