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

Shade came through the clouds at an angle that left no room for misunderstanding what was happening.

The dragon was not gliding. It was descending with intention, black scales catching the firelight from the burning harbor buildings below, the violet rim of those eyes visible even from the street level where the fighting was still grinding forward in the narrow lanes between Harrowfield's stone buildings. Someone in the square saw it coming and pointed, and for one suspended moment both sides of the battle looked up.

Arthur's soldiers broke first.

Not all of them. Not immediately. But the ones closest to the harbor edge, the ones who had come ashore from the water creatures and had been fighting in the streets for the past twenty minutes, those ones looked up at a black dragon descending toward them with a rider on its back and made the kind of calculation that well-trained soldiers made when the arithmetic of a situation changed beyond recovery. They pulled back. Not routing, not panicking, just the disciplined retreat of people who had decided the current position was no longer worth holding.

The ones who did not retreat found out what Shade thought about that.

The dragon leveled off twenty feet above the harbor square and the Cluster Bubble Salvo came down in a spread that covered the open ground between the dock steps and the first row of buildings. Small detonations, twelve of them, popping across the cobblestones in a pattern that had no safe direction to run from because the spread was the point. Three soldiers went down from the blast radius. Two more stumbled into the recruits waiting at the square's edge and found that stumbling into recruits was its own category of problem.

Noah was off Shade's back before the dragon had fully stopped moving.

He hit the cobblestones and came up already reading the square, the battle's current state assembling itself in his head in the two seconds it took him to find his footing. Valen at the north entrance, still fighting, the golden glow of his spear visible through the smoke. Werner at the east lane, the gauntlet's heat shimmer marking his position even when the smoke made the man himself invisible. Brom somewhere south, identifiable by the sounds things made when Brom hit them.

What had changed while Noah was in the air was the greens.

---

The thing about greens that the other colors tended to forget was that healing was not a passive activity. It was not standing behind cover and waiting for people to crawl back to you. Sera had worked this out somewhere around the gate's first floor and had not revised her position since.

She was in the middle of the square.

Not exposed, not reckless, but in the middle of it in the way that a person stood in the middle of something when they had decided the work required proximity and proximity required accepting the risk that came with it. Her bottle was in her left hand and she moved between downed recruits and village men with the efficiency of someone who had stopped thinking about individual cases and started thinking about throughput.

A village man with a dark chi burn across his forearm got thirty seconds of her attention and stood back up with the arm functional. A yellow recruit with a gash across her thigh that would have ended her ability to move got twenty seconds and got back to work. Sera did not celebrate either result. She was already moving to the next one before the people she had treated had finished understanding they were better.

Beside her, a green named Corvin was doing something different.

Corvin's ability was not healing. It was enhancement, a rare expression of green classification that the instructors had spent a week trying to explain to him before giving up and telling him to point it at friendly targets and see what happened. What happened was that his hands produced a warm amber glow when he activated it, and when that glow transferred to another person it found whatever they were already doing and amplified it, not uniformly, not predictably, but in the direction the ability was already moving.

He put his hands on a village man's shoulders. The man had been swinging a wood axe with tired arms, the strikes landing but not with enough force to matter against armored soldiers. When Corvin's amber glow transferred, the next swing the man took left a dent in a soldier's breastplate that should not have been possible from an unblessed wood axe. The man stared at his own hands.

"Keep swinging," Corvin said, already moving to the next person.

He touched a recruit's throwing arm and the recruit's next knife covered fifty feet in a flat line that buried itself in a soldier's shoulder joint at the gap where the armor did not cover. He touched Werner's back as Werner was mid-punch and the gauntlet's discharge on impact blew the soldier's dark chi barrier apart so completely that the energy scattered in visible arcs across the cobblestones.

Werner glanced back at him.

Corvin was already gone.

---

At the east lane, the fighting had compacted into something uglier than the open harbor engagement. The lane was too narrow for anything with wings and barely wide enough for two people to stand abreast, which meant the soldiers coming through it were funneling into a space that Brom had decided was his.

Brom fighting in a narrow lane was like watching someone use a precision instrument for a job that did not require precision. He was too large for the space, his enhanced frame taking up most of the width, and he solved this by making the width irrelevant. He did not dodge in the lane. He absorbed. A dark chi strike to the chest rocked him back a half step and he used the step to plant and drive forward, and the soldier who had thrown the strike found that the return on that investment was Brom's forearm across his chest at a speed that bounced him off the lane wall hard enough to leave an impression in the stone.

The soldier behind him tried to climb over his fallen companion and Werner arrived at the lane's entrance from the square side.

One arm. One gauntlet. Werner fighting one-armed should have been a limitation. It was not a limitation. It was a lesson the soldiers in the east lane were still in the process of learning when the gauntlet found the leading man's dark chi barrier and the discharge went through it like the barrier had been a suggestion.

The man sat down.

The man behind him made the correct decision and started moving in the other direction.

---

Shade had not left the square.

The dragon had settled at the harbor end of the open space with its wings folded and those black eyes moving across the battle with the calm attention of something that was done with the immediate problem and was watching to see if any new problems presented themselves. Three soldiers who had been attempting to hold a position near the dock steps looked at Shade and looked at each other and abandoned the position without discussing it.

Pip saw this from his elevated position on the bamboo tower and filed it away.

He also saw what the soldiers near the granary were doing to the recruits who had been holding that position, and he saw that the recruits were losing ground, and he pulled his chakram and threw it at a roof.

This sounds wrong. It was not wrong. The throw was angled to use the roofline as a redirect, the blessed weapon's opinions about trajectory allowing it to go places that physics considered inadvisable, and the chakram came around the corner of the granary building from an angle that had no thrower attached to it from the soldiers' point of view and exploded against the nearest soldier's back.

BOOM!

Not lethal. The chakram's explosive effect was calibrated by some property of the blessing that Pip had not fully worked out yet but was beginning to develop theories about, and calibrated in this case meant enough force to launch the man forward into his companions and turn a disciplined three-man hold into three people trying to not be stood on by each other.

The recruits who had been losing ground found themselves with an opening.

They used it.

Nami was at the square's west entrance, which was where the most organized resistance had been coming from since Arthur's soldiers had established a foothold in the market quarter. She had been working that entrance for twenty minutes with both knives and the specific patience of someone who had been taught by brothers that the point of a fight was not the first exchange but everything that came after it.

A soldier came at her with dark chi in both hands and threw a burst that she stepped inside, the energy passing her left ear close enough to heat it, and her right knife found the gap at his armpit where the black armor had to allow movement. Not deep. Enough. The soldier's arm dropped and she was past him before he finished processing why.

The one behind him was smarter, holding ground, waiting, making her come to him. She did not come to him. She threw the left knife at his knee, not to penetrate the armor, just to make him move his hands down to protect it, and when his hands moved she closed the distance and her right knee found his helmet from below.

He sat down.

She retrieved the left knife from where it had clattered against the cobblestones and looked up and found the entrance clear.

---

It ended the way battles in villages ended. Not with a single moment, not with a signal, but by degrees, the resistance thinning as the remaining soldiers made individual calculations about their situation and arrived at similar conclusions. The ones who could retreat toward the water did. The ones who could not either surrendered or stopped moving for other reasons.

The harbor square went quiet in stages.

Smoke sat over everything. The three fires that had been burning since the initial aerial assault were down to smoldering, the village's bucket chains having done their work during the fight with the specific determination of people who had decided that their homes were worth protecting even if their arms were not trained for it. The cobblestones were wet from the chains and dark from the smoke and evidence of everything that had happened in the last hour sat across every surface.

The recruits came together in the square from their various positions the way water found its level, drawn by the quiet after the noise. Some sat down immediately. Some stood and breathed and looked at the square around them as if confirming it was still there. Sera moved through them still working, her bottle out, the glow of the healing compound visible in the gaps between buildings where the smoke had not yet settled.

The villagers came out.

Not all at once. First the ones who had been fighting in the streets, the men with axes and farm tools and the specific expression of people who had done something they had not known they were capable of and were still integrating the information. Then the ones who had watched from the granary entrance, the women and the older men and the children who had been kept back, all of them coming into the square and seeing what the square had become and who was standing in it.

Then they saw Shade.

The dragon was still at the harbor end, still folded, still watching, the pale violet of its eyes moving across the crowd with the unhurried attention of something that had decided the humans around it were not a problem. The crowd's reaction was a sound, not a word, not a scream, just the collective noise of a hundred people encountering something at a scale their bodies registered before their minds caught up.

Then someone in the crowd said, "The knight. The young one. He rode it."

The word moved through the square the way fire moved through dry grass. Not loud, not announced, just present everywhere in a moment, the information finding every person simultaneously. Dragon knights killed dragons. That was the order. That was what the name meant, what the training produced, what the blessed items were for. The order existed to hunt dragons, not to sit comfortably at the harbor end of a village square on the back of one.

And yet.

The villagers looked at Noah and the looks did not have simple names.

Mistress Edra, who had fed them bread and ale and asked nothing in return, pushed through the crowd and stood in front of him with her flour-dusted hands and her round face carrying something that was past gratitude into the territory of things people felt when they had been genuinely afraid and were genuinely no longer afraid. She did not say anything. She took both his hands in hers, flour and all, and held them for a moment.

Then she let go and turned to the square and said, loudly, "Bread and soup. Everyone. Inside."

The crowd followed her, because that was what you did when Mistress Edra spoke.

Pip appeared at Noah's left shoulder. Nami appeared at his right.

They stood there for a moment, the three of them, watching the villagers file toward the Saltback with the loose grateful movement of people who had just discovered they were still alive and were treating the discovery warmly.

A woman near the granary door was telling her neighbor something, gesturing at Noah, her expression carrying the beginning of a story she would tell for years. Three children who should have been inside were watching Shade from a distance that was brave for their age, the bravest one having gotten to within thirty feet before his courage found its limit.

Pip looked at this. Looked at Nami.

Nami looked back at him.

They did not speak. The look said everything the words would have said and said it without giving it to anyone else who happened to be listening.

What if they knew.

Not about Shade. Not about the taming, which was extraordinary enough on its own. What if they knew about Ares, who was sitting in a tree line four hundred feet away with the patience of something that had been doing exactly this for months. What if they knew what Burt could actually do when he stopped pretending to do less.

What if they knew who Burt actually was.

Pip's expression settled into the one he wore when he had decided something was not his to decide.

Nami's did the same.

They would not tell. That was not their secret to carry to other people.

---

Werner stood at the east lane entrance and did not move for a long time.

He watched Burt in the square. Watched the villagers come to him. Watched Shade at the harbor end with the patient certainty of a tamed animal, which was impossible, which was a word Werner was revising the definition of in real time.

He thought about the first week of training. Valen saying Black Knight potential without hesitation, without qualification, with the tone of a man stating something that was already decided.

He thought about the gate. The second floor. The combined chi, the white and the dark running simultaneously in a way that Werner's grandfather had written about in terms that suggested it was a technique belonging to the enemy and no one else. The technique that Arthur's soldiers had been using in the harbor tonight.

He thought about the wyvern. About the moment of blue-white light over the harbor when he had been the only person awake and had seen Burt running toward something that was moving faster than anything had a right to move.

He thought about a black dragon sitting calmly at the harbor end of a village square.

He thought about all of it assembled together, every piece of it, and the picture it made was not the picture of a tavern boy from a village on the coast with exceptional physical ability and good instincts.

'Who are you,' Werner thought, watching Noah accept a cup of something hot from a village woman with the easy grace of someone who had been accepting things from people his whole life. 'What are you.'

Not with hostility. That was the thing Werner had been working through since the harbor, the thing that had no clean resolution. Friend or enemy was the natural question to ask about someone who carried the enemy's techniques and rode what the order existed to kill and somehow sat in a village square looking like the most ordinary person in it.

Werner did not have an answer.

He was still looking for one when Valen stepped up beside him.

The instructor stood there. Did not speak. His golden spear was at his side and the glow had faded from his frame and his scarred face was turned toward the square, toward the recruits coming together, toward the villagers and the soup and the children edging toward a black dragon.

Toward Burt.

Valen stood there for a long time without a word coming out of his mouth.

That, from a man who always had something to say, was its own kind of answer.