The festival dawned in a rush of color.
Sunlight spilled over bright banners, music burst from every doorway, and the scents of sweet bread and ripe fruit mixed into something almost intoxicating.
Ashan—Noctis—ran with his sister and friends, laughter noisier than any unease. His parents watched from the steps near the square; his father's grin balanced pride and joy, his mother's wave beckoned them to stolen tastes of honeyed cakes.
Children dragged ribbons through the dust. Lanterns spun halos of light. Drums and pipes wrapped the village in a moving rhythm.
For a little while, even the echo inside him quieted.
His sister tugged his sleeve.
"Come dance!"
Magari and Sefa hauled him into the ring, feet pounding with the others around the bonfire. Dust rose in golden clouds beneath their steps.
For one fleeting moment, everything felt perfect.
The Echoframe broke it.
A sharp, cold jolt ran down his spine as its pulse cut through the music.
Named Entity detected. Monster—Rekthir. Domains: Earth, Nature. Approach vector locked. Danger: high. Protection imperative.
His heart slammed once, hard.
He grabbed his sister, Magari, Sefa, pulling them in close.
"Stay with me. Now."
As if answering the command, a shadow rolled across the white sun.
Music shattered into silence. Drums fell from hands. Dancers froze, faces lifted, eyes wide with awe and dread.
The sky tore open with a roar.
A beast plunged from the clouds.
Its body was thick, clad in plates of stone veined with moss. Wings of clay spread, beating storms from thin air. Ember-like eyes flared in a face of rock and root.
It hit the market square, around two and a half meters tall, not colossal but terrifyingly dense with power. Its tail whipped, obliterating stalls. One bite shattered a house.
People scattered, screaming.
Roots burst from its palms, spearing through barrels and benches, flinging debris in arcs of splintered wood.
Noctis pulled his sister and friends under a half-broken awning, curling around them as stone and dust rained.
His parents stumbled toward shelter, faces white with fear. Hunters seized old spears and shouted orders, but the monster turned the ground itself against them.
Earth buckled and rose. Streets warped, becoming walls that trapped people in pockets of chaos. Children cried. Lanterns burst in showers of sparks.
Power surged through Noctis like a returning tide.
He met his sister's gaze.
"Hold on. I won't let go," he whispered.
The Echoframe hummed: Rekthir commands Earth and Nature. Weakness: unstable when lifted from ground. Strategy: force it off its anchor; attack mid-air. Evacuation remains priority.
He waited, watching hunters charge and fall, watching the village's courage crumple under elemental fury.
No one came who could stand between the beast and this doomed square.
In a dream built on illusions of safety, Noctis alone remembered the rules beneath.
He squared his stance, strength coiled under borrowed skin, eyes locked on the monster raging below the broken sky.
The festival had ended.
Only survival remained.
The battle began in confusion and ended drenched in ruin.
When the monster struck the square, the village's hunters gathered themselves as best they could—spears lifted, bows taut, old stories clutched like shields in their minds. They threw themselves at Rekthir in waves, shouting courage into a sky already cracking.
Courage turned to screaming.
The earth convulsed under the monster's will; stone arms tore up from the sand, dragging bodies down. Spears snapped against its hide, claws splintered wood, lifted men and crushed them with absent, grinding force.
They fell one after another—a scatter of lives, each bright for an instant, then gone into blood and dust.
Noctis seized Sefa, Magari, his sister, anyone close enough to reach, and forced a path through the stampede. Children shrieked, parents called names into choking dust, bodies pressed so tight he could hardly move. Behind them, Rekthir shook off the last spear, wings hammering the air, tail carving another wall into rubble.
"Run! Split and get away!" he shouted.
The command cut through the chaos, but fear made everyone slow.
The beast recognized a herd ready for slaughter and turned.
It dove. Stone wings stretched wide, claws and roots whipping in brutal arcs.
Noctis called out again, but the monster outpaced his voice. Houses folded inward, the air sizzled with power, and people died everywhere he looked. Sefa, Magari, his sister, his parents—all caught in surges of earth and crashing force, thrown like leaves, the square awash in red.
He stopped.
Instinct howled at him to fight, to flee, to do anything, but in that moment a single claw swept toward his chest.
The Echoframe flared.
A shield of gold erupted, the reward from his desert trial answering before he could act. The claw struck, shattered into dust, and blew past him in a burst of broken stone.
Noctis remained still while the world ended.
Around him, bodies dropped and did not rise. Dust swallowed last breaths, and dreams fractured against rock. The shield's glow throbbed softly around an untouched figure whose hands hung empty.
What rose inside him was not grief, not horror. It was something raw and jagged—an emptiness tearing at his numbness, overwhelming his senses with a feeling he did not know how to carry.
The village blurred.
Time lengthened. His heartbeat pounded so loud it seemed to fill the square.
He looked at the fallen, at each rigid face stamped with terror or acceptance. Rekthir roared, its echo thinning, clouds above unraveling as if even the sky recoiled.
He alone stood whole.
Gold light pulsed faintly over his skin. Inside that glow, something in him cracked and tried, weakly, to knit itself together. A thin spark of loss burned where nothing had burned in years.
But the sensation remained only that: pain without form.
No tears came, no scream broke loose—only the outline of a wound etched into memory.
The Echoframe broke the silence.
Alert. Trauma threshold surpassed. One percent of suppressed emotion restored.
He blinked and sensed it: a hairline break in the inner void, a splinter of self that might, if allowed, change everything.
He stared at his hands, at the fading gold along his fingers.
For a single heartbeat, the pain sharpened.
Then the square froze again.
Nothing moved.
Something new woke in him—not a feeling, but a command.
A trembling drive surged through his core, alien and yet oddly right, carrying the inevitability of prophecy.
Something must die.
Symbols the color of deep sky curled through his vision.
Directive: KILL THE LITTLE WYVERN.
Threat assessment: Impossible.
Noctis forced his way through wreckage: splintered tables, toppled stalls, broken bodies. Memory guided him—the way the villagers once pierced the Wyvern's plates, the seams their spears had found, the joints where arrows lodged.
He had no spear, only the snapped haft of a torch and a shrine-blade scavenged from the debris.
The Wyvern saw him.
It shrieked. Silk-threaded sound ripped the air apart, high and thin enough to feel like it was cutting his soul.
It lunged. Legs arced, fangs bared.
Noctis did not flinch.
The first blow tore his shoulder, stripping flesh and fabric, letting cold air sink into raw muscle. Where agony should have exploded, there was only data: damage registered, movement recalculated. Each step, each turn came detached and precise, like pieces placed in a game.
He moved with a grace that no longer felt human.
A hooked leg drove straight through his thigh. Bone cracked. He spun on the ruined limb, driving his blade up into the old weak point where arrows had once stuck. Black ichor sprayed, eating into his skin; nerves burned out in patches. Still no fear, no flinch.
The Wyvern twisted, vast and suffocating in the flicker of festival fires. It hurled him into the ground; the world rolled and knotted around him. His vision lurched, but his body recovered on its own.
Override engaged, the Echoframe declared.
Nerve damage: eighty-seven percent. Vital limit: postponed.
He pressed in.
The next target lay in the notch behind its mandibles. He cut there, blades worrying at joint and tendon. The Wyvern recoiled, hissing, torn silk and blood trailing.
By then, his body was failing.
He was hardly standing—organs faltering, bones fractured—yet his grip remained steady. The battle shed all style and fury; it shrank to a series of flawless, ruthless choices.
He let a claw spear his abdomen, accepting the wound to buy reach.
In that opening, he thrust the blade into the Wyvern's cluster of eyes.
It convulsed.
It crushed his ribs in return. He heard, rather than felt, the wet collapse of bone.
He staggered, leaving a trail of dark, shimmering blood. The Wyvern's legs glinted as they spun a shifting web around him, threads slicing and snapping through the air. Yet strand after strand missed by the smallest margin.
He stayed a breath ahead of death, buying advantage with pieces of his own flesh.
The fight dragged across the corpse of the festival. Lanterns sputtered and died overhead. Noctis' breath smoked in the cold—if he was even breathing at all.
His skin was a map of open wounds, his body half-hollow, but his nerves refused to deliver pain.
When the Wyvern finally buckled, he climbed onto its swollen back, every motion wrong and relentless.
It shrieked one last time, jaws snapping for him. Its teeth closed on his arm, bones cracking.
He let them.
With his free hand, he rammed the torch-haft into the base of its skull.
The creature spasmed, webbing tightening and then slackening. Its legs folded in, heavy frame sagging into the rubble.
Silence dropped.
Noctis stood over the carcass, a figure flayed and dim, more wound than man, yet standing.
Blood gathered in pools, reflecting the Wyvern's lifeless eyes. Only the faint beat of his heart, distant and disobedient, lingered.
The Echoframe spoke again.
Target neutralized. Pattern anomaly recorded. Restore this memory, or erase it?
He studied what was left of his hands, the hollow inside his chest.
Night offered no answer.
He dropped beside the cooling corpse.
Exhaustion finally overrode numbness. Victory's hush wrapped around him as the smell of blood and torn silk thinned, night wind stripping heat from broken flesh.
His eyes closed.
Sleep did not rescue him.
Instead, he slipped into the breach where his memories had been cut apart. He drifted through a second realm: a void sculpted by the Echoframe's careful cruelty.
There was only gray, endless and soft, with stars that were not stars at its edges—tiny echoes of every past defeat.
Here, the pain he refused in life took on form.
It stretched over old losses, over every narrow escape and solitary stand.
Visions twisted by like smoke: a village that had never fully been, happiness shattered by claws and prophecy. Half-faces smiled, half-faces screamed. Lanterns swung in a wind he could not feel.
Each image slipped past before he could catch it, swallowed by the maze of dark.
Then the gray split with light.
An interface bloomed in his mind, sharper and more vast than any before—a cascade of symbols in violet and gold, like the sky itself had chosen to pour strange geometry into him.
System log: Achievement—No Limits.
The unthinkable had been done.
He had killed the Little Weaver, a thing the system itself had condemned as unkillable. Gates that once stayed shut began to unlock.
Sensation rolled through him, not pain but a merciless clarity. Boundaries he hadn't known he was obeying tore and fell away.
For the first time since he had stepped beyond human, something deep inside stirred.
It might have been hope.
It might have been the first breath of true power.
The Echoframe chimed, notes like distant bells.
Reward uploading. Core recalibration underway.
Light pooled, spun, drew itself together. It twisted inward until it burst into a single, blazing Core.
A sphere hung before him, violet at its heart, wrapped in shadowed threads and silver fractals that pulsed like a living organ. Glyphs whirled around it, carrying promises older than despair and fresher than first dawn.
It drifted toward him like an outstretched hand.
Boundless Pathway, the system named it.
A Core to raise him to the next tier, to open sealed gates, to awaken powers sleeping at the edges of his story.
Noctis extended his hand.
Contact felt like being shattered and remade in every direction at once. The world broke into branching futures, spinning around him.
Memories exploded and rebuilt—a boy under violet skies, the ruin that followed, the hard, narrow path of survival, the fragile pull of something better.
For a heartbeat that seemed to hold every other, he was all his wounds and all his endurance at once.
The Core sank into him. Light and shadow threaded through his being until they were indistinguishable.