Noctis’ fist hit the tower, and the Seal construct shattered.

Fuck!

Felix clung to her knuckles, claws digging furrows into slick godflesh as he was carried by her fist’s dauntless momentum. The strike fluctuated through his center, the impact rippling into his significance and tearing it free. Holes punched through his Aspects and En’Cridhe was left behind, its top bent now as the Seal’s influence waned. The pieces of red-gold and blue-white power faded, but did not disperse.

It still held.

Adamant Discord!

Mana poured through him as he reestablished his hold on the skies of far flung Territories and kicked off, swinging up and around Noctis’ fingers. They clutched at him, but they were as slow as they were enormous, and he zipped through just as the goddess hit the edge of the crater.

Her arm buried itself to the elbow, sundering the earthen rim and causing an avalanche of rock and dirt to drop into the crater. It hissed as it hit, like water poured on boiling oil, the unstable Mana gone wild. A geyser of power erupted, spraying through the air as Felix slung through behind his crackling lightning.

He risked a look backward, just as Noctis tore her arm free of the rim. Chunks of bedrock sheared away, but jagged moonshards clung to her—they flowed up her fist and into her arm, partially sinking into the slick shadowflesh while the rest stuck out like splinters.

An empty face turned to him, welling with sudden crimson light.

Heretic! Touch Not The Bonds!

She lurched after him, but her enormous body was still mired in the crater’s depths and Felix was faster. He shot ahead of her grasping hands, finally clearing the crater, and he felt an immediate difference. His Skill firmed up, its song more vibrant and ordered, and the pale blue lines returned to his awareness. Felix seized them in his off hand, hauling himself in a new direction as the goddess crawled out of the pit.

The lesson was clear: stay away from the crater. It didn’t seem to affect the goddess—what joy—but it made even evasion a hundred times harder.

Noctis skittered forward, faster than she seemed, her four arms slamming into the broken earth. Beneath her ribcage, her body became lashing tendrils, each alight with dark fire and a trail of chaotic, glitching power.

That’s giving me nightmares later. Astrum Ascendence! Sonata of Domination!

Fiendstone spikes shot up through her chest. To Felix's surprise, they pierced the goddess straight through. She reared back, two of her arms clutching at the spikes as her empty face crumpled in clear pain.

Felix clung to a bolt of lightning a hundred feet away, brows furrowed and Mind whirling. Things weren’t adding up. Noctis’ attacks hurt, but the damage to his significance was minimal. Siva had been a lot harder to fight, and she hadn't even been fully freed from her wound.

He didn't let that stop him.

He curved the Fiendstone, shaping a cage across Noctis’ clutching arms and locking her into place. More than that, he strengthened the ground beneath the rampaging goddess, keeping chasms shut tight, even as she reached out and smashed the earth. Her shadowy Essence escaped, however—it rose up, those bits of moonshards in her arm flowing down into powerful abominations.

Go, My Children! Rip And Tear!

They ran off past Felix, and his people screamed behind him. Still fighting against their own monsters, they'd finally noticed the approaching goddess.

Felix bared his teeth. He couldn't let her get to the ship and his people.

Sonata of Dominance is level 143!

He pulled more Fiendstone forward, stabbing through Noctis' neck and her clutching wrists, fouling the shadowy power that flowed from her grip. She reared back, her power coating his shapings in a thick, brutal hoarfrost. It did nothing to break it, however.

Felix roared, his power a second crescendo beside his voice. The cage closed as he lifted his arm, thrusting upward and through the goddess. She howled, a sound that surpassed human hearing. It tore through him, low and high at the same time, a Dissonance slung amidst the Grand Harmony.

All at once, Noctis flickered, her form turning liquid as she poured through the cage. Free in an instant. The tendrils at her back slashed forward toward Felix. He dodged through them, lightning sparking across his path.

Stride of the King is level 144!

Sonata rang out, shaping shadow itself this time, seeking to seize her flesh—but it skittered out of his control. Something about what she was fought against him. It wasn't Divinity. In fact, as her power slammed against his, he received no notification of his Titles activating. His Will was not amplified against Noctis, not as it usually was.

In a moment of distraction, she slammed him to the earth.

Felix hit the ground, demolishing it for thirty feet in every direction before vanishing. The rock and dirt liquified around him, shaped by his song into a tunnel that sent him curving back up toward the surface. He shot back into the air not fifty yards away, bursting from the rock to punch the empty goddess right in the jaw.

Noctis' head snapped backward, her whole Body flailing as it was lifted from the earth, all four arms clawing in the air and tendrils lashing.

She fell back toward the crater and En’Cridhe.

Felix's eyes widened again as the goddess's arms landed near the tower, and she noticed.

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You Wish To Save This Structure, Do You? An empty laugh bubbled through her. I Can Sense It. The Sweet, Glorious Power Of The Continent. The Binding Of Significance And Authority. True Magic, Persisting Through The Ages.

She snarled. It Is Not For You!

Noctis reached out, two of her four hands slashing toward the dangling tower. Felix sent Fiendstone in a wave toward her, but he was too late. The goddess was met instead by brilliant silver moonbeams.

They seared down into the goddess, burning her hands as screaming windblades burrowed their way alongside them. Noctis pulled back, once again in pain, as Pit and Scylla flew down, flanking her against Felix, who shaped fire up around her in a ring. She charged it, shadowflesh weathering the heat, at least until Felix enhanced the shaping with Astrum Ascendence.

Noctis scrambled away. Back toward the Fiendstone spikes still sticking out of the ground. She was cornered…but Felix wasn’t winning.

He couldn't cage her and he couldn’t eat her. The unstable Mana was part of the goddess somehow, and the Beast stirred in him at the mere thought of devouring her power. She was getting hurt far more than she should be, but she wasn't dying.

Unseen Beholder!

The Skill sparked in his Mind before the song guttered out, unable to sound. Felix closed his eyes and jerked his head to the side, feedback tearing through him. He couldn't see the goddess’ information, but if he were to guess, she was getting hurt far more than he expected.

Something else though…

There was a resonance he couldn't identify at first, hidden underneath the craziness of the unstable Mana and wild violence. The glitching shape, the fact that her hits were severely blunted, only barely affecting his significance.

This wasn't Noctis.

Felix flared Adamant Discord, pressing it beyond the normal to see the Bonds that blazed beyond reality. His Bonds of Fellowship were there with his people—the strongest leading back toward the Unbound—but there was another that led straight to Noctis herself. A Bond of Enmity.

It was Noctis, but she'd been changed. Not a construct or a trick, this was her, but less. As if she were a husk, an echo, stripped of its Divine might but left with the powerful stats of her Body and some piece of her Mind.

He was fighting a ghost.

"Get back!" Elowen soared forward, the Theron mage lit by purple Mana as her robes snapped in her wake. She thrust her hands forward. “Order Departs!”

Noctis, who'd leaped for the distracted Felix, fell back, hurled aside by her telekinetic Mana…directly onto chitinous spikes. They speared into her side, trapping the echo for a moment as a flock of Chimera flew overhead and dropped a screaming Gnome.

“AHHHH!” Archie shot through the air, whirling Molten Blades like a helicopter as he slashed through the goddess’ expose neck. Shadowflesh sprayed as he leaped aside, caught by another passing wyvern.

Tangling vines sprouted, spraying green-gold light across the goddess’ arm as it was infested with thorny growths that strapped its arm to the ground. A volley of arrows followed, pelting its Body and taking five-foot-wide chunks out of its slick flesh.

The Unbound had come to fight.

"You will hurt no one else!"

Ondine flew out, her multicolored wings commanding the air Mana around herself in a way that not even Pit could manage. It swirled across her arms, a white-green radiance that spiraled up into the sky. The clouds twisted at her command, and the Sylphaen dropped her lifted hand.

A cyclone descended from above. Felix started, but it wasn't one of the anomalies, merely a construct of her Skill. It roared into Noctis, tearing at her with flung stone, driving rain, and crashing lightning.

Felix smiled, catching the idea, and he shaped pieces of his Fiendstone apart, breaking the useless spikes into jagged shards to become projectiles that joined Beef’s rapidly breaking chitin. Twisted by the cyclone, they scoured the echo, tearing pieces of it away, walling it in place inside of the roaring winds just this side of the crater. He watched it try to ooze away from the strikes, but there were too many to avoid and nowhere to go. The winds hurled it backward, the power of this many Unbound too much, it seemed, to face.

Ondine screamed, and the winds grew more furious. Her face, normally so calm, was twisted into a wrathful grimace. The woman wanted blood, but Felix didn't blame her.

He was tempted to let her finish it, but he still hadn’t figured out why the echo was here, or its purpose.

Felix paused, his Perception catching a glint of light. Something rippled across the echo of the goddess. As the cyclone tore apart shadow flesh, the glitching liquid flowing around the column, it revealed an object buried in Noctis' chest. The echo flickered around it, jolting about as if trying to eject the thing, but the object sat there as if it were more real than reality itself.

A doorway.

Vess!

He’d been right!

It was an Omen Door. Nothing else looked so heavy and detailed. Disparate pieces of information filtered into Felix's Grandmaster Mind, all of it perfectly recalled, as it whirled faster than the cyclone before him. An Omen Door, buried in a goddess's chest. It couldn’t have started there, as Noctis had been bound to her moon still… which meant it was put there on purpose. There were chunks of moon rock surrounding it, anchoring it in place in a circle that could only have been intentional. And binding it all together were dull golden threads.

No. Felix clenched his jaw. No, she died.

“Noctis!"

An armored woman leapt across the air, arcing over Felix and the others to land on the broken earth. Two massive axes of light formed in her hands as she touched down, only to leap again, axes raised.

She shot through the howling storm, and her light was immediately lost.

"Gabby!" Felix jumped after her. The storm was rough, but it wasn’t meant to keep things out.

You Dare Raise Your Hand Against Me? Noctis’ voice bubbled, thick as if she were speaking through mud. You Defy Our Bargain, Little Titan!

There Are Consequences To Disobedience!

Felix emerged from the storm’s edge and landed on Noctis’ twisted shoulder. Power swirled around the echo, sparking among the frenzy of lightning and lashing winds. Shadow and cold snapped around Gabby, who was busy climbing Noctis’ empty face.

“No!” Felix reached out, his Sonata singing on the gale, but the shadow cleared…and left behind an unharmed woman.

Gabby laughed into the abscess and lifted her axes. “Defy this!”

She slammed her axes home, tearing through the god’s face with an outsized sizzle. Shadowflesh seared away, peeling back from each strike, and the goddess let loose a riotous, blood-curdling scream.

“That’s called pain!” his sister howled, her hair slicked back by rain. “And there’s more to come!”

Below, the Door sparked with light. The binding threads sizzled…and snapped.