The choir gathered itself into a single, awful note.
The Living Reliquary hunched in the red gloom, a cathedral's worth of relics breathing like a lung around a furnace of stolen faith. Antlers re-flowered with serrated tines. Scripture-sinews ratcheted tight across its ribs. Beneath the crown of fused crowns, the relic-heart flickered in the cracks—there, not there—like a ruby seen through shattered glass.
[Boss: The Living Reliquary | HP: 3,450 / 12,000]
Phase: THREE — Terminal Hymn engaged
Mechanics: Heart exposure windows occur immediately after Hymn cadence peaks. Choir damage persists (−30% from node destruction).
[Noctis — Current Status]
HP: 1 / 2,400
Blood: 0 | Faith: 0 | Iron: 7 | Soul: 0
Skills: Locked (insufficient essence)
Noctis set his feet on the knife-thin rib of marble and let his breath thread to a single, unbroken line. This would be angles, weight, and refusal. Nothing else.
"Sing, then," he whispered.
The hymn rose, a pressure that wasn't sound but felt like a fist closing around the skull. Fractured catwalks shivered. Chains thrummed. The undercroft's blood-rivers spiked into crimson thorns and fell. When the note peaked, the reliquary's chest opened—a hundred shutters of gold and bone retracting to show the core's dull red throb.
Window.
Noctis was already moving.
He sprinted along the slanted rib, boots scraping sparks. A dangling counterweight hung over the boss—once part of an upper transept hoist, now held by a single bent bracket. He leapt, caught the iron hoop, and swung in a tight arc that snapped the bracket loose with a sound like a bone breaking.
The counterweight fell.
[Environmental Impact]
Debris crush — -600 (sanctified inlays amplified on impact)
Boss HP: 3,450 → 2,850
The reliquary bucked under the blow, antlers scything blind. The chest shutters hiccuped—half-open, half-shut—as it rebalanced. Noctis rode the recoil down a chain into a slide along a powdered-glass slope, boots carving a groove. He caught a shard of sanctified case glass by the frame—three handspans long, edges jagged with scripture-gold.
He never stopped running.
The chest cracked wider on the next breath of the hymn. He dove, rolled under a claw, and drove the shard like a chisel into the heart seam through the gap in the shutters, punching with both hands until his palms split.
[Precision Hit: Relic-Heart]Sanctified shard puncture — -500Boss HP: 2,850 → 2,350Status: Heart exposure shortened by pain-reaction
The reliquary spasmed. Shutters slammed, nearly taking his forearm. He ripped back just in time, the shard snapping in half. A backhand of chalice-knuckles smashed the ledge he stood on into dust—he was already gone, slinging himself sideways along a hanging chain and landing in a crouch on a cracked cornice that swayed underfoot.
Do not get hit. There was nothing left to spend but bones and nerve.
Below, the blood-river swelled and sloughed away, taking a rain of relic dust with it. Two Relic Wraiths crawled over a broken pilaster toward him, their glass bones rattling.
He ignored them.
The reliquary threw its antlers like spears, impaling the wall where he'd been a heartbeat earlier. The impact shook a line of rebar spears loose from a shattered buttress—iron rods pocked with mortar, sanctified caps winking on their tips.
He seized one on the fly.
It weighed like truth—honest, cold, unforgiving. He planted, slid one foot half a pace, and javelined the rebar with everything left in his shoulders at the seam of the reliquary's left scapula where scripture and chalices braided into a hinge.
[Environmental Penetration]
Iron spear (sanctified tip) — seam break -350
Boss HP: 2,350 → 2,000
The wraiths reached the cornice as the reliquary twisted, howling. Noctis stepped into them once—one stroke, two bodies, heads spinning into the blood-wind. He did not break stride.
Something cold and almost clean kissed his cheek. He looked up.
A cracked sanctum bell hung above the undercroft void—suspended by a failing yoke and three chains, its rim etched with prayers that still held a little light. The reliquary's antler thrusts had loosened two of the chains. The third held, barely.
The hymn inhaled.
"Come on," he said, to the bell, the chains, the monster, himself.
The hymn peaked.
He ran up the wall.
It was nothing anyone should ever do. Two steps on jutting stone bosses, one great reach for a ledge, and he was hauling his weight by forearms that felt like rusted hinge pins. He swung out, drew his blade, and severed the last chain in one economy-clean cut.
The bell fell.
[Environmental Impact — Sanctified Resonance]
Bell drop & shockwave — -900, Stun 1.5s, Heart fully exposed
Boss HP: 2,000 → 1,100
The undercroft rang. The sound wasn't heard so much as felt—through ribs, through teeth, through the crack in the world that let light in.
The reliquary sagged, shutters blooming wide in a gape of molten red.
Kill window.
Noctis dropped with the bell, landed in a roll that nearly took him over the edge, caught himself with one hand on a hooked chain, and flung his body in a low, skidding line toward the open chest.
He didn't have a skill. He had aim.
The blood-river surged—a tidal heave called by the boss's pain—rearing up into a wall to sweep him away from the core. He did the ugliest thing in the book: he slid into the wall like a batter stealing second on gravel, let it lift him, and used the slope to angle his body straight through the shutters with his blade turned to a stiletto line.
He stabbed the heart.
[Precision Hit: Relic-Heart]
Direct pierce (no essence carrier) — -300
Boss HP: 1,100 → 800
The reliquary's stun broke. Shutters slammed. Noctis tore free half a breath before they would have cut him in two. A crown-tine hammered down; he slipped aside, felt air part where his skull had been, and fell to a lower spar that thunked under his boots.
800.
The choir re-cohered into something flatter, colder. The reliquary changed footing, widening its stance across three broken ledges. Its crown lowered, antlers closing like a trap around the space he occupied. It meant to gore and hold, then sing him into paste.
Noctis's breath slowed until the edge of the world sharpened.
Two chains. One broken lantern the size of a coffin swinging over the blood-river. A cracked truss straining above the boss's back. A prayer-strip banner half-burned, still tethered to a pulley.
He moved.
He cut the banner loose and caught its pulley line with his left hand as the reliquary lunged. The line yanked him off his ledge as antlers bit into stone where he had been, tearing the ledge out by the roots. He rode the swing—one arm, jaw clenched—as the broken lantern arced toward him. He grabbed the lantern's frame with his right hand, boots skidding against iron.
He had one timing left in him.
"Take it," he said, to the monster, to the world, to whoever listened.
He kicked off the lantern. Momentum whipped it into a violent pendulum that crossed the reliquary's open chest at the top of the next hymn peak.
The lantern's sharpened strut and chain scythed through the exposed heart like a guillotine.
[Environmental Kill Attempt — Sanctified Lantern Pendulum]Heart cleave — -700 (sever)Boss HP: 800 → 100Status: Catastrophic exposure; shutters pulsing erratic
The lantern sheared away, chain screaming in its housing until it snapped, plunging the wreck into the blood-river in an explosion of steam and iron stench. The reliquary staggered, antlers scraping sparks, chest shutters trying and failing to close over an organ that was more ruin than heart.
It still stood.
It lifted its antlers one last time—every broken relic in its body straining for the final thrust.
Noctis lowered his blade.
He did not have strength left. He had a line.
"Return thy blood," the boss intoned, the words scraping out of every chalice mouth at once.
He stepped in on the lunge—not away, not aside—inside the circle of the crown, where geometry turned murder into leverage. His left hand caught a tine, palm ripping open on the serrations, and redirected the thrust with a small, perfect turn of the wrist that set needle-tips a handspan to the left.
The reliquary drove its own antler through its heart.
[Parry Redirect — Self-Pierce]
-400 (self-damage | sanctified antler)
Boss HP: 100 → 0
The world held still, like a breath between prayer and answer.
The choir stopped.
The reliquary sagged to one knee and then another, the antlers that had crowned it for so long drooping like the branches of a burned tree. Light bled out of the seams in a thousand thin threads, each withdrawing from the world like a vow returned to silence. The thing bowed as if to an altar that no longer existed, and came apart in slow rain—chalices ringing, crowns cracking, scripture curling to ash as it fell.
Noctis stood with his blade down and his hand open to the red air, blood running off his fingers in a slow drip. He swayed, then set his feet harder. He did not fall.
[Noctis — Post-Kill Status]
HP: 1 / 1,050
Blood: 0 | Faith: 0 | Iron: 7 | Soul: 0
Condition: Exhausted; micro-fractures; essence drought
He exhaled. It shook.
The undercroft answered with a sound like the sea being dropped from a height. Every support that should have gone first and hadn't decided to go now. Whole walls let go of centuries. Rivers of blood found new paths and took them through stone.
[Dungeon: Catastrophic Failure]
Collapse Timer: 90s
Primary Egress: Sealed Gate (Nave) — integrity compromised
Secondary Egress: Crack above transept — accessible via counterweight route
He looked up. A split in the darkness bled cold night. Wind touched his face, clean for the first time in hours.
He moved.
He ran the ruin like it had always been meant for feet. Slabs slid under him; he used the slide. Chains spun; he used the spin. When a reliquary case toppled like a tomb, he vaulted it as it fell and rode the far edge down like the lip of a wave. He did not think about the meter-long gap into which the world had already fallen. He left the thought behind with the ash.
The counterweight route was a dead crane line strung above the old transept. A load drum sat on a fractured balcony, half of it already torn away. The line crossed the undercroft void and ran to a shattered clerestory where the crack shed its thin ribbon of starlight.
He seized the drum's handle. It didn't turn. He put his back into it, teeth set, shoulders screaming, and felt the first grudging roll.
The floor under the drum tilted.
He sprinted three steps up the tilting plane, threw his weight into the handle again, and kicked the ratchet dog free with the side of his boot.
The drum spun.
The line snatched him by the waist so hard his breath left him in a grunt and flung him across the void. He tucked into a hurtling blur, shoulder to hip, as falling bell fragments and blown scripture went past in a storm. The line sang. The crack opened like an eye.
The drum on the far side had no ratchet. He hit hard, fingers finding a fractured sill, boots skidding on powder. The line went slack behind him as the first drum tore free and tumbled into the undercroft with a thunder of iron.
He hauled himself up through the crack as the transept beneath him folded in on itself like a book closing.
Night.
Cold. Thin. Not-blood.
Noctis crawled out onto the cathedral roof, where broken slate flashed in moonlight and wind worried at the edges of torn banners that had baked in silent air for years. He lay on his back and watched a long, dark breath condense above him and go thin.
Below, the cathedral gave up the fight in a last, deep sigh and settled into a shape the earth would recognize again. He listened until the grinding ended and only the wind remained.
He sat up. The world spun and steadied. He looked at his hands. They were his. He looked at the sky. It was not red.
He stood.
[Escape Confirmed]
Dungeon: Collapsed
Pursuit: None
Safe Margin: Achieved
[Final Ledger]HP: 1 / 1,050
Blood: 0 / 294
Faith: 0 / 8
Iron: 7 / 15
Soul: 0 / 6
Skills Used: None (Phase Three) — environmental kills and precision only
Boss Damage Summary (Phase Three):
– Counterweight crush -600
– Sanctified shard (heart seam) -500
– Rebar seam break -350
– Sanctum bell resonance -900 (stun + full exposure)
– Direct heart pierce -300
– Lantern pendulum guillotine -700
– Parry redirect (self-pierce) -400
Total: -3,750 (overkill absorbed by collapse dampening at kill)
He sheathed his blade. The leather creaked. The motion felt like the first honest thing to happen in days.
The fractured bell up here rolled once, found a home against a crunch of slate, and accepted the night.
Noctis looked at the city beyond the cathedral's edge—black roofs, a ribbon of silver water, a scatter of lamps like embers in cupped hands. The wind went over his face and took the old blood away by inches.
He stepped off the broken ridge and began the long, careful climb down.
The ashes of the knight were behind him. The reliquary's heart was silent. The hymn was over.
And somewhere ahead, the next vow waited.
The city was quiet.
Noctis crouched on the roof of a slanted house, slate tiles cold beneath his palms. The moon washed the streets below in silver, the river beyond glinting like a blade slipped across stone. From here, the cathedral looked less like a place of worship and more like a carcass—its spire broken, its belly collapsed, smoke still bleeding into the sky.
He exhaled. The sound felt too loud against the hush.
[Current Status]HP: 1 / 2,400Blood: 420Faith: 110Iron: 42Soul: 4Wraith: 2Apex: 1
Alive. But only just.
His knuckles were split, his blade still sticky with dried ichor. His essence pools were swollen from the Reliquary's death, but his body was too broken to wield them yet. He needed more. He needed to recover.
Blood. Always blood first.
He dropped from the roof like a shadow poured from slate. His boots touched cobblestone without a sound. The street was narrow, lined with simple dwellings, shutters barred, lamps extinguished. A city asleep. A city ignorant.
He moved to the nearest door. His hand pressed the wood. His essence rippled—no lock resisted.
Inside, the dark smelled of clay and salt. A small table with two chairs. A shrine in the corner, abandoned like the cathedral that had just burned. A bed in the next room. Two bodies curled under a wool blanket.
A husband and wife.
They stirred when he entered. Some instinct, some quiver of air. The man blinked awake first, confusion glazing into fear as his eyes caught the gleam of gold-and-crimson irises in the dark. His hand twitched for something—knife, tool, anything. Too slow.
Noctis was already there.
His hand crushed the man's throat. The blade whispered through his ribs. Warmth spilled, rich and immediate.
[Blood Essence Acquired] +80
The wife screamed. He turned, quick as breath, and the sound cut short under fang and steel.
[Blood Essence Acquired] +70
The room stilled. Only heartbeats fading into silence. Only blood soaking into the sheets.
Noctis wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes half-closed as the warmth worked its way into his channels.
[Skill Activated: Sanguine Recovery II]Cost: -65 Blood, -18 FaithHeal: +1,100 HP
[Status Updated]HP: 1 → 1,101 / 2,400Blood: 420 + 150 - 65 = 505Faith: 110 - 18 = 92Iron: 42Soul: 4Wraith: 2Apex: 1
The ache in his limbs eased. Ribs knit. His breath no longer rasped. He rolled his shoulders once, testing the range, feeling power steady back into muscle and bone. Not whole. But enough.
He stood in the small room, the bodies cooling in silence. Their blood was gone. Their shrine still burned faintly with an ember of faith that hadn't been enough to save them. He touched its edge with his fingertip, smearing it with crimson, and turned away.
Outside, the wind smelled clean again.
Noctis vaulted back to the roof, eyes scanning the sprawl of the city. Chimneys smoked faintly. Lanterns guttered in alleys. Beyond the river, larger buildings rose in clusters. Somewhere in that maze lay hunters, priests, soldiers. But tonight they still slept.
He crouched at the ridge, golden eyes narrowing. His body hummed with stolen life. His mind steadied. His ledger was balanced again.
"Recovery first," he whispered.
The city whispered nothing back.
And so he vanished across the rooftops, a shadow among slates, leaving only silence in the house he had emptied.
The rooftops carried him toward the barracks like veins across a body, each slate tile a step of shadow. Noctis moved without haste, savoring the quiet. The city had not yet woken to the ruin behind him. Soon they would. But not yet.
He paused.
A sound pricked through the stillness — soft, rhythmic. Not footsteps. Not chains. Softer. Human. The rhythm broke, swelled, and became unmistakable. Moans.
His head tilted, crimson eyes narrowing.
He turned toward the sound. A shutter half-closed. A faint flicker of candlelight behind. A small house tucked in the row, its walls thin enough to bleed secrets.
He descended.
Inside, he found them. A man and a woman, tangled together, lost in themselves. They hadn't heard him. They wouldn't.
For a moment, he watched. The sight pulled at memory — long buried, long rotted. He had lived once in halls of silk and laughter, wine on every table, perfumed skin at his fingertips. That was before betrayal. Before the chains.
His lips curled. It had been too long. Tonight, he decided, would be his celebration.
The man never even looked up before Noctis's hand closed over his mouth. A twist. A snap. Silence.
The woman gasped. He was upon her before the sound could become a scream. His hand pressed over her lips, his eyes burning into hers.
"Don't," he whispered.
Terror froze her. Her eyes were wide, reflecting only crimson.
He leaned closer, voice quiet, cruel. "If you can satisfy me, I will spare you."
Her head shook, then nodded — desperation in every tremor. He smiled at her answer, not with warmth but with mockery. His claws brushed her cheek as though in gentleness. Then his fangs slid into her neck.
The candle sputtered. Her body went still.
[Blood Essence Acquired] +160[Skill Activated: Devour]The maiden's form dissolved into red mist, absorbed. Nothing remained.
The room fell silent but for the candle's faint hiss. Where there had been life and sound, only emptiness lingered.
Noctis stood, eyes gleaming, smirk cold. "Satisfied."
He slipped back into the night, leaving the house hollow.
The city spread ahead, its heartbeat steady, unaware. The barracks loomed across rooftops, their stone walls lit faintly by lanterns. Soldiers inside. Blood richer than peasants. Faith thicker. Iron in their bones.
Three birds with one stone. Strength, essence, fear.
He smiled again, thinking of the horror to come.
And he moved, a shadow across the tiles.