Noctis did not release the serpent's tail immediately after the last collision, because the force he had already put into the creature's body still needed a fraction of time to finish moving through it, and that final passage of impact told him more than the sound of shattered stone ever could. The chamber continued to tremble in diminishing waves, dust spilling from fresh fractures in the wall while loose fragments of rock struck the floor and rolled across the broken surface in uneven arcs, but within all of that noise and movement his attention remained fixed on the serpent itself, not on the spectacle of damage around it. The titan's body no longer carried the same dense, coherent tension it had held earlier in the fight, and the difference was immediately visible in the way its coils failed to recover cleanly after the rebound, the long weight of it sagging in sections where earlier it had snapped back into balance with dangerous speed.
Through Omni Eyes, the truth of that condition settled into measurable clarity. The vitality that had once made the creature feel like an inexhaustible wall of pressure and armor had fallen to a level where the instability he was seeing in its movement finally matched what the system was telling him, the losses from the earlier barrage, the blunt force of his fists, and the repeated wall impacts now compounded into something much closer to collapse than resistance. It still lived. It still held enough strength to lash out if given room. But twenty-five percent remaining was no longer the kind of reserve a titan could afford to waste carelessly, especially not with injuries distributed through its body and its instincts already beginning to split between survival and fury.
Noctis measured that number not as confirmation that he was close to victory, because that had ceased to be in doubt well before this point, but as a control problem. Too much force and he would kill it. Too little and the serpent would retain enough will and strength to reject the beast taming when he invoked it. The skill was not a trick to be cast on a creature still secure in its own power. It was a line of domination, and domination required the target to be broken low enough that resisting it became less viable than yielding.
"Not dead," he thought as he held the tail steady and watched the giant body tremble against the ruined wall, "but not useful yet either. I need you lower than this."
The serpent was beginning to understand the same thing, though from the other side of the equation. Its eyes, which had earlier widened in disbelief when it first managed to look down the length of its own body and see him controlling the tail, had lost the sharp aggression they carried at the start of the battle and now held a more unstable awareness, one that shifted too quickly between rage and fear to belong cleanly to either. The great head was not fully lifted from the stone and broken wall yet, but the neck had started to tighten as though some final instinctive effort to pull free remained inside it. The trembling that moved through the rear half of the body told the more honest story. The creature knew what he had done to it, and more importantly, it had begun to anticipate what would happen if he kept doing it.
That anticipation mattered.
The fear in a beast was often more useful than the wound.
Noctis adjusted his grip only slightly, tightening his hands around the tail with enough force that the scales beneath his palms ground faintly against one another, and the serpent's body answered that minute change as if the next blow had already landed. A visible shudder ran through the length of it, beginning near the rear where he held it and traveling forward through the coils before dying out somewhere beneath the broken alignment of its shoulders. The head lifted by a fraction, the mouth opening just enough to drag in a harsher breath, and in that moment the creature's awareness of cause and effect became perfectly clear to him. It knew. The previous slams had taught it that the pain was not random, not environmental, not some dungeon punishment happening around it. The pain came from him. And because it came from him, the slightest movement of his hands had already become a threat.
Noctis found that useful enough to hold for a breath longer.
Then he chose to continue.
The force did not begin in his arms. It began where his feet rooted into the broken chamber floor, the cracked stone shifting under the pressure of his stance as he settled his weight and drew tension through his legs into his center. The serpent's tail remained monstrously heavy even weakened, and he did not insult that weight by pretending it could be handled carelessly. He let the line of force build through him with the same control he had used in every part of the fight that mattered, tightening through his core, through his shoulders, and then finally through the locked sequence of muscle and bone in both arms until the pull became something the serpent could feel before the motion actually took it.
Its eyes opened wider.
The trembling intensified.
By the time the rear of its body started to rise, the creature already knew what was happening, and that knowledge made the next instant crueler rather than softer, because fear offered no leverage against what he was applying. The tail lifted, then the rear coils followed, and the serpent's remaining contact with the floor broke in jerking stages that made its size look briefly clumsy rather than immense, as though the body had become too large for itself the moment it was no longer dictating where its own weight should go. Noctis turned through that lift with a sharper arc than before, not careless, but more committed, because now he understood how close to the line of death he could bring the creature without crossing it.
The serpent cut through the air and met the wall with a violence that exceeded the earlier slams.
This time the impact drove the side of its body and the angle of its head deeper into the stone, and the sound of it carried a denser finality, less like the strike of a moving object against a barrier and more like the wall itself losing an argument it had no capacity to win. The chamber answered in full. Cracks shot outward in branching networks around the point of contact, larger pieces of rock tore free rather than simply chipping away, and a thick burst of dust and powdered stone erupted around the serpent's body before the returning shockwave drove it back into the chamber.
Noctis did not let that impact stand alone.
He watched the system register the loss at the same time that the serpent's body shuddered under the rebound, and the number that dropped away from its remaining vitality did not merely satisfy him. It tightened his caution.
Eleven percent.
For the briefest moment, his eyes narrowed.
"That was more than I meant to take."
The thought did not come with panic, because panic would have been too slow and too useless to deserve space in his mind, but it did sharpen the next calculation immediately. The serpent had only fourteen percent remaining now. Another strike of the same force delivered without adjustment would not weaken it further into compliance. It would erase it. The difference between successful binding and wasted opportunity had become very narrow, and the only reason that did not irritate him was because now the problem had become one of precision, and precision always interested him more than brute repetition.
The serpent hung in the moment after the impact with a ruined, sagging instability that looked almost boneless despite the monstrous strength still hidden in its frame. The head dragged lower. The coils no longer snapped cleanly into shape. Blood had spread farther across the scales from multiple cuts and impact lines, and some of the heavier plates near the rear where he gripped the tail had begun to separate just enough that the darker tissue beneath them showed through where the repeated traction had strained the body against itself.
Noctis drew the creature off the wall again, but this time the redirection was tighter, shorter, and more exact. He did not need spectacle now. He needed a measured strike to push the serpent below the threshold he wanted without breaking it apart. The arc he used on the next throw reflected that, his body turning with less width but greater control, bringing the titan around in a trajectory that forced the head—not the broad side of the torso—into the line of impact.
The serpent tried to resist.
The effort showed in the final tightening of the neck and in the desperate spreading of the coils as though some last remnant of instinct believed it could still make itself heavy enough to matter. But being heavy only made the collision worse. The head struck the wall first, and because the body followed behind it without enough strength left to reorganize the transfer of force, the impact pushed through the skull and neck into the stone with a hard explosive resonance that shook dust free from every upper seam in the chamber. The wall buckled, the serpent's head snapped at an ugly angle before the body rebounded, and the system inside Noctis's vision resolved the result with brutal simplicity.
Two percent.
For a moment, the creature remained suspended in his control even after the impact had already done what it needed to do, and in that moment he could feel how close to death it had truly come. The body was still massive. The scales still looked formidable. But the internal coherence that made those things matter had almost completely failed. What remained now was not a combatant at the edge of endurance. It was a titan balanced on the final thread of its own life.
Noctis released the tail at once.
The serpent's body dropped out of the arc and sagged along the wall in a collapsing slide of scale, blood, and loosened debris, too weak to recover itself properly from the rebound. He did not waste time approaching on foot. Genesis Step carried him directly to the front of the creature where the head had embedded itself partially into the fractured stone, and when he came out of the displacement, his hands went immediately to the serpent's skull.
Even in this state, the weight of the head was absurd.
The scales along the crown were cracked, one side marred by the repeated fist strikes from earlier, and dust clung to blood and venom residue in a grim mixture that made the whole thing smell of heat, stone, and damaged flesh. Noctis set his grip beneath the harder ridges of the skull and pulled, not with the same overwhelming violence he had used during the throws, but with enough force to wrench the head free of the broken wall. Fractured stone came with it, falling away in chunks as he dragged the serpent forward and then let the head drop to the floor in front of him with a heavy impact that sent another short cloud of dust across the chamber.
The serpent did not rise.
Its eyes remained open, but the focus inside them had become erratic. The pupils contracted, widened, then steadied badly as though even the act of seeing had become difficult under the weight of its injuries. The tongue no longer flicked in quick sharp reads of the air, but dragged out once with obvious weakness before withdrawing again. Its breathing, which earlier had pushed strength through the room just by the expansion of its throat, now came unevenly, and the body attached to that head no longer held itself in any line worth calling ready.
Noctis stepped closer.
This was the point where carelessness could still ruin everything. A creature at two percent vitality could die from one unnecessary excess, and the beast taming skill did not care how impressive the preceding domination had been if the target crossed from submissive weakness into death a heartbeat before the bind took hold. He studied the serpent's condition through Omni Eyes again, not because he doubted the number, but because he needed to know whether what remained of the creature's resistance still held enough coherence for taming to matter. The answer came through multiple layers of perception at once.
The vitality was low enough.
The structure of the creature's will had been broken enough.
The fear was already there.
Good.
Noctis knelt slightly, enough to bring himself nearer to the lowered line of the serpent's head, and placed one hand over the edge of the creature's mouth where scale gave way to the softer structure around the jaw. The contact drew a weak reaction, a tiny attempt at withdrawal, but the serpent did not possess enough force left to pull away more than a fraction before that effort collapsed.
"Yeah," he said quietly, his voice no longer carrying the pressure of combat, but not softened either. "You're done fighting. That's exactly where I need you."
He let the beast taming skill surface fully through the blood grid.
The activation did not come as a shouted command or a theatrical burst of power. It began where his will met the creature through contact, the aura inside him answering the skill's invocation by rising in a concentrated surge that moved not outward into the room, but down through his arm and into the line where his hand held the serpent's mouth. The first wave of that aura spread over the head like heatless pressure, a crimson density that wrapped the skull without obscuring it, and then the structure of the skill began to assert itself.
The aura divided.
What had first appeared as one coherent surge separated into multiple streams, each thread of power finer and more deliberate than the broad force he had used in combat, and those streams crossed over one another as they spread along the serpent's head and neck. They did not lash or flare. They wove. Each line sought position as though guided by a design older than the moment of activation, and the more they converged, the more visible the nature of the binding became.
The serpent felt it.
The remaining tension in its body rose once, sharply, not into attack, but into resistance, and for a brief instant the head strained against his hand as the creature tried to reject the foreign will settling over it. The effort was weak compared to what it had been only moments earlier, yet it was enough that the lines of aura tightening across the scales visibly brightened where resistance met them. Noctis did not pull back. He pressed harder, not physically, but through the intent behind the skill, forcing his authority through the beast path as a declaration rather than an argument.
"You lost already," he said, the words even, direct, and entirely without room for appeal. "This isn't the part where you choose."
The resistance faltered.
The crimson streams tightened and began to sink into the serpent's scales, not disappearing, but fixing themselves into more permanent patterns. Symbols formed. Not all at once, and not as a simple mark stamped onto the creature, but in layered sequences of runic structure that resolved out of the converging lines and locked into place one segment at a time. The first markings appeared near the crown where his blows had cracked the skull. Others formed along the jawline and the sides of the neck, spreading in a controlled network whose geometry reflected ownership rather than ornament.
The chamber itself seemed to notice the change. The torchlight bent subtly toward the lines of crimson runes, and the drifting dust that still moved through the air slowed where it crossed the aura around the serpent's head, as though the binding process had imposed a temporary order even on the smallest loose matter in its range.
Noctis felt the exact moment when the serpent's resistance gave way.
It was not dramatic. There was no explosion, no scream, no sudden rupture of power. It happened in the same quiet irreversible way a locked mechanism turns when the final tooth falls into place. The pressure pushing back against him disappeared, and in its place came a strange, immediate sense of connection, not affection, not harmony, but linkage. The creature beneath his hand was no longer merely something he had beaten into weakness. It had been entered into his system.
A message surfaced in his perception.
Not as an interruption, but as the formal recognition of what had already finished.
Beast Taming successful.Dark Serpent has been tamed.
Noctis let out a slow breath he had not realized he had been holding through the final layer of the bind, and the faint smile that formed this time stayed for more than a fraction because it belonged not to the violence of the fight, but to the completion of something that mattered. The first familiar. Not a weak test subject. Not some convenient lesser beast chosen simply because it was available. A titan serpent, dragged to the edge of death and then pulled back across that line into his control.
"Now that," he murmured, looking down at the runic marks still glowing faintly over the serpent's head, "was worth the trouble."
The serpent's eyes remained open, but the quality in them had changed. The fear had not vanished, and neither had the exhaustion or pain, but the resistance was gone. The connection between them remained clear in the same way the blood grid remained clear, and beneath that new link Noctis could sense not obedience in the sentimental sense, but access. Command. Potential. The creature was not healthy enough to move properly yet, and he had no intention of forcing it to rise in this state, but that did not matter. The important thing was done.
He withdrew his hand slowly from the serpent's mouth and straightened, allowing his gaze to travel once across the ruined chamber with the kind of calm that follows a problem fully solved. The walls were cracked and cratered where the serpent's body had struck them again and again. The floor was carved with lines from his earlier attacks and split by impact fractures from his fists and the titan's own weight. Dust still drifted through the violet torchlight in slow descending curtains, and the whole room carried the residue of a battle that had changed shape three or four times before finding its true conclusion.
Noctis looked back at the serpent and the glowing runes settled into place over its scales.
"One slot left," he thought.
The idea did not distract him from the present. It sharpened it.
Because now the beast path was no longer theory. It had become real in his hands, in the blood grid, and in the wounded titan lying at his feet. The first familiar had been claimed, and the next stages of the journey—through the forest, through the den of bears, toward the academy, and beyond—would no longer be traveled by him alone.