Noctis does not move for a while.
He stands in that quiet gap between one story and the next, between the Gate's endless trial and whatever waits beyond it. For the first time since his ordeal began, there is no immediate threat. No timer counting down. No presence ready to kill him again.
All possibilities lie before him now.
Every power he has seen, every mystery he has glimpsed, every path that was once locked away—they all exist as options now. They are not in his hands yet, but they wait within reach, wrapped inside the dark aurora of the Core he has reclaimed.
He is no longer only the boy who refused to die.
He is something else now.
He is the question that appears at the end of every answer.
He is the echo that comes right before a story begins.
He is the Unknown itself, wearing human shape.
And beneath his feet, the world that was almost erased, almost rewritten into nothing by the Gate's terrible trials, now lies still and whole. It is not waiting for orders. It is simply waiting to see what happens when someone who has endured everything finally chooses their own path.
Noctis stands in this post-Gate world, the Unknown Core humming quietly inside him. The sensation is strange—like holding a storm inside a crystal. Whenever he tries to look inward, to see or touch this new power directly, his inner interface responds.
The Echoframe's display fills with symbols.
They do not form words he understands. They do not match any language he has seen. They flicker, reshaping themselves faster than he can follow. Sometimes, the interface simply shows rows of question marks.
?????????
He experiments.
He focuses on his hands and tries to direct the Core's energy outward. He imagines fire, light, blades of concept, shields of void. Each time, something happens—but not how he expects.
His hands glow.
Sometimes the light is pale and sharp. Sometimes it is deep and dark. Sometimes it changes color like moving oil. He feels power there—wild, immense, eager.
But the moment he tries to shape it into anything familiar, it slips away.
Instead of forming a bolt or a barrier, it breaks apart into raw force and vanishes back into the Core. It is like trying to catch smoke or sculpt a river with bare fingers.
Memory fragments flicker through his mind as he tries.
He sees children's faces laughing under a broken sky. He sees streets from his old life, soaked in rain, lit by tired neon signs. He sees hands reaching for him—some to give, some to take. He hears voices speaking his name with love, with anger, with fear.
He recognizes these images as important.
But he does not feel them.
The void inside him remains: deep, flat, silent. The memories are like pictures on glass—clear to look at, but with nothing reaching through to touch his heart.
Softly, the Echoframe speaks again.
This time, its voice sounds distant, as if coming from far down a corridor, or from the bottom of a deep well. There is something almost mournful in the tone, as if it too has lost something along the way.
"You cannot wield this power yet," it says.
"The Unknown is not for those cut off from their own beginning.
To wake what sleeps inside,
you must reclaim your humanity
and with it, your emotions."
The message sinks into him like a stone dropped into still water.
A new hunger stirs—unlike the hunger for survival or strength. This one is more complicated, harder to name. It is a craving not for more power, but for something that feels "real" in a different way.
He understands.
The Core is his. The Gate is complete. The Existence has surrendered and broken apart. But that alone does not make him whole. Power without self is hollow.
If he wants to truly reach the Unknown—not as an empty vessel, but as someone who can choose what to create with it—he cannot remain numb forever.
He has to go back, not into the Gate, but into himself.
He has to:
Reclaim memories, not as data, but as lived experience.
Find joy in small, fragile things again.
Accept fear without letting it rule him.
Remember what love felt like, in all its risk and tenderness.
Look at sorrow and let it hurt, instead of sealing it away.
Only when his core holds both emptiness and fullness—when he is both a survivor and a feeling human being—will the Unknown truly open. Until then, the Core will remain like a locked book written in a language he cannot yet read.
The Echoframe's tone sharpens.
For the first time in what feels like forever, its voice rings out clear, bright, and sure:
"You have gained 50% of your memories because of your achievement!"
Noctis barely has time to process the number before it hits.
Pain tears through him—not the pain of broken bones or burned skin, but the pain of a dam bursting. The thin barrier between his present self and his buried past does not crack; it splits wide open.
Light floods his vision.
The world around him twists, ripples, splits. The ground he stands on seems to drop away. Skies bend. Colors reverse. For a moment, up and down swap places.
He falls.
Not into the Gate this time, but into his own past—into the faces, voices, and moments he had forgotten or refused to feel.
It began with darkness, then softened into something like dusk.
At first, there was nothing but a heavy, colorless blur. Then shapes appeared. Edges sharpened. Sound crept back in. Noctis realized he was not a man standing at the end of a billion cycles.
He was a child again.
The word "child" had never really belonged to him. Even in this memory, it felt like a borrowed label, something made for softer lives. Childhood, for him, was not a time of games and safety. It was more like a rumor—something he had heard existed for other people, in other places, but never truly touched.
Now, as the veil over his memories trembled and split, that lost time came back. Not in vague flashes, but in full color and sharp sound. Feeling seeped into his bones like slowly returning blood to frostbitten limbs.
He stood in a small room.
The walls were thin, stained by years of hard living. Faded paint peeled at the corners. A few pieces of furniture crowded the space: a low table, two mismatched chairs, a sagging couch. Clothes draped over the backs of chairs. A chipped mug lay on its side, forgotten on the floor.
Everything inside looked both precious and unwanted at the same time. These were the only things his family had—yet none of them felt like they made life better.
Shadows crawled along the walls, twisted into sharp angles by a single dim light. They moved in time with the voices cutting through the air.
His parents were arguing.
At first, their voices were muffled, like sound coming from another room. As the memory settled into place, the words grew clearer—not the exact sentences, but the rhythm of them: sharp, bitter, exhausted. The kind of argument that has been repeated a hundred times with only small changes.
His mother's voice broke often, fraying at the edges.
Her eyes were red and swollen from too many nights without sleep. The skin beneath them was dark, her cheeks hollowed by worry and hunger. There was a time when her gaze might have held dreams—plans for a better job, a safer home, a small happiness she could reach for.
Those dreams were gone now, or buried so deep that she flinched when they tried to surface.
His father was like a storm trapped behind glass.
He was strong, broad-shouldered, hands calloused and worn from work that never seemed to pay enough. His jaw clenched whenever he spoke. His shoulders hunched with a mix of shame and anger he refused to name. Every movement felt tight, as if he were always one second away from shattering or striking something.
He did not touch Noctis kindly.
If his hand brushed the boy at all, it was by accident: a shove to move him out of the way, a rough tug when things were urgent. Hugs, gentle pats, the simple weight of a hand on a child's hair—those were stories Noctis heard about other people's families, never his own.
Noctis did not understand everything they shouted.
Were they arguing about money? About bad luck? About the strain of raising a child in a world that seemed determined to grind them down? The specifics blurred, then and now.
What he understood—what burned itself into him—was the feeling.
The sound of rage and despair slammed back and forth between his parents like a door banging in a storm. Each word sounded like a knife thrown at the wall. Each bitter laugh sounded like something important cracking.
He shrank into a corner, trying to take up less space.
Their anger was never really about him, but he was always in its path. He listened to their voices bruise the air, knowing that nothing he said would make it better, that any sound he made would only be one more thing for them to snap at.
At last, the argument ended.
Not with a soft apology, not with a tired agreement, but with a single, final sound.
A door slammed.
The noise shook the small room. It echoed in his chest. After that, everything felt thinner, less real.
His mother moved first.
Her hands shook as she gathered a few items—clothes, maybe, or small things she could not leave behind. Her eyes slid over Noctis, then away again. The look on her face was not cruelty; it was something worse: empty defeat. She seemed like someone too tired to even hope her choices could be good ones.
His father stood by the doorway, jaw tight, eyes hard.
He did not shout now. He did not say "I'm sorry" or "I'll fix this." He glared at the floor, at the wall, at the ceiling. Anywhere but at his son. Pride and pain warred inside him, locking his face into a mask that would not bend.
Night fell.
Thunder rolled outside, rattling the thin windows. Rain drummed on the roof, a steady, relentless tapping. The blanket on Noctis' narrow bed was thin. Cold seeped up from the floor and crawled under his skin.
He drifted in and out of sleep, half expecting to wake to the sound of his parents talking again, maybe quieter this time, maybe with some hint of a solution.
Dawn came.
Light crept into the room, pale and gray. Noctis opened his eyes.
The house was silent.
His mother's coat was gone from its usual hook. His father's boots were missing from beside the door. The small pile of belongings that always cluttered the main room had shrunk. It felt as if the room had been scooped out, leaving only a shell.
They had not woken him.
He got up and walked from room to room, bare feet cold against the floor. The air felt wrong, like air left behind after a fire has gone out. Whatever warmth had been here—however small, however unstable—was fading fast.
On the table lay a note.
The paper was crumpled at the edges, as if someone had folded and unfolded it several times before laying it down. Ink had smudged. The words were blurred, hard to read in the thin morning light.
Maybe if he had tried, he could have made out the letters. Maybe it said "We're sorry" or "We'll come back" or "You'll be better off."
He never knew.
Maybe he didn't want to know. Maybe some part of him understood that whatever sentence lay on that page would not change the fact that they were gone.
The silence in that empty house wrapped itself around him.
It was not a momentary pause between sounds, but a deep, suffocating quiet that sank into his bones. It stayed there long after this memory faded, casting a shadow over every room, every street, every world he walked.
When he stepped outside, nothing changed.
The neighborhood did not notice his parents were gone. Fences stood crooked and rusted, paint flaking away in strips. Windows stayed shut, curtains drawn. Doors closed before he could reach them. People moved quickly down the street, eyes fixed on their own problems.
No one asked why a small boy was alone.
No one asked if he needed help.
Days passed.
Hunger crept in slowly, then pounced. At first it was just a dull ache, an emptiness in his stomach that he tried to ignore. Soon it sharpened, turning his limbs heavy, his head light. Colors dimmed. Time stretched between one scrap of food and the next.
He learned very quickly that the world did not have a safety net.
Officials existed—people in uniforms, workers from agencies—but they came with forms, questions, and systems that had no patience for kids who fell through the cracks. Noctis understood instinctively that if they found him, they might shove him into some crowded home or distant place where he would be another forgotten number.
So he learned to stay invisible.