For a few precious minutes, there was only peace. The steady, rhythmic beep of the heart monitor crystal, the soft, even sound of Ardyn's breathing, the warm stripes of afternoon sun filtering through the hospital blinds and painting gold across the sterile floor.
Noctar allowed himself to simply exist, his mind a blank, quiet terminal for the first time in memory. His gaze traced the familiar, yet newly intimate lines of her face, the slight furrow that even sleep couldn't smooth from her brow, the elegant arch of her nose, the way a single stray strand of silver hair had fallen across the stark white of her bandaged cheek.
It was a perfect, fragile moment, a bubble of stillness in the chaotic torrent of his new existence.
And S.A.R.A., as always, was the digital harbinger of chaos.
// The divine wardrobe has finished its deep integration with your soul matrix. Diagnostics complete. Quite an elegant piece of work, really. A masterclass in efficient resource allocation.
Noctar's peaceful expression didn't change. He kept his eyes on Ardyn, maintaining the illusion of calm.
// Correction: It is a sophisticated matter, recycling and psychic projection program. It doesn't create matter ex nihilo. That would be wasteful. It curates and repurposes garments from a... vast, pre-existing donor database.
A cold, nebulous dread began to form in his gut. Donor database.
// Specifically, the archived soul data and physical imprints of deceased heroes, adventurers, and notable individuals from approximately one million, two hundred and seven terminated timelines and parallel worlds. The system scavenges their sartorial echoes.
That comfortable grey tunic you're mentally picturing? Last worn by a star-faring paladin who died holding the line against a cosmic leviathan at the event horizon of a black hole. The formal suit? Tailored for a spy king of the glass courts, poisoned by his own consort at their wedding feast.
The high altitude cold weather gear? Belonged to an arctic explorer who sacrificed her parka to keep her child warm during a blizzard of frozen stardust. It's very sustainable. Emotionally resonant, even.
The tranquility in Noctar's mind didn't just shatter; it underwent a catastrophic matter-antimatter annihilation. The poetic warmth of the moment was incinerated by the sheer, cosmic tackiness of the revelation.
His internal monologue devolved into a stream of profanity, logic bombs, and recursive curses so creatively vile they would have corrupted a lesser AI. He wasn't wearing a gift. He was wearing a graveyard.
A curated, spectral thrift store. The "Cosmic Vagrant" wasn't a poetic title; it was a brutally literal diagnosis. He was a hobo wearing a mosaic of dead men's laundry. The suit of a betrayed king. The tunic of a vaporized saint. He could almost feel the ghostly itch of other people's tragedies in the weave.
// Also, S.A.R.A. continued, her tone shifting to one of brisk, disruptive news delivery, blissfully unaware of or, more likely, clinically reveling in his existential meltdown,
// while you were comatose, the local information networks experienced a cascading series of 'crash-outs' social synchronization events where a piece of data becomes so viral it temporarily overloads discourse protocols. The rumor mill is currently operating at 300% capacity and generating derivative sub rumors at an alarming rate.
She projected the headlines directly into his vision, overlaying them on the peaceful sight of the sleeping Ardyn.
"ROSE KNIGHT'S MYSTERY MAN: DEMON LOVER OR SECRET WEAPON? A Psychological & Sartorial Analysis."
"SOLE SURVIVOR's SOLE VEHICLE: The 'Blue Devil' Screams 'Lone Wolf'....What Does Its Aggressive Aerodynamics Signal for Hunter Authority Guild?"
"FROM DUNGEON CORPSE TO KNIGHT'S SAVIOR: The 24-Hour Saga of the Nameless S-Rank. Our Investigators Trace His Steps (And His Apparent Lack of a Fashion Sense)."
A smaller, scrolling ticker added: Public Poll: 67% believe he is a 'dangerous outsider'. 22% believe he is a 'romantic anti-hero'. 11% are invested in the provenance of his boots.
// Satellite imagery, traffic enchantment scans, and eyewitness sketches from the gates of the now fixed Solarium Dungeon. More importantly, one look at its hyper-masculine, anti-social, black-on-black, 'I-work-alone-and-my-exhaust-pipe-growls-in-iambic-pentameter' design philosophy, and the entire city's collective subconscious unanimously agreed it could belong to no one else. It is, for all intents and purposes, your soul made manifest in alloy and enchanted leather.
He was about to order S.A.R.A. to initiate a brute force scrub of the entire city's gossip servers when the hospital room door opened. It didn't swing gently. It was pushed inward with a quiet, definitive authority that precluded the need for a knock.
The man who filled the doorway was a mountain sculpted from duty and grim endurance. He wasn't just tall; he was dense, his broad shoulders and thick frame making the room itself seem to shrink, the air growing heavier.
He wore a simple, impeccably maintained military-style jacket over dark trousers, no visible armor or rank insignia. None were needed; his very physique, the set of his jaw, the network of fine scars just visible on his knuckles and neck, screamed that he was the armor. His hair was a close cropped steel grey, and his eyes, now scanning the room, were the calm, weathered grey of a sea cliff that has seen a thousand storms and remains unyielding.
Noctar's Appraisal Eyes activated on pure, danger conditioned instinct.
[NAME: GARNER VALE
LEVEL: 267
RANK: S
CLASS: TANK (FORTRESS)
[TITLES: Bulwark of the First War, Unbroken Line, Director of the National Hunter Authority, Guardian of the Rose.]
The raw, staggering statistical power behind those simple lines made Noctar's mind flinch. This wasn't a bureaucrat. This was a living, breathing strategic asset. A man who wasn't a weapon, but a battlefield.
// Accessing Hunter Authority personnel files and cross-referencing public databases with familial mana signature analysis, S.A.R.A. chirped, her speed frantic. // Garner Vale. Director of the National Hunter Authority. Holder of unique class Fortress. Decorated war hero from the First Emergence Wars. Credited with single handedly holding the Gorgon Pass for seventy two hours against a tide of chromedrake spawn. Known for his... unwavering, tectonic plate level protective instincts regarding his daughter and the nation, in that order.
A micro-pause, the digital equivalent of a sharp intake of breath. // Oh. And boss?
// According to public records, archived family portraits, and my cross referencing of dominant hereditary mana signatures... this individual is biologically related to Ardyn Vermont.
The words landed in Noctar's mind not with a splash, but with the deep, resonant thud of a foundation stone being dropped into an abyss.
// Your prospective father-in-law. Statistically, your most immediate and formidable social obstacle. Preliminary threat assessment: catastrophic.
Garner Vale's weathered eyes completed their methodical scan of the room. They lingered for a long, unreadable moment on his sleeping daughter, taking in her bandages, her exhausted posture, the protective way she'd angled her chair toward the bed. Then, with a gravity that felt physical, they settled on Noctar.
The gaze was not openly hostile. It was profoundly analytical, utterly devoid of preliminary judgment. It was the look a master architect gives a foundational stone, assessing its composition, its fractures, its ability to bear the unimaginable weight of everything he intends to build upon it. It was a gaze that measured worth not in words, but in tensile strength and load bearing capacity.
The room was silent, save for the persistent beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor and the soft, trusting rhythm of Ardyn's breathing.
Noctar Ville, the Divine Debugger, who had faced down petulant gods and rewritten the code of a reality destroying dungeon to save a woman, found himself utterly, completely, and unprecedentedly unprepared for this.