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

The battle against Arthur’s men was on.

On the ground, dragon knights and regular knights were fighting bravely against men in black armor, wielding the mysterious white and red forbidden technique.

The dark chi came off Arthur’s soldiers in waves that were visible before they were felt, the red-white energy building at their fists and palms and releasing in bursts that hit like something far heavier than a human body had any right to produce. A regular knight three lines back caught one across the chest and left the ground entirely, his armor crumpling inward at the impact point, and he came down eight feet away and did not get up immediately. The two knights beside him filled the gap before it opened fully, their blades finding the soldier’s guard, the exchange fast and grinding and real.

Dragon knights were different from regular knights in the way that storms were different from wind. Not just more, but fundamentally other in kind. A yellow knight named Sera, not the Sera from their group but an older woman three years out of her own gate, had both hands raised and the air in front of her compressed and released in pulses that hit Arthur’s soldiers at range before they closed to striking distance, each pulse carrying enough force to break formation. She was working five at once, cycling the pulses in a pattern that kept all five of them reacting rather than advancing, her blessed item, a set of bracers that rang like struck metal when the ability moved through them, glowing at her wrists.

She was winning.

Beside her, a red recruit from a different camp had his ability pushed to its limit, the earth enhancement that ran through his legs letting him cover ground at a rate that made the soldiers tracking him consistently wrong about where he would be. His blessed blade had a flame running its edge that he had not put there consciously, the weapon expressing something in response to his state that he had not learned to control yet. He hit a soldier with a strike that left a burning line across black armor and the soldier stumbled and the recruit was already at the next one.

He was winning too.

But further down the line, where the formation had thinned and the numbers were wrong, three dragon knights were losing.

Two of Arthur’s soldiers had one of them pinned against a cart, dark chi suppressing the knight’s ability every time it tried to build, the red-white energy hitting him in intervals that were timed precisely to interrupt recovery. The third soldier had a hand around a dragon knight’s throat and the knight’s feet were off the ground and the other dragon knight was fighting two opponents simultaneously and her blessed item was a healer’s instrument, not a weapon, and she was using it anyway because there was nothing else.

The sky above all of this was worse.

Arthur’s dragons came in formations that had been drilled, their riders keeping them in coordinated passes that covered each other’s approaches, the breath attacks staggered so that one was always building while another was releasing. A green knight with a barrier ability was holding a section of the field under a dome of compressed air that had taken three direct fire blasts and was showing the strain of it in the way the dome surface rippled and distorted like heat above summer stone.

The dome would not last another blast.

"RED DEATH!"

The shout came from the eastern flank, from a scout on the ridge who had been watching the sky and whose voice carried the specific pitch of someone reporting something their training had not fully prepared them to report calmly.

The red mist came first, rolling down from the upper air in a wave that hit the battlefield’s temperature from the top down, the cold night air replaced by something that had no business existing at this altitude. Then the sound, that deep resonant concussive pressure that a red death produced when it committed to a dive, not a roar, not a screech, just the sound of something very large moving through air faster than air wanted to accommodate it.

Ares hit the center of Arthur’s ground formation like a geological event.

KOOOM!

The impact crater was twelve feet across and four feet deep, the cobblestone-hard frozen earth driven downward as if it had simply agreed to become lower, and the shockwave from the landing rolled outward across the field in a visible ring that flattened anyone within thirty feet who did not have something solid behind them. Arthur’s soldiers in the immediate radius went down in every direction, their dark chi defenses irrelevant against the fact of that much force arriving that fast from directly above.

Then Ares was in the sky again.

He went up fast, the wing beats driving him vertical, and his chest began doing what Noah had seen from Nyx a hundred times, the ribs expanding, the internal temperature climbing, the volcanic breath gathering in the core of him with the slow building pressure of something that did not hurry because it did not need to.

The red glow bled through his scales first. Not fire, not yet, just light, the color of metal in a forge at the moment before it becomes workable, running from his sternum outward through every scale in a spreading wash of illumination that turned the night air around him the color of dying sun.

Then it was not just light.

The air around Ares’s body began to distort. Not shimmer, not wave, something more committed than that, the atmosphere itself reconsidering its relationship with the space Ares occupied as the temperature around the dragon climbed past what air was designed to tolerate. The Inferno Storm activated not as a weapon but as a condition, a state Ares entered, and when he entered it the dragons of Arthur’s aerial formation began making decisions about their approach vectors that their riders had not instructed.

BOOOOOOM

The beam came down.

It was not a breath attack in the way that description implied something a body produced. It was a directed geological event, a column of superheated material that had been accumulating in Ares’s core since the dive and was now finding its exit, wide enough to swallow a house, red-white at the center and orange at the edges, and where it hit the formation of Arthur’s dragons it did not burn them.

It moved them.

Three dragons went sideways simultaneously, the impact of that much thermal force at that proximity overriding whatever their riders were doing with the reins, and two of them lost enough altitude in the recovery that they were in the range of the ridge archers before they climbed back out.

Then through the light and the heat and the chaos of Ares doing what Ares did, something fell.

Noah came down through the middle of it with dark chi running up both legs in that red-white energy that Werner’s father had called the forbidden technique and that was coating his calves and thighs in something that looked like fire seen through red glass, and white chi at both fists, the clean brilliant energy so bright against the dark that the soldiers below had a second of looking at it before they understood what it was attached to.

He hit the ground between two clusters of Arthur’s men with both feet driving into the earth and the chi releasing on impact.

The crater his landing left was not as wide as Ares’s but it was deeper, a narrow bowl driven into the ground by the concentrated chi discharge, and the concussive wave that rolled outward from it traveled along the ground rather than through the air, catching ankles and knees, dropping nine soldiers in the immediate radius not from injury but from the simple physics of a wave moving through the surface they were standing on.

Noah was already moving before the dust from the landing settled.

He took the nearest soldier with a palm strike to the sternum, the white chi detonating at the contact point, and the man traveled four feet backward and did not find his footing at the end of it. The second soldier threw a dark chi burst at his flank and Noah turned into it, getting his forearm up, the chi in his arm absorbing the strike and dispersing it, and his returning elbow found the joint between the soldier’s helmet and gorget and the soldier’s legs made an immediate executive decision about the remainder of the engagement.

"Objective is total elimination!" Noah called out, his voice carrying through the noise. "Their ships are further out, we hold this ground and push them back to the water!"

A dragon knight nearby, a red from a different camp with a sword that crackled with lightning across its edge, looked at Noah with the expression of a man deciding whether to be offended.

"Who put you in charge?" he said.

Something whistled through the air.

Not an arrow. Not a blade. Something that moved with a sound that was almost mechanical in its consistency, a low spinning note that climbed in pitch like a jet engine picking speed as it closed distance, and it passed through the formation of Arthur’s soldiers overhead at a height that made several of them duck instinctively.

CRACK.

The hammer hit the ground twenty feet away and stood there, the handle vertical, the head buried six inches into the frozen earth, still ringing from whatever it had been thrown through on the way.

Egor walked through the gap it had cleared, his hand extended, and the hammer pulled itself from the ground and returned to his grip with the familiarity of something that had been doing exactly this for years. His face was doing nothing, which was how Egor’s face looked when Egor was fully engaged.

He looked at the red knight.

"You listen to the kid," Egor said.

The red knight looked at Egor. Looked at the hammer. Looked at Noah.

He turned back to his opponents.

"ADVANCE!" Noah’s voice went over everything.

The line moved.

What happened in the next twenty minutes was not a battle in the organized sense. It was a series of individual catastrophes that added up to a direction.

Dragon knights who had been holding ground found themselves pushing forward, the momentum shift coming not from any single thing but from the accumulation of many things happening simultaneously. Yellows on the ridge were raining down projectiles with their blessed weapons, each one finding gaps in Arthur’s formation that the soldiers below them were not covering because they were busy with the people in front of them. Greens moved through the friendly lines with their bottles and their enhancement hands, touching shoulders and wrists and leaving behind people who had been flagging and were now not.

Noah and Egor worked the same ground the way two very different instruments worked the same piece of music, each one doing something the other could not, the combination producing something neither produced alone.

Egor’s hammer moved in arcs that were not large but were absolute, each swing carrying that golden enhancement energy that built in the shaft and released on contact with anything solid, and when it released across a group of Arthur’s soldiers the result was a shockwave that traveled through them rather than around them, dropping three, four, five at once in a cascading effect that started at the impact point and propagated outward through whoever was close enough to be close enough.

Noah moved between them.

Where Egor cleared space with force, Noah moved through what remained, his pace something that the soldiers tracking him kept being wrong about, the dark chi in his legs pushing him from position to position at intervals that did not match what a human body was supposed to manage. A soldier threw a dark chi burst at his back and Noah’s hand came up behind him without his head turning, reading the attack from the way the air moved, and the burst hit his palm and he redirected it into the soldier to his left who had been preparing his own throw and had not finished preparing it.

His fist hit the ground when he dropped to avoid a sweeping blade and the chi in his knuckles discharged into the earth and the spiderweb crack that spread outward from the impact point covered six feet of frozen ground in a fraction of a second, the fractures running under the feet of four soldiers and destabilizing every one of them.

He was upright and moving before the cracks finished spreading.

The ground around them was becoming a record of where they had been, the craters and the shattered earth and the scorch marks and the golden impact signatures from Egor’s hammer writing a map of the last twenty minutes across a hundred yards of contested field.

The last ship.

It sat at the bay’s edge with its boarding ramp down, Arthur’s remaining organized force using it as a resupply point, soldiers moving back and forth with the discipline of a unit that had not yet decided the engagement was lost. The ship itself was large, the largest of Arthur’s fleet that had not already been destroyed, and it was close enough to shore that the gangway touched the dock.

Egor looked at the ship. Looked at Noah.

He held out the hammer.

Noah looked at it.

Took it.

It was heavier than it looked, which was saying something because it looked extremely heavy, and the golden enhancement energy running through the shaft hit his palm and ran up his arm and his arm’s opinion of the weight changed immediately, the energy distributed through his grip making the mass of it feel like potential rather than burden.

He looked at the ship.

He ran.

The approach covered a hundred yards of dock and the soldiers on the gangway and the deck saw him coming and the dark chi built in their hands and released in a salvo that hit the dock around his feet in bursts that cratered the wood and threw splinters in every direction. He went through the gaps between them, not dodging in the reactive sense but moving in a line that had accounted for their trajectories before they launched, the gaps already there because he had already been reading the angles.

He hit the gangway at full pace and went up.

At the top of the gangway, with the deck of the ship ahead of him and the soldiers on it converging and the mast overhead against the dark sky, Noah jumped.

The rotation began before he left the surface, his body coiling into the leap, the hammer coming around in a swing that gathered speed as he rose, the arc of it building through the apex of the jump where he was neither rising nor falling and everything was angular velocity and the chi in his legs and the golden enhancement in the shaft combining into a single concentrated output.

The hammer came down at the mast.

The VPT compression went into the strike at the last instant, everything narrowed to the point of contact, and the mast did not break.

It ceased.

The energy released through the wood and the wood’s structural integrity made an immediate and unanimous decision, the mast coming apart from the impact point in every direction simultaneously, the debris field launching outward across the deck and the rigging falling in a cascade that took the sail and the crow’s nest and the forward ballista mounting with it.

THROOOOOOM.

The sound of it rolled across the bay.

Noah landed on the deck in the clearing the debris had left, the hammer in both hands, and the soldiers remaining on the deck looked at what had just happened to their mast and at the person standing in the middle of it and the dark chi in their hands dimmed.

The ship listed. Whatever the mast had been connected to below deck had been connected to more than just the mast.

They went over the side before it finished deciding.

---

The bay was quiet in the way it got quiet when the loudest things had stopped.

Knights standing in the field looked at each other and at the ship listing in the water and at the sky where Ares was circling in slow passes that said the aerial threat had been addressed. The soldiers who had not gone down had retreated to the water, and the water had taken most of them, and the ones it had not taken were sitting on the ground with their hands visible because that was the calculation they had arrived at.

"He kept up with Egor," someone said, behind Noah. Not quietly. The kind of statement that came out at normal volume because the person saying it had not decided to keep it internal.

"He didn’t just keep up," someone else said.

"Egor’s a black knight. The only one the kingdom’s produced in fifty years. Nobody keeps up with—"

"You just watched him do it."

A silence.

Then, from the water, the surface moved.

The movement started at the bay’s mouth where the depth was greatest, a displacement that worked its way inward in the slow inevitable way of something large that had decided it was done waiting beneath. The water creatures surfaced one by one, those massive ridged bodies breaking the surface, and their mouths opened in the way that had produced Arthur’s soldiers before.

But what came through the mouths this time was not soldiers.

The first one cleared the teeth and stood on the dock and the scale of it reorganized the available space, seven feet, closer to eight, the grey-dark musculature carrying no armor because it did not need armor, the tail behind it moving with the slow deliberate balance of something that had not arrived at bipedal movement by accident but had arrived at it as a design choice. The hands at the end of those arms ended in things that were fingers the way a blade was a finger, and the face above the musculature had no expression because it did not have the architecture for expression.

It had a horn.

One horn, rising from the skull between the eyes, thick at the base, forward-curved.

Then another stepped through. Then three more from a different mouth. Then more, from every water creature that had surfaced, the dock filling with grey shapes that moved with the unhurried certainty of things that had done this before in other places and knew how it went.

Some had one horn.

Some had two.

Pip’s voice came from above, from Shade still circling, and it had lost everything that made it Pip’s voice and was just the sound of someone saying words that their mouth was producing before the rest of them had caught up.

"Those are the things from the corridors," he said. "In the Black Room. The passages. Those are what we fought."

"What are they?" someone nearby said.

No one answered because no one knew.

Except one person.

Noah looked at the dock. Looked at the shapes filling it. Counted horns with the automatic assessment of someone for whom this count had always mattered because the count told you what you were about to survive or not survive.

Then his eyes went to the largest water creature, still mostly submerged, its back above the surface like a dark island.

Something stood on its back.

The size of it was wrong in the way that certain sizes were wrong, not just large but occupying space differently from large, as if the scale of it was a fact that the surrounding environment was still processing. The four horns rose from its skull in a configuration that Noah had seen before, in a different world, in a different timeline, on a creature that had killed millions of people in a single day.

His throat tightened.

’No,’ he thought. ’Not here. Not in this timeline. It is not possible for a four horn to be—’

It turned its head.

The eyes found him across the water with the patience of something that had all the time there had ever been.

"It’s a four horn," Noah said.

His voice came out quiet. Not afraid. Just the voice of a man stating a fact that had not finished arriving yet.

Around him the knights who had just won a battle against Arthur’s army looked at the dock and looked at what was stepping off the water creatures onto it and looked at the thing standing on the back of the largest one, and nobody said anything because nobody had words for what they were looking at.

Pip and Nami had brought Shade down to hover twenty feet above Noah’s position, and Pip looked at the dock and looked at the four-horned figure and looked at Noah.

"What," Pip said carefully, "is that."

Noah looked at it.

"The worst thing I have ever seen," he said. "In any world."