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

BOOM!!

The second ship had not finished listing from the first attack when Shade pulled into the banking arc and Noah felt it.

A shudder. Starting at the base of the dragon's neck and running back through the spine under him, not pain, not fear, something else entirely, the vibration of a biological system charging something it had not used in a while. The temperature along Shade's back dropped several degrees in the space of a single breath, the scales beneath Noah's hands going cold in a way that had nothing to do with the altitude or the sea wind.

Noah had felt Nyx charge Inferno Storm enough times to know what a dragon building toward something felt like from the outside.

This was different. This was pressure without heat. A compression happening somewhere deep in Shade's chest cavity, not one thing gathering into one point but many things, dozens of them, the sensation like watching a single flame become an ember bed.

Shade's body rolled slightly, orienting the chest cavity downward toward the third ship.

Then it fired.

Not one burst. Not the single translucent column from the first attack. What left Shade's mouth was a swarm, small projectiles launching in a spread that covered a forty-degree arc, each one the size of a fist, catching the grey light as they fell and throwing it back in pale iridescent colors that would have been beautiful if you were not watching them fall toward a ship full of soldiers.

The first cluster hit the deck and popped.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

Four simultaneous detonations, small individually, but the spread meant they hit four different points across the deck simultaneously and the structural damage from each one found its neighbor and compounded. Timber split. Iron fittings blew off their mountings. A section of the forward railing simply ceased to exist as a coherent object.

Three bubbles did not pop.

They stuck to the main mast, the hull above the waterline, and the base of the ballista mounting at the ship's stern. They sat there translucent and faintly pulsing, and the soldiers who had been moving toward them stopped moving because something in the way the bubbles were behaving suggested that moving toward them was a category of decision with a limited future.

They were right.

The delay detonations went off in sequence, three seconds apart, and the last one took the ballista mounting off the stern in a single clean removal that sent the weapon spinning into the sea.

But Shade was already shuddering again.

The cold came back harder this time, the compression deeper, and Noah felt the dragon's chest cavity expand against his legs as Shade drew in and held and built, and what came out of the dragon's mouth next did not look like an attack at all.

It looked like fog.

Pale, almost colorless, drifting forward from Shade's open mouth in a spreading cloud that caught the wind and moved with it, rolling down toward the cluster of soldiers on the fourth ship's deck who had their shields up and their dark chi lit and were braced for something they could see.

The vapor reached them before any of them finished deciding what it was.

It went through the shield formations the way weather went through formations, finding every gap between raised armor and pressed bodies, curling into helmet visors, settling into the spaces that armor by definition could not cover because armor that covered everything was a coffin. Three soldiers broke immediately, hands going to their eyes, the vapor finding the soft tissue there with the efficiency of something that did not need to hurry. Two more broke from the ranks coughing with wet sound of lungs that had been introduced to something corrosive and were registering strong objections.

The formation collapsed from the inside.

BOOM!

The delayed bubble on the hull went off and the ship listed hard to port and the soldiers who were still standing found the deck had changed its opinion about being horizontal.

From behind them, Noah heard it. The sound of organized pursuit, multiple wingbeats falling into formation, the riders on the remaining reserve dragons having watched two ships get taken apart by something that had appeared from above the cloud line and was now making a third pass.

He looked back over his shoulder.

Six dragons. Spread in a pursuit arc, the riders low against their mounts' necks, dark chi already building in the hands of the nearest two. The formation was good. Spread wide enough that Shade could not turn without presenting a flank to at least two of them, close enough that breaking for altitude would put Noah inside the range of whatever the rear pair was charging.

Shade felt the pursuit without Noah telling it anything.

The dragon did not accelerate away.

It rolled.

A full barrel roll at pursuit speed that inverted Noah completely, the sea above him and the clouds below for one lurching second, and when Shade came out of the roll they were no longer in front of the pursuit formation. They were beside it, the roll having bled lateral distance and converted it into a position change that put the nearest pursuing dragon within twenty feet of Shade's left flank.

The pursuing rider had not finished processing that his target had moved when Shade hit his dragon with a single explosive burst at contact range.

KROOOOM!!

The burst hit the pursuing dragon at the joint where the left wing met the body and the wing went wrong immediately, the membrane tearing from the shockwave, the joint itself losing the structural integrity it needed to generate lift on that side. The dragon rolled away from the formation, its rider hauling on the reins, the animal fighting its own body weight as the asymmetry in its wings turned controlled flight into managed falling.

It went down toward the sea in a long descending spiral and did not come back up.

The remaining five adjusted. They were good. The formation closed the gap Shade's roll had created and the spread tightened, the riders communicating with hand signals rather than voice, the rear pair angling to cut off the altitude option.

Shade was a war dragon.

This is worth saying plainly because the next forty seconds made it obvious in a way that no description of the animal's classification or breath type could communicate. Shade had not been waiting for Noah to tell it what to do. It had been fighting in the air since before Noah existed and the pursuit formation was a problem it recognized the shape of and had opinions about.

The dragon dropped its nose and dived.

Not away from the pursuit. Into it, back through the gap between the two lead pursuers, the gap they had been closing but had not yet fully closed, and Shade went through it at a speed that turned the closing geometry into irrelevant information because by the time the two lead dragons could react Shade was already behind them and climbing.

The rear pair found themselves as the lead pair.

Shade hit the nearest one from below, coming up under the dragon's belly where the scales were thinner, the burst going upward and the pursuing dragon folding around the impact point in a way that said it was done with this engagement and gravity agreed.

BOOM!!

The second rear dragon's rider threw a dark chi blast at Shade's flank and it hit and Noah felt the impact through the scales beneath him, the energy burning across Shade's side in a line that the dragon registered with a single sharp roll that said it had noticed and was filing it appropriately.

Three left.

Noah looked at the formation and looked at the distance between them and made a decision that would have seemed unreasonable to anyone watching who did not know what Noah's legs could do.

He let go of Shade.

The wind hit him immediately, full body, the speed of their flight turning air into a physical argument against every choice he was making. He fell away from Shade's back and the nearest pursuing dragon was fifteen feet below him and closing because the pursuit arc had brought it up to match Shade's altitude and now there was a person falling toward it that the rider was in the process of noticing.

Noah's legs found the dragon's back between the rider's mount and the wing joint.

He hit with white chi through both feet and the impact drove the dragon's body downward and the rider forward and Noah was already moving, one step up the dragon's neck, his right fist finding the base of the skull at the junction point where the Vital Point Technique had something to say, and he said it at full concentration.

KOOOOOM!!

The dragon went limp in the front section, not dead, the VPT finding the motor junction and interrupting it, and the animal dropped nose-first with a rider who was now dealing with a dragon that had stopped cooperating and a person who was no longer on it.

Noah was already on the next one.

He had pushed off the first dragon's neck as it dropped, the push giving him enough lateral distance to catch the second pursuing dragon across the wing joint, both hands gripping the leading edge, his weight swinging him underneath and back up onto the animal's back in a single continuous movement that had no pause in it anywhere.

The rider on this one turned around.

Noah hit him with an open palm strike to the helmet that sent the man sideways off the dragon and into the open air, and then his fist came down on the base of the dragon's neck at the VPT point and the second dragon joined the first in its unscheduled descent.

He pushed off again.

The last pursuing dragon's rider had watched two of his companions lose their mounts to something that moved between them like it was walking between rooms and was in the process of making a decision about whether continuing pursuit was consistent with his personal goals when Shade arrived from above and the acid vapor cloud that rolled off the dragon's open mouth settled over the rider's helmet and made the decision for him.

The rider went for altitude, blind, the dragon following the rider's panicked instruction, and they climbed away from the engagement at a rate that suggested they had found somewhere else to be.

BOOM!!

Below them the sea was evidence.

Two ships were taking on water in the deliberate manner of objects that had accepted their situation. A third was on fire along the stern section, the pale green-white flame eating the timber with the unhurried commitment of the acid compound doing its secondary work. The fourth had lost its mast and its ballista and was turning in slow circles because whatever mechanism governed its steering had been on the section of deck that no longer existed.

The fifth ship had seen everything and had begun moving away from the engagement zone with the urgency of a vessel whose crew had completed a rapid assessment and arrived at a unanimous conclusion : The black haired kid was a problem.

Noah put his hand back on Shade's neck.

The dragon was already orienting toward the water below, those black eyes finding the shapes moving at the surface, the massive ridged bodies of the water creatures that had carried Arthur's soldiers to the harbor in their mouths. Three of them were still in the engagement zone, their riders directing them from positions on their backs, the soldiers they carried either already deployed or waiting in the flooded chambers of the creatures' bodies for the signal to surface.

The nearest one was two hundred feet below.

Noah leaned forward and Shade understood.

They came down fast, not the committed dive of the ship attacks but a controlled descent that kept the angle tight and the approach vector directly above the creature's ridged spine. The water creature was long, longer than any of the warships, its body moving through the sea with the slow power of something that had been built over a very long time for a very specific purpose.

Shade hit it on the third dorsal spine from the front.

Not with a breath attack. With its body, the dragon's claws finding the spine and gripping, and the explosive burst that followed came from contact range, Shade's chest cavity releasing directly into the creature's hide at a point that a surgeon, if surgeons concerned themselves with creatures of this size, would have identified as suboptimal for continued operation.

THROOOOOM!!

The creature's body reacted the way bodies reacted when something catastrophic happened to an interior section. It surfaced, fully, the enormous mass of it clearing the water in a breach that sent waves rolling outward in every direction and the soldiers in its mouth compartment spilling into the sea as the jaw fell open from the convulsion of the impact.

They hit the water in clusters, black armor doing what black armor did when separated from a surface to stand on, and the sea accepted them with the permanent finality of something that did not negotiate.

The second water creature turned toward the commotion.

Shade hit it from the side, the Cluster Bubble Salvo releasing in a spread that covered the creature's flank from gill to mid-body, the small explosions going off in sequence across the surface, and the delay detonations buried in the creature's hide went off three seconds later from the inside.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

The creature dove. Deep, immediately, taking the pain away from the surface and down into the dark where nothing could follow, and the soldiers it had been carrying were already in the water because Shade's first salvo had caught the compartment section and the water had done the rest.

The third creature did not wait for its turn.

It turned and moved northwest at a speed that suggested it had received information about the current situation and had formed a strong opinion.

Shade watched it go.

Noah looked at the water below them. At the black-armored shapes floating face-down in the spreading debris field of two ships and one catastrophically surprised sea creature. At the soldiers clinging to floating timber, some of them still moving, most of them not. At the fifth warship, now distant, growing smaller as its crew put everything they had into the oars.

He counted what he could see.

'Over three hundred,' he thought. Between the ships and the water creatures and the pursuit formation that Shade had disassembled across the sky above the bay. 'Three hundred who came across that water and are not going back across it.'

He exhaled.

Shade was hovering, the massive wings working in slow steady beats, those violet-rimmed black eyes scanning the water below with the calm attention of something that had finished what it came to do and was waiting to find out what came next.

Noah put his hand flat against the dragon's neck.

"Good job, Shade," he said. "Let's go see how the harbor is holding up."

Shade turned toward Harrowfield and the distant sounds of the battle still running in its streets, and they flew back through the cold air above the sea with the pale smoke of burning ships rising behind them into the grey sky.