It goes on.
Hundreds of deaths. Then thousands. Then so many that numbers stop meaning anything at all. Every route he tries fails. Every plan ends the same way: dissolution. Sometimes it is quick, like being switched off. Other times it is stretched out, every nerve lit with such sharp, precise pain that it would have shattered any other mind.
Noctis keeps coming back.
Each time, he changes something. He moves forward. He goes left. He reverses. He digs down. He climbs into the sky. He never repeats a path exactly. He treats each attempt as an experiment, a new calculation in a problem that refuses to be solved.
After a while, time stops feeling linear.
It is as if centuries are bleeding together in a single, long moment. The trial twists time to suit itself. Some deaths arrive suddenly—one wrong breath, one misstep, and he ceases to be. Others are stretched thin: he drowns slowly in seas made of memory, or lies pinned under mountains built from the weight of his own failures. The world does not stay the same. Every cycle, the terrain shifts. So does the thing that rules it.
Sometimes the entity is a towering monster made of too many limbs and too many jaws. It chews him apart with teeth that seem to open into whole universes as they bite down. Sometimes it abandons limbs altogether and becomes a single, smooth sphere hanging overhead, perfectly polished, perfectly still—until it sheds a rain of glittering fragments that erase him one grain at a time, from foot to mind.
At the true center of this ever-changing arena—past the breaking storms, beyond seas that shatter like glass and reform themselves—the Existence reveals itself. Not as an animal. Not as a god. Not even as a single, stable shape.
It feels like a question the world cannot answer. A living contradiction born from rules the Gate does not want to admit exist.
It never appears the same way twice.
Sometimes it floats as layer upon layer of thin veils, drifting like smoke. Look closer, and those veils twist into a serpent made from color and void, flowing through every shade at once before collapsing into a kind of hunger so deep it gnaws at memory, chewing up thoughts until names and faces slip away.
Sometimes it walks.
It becomes a giant without a face, its arms circling its chest in endless spirals. The closer you look, the more detail appears—each finger splitting into many smaller ones, each motion dragging long echoes behind it, heavy with the feel of old thunder and slow time.
Sometimes, between one death and the next, it does not take a shape at all.
It is only sound—a chorus with no source, chanting in a language that is not meant to be understood. The words twist the world with each syllable. The air turns to moving water. The ground hums with music. Noctis' thoughts dissolve into static, screaming and incomprehensible, until he dies just to make it stop.
Its powers reach beyond anything he has seen, beyond the simple ideas of "attack" and "defense."
There are Conceptual Blades—cuts that do not just slice skin, but shear through meaning. When they strike, he forgets why fighting matters. He forgets what pain is for. For a moment, even survival seems pointless, like a word stripped of all definition.
There are Gravity Wells—tiny, invisible stars that bend space around them. Step toward the Existence, and you find yourself circling back, walking directly into your own shadow. Reach out, and your arm loops back into your body, trapped in loops of folded space, as if the air itself has turned into a predator.
There is Chronostasis—time unraveling and stitching itself together wrong. Sometimes he dies before he even understands how he has been hurt, only to realize in the next instant that his body actually ended a thousand cycles ago, and everything since has been echo.
And there are Reflections.
In those cycles, the Existence simply copies him. It wears a broken version of his face and steps, then fills that mimic with force. The copies move like storms, twisting his own habits against him. They are always just a fraction stronger, a fraction faster, always one adaptation ahead.
Still, Noctis returns.
Every time he is erased, he comes back to the threshold.
He does not scream. He does not despair. He does not even rest. He simply notes what happened, adjusts, and walks forward again.
Yet all of that is nothing compared to its worst ability.
Its most terrifying power is something he comes to know as Existence Denial.
In some cycles, the entity does not lash out or roar. It simply looks at him.
Reality changes.
Wounds that had knit themselves shut split open along their old seams. Scars break. Bones fracture in the same places they once did. Paths that, in previous runs, gave him small chances of hope—the narrow corridor, the high ledge, the hidden hollow—rot and collapse into dead ends, filled with stale air and silence that feels like judgment.
Sometimes, it erases him with nothing more than a vague, dismissive gesture. No hand, no visible force. Just the quiet, unspoken decision that he no longer exists here. One moment he is there, ready to move, and the next, there is only a blank in the world where he stood.
Whenever Existence Denial occurs, even the Echoframe seems to recoil. Status lines flash and distort. Code runs backward, strings of logic tangling and disintegrating before his eyes, as if the system itself is not meant to witness this kind of undoing.
The more he fails, the more the trial escalates.
Reality melts into shapes that should not exist. Cubes made entirely of fire hover in the air, burning without fuel or ash. Stairs made from living bone twist up into the sky, steps pulsing faintly with each beat of an invisible heart. Oceans made of black feathers surge upward instead of down, waves crashing into the clouds, raining darkness.
Gravity twists itself into knots. Some cycles, simply trying to think feels like forcing his mind through a storm. Cause and effect blur together. He takes a step, then realizes the decision to step has not yet been made. He remembers dying before the fight even begins.
Nightmares stop being limited to sleep.
They bleed into the trial. Whole runs become hunts where the only thing chasing him is his own regret. He races through corridors, pursued by echoing footsteps that sound like his. Faces appear in the walls: people he failed to help, lives he never saved, some he barely even recalls. Their laughter echoes after each rebirth—thin, sharp, and disappointed.
Sometimes, the Existence does not attack at all.
It stands in the center of the arena in a form that is half-transparent and half solid metal, as if it is being rendered and erased at the same time. The air around it bends and warps with pressure. The ground beneath its feet cracks even when it does not move.
When it looks at him in that shape, it does not feel like being watched.
It feels like being measured.
Its gaze moves over him slowly, not in judgment, but in calculation. It is as if it is weighing his persistence, counting his breaths, examining his will down to the smallest particle.
Noctis always moves toward it.
He does not speak. Words would not help. His inner void leaves no space for awe. Fear cannot stick to him; it slides off whatever he has become.
But he feels something watching him back—not just the Existence, but the trial itself. It responds to him. Every time he refuses to break, it changes the rules again, studying this refusal like an anomaly it doesn't yet understand.
Across what feels like countless eternities, each meeting brings something new.
A new form.
A new law.
A new way to die.
Time stops being a path and becomes rubble scattered around him. Each "life" ends. Another begins. The edges between them fade. He stops knowing which death belongs to which cycle, or which thought occurred before which rebirth.
Each annihilation takes something from him and gives something back.
He is pushed further and further from anything that could be called human—further from warmth, further from hesitation. His emotions thin to single threads, stretched across impossible distances.
And yet, one thing remains untouched.
There is still a core of refusal, deep and immovable. A single, relentless drive to continue. To step forward again. To see the next rule, the next horror, the next form of this impossible enemy—and adapt.
However the Existence changes, however the world breaks, Noctis returns.