The momentum of the beast's violent twist nearly tore him loose, his body swinging out over a sheer drop into the churning magma below. For a terrifying, elongated second, he was a pendulum dangling over oblivion, the heat blistering the soles of his boots.
That second of precarious distraction was all it took.
Across the caldera, Ardyn saw him. Her ice-blue eyes, moments ago narrowed in furious concentration, widened with a shock so profound it cut through her battle focus.
The dragon's massive, spiked tail, moving with a whip-crack speed that belied its size, swept around in a punishing arc. It caught her square in the side, just under her ribs. The sound of the impact was a sickening, wet crunch of broken armor and driven breath. She was flung backward like a discarded toy, her sword, spinning from her grasp to skitter across the hot rock.
A sound tore from Noctar's throat then not a scream, but a roar of pure, incandescent rage that was far hotter than the volcano's heart. It burned away the last of his dizziness, the last of his pain. The sight of her falling weaponized his despair.
He hauled himself up, scrambling over the burning, shifting plates of the dragon's hide, his mind screaming a single name, his body reduced to a single, focused purpose. He reached the base of the beast's thick neck, his eyes locking onto the pulsating, corrupted reverse scale now visibly throbbing with a sick, magenta light.
[ROOT_ACCESS: FINAL_OVERRIDE. ENGAGED]
The physical world, the heat, the roar, the smell of sulfur and blood, dissolved into a crashing waterfall of emerald-green code. He saw the dragon not as a creature, but as a towering, complex executable file.
The bug was a vicious, red subroutine wrapped around its core integrity protocol, a digital tapeworm. He didn't try to understand its functions, to patch it, to rewrite it with elegant logic. There was no time for finesse, for the artistry of debugging. This was triage. With a final, desperate surge of will that felt like tearing his own soul in half, he issued the most basic, brutal command possible.
[SELECT: FILE_DRAGON_PRIME_CORE]
[LOCATE: SUBROUTINE_CORRUPTION_VIRUS_ALPHA]
[COMMAND: FORCE_DELETE_IMMEDIATE]
[OVERRIDE_ALL_PROTESTS: Y]
The glitching, malignant red code flashed once, a scream in data form, and vanished.
The effect on the physical world was instantaneous and profound. The dragon's roar of predatory triumph faltered, choked off into a confused, pained gurgle. The unnatural, chaotic energy that had made the air shimmer and warp around it snapped back inward, collapsing into a stable, if still terrifying, aura of primal heat.
The feral, glitching intelligence in its eyes was gone, replaced by the base, bestial fury of a wounded animal. It was no longer a reality-bending abomination; it was just a very, very angry, and now critically confused, monster.
And a very vulnerable one.
Noctar's Perdition pistol was in his hand, the Infernal Iron warm from the ambient heat. He had no mana left for a spell, no strength for a drawn-out fight. His body was a burnt-out husk. But the weapon had one final, energy cell left in its chamber. He didn't aim. He simply pressed the scorching-hot barrel directly against the now-unprotected, fleshy reverse scale, the epicenter of the beast's vulnerability.
"Go to hell," he rasped, the words barely a whisper lost in the dying rumble of the volcano, and pulled the trigger.
The report was deafening at point-blank range. The single, concentrated blast of void-touched energy ripped through scale, flesh, and vertebral bone. The dragon stiffened, a full body seizure of death. Its massive form shuddered once, a final tremor that ran from its snout to the tip of its tail, before the furious light in its eyes winked out like a drowned star.
As its body began to dissolve into a storm of shimmering motes of light and coalescing experience points, Noctar's borrowed strength vanished entirely. The last of the adrenaline evaporated. He fell from the great height, a puppet with cut strings, hitting the hard, hot ground with a final, bone jarring impact that drove the last whisper of air from his lungs.
The last thing he saw before the welcoming darkness rushed up to claim him was a blur of silver and gold, Ardyn, one arm clutched to her injured side, ignoring her own grievous wounds, forcing herself to her feet and stumbling toward him, her beautiful face a mask of frantic, undeniable concern.
---
Consciousness returned not to the smell of antiseptic or the feel of sheets, but to the familiar, oppressive, silent grey of the judgment lobby. The endless, featureless plain. The absolute quiet.
And two very, very familiar figures.
Byte, the God of Tech, a shifting silhouette of holographic static and flickering runes, was actually fidgeting, his form glitching nervously. He couldn't seem to meet Noctar's soul-form gaze. Mortis, the God of Death, leaned casually on his ominous, simple scythe, his bony face arranged in what could only be described as… impressed, deeply amused glee.
Noctar's soul-form, which usually felt like a cool, logical data-stream, simmered with a cold, quiet fury that radiated like heat haze. He fixed his glare on Byte. "You."
"I… may have engaged in a strategic omission regarding the full scale of the systemic degradation," Byte said quickly, his voice the sound of a dozen processors whirring under strain. He held up hands made of condensed light. "In my defense, I thought the true number might be… psychologically counterproductive. Demotivating, even."
"One hundred thousand corrupt world core bugs is not an 'omission'," Noctar's voice was dangerously soft, each word a shard of ice. "It's a lie of cosmic proportion. It's a suicide mission dressed up as a contract."
"Oh, let him have it!" Mortis cackled, the sound like dry bones rattling in a tin coffin. He pointed a phalange at Byte. "He deserves the dressing-down! Guilt is a delicious look on a god of logic!"
The hollow sockets of his skull turned to Noctar, a flicker of cheerful blue fire deep within.
"But you, mortal… to see you fight like that! Not for glory, not for the 'world', but for a single, stubborn woman… it was magnificent! Truly! The drama! The sacrifice! The sheer, stupid, beautiful romance of it! Win her heart! Conquer her like you conquered my queues! I'm investing in this narrative! I'm cheering for you!" He gave a grotesquely enthusiastic thumbs-up with a bony hand.
Byte sighed, the sound of a thousand servers crashing in a distant datacenter. "You are profoundly unhelpful." He turned back to Noctar, and for a fleeting moment, the glitching static cleared, revealing something akin to genuine, weary contrition.
"The bug you deleted was a high-priority anomaly. It was… festering. You cleansed it. As a token. A small one." He snapped his fingers, a sound like a keyboard clacking in a cathedral.
A new icon materialized in Noctar's mental inventory, shimmering with intricate, divine-grade code.
[ACQUIRED: WARDROBE_OF_THE_COSMIC_VAGRANT - (DIVINE ARTIFACT)]
// EFFECT: AUTOMATICALLY EQUIPS THE USER WITH GARMENTS PSYCHICALLY TAILORED TO THEIR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT (HEAT/COLD/CAMOUFLAGE) OR DESIRED SOCIAL CONTEXT (FORMAL/STEALTH/LEISURE). SELF-REPAIRING. CANNOT BE DESTROYED, STOLEN, OR STAINED. INCLUDES POCKETS OF SPATIAL COMPRESSION.
Magical, indestructible, context sensitive clothes. He had nearly been erased from existence, had pushed his soul to the brink for a woman he barely knew, and the God of Technology's apology was a fantastical, infinitely useful… wardrobe.
Noctar just sighed, the cold anger bleeding out into a profound, cosmic exhaustion that seeped into his very essence. He had too much to say accusations, calculations, demands for better tools, for real answers and yet, nothing at all that would change the fundamental, absurd reality of his situation.
He gave one last, withering look that encompassed both the guilty god and the cackling psychopomp, and willed himself back to the land of the living, the pain, and the consequences.
---
The first thing he felt was the sterile, sharp smell of alchemical antiseptic and clean linen. The second was a dull, throbbing ache that seemed to originate in every single cell of his body, a comprehensive ledger of his recent stupidity. He cracked open his eyes, wincing against the soft, bright light of a crystal lamp set into a white ceiling.
With monumental effort, he turned his head on the stiff pillow.
There, slumped in a high-backed chair pulled right up to his bedside, was Ardyn.
She was asleep. Her head was tilted back against the chair, the strong line of her jaw relaxed. Minor healing bandages were visible on her forearms and across one sharp cheekbone. Her legendary silver hair, usually bound with severe precision, was loose, a cascading waterfall of platinum over the shoulders of a simple grey medical tunic.
It framed a face that even in the vulnerability of sleep held a residue of fierce determination. On the small metal table beside her chair, next to a pitcher of water, lay a single, perfect white rose probably from her garden, its petals flawless, a stark note of tender life in the clinical room.
She was safe. She was whole.
And she had stayed.
For the first time since he'd crash landed on Ethron through the confusion, the dungeon, the brutal calculus of survival... a genuine, uncalculated, perfectly peaceful smile touched Noctar Ville's cracked lips. He didn't need to speak.
He didn't need to move. He didn't need to debug, analyze, or plan. He just watched the slow, steady rise and fall of her breath, and for a moment, the relentless, grinding logic of his mind finally, blissfully, went quiet.