Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner

BOOM!!

A concussive wave passed by as a black armored soldier drove both palms into a red's chest and the recruit left the ground like he had been launched from something. He hit the granary wall and slid down it leaving a smear of red, and the soldier was already turning toward the next target before the boy finished falling.

That was the thing about Arthur's men nobody had accounted for. They were not raiders. They were not opportunists who had strapped onto dragons and hoped for the best. These were soldiers who had trained with dark chi the way Valen's recruits had trained with their abilities, which meant they had trained with it for years, and the difference between a person who has drilled something for years and a person encountering it for the first time is not a gap you close with enthusiasm.

Cael found this out the hard way when he came in with his blessed blade already lit and the soldier he targeted simply read the angle, slipped inside it, and drove a dark chi elbow into his jaw that sat him down hard on the cobblestones. To Cael's credit he did not stay down. To the soldier's credit, he had already moved on to the next problem before Cael got his knees under him.

The soldier had been working through the square for two minutes and the evidence was written on the cobblestones. Three village men down. A yellow recruit sitting against the granary wall with her throwing arm hanging wrong, her other hand pressed against it, jaw set against the sound she wanted to make. Two more recruits pushed back to the square's far edge and bleeding.

Valen had been on the harbor building's roof.

He came off it.

The golden glow did not build gradually when Valen activated it. It arrived at full intensity, running from his boots upward through his frame, the same energy that had been in his spear since the day he pulled it from an altar in a gate chamber twenty years ago now living in his body the way it lived in the weapon, because after long enough the line between a knight and their blessed item stopped being a line at all.

He hit the ground and the soldier heard it and turned and got his dark chi up fast. Trained fast. The burst left both hands before Valen had fully closed the distance, compressed and aimed and real.

Valen's spear was already between them.

The shaft caught the burst and the gold running through the weapon's grain ate the dark chi the way fire ate paper, the energy dispersing along the spear's length and bleeding off as heat, and Valen was inside the soldier's guard before the man could pull his hands back for another charge.

The spear's base came around in a short horizontal arc and hit the soldier across the jaw.

The man's legs went before the rest of him did. He was sitting on the cobblestones before Valen had completed the follow through, and he did not make any further contributions to the engagement.

Valen moved to the yellow recruit with the wrong-hanging arm. Crouched. Looked at it.

"Can you throw left?"

She tested it. Winced. Nodded.

"Then throw left," he said, and stood.

Three streets over the sound of Werner's gauntlet discharging told him that direction was being handled. He went the other way.

The street was narrow, the buildings pressing close on both sides, and two soldiers had a cluster of villagers pinned against a doorway at the far end. An older man, two women, a boy. The boy had found a rock from somewhere and had thrown it, which Valen knew because one of the soldiers was turned toward the doorway with the specific body language of someone who had just been mildly annoyed and had decided to become less mild about it.

Valen covered the street's length at a pace that was not hurrying and arrived before the soldier finished deciding.

The spear came forward in a straight thrust aimed at the gap between the soldier's helmet and gorget, not to penetrate, just to occupy the space so the man's attention went to the point at his throat rather than the doorway behind him.

It worked. The soldier's hands came up, dark chi building, and Valen pulled the thrust back and swept low with the shaft, taking the soldier's footing at the ankle. The man went down on one knee and Valen's boot found the back of his helmet and put him the rest of the way down.

The second soldier threw a dark chi burst from six feet away that hit Valen across the left shoulder and pushed him sideways a step. The golden glow absorbed most of it, the energy scattering across his frame, but most was not all and he felt the impact in the joint.

He rolled the shoulder once. Still worked.

His spear hand came back and threw.

Not to kill. The spear took the soldier in the meat of the thigh, punching through the black armor at the leg joint, and the soldier went down with the spear still in him and Valen crossed the distance and pulled it free before the man had finished deciding how badly it hurt.

He looked at the doorway.

The boy still had his arm up, the throwing posture locked in place, nothing left to throw.

"Granary," Valen said. "All of you. Move."

They moved.

Valen turned back to the street and found three village men who had been losing ground against two remaining soldiers now had Valen on the soldiers' flank, and the soldiers discovered this at the same moment the village men did, and the next thirty seconds sorted itself out accordingly.

The harbor square was noise and fire and the smell of ozone and something older than either, the specific smell of stone that has been struck by energies it was not built to absorb. Three separate engagements were happening simultaneously and they had nothing to do with each other except proximity, which meant the square had become the kind of place where the wrong step in any direction put you in someone else's problem.

Noah moved through it like he was reading a map of something only he could see.

He came around the corner of the dock building and found two soldiers pressing a pair of village men back toward a wall, the villagers swinging wood axes with more heart than technique and getting nowhere. The soldiers were not even fully engaged, just keeping them pinned, maintaining position, the tactical patience of people who knew the axes could not penetrate their armor and were happy to hold until something more useful came along.

Noah hit the nearer one from the side.

Not a punch. A shoulder charge with white chi flooding through his entire left side, the impact arriving before the soldier registered the approach angle had changed. The man went sideways into his companion and both of them lost their footing on the wet cobblestones and went down in a tangle of black armor that took a full second to sort itself out.

One second was enough.

The village men did not need instruction. They had been swinging axes their whole lives.

Noah was already gone before either soldier stopped moving.

Across the square, Werner was at the street entrance where the largest cluster of soldiers had come ashore, and what Werner was doing there defied easy description so it is better simply to describe it.

The gauntlet was not glowing. Glowing implies something decorative, something ambient. The channel patterns running across Werner's knuckles and up the back of his hand were operating at a level past that, the energy in them visible as heat distortion in the air around his fist, the kind of shimmer you saw above summer roads and nowhere else. When his fist hit the dark chi barrier the nearest soldier threw up, the sound it made was not the sound of a punch landing on a defense.

It was the sound of a defense being informed that it had been incorrect about its own nature.

The barrier shattered inward. The soldier behind it stumbled back and Werner was through the gap before anyone in the vicinity had finished processing that there had been a gap to go through. His elbow found the soldier's helmet at the hinge point, the gauntlet's channel patterns discharging on contact, and the man dropped straight down the way people drop when every voluntary muscle has simultaneously received news it cannot act on.

The three village men behind Werner who had been holding a crude barricade of overturned cart and barrel stared at what had just happened.

Werner looked at them.

"Hold this entrance," he said. His voice had the flatness of someone who has moved past all the emotional registers and arrived at pure function. "Nothing gets through."

The village men, who had just watched a one-armed teenager punch through a wall of dark chi with his bare hand, held the entrance.

Brom was at the waterline.

There was a certain quality to watching Brom fight that the other recruits had privately acknowledged to each other at various points during training and never quite found the right words for. It was not simply that he was large, though he was. It was not simply that his enhancement magic made him larger, though it did, the mass and density of him increasing when the ability was fully active until he occupied space with the kind of conviction that suggested the space had been his to begin with and he was just reminding it.

It was that Brom fought like the outcome had already been decided and the present moment was just administrative.

Two soldiers came at him simultaneously from different angles, dark chi lit in both pairs of hands, the approach coordinated in a way that said these two had trained together. The one on the left high, the one on the right low, the classic split designed to force a choice between defenses.

Brom did not choose between them.

His left arm caught the high attack at the forearm, absorbing the dark chi burst with enhanced flesh that was currently denser than most armors, and his right foot came down on the low attacker's knee with the full weight of an enhanced body behind it. The sound the knee made was architectural. The soldier folded and Brom's elbow was already coming back around to address the first attacker's follow-up, which did not arrive because there was no follow-up from a man who had just been hit in the jaw by something the approximate size and temperament of a falling tree.

One of Arthur's soldiers caught Brom across the back with a concentrated dark chi burst that would have launched a lesser person across the square.

Brom stumbled forward one step.

He turned around with the unhurried quality of a man deciding whether something deserved his full attention.

The soldier ran.

Brom let him go. There were others.

Valen saw Burt move three times in ninety seconds.

The first was the chi burst thrown at a soldier eight feet away, the punch landing on air and the force arriving anyway. Not a technique from any curriculum Valen had encountered in twenty years of training recruits. Not a technique from any curriculum period.

The second was the catch. A dark chi projectile pulled from the air mid-flight, redirected, sent back along a line that found a soldier on Valen's blind side before Valen had registered the man was there. That one required either reflexes that did not belong in a seventeen-year-old's body or a familiarity with dark chi that sat in a category Valen was not prepared to open right now.

The third was the dive.

Burt ran off the dock edge, hit the water, and the harbor surface erupted outward from his passage in a rolling wave that pushed the nearest fishing boats against their moorings. Two hundred meters of open water and Valen counted eleven seconds before Burt surfaced again.

He stood with his spear in his hand and looked at the water and thought about a boy who had been serving drinks in a tavern three months ago.

Then a soldier came at him from the left.

The thinking was for later.

__

Pip was not in the square.

Pip had climbed the bamboo watchtower at the harbor's northeast corner twelve minutes ago and had not come down. He stood at its top with his chakram in his hand and his eyes on the sky with an expression that would have concerned anyone who knew him well, because it was the expression he wore when he had stopped narrating his own thought process and gone fully internal, which meant whatever conclusion he was approaching was either very good or deeply alarming.

The aerial formation above Harrowfield had not fully committed to landing. Some had, drawn down by the resistance at the harbor, but the majority were still cycling overhead in loose patterns, waiting for something, the riders keeping their positions with the discipline of people who had orders about when to descend. Their breath attacks came in intervals designed to suppress rather than destroy, keeping heads down, keeping the defenders reactive.

Pip watched them cycle and counted.

He watched the way they banked. Which direction they turned. Which riders gave their dragons more rein and which kept them tighter. He was looking for the one that was slightly less coordinated than the others, the one whose dragon fought its heading by a degree or two on every pass, the one whose rider compensated by leaning rather than directing, which told you the bond between them was functional but not deep, which told you the dragon was present by training rather than by choice, which told you that if the right thing happened to the rider, the dragon would have a very bad few seconds before it found a new relationship with the concept of altitude.

"There," Pip said.

Nami was beside him. She had a borrowed arrow in her hand, taken from a yellow named Soren who had been shooting at anything within range and had handed it over with the expression of a person who trusted that whatever Pip and Nami were doing was better than what he could accomplish with it.

The arrow was standard. Unblessed, unenchanted, the kind of thing that would bounce off dragon scale without leaving a record of the attempt.

Nami looked at the arrow and looked at the dragon Pip was pointing at.

"That's three hundred feet of altitude and moving," she said.

"I know."

"This arrow—"

"Is going to be something different in about thirty seconds," Pip said, already looking around the tower platform. "Soren."

Soren, below them on the dock, looked up.

"Get up here," Pip said. "And put your hands on Nami."

Soren climbed the tower with the urgency of someone who trusted that sentence meant something tactically useful and not something else entirely. He reached the platform, looked at Nami, looked at Pip, and placed both palms flat against Nami's shoulders.

His ability was amplification. Not his own strength, not his own attacks. He found what was already in the person he was touching and turned up whatever dial governed it, the way a lens focuses light that is already present rather than generating its own. His hands started to glow, a warm yellow that ran from his palms outward along his fingers, and the glow transferred.

Nami's body lit up.

Not her hands. Not her eyes. Her entire body, the yellow energy running up from where Soren's palms touched her and spreading outward through her arms, her torso, down her legs to the soles of her feet, until she was standing on the tower platform throwing light across the harbor like a second source of it. Her grip on the arrow tightened and the arrow lit too, the same yellow running down the shaft from her fingers to the head.

She drew it back without a bow.

The arrow floated at her fingertips, held in place by something other than physics, the energy running through it making the air around the head shimmer with heat that had nothing to do with fire.

Pip pointed. "Second from the left on the northern pass. Watch the banking arc. It comes left in three, two—"

Nami released.

The arrow left her fingers and for one full second it behaved like an arrow, cutting through the air on a straight line toward a target that was three hundred feet up and moving. The soldier riding the dragon tracked it coming, adjusted posture to dodge, the movement confident with the experience of someone who had done exactly this mid-flight before.

Then the arrow did something an arrow is not supposed to do.

It accelerated.

The yellow energy running through the shaft had been building from the moment Nami released it, Soren's amplification working on the kinetic force already in the projectile and finding more of it, finding all of it, and the arrow that had been moving fast became something that moved the way a decision moves, which is to say it was simply somewhere else before you finished understanding it had left.

It hit the rider in the gap between his helmet and his gorget.

The rider went off the dragon.

The dragon, which had been flying in controlled formation with the coordination of something that had done this for years, suddenly found itself making decisions it had been told it did not need to make. It banked hard. Overcorrected. Banked the other way. The altitude dropped in lurches, the animal's enormous body fighting its own instincts, and the drop became a fall became a crash trajectory that ended in the sea two hundred meters off the harbor mouth with a sound like something enormous had decided to become briefly a part of the ocean.

Pip watched it hit.

"Good," he said.

Nami was already lowering her arm, the yellow glow fading from her body as Soren released her shoulders..

Pip watched it go under.

He looked down from the tower at Burt on the dock below.

"Since we can't exactly invite our red friend to the party," Pip called down, pointing at the water where the dragon had gone down, "you might as well steal one."