The spear flies at him, fast and absolute.
Noctis moves.
His body flows into the style he learned in the world of false spring, where every flower was a blade and every breath was poison. He moves like a dancer trained inside an orchard made of knives. His steps are small but precise. His weight shifts at exactly the right moment.
The spear hisses through the place where his chest was an instant before and keeps going, stabbing a hole in the horizon. Where it pierces, the world goes dead—color drained, motion gone—but Noctis is no longer there.
He flickers.
In the space of a heartbeat, he switches between all the states he has learned to inhabit. For just a breath, he is solid flesh, then a phantom blurred by motion, then a strip of shadow hugging the broken glass, then a spark of harsh light darting between falling debris. Every trial taught him a different way to exist, and in this final battle, he uses them all.
The fight explodes.
The battlefield shifts with every exchange, changing as fast as thought.
The glass forests around them shatter as winds crash in from nowhere, winds that do not follow normal rules—blowing sideways, inside-out, cutting through matter and logic alike. Broken shards of screaming glass whirl like swarms of knives.
Rivers made of raw chaos surge up. For a few seconds, they are boiling entropy, tearing at anything they touch. Then they freeze solid, turning into jagged pathways of hardened "hope," sharp and brittle. After that, they explode into storms of glittering fragments that slice through illusions and memories alike.
Towers crumble and rebuild themselves in different shapes. Somewhere above, laughter echoes—not just from Noctis or the Existence, but from hints of the other forms he fought: the choir of mouths, the masks of the Theatre, the voices of the starving wars. The whole Gate seems to be watching its own finale.
Every move the Existence makes is familiar in some way.
It calls up a "Garden of Cuts" around him. Roots erupt from the ground, petals unfold from the air, each one carved from his own memories. They do not cut his skin. They aim for his will. Every brush attempts to slice away his reasons to keep going—carving at his stubbornness, his identity, his hard-won sense of self.
But Noctis has already walked through a garden that tried to smother him with beauty and gentle death.
He lets the cuts land.
The pain they bring is not physical—it's the echo of old grief, old loneliness, old rage—but he has been living inside those echoes for longer than most stars have shined. He pulls that pain in, condenses it, and uses it as fuel to sharpen his focus. What was meant to soften him instead hones him further.
The Existence escalates.
It throws entire worlds at him, each one a weapon shaped from a trial he barely survived before.
The Hourglass Blade appears—a sword made from flowing sand and fractured time. With every swing, years peel away from Noctis' history. Skills earned in blood start to unravel, threatened with being erased as if they never existed.
The Petroleum Crown ignites above him—a halo of oily black flames that drips down over his head and shoulders. Each droplet sets a memory on fire. Regrets flare like torches, trying to burn him up from the inside, hoping the weight of what he failed to do will crush him.
The Hungry Choir roars to life around them.
Countless invisible mouths open, each one a different version of his own voice. They whisper and shout over each other:
"Stop."
"Rest."
"Give up."
"You've done enough."
"There is peace in ending this."
They tug at his awareness, trying to split him into a thousand potential selves. Each one is tempted to lie down and never stand again.
Noctis finally understands the true way the Existence fights.
Every attack is more than an attempt to kill his body. It is a question, a challenge aimed at his existence: Is your endurance anything more than fear of stopping? Are you really choosing to continue, or are you just stuck in motion?
He knows the truth now.
Surviving by accident is over. This last trial is about turning survival into something active, something chosen.
So he answers with more than dodges.
He turns survival into art.
From the "Scream That Blinds" cycle, he learned the pattern of a roar that became reality. Now he pulls at that memory. Without making a sound, he shapes an answering rhythm inside himself—a counter-beat meant only for forces like the Existence.
He steps in time with that invisible music.
The next sound-based attack slams into him and dissolves. The pressure that should freeze his body instead breaks against a quiet internal note, leaving calm where terror should have been.
From the "Paradox Garden," he remembers stepping through a garden where time-folding flowers cut futures. He learned there that sometimes, stepping into a collapsing rule could push him forward instead of crush him.
Now, when pieces of this final world begin to fold—when logic buckles and reality tries to snap shut—he does not pull back.
He steps directly into the collapse.
He plants his foot on falling fragments of world and uses them as stepping stones. He moves toward destruction instead of away from it, riding the collapse up and forward, because he has finally learned the most dangerous lesson: sometimes, to end something absolute, you must walk straight into what it is and refuse to disappear inside it.
They tear through stage after stage of shaped reality.
Each clash pulls them into a different echo of his past cycles: a field of hunger from a starving war, a palace of music from the feast of truths, a river of entropy that once ate his thoughts, a shrine of spinning names and losses.
Noctis bleeds, but his blood is not ordinary now.
When the Existence's attacks land, light spills from his wounds instead of red. Each drop glows with a memory: a small boy shivering in an alley, a hand reaching out in kindness, a scream of defiance in the Theatre, a stubborn step forward in the Shrine. The lessons he paid for with those deaths shine around him.
The Existence grows harsher.
Its voices overlap more, arguing with themselves.
"Is this all you are?" it demands between strikes. "A mirror that refuses to break, even when ground to dust?"
Noctis does not answer with words. He lets his movement speak.
He sidesteps through a blast of Denial, spins under the sweep of the Hourglass Blade, uses the explosion of the Petroleum Crown to burn away a trap rather than his own mind. He has become a map of the Gate's cruelty, and now he is reading himself.
The battlefield warps again.
The Existence gathers itself.
All its forms—gardener, judge, storm, beast, paradox, choir—pull inward, compressing into a single point. It draws on everything it is, everything it has done, every way it has ever won before. The sky dims. The towers crack. The rivers stop.
Then it creates the Void Mirror.
A massive surface appears between them, smooth and dark, curving like a black moon. It reflects Noctis, but not as he is now. It reflects him as a storm of images—every wound, every death, every moment of suffering layered on top of each other.
The Mirror does not only show these wounds.
It sends them back.
All at once.
A billion deaths slam into him in a single instant.
He feels:
Glass ripping his flesh.
Poison flooding his veins.
Songs shredding his mind.
Roots crushing his will.
Hunger gnawing his bones.
Water choking his lungs.
Hands letting go.
Eyes turning away.
Emptiness swallowing hope.
Loneliness stretching so wide it seems to freeze time itself.
Every death he has ever endured, every heartbreak, every failure, every moment of terror or abandonment—stacked and fired into him like a single, unbearable bullet.
For the first time in a very long time, his knees tremble.
But this cycle is different.
All the other times, his instinct would have been to fight this. To push the pain away, to try to wall it off, to cling to an empty core untouched by feeling. To stay hollow as a shield.
Now, at the very end, he makes another choice.
He doesn't resist.
He forces his eyes to stay open. He holds the Mirror's gaze and lets everything rush through him. Every death. Every cry. Every helpless moment. Every time he failed to save someone, failed to save himself. He doesn't try to numb it. He doesn't try to downplay it.
He accepts it.
He reaches into the Mirror with his mind, his will, his very being, and takes those billion wounds into himself as part of what he is.
Then, in the middle of that storm of pain, he does what he has always done best.
He weaves.
He threads each death into the next—not as a chain that binds him, but as a sequence in a larger pattern. Each screaming end becomes a single note in a vast, impossible song. Each hard-learned lesson becomes a piece of armor, a hidden weapon, a subtle movement in a plan no enemy could ever predict.
He stops seeing his suffering as proof of weakness or punishment.
He sees it as raw material.
The Void Mirror, meant to drown him, becomes a loom.
On it, he shapes a new existence: not a boy running from terror, not just a survivor clinging to the next breath, but a being made from mastery of everything pain tried to teach.
The Existence shudders.
Its many voices stumble over themselves, some gasping, some falling silent. Its forms flicker. For the first time since this began, it loses rhythm.
Noctis steps forward.
He is not taller. He is not surrounded by glowing wings or flaming auras. But something has changed in the way he occupies space. He is no longer just someone who refuses to die; he is someone who has turned death itself into understanding.
His final attack is not a blast of energy or a clever trick.
It is an act.
A single, resonant decision, expressed without words.
He looks at the Existence—the embodiment of all endings, all "no," all Denial—and refuses to accept its premise.
It has always said: this is where you stop.
He answers, for the first time, with his own version of "no."
Not the Existence's No that kills paths, but his own "No" that denies any enforced limit on what he can become.
The sound of it is not heard with ears. It moves through the battlefield like pressure, like a change in gravity. Everything the Existence is built from—its rules, its finality, its certainty—meets this new, quiet refusal and cracks.
The Void Mirror splits down the center.
Cracks race through it, webbing across its surface. Each fracture splits open with a soundless shock. The reflections of his deaths shatter into fragments of light and vanish, no longer weapons but dust.
The Existence's concepts crumble with it.
Its invincible weapons, its perfect traps, its role as the thing that always wins in the end—those ideas shiver and break apart like glass dropped from a great height.
Silence falls.
The Existence's core appears—not hidden, not armored, just there. It is pale and bright, pulsing gently like a tired heart. There is no rage in it now. No cold arrogance. Only wonder—and, strangely, relief.
"You are more than infinite suffering," it says quietly.
Its voice has lost its thunder. It sounds almost human now. "You have changed the Gate itself. Go, Survivor. May no one ever have to follow—but if they do, let what you forged here guide them through the impossible."
The Existence trembles.
All its forms begin to flicker: the storm, the gardener, the choir, the labyrinth, the judge, the beast. They wink in and out like dying stars. The great enemy of countless souls—the trial itself, the boundary at the edge of being—starts to come apart.
Something deep within it releases.
Its rigid shape softens. Armor melts into mist. Its hunger unwinds. Its power turns from a clenched fist into an open hand. All the rules it used to enforce loosen as if untying a knot.
The core at its center glows brighter.
Its light is terrible and lovely at once—the color of wishes that were never spoken aloud, of hopes buried too deep to name. It fills the battlefield, then narrows back to a single, clear point.
Then, slowly, the Existence kneels.
Its head bows. Its arms open as if to welcome something greater than itself. Shadow peels away like old paint, leaving behind a frame made of thin lines of starlight.
Masks fall. Eyes close. The countless layers of paradox and contradiction drop off.
Its voice comes one last time, barely more than a breath.
"You are the last and the first.
My battle is over.
What remains of me survives in you."
Its body fractures.
It does not explode. It unravels. Pieces of it drift upward like dust caught in sunlight. Each speck shines briefly—like a tiny star, like a spark of possibility—before fading into the far horizon.
The battlefield empties.
The towers fade. The rivers dry. The glass forests slump. The shrines and stages and oceans all dissolve into the same whiteness that greeted Noctis at the beginning of this final cycle.
At the very center of that emptiness, something remains.
A Core.
It hangs in the air just out of reach at first, turning slowly. It is darker than space—black as the deepest midnight—but wrapped in shifting lights: curtains of color like auroras, lines of glowing symbols that twist and reform into scripts no mind can fully read. It glows with an impossible promise, as if it contains not just power, but the potential to redefine what power means.
Noctis walks toward it.
He moves slowly, not out of fear, but because every step makes the weight of what he has done more real. He feels his agonies, his victories, his lessons, his mistakes—all of them pressing in. Not as pain. Not as pride. As sheer presence.
He reaches out.
His hand, pale in the strange light, stretches toward the Core. His fingers shake once, then steady. He touches its surface.
Everything breaks.
Not in sound or light, but in meaning.
The battlefield, the Gate, the Existence's last remnants—everything falls away like a story reaching its final sentence. Colors go first, draining into nothing. Then sound fades, leaving a silence so complete it feels like a new material. Every remaining emotion, thought, and intention is pulled out of him like ore dragged from stone.
There is a moment of absolute black.
Not frightening, not peaceful. Just pure, untouched potential.
And in that black, something new waits to be written.