Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 721: Blood to pay 3

A portal split the sky.

Not a small opening. Not the tight efficient circle Noah used for standard domain travel. This one tore, purple energy bleeding outward from the edges in threads that reached across the cloud layer, and the roar that came through it before anything else did reached the battlefield before the sound of the portal opening had finished traveling.

Every Harbinger on the ground stopped moving.

Not tactically. Not by choice. Their bodies just stopped, the instinct older than decision-making firing before the brain could override it, and in that half second of collective stillness every Eclipse member and Ares soldier and task force fighter on the battlefield felt the same thing, a pressure in the chest that wasn’t fear but lived in the same neighborhood.

Red mist began to pour out of the portal, creating its own dense cloud.

Then Nyx came through.

He filled the portal the way something filled a space when the space had been built for smaller things. His wingspan caught the alien sunlight and threw it back red-orange, the scales running that deep crimson that had no equivalent in anything humans had domesticated or imagined. His eyes found the battlefield immediately and the sound that came from his throat wasn’t a roar exactly, it was something below a roar, something that operated at a frequency that bypassed ears entirely and arrived directly in the chest cavity of everything within range.

Harbingers scattered.

Not the three horns. The three horns held their ground because three horns had the capacity to override the biological response that every one horn and two horn on the field immediately surrendered to. But the one horns and two horns moved in every direction that wasn’t toward Nyx, and the Eclipse members and Ares soldiers who had been pressed back for the last ten minutes suddenly had room.

Ares came through behind him.

Smaller than Nyx by a meaningful margin but smaller than Nyx still meant something that made the ruins below look like furniture. The Molten Core was already running, visible through his chest scales as a deep amber pulse that brightened and dimmed with his breathing, and where Nyx ran cold and precise Ares ran hot and immediate, the heat coming off him already making the air above him shimmer.

They separated the moment they cleared the portal.

Nyx went left, toward the largest concentration of three horns on the northern section of the ruins. Ares went right, toward the engagement at the waterline where two three horns had been occupying Aurelius and three of his wives for the last four minutes and turning that engagement in a direction nobody wanted it to go.

The three horns on Nyx’s side registered him coming and charged.

Both of them. A coordinated approach, one from each side, because three horns were intelligent enough to understand that converging on something simultaneously was better than taking turns. They were fast and they were committed and the one on the left got its hands on Nyx’s left wing before Nyx had fully oriented.

Nyx folded the wing.

The three horn that had grabbed it went with the fold, its grip working against it now, the wing closing around it and driving it downward and Nyx’s body following, the full mass of a Red Death Dragon landing on a three horn from above while it was still tangled in his wing, and the impact turned the ruin floor beneath them into rubble that launched outward in a ring.

The second three horn hit Nyx across the back.

Nyx didn’t move off the first one. He stayed where he was and took the hit across his scales and the scales registered it and the Harbinger Skin equivalent that was just his biology doing what Red Death Dragon biology did distributed the force and he released an Inferno Storm directly into the three horn beneath him.

Inferno Storm at contact range was not like Inferno Storm at distance.

The three horn stopped moving.

The second one hit him again. Harder. Getting traction now, finding the gap between scale sections, and Nyx felt it this time and turned and what came from his throat at this range wasn’t fire and wasn’t lava and wasn’t any single thing but the combination of both running at the temperature that Red Death Dragons reached when they decided to stop being patient.

The second three horn was still standing after it. Barely. But still standing.

Nyx looked at it.

The Molten Core ignited.

Ares had been running the Molten Core since he came through the portal and the thing it did to his movement was the thing it always did, converting his physiology into something that healed as fast as it was damaged and moved faster than the mass of it should have allowed. He hit the first three horn at the waterline before it had finished registering that something new had entered the engagement, and his shoulder into its chest produced the sound of two things that had significant mass colliding at significant velocity, and the three horn went through the ruin wall behind it and kept going, the wall having had an opinion about stopping it that the three horn didn’t share.

Aurelius looked at Ares.

Ares looked at Aurelius.

Then Aurelius went back to the second three horn with the renewed confidence of someone who had been managing a problem for four minutes longer than he wanted to and had just been given breathing room.

---

Below all of it, Noah had blinked and landed ten meters from Kruel.

The E.N.D armor had assembled around him in the blink from Diana’s position to this one, the notifications running at the edge of his vision as each piece locked into place.

[E.N.D Equipped]

[Void Striders Equipped]

[Gorrauth Blade Equipped]

The black dragon scale plating settled across his frame, the purple void energy finding its channels through every seam and joint, the dragon heart at his chest catching the alien light and throwing it back deep purple. The Void Striders locked around his feet and the immediate sensation of them was the sensation of gravity becoming optional. The Gorrauth Blade materialized in his right hand, the dark crimson mist bleeding from the fuller immediately, the asymmetrical crossguard cold against his fingers, the pulse in the blade running at its usual rhythm.

Like something inside it was still alive.

He looked at Kruel across the ten meters.

Kruel looked back.

Then Kruel looked up at Nyx and Ares moving through the sky above them, the battlefield below those two already reshaping around their presence, one horns and two horns fleeing or dying and three horns engaging with the commitment of things that had made a decision.

"You brought help," Kruel said. His voice was exactly what it always was. Level. Conversational. The voice of something that had never needed to raise it. "We will see in the long run whether they help me or you."

He smiled.

Noah looked at the quest notification still sitting at the edge of his vision.

[Hierarchy exists for a reason.]

[When faced with a natural superior, prove your existence.]

[Defeat the enemy in front of you.]

[Reward: Biological Integration — Stage 2 Unlocked]

[Failure: Integration stalls. Permanently.]

He gritted his teeth.

"This ends today," he said.

And he moved.

The Void Striders took him from standing to Mach 2 in the first step and the ground beneath that step ceased to be ground, just a crater where the launch had gone, and he crossed the ten meters before Kruel had fully tracked the movement and drove the Gorrauth Blade toward Kruel’s side in a strike that carried everything the E.N.D armor’s stored force and his own Strength stat and the Void Striders’ momentum had built.

Kruel moved.

Not away. Sideways, a lateral shift that was wrong for the size of him, his mass doing something it shouldn’t have been able to do at that speed, and the blade caught air where his side had been and Noah was already adjusting, already blinking, appearing behind him with the blade coming around in a horizontal arc.

Kruel’s elbow came back.

[-1,100 HP]

It caught Noah across the chest and the E.N.D armor took most of it, the Harbinger Skin converting incoming force to stored void energy, but most was not all and the force that got through moved him ten meters in the wrong direction and he used the movement, converted it, blinked mid-flight and appeared above Kruel coming down.

[Rend Activated]

He drove his fist down at Kruel’s shoulder, the draconic force concentrating to a point, and Kruel got his forearm up in a block that stopped the fist but not the Rend, the tearing force that wasn’t void-based and didn’t erase but destroyed, and the block arm took something from it, a crack running through the grey hide from wrist to elbow that bled black.

And to add insult to injury, Noah struck at the part with the Gorrauth Blade.

Kruel looked at his arm.

Then at Noah.

"Faster," Kruel said. "Significantly faster than our last meeting."

He hit Noah.

[-1,800 HP]

The punch was not aimed at the armor. It was aimed at the gap between the chest plate and the shoulder plate, the joint, and Kruel had found it in the first exchange because Kruel was the thing that had survived everything humanity could bring against him by being faster at reading an opponent than the opponent was at reading him. The force went through the gap and the E.N.D absorbed what it could and Noah left the ground and the Void Striders fired mid-flight and he stopped his own momentum and came back.

[Void Barrage activated]

He fired twelve shots in two seconds, each one a thumb-sized void projectile, spreading them across Kruel’s torso and arms and face in a pattern designed not to hit but to force movement, to make Kruel step in a specific direction. The Harbinger’s speed meant standard aimed void attacks were a bad bet. Force him to move. Control the direction. Then put something in the direction he moved.

Kruel moved left.

Noah blinked left ahead of him and the Null Strike was already committed, the void energy coiling around his fist, and Kruel’s hand closed around his forearm at the elbow before the fist got anywhere near his face.

The third time in this fight Kruel had done that. Block whatever punch Noah was going to throw. He was cautious of Noah, that much was clear to Noah now.

’He knows,’ Noah thought, pulling back and creating distance. ’He’s mapped the null strike. He knows the range, the tell, the quality of void energy that precedes it. Every time I commit to it he’s already at my forearm.’

He looked at Kruel across the new distance between them.

Then he noticed.

No white lines.

He had been fighting for three minutes at speeds that made the earlier engagement look slow, taking hits that the E.N.D armor was converting to stored energy at a rate that was building toward something significant, hitting Kruel with everything except erasure, and there were no white lines.

In the academy. Before they understood what any of this was. The white line precursors, appearing between himself and whatever was about to kill him, the innate ability he had never found a system name for, the thing that showed him lethal attack vectors before they existed. Not normal attacks. Not hits that would hurt or damage or even break something. The lines that led to outcomes that ended with him specifically not existing anymore.

On Sirius Prime there had been hundreds of them before Kruel had moved. The moment Kruel entered his awareness the lines had appeared everywhere, covering every angle, every vector, every possible geometry of approach, and the density of them had been the thing that told him, before anything else, what he was dealing with.

There were none now.

Kruel was throwing punches that shattered things. That could drive Noah’s body into the ground hard enough to crater it. And there were no white lines.

’Either the ability is broken,’ Noah thought, and he filed that away because now wasn’t the time to examine it. ’Or Kruel genuinely cannot kill me right now.’

’Or he’s not trying yet.’

He looked at Kruel standing across the open ground, bleeding from the arm where Rend had gotten through, the grey healing over the crack slowly, the regeneration working but working against the Gorrauth Blade’s energy that was still in the wound doing what Gorrauth’s energy did to Harbinger healing.

’That’s why I brought this blade,’ Noah thought. ’Every hit that gets through with it. Every cut that opens. The regeneration fighting something it can’t fully resolve.’

He went back in.

This time he didn’t lead with anything. Just closed distance with the Void Striders and threw a strike that had no void energy in it, no Rend, nothing that required Kruel to make a specific defensive choice. Just a straight punch with Strength.

Kruel blocked it.

The impact of the block sent both of them backward a step and the ground beneath both of them didn’t crack. It caved. The pressure of two bodies applying force against each other through a shared point drove the ruin platform downward like a piston, the stone compressing beneath their feet, and water erupted around them in rings that reached a hundred meters into the air.

The stone beneath the swamp gave out.

They went through it together.

Three seconds of darkness and pressure and the alien sea floor rushing up toward them and both of them still exchanging strikes on the way down, and Noah got the Gorrauth Blade into Kruel’s side twice before they hit the bottom and the impact of it produced a column of water the size of a building erupting back upward through the gap they had made.

They burst back out through the surface.

The column of water went into the sky and kept going and observers miles away on the battlefield could see it, a white pillar rising above the coastal ruins and not coming down at the speed water came down, the force of two things fighting all the way from the surface to the sea floor and back in seconds having done something to the local ocean that the local ocean was still processing.

Noah landed on the ruin edge.

Kruel landed across from him.

They both breathed.

Kruel looked at his side where the Gorrauth Blade had gotten through twice. The wounds were healing but wrong, the edges of them not closing cleanly, the Gorrauth energy in the tissue interfering with the regeneration at the cellular level.

"Interesting blade," Kruel said.

"I know," Noah said.

"It disrupts my healing," Kruel said, with the tone of someone annotating a research finding. "I haven’t encountered that specific mechanism in some time." He looked at the wounds. "Where did you find it."

"I killed the person it belonged to. Gorrauth...but don’t worry, you’re next. " Noah said.

Kruel looked at him. Something moved in his expression that wasn’t surprise. "Gorrauth," he said. "You killed Gorrauth."

’Does he know Gorrauth? I mean harbingers existed in that timeline. Could there be something he knows?’ Noah thought for a second.

Kruel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You grow exponentially faster than the average human. Three years since our last meeting and the difference is." He tilted his head. "Measurable." He looked at Noah directly. "A pity the rest of your species isn’t as exceptional as you are."

"I’m not here to talk with you. I’m here to end you," Noah said.

Kruel smiled. "You think in terms of ending things," he said. "This is very human. You believe if you remove the threat the threat is gone." He began walking toward Noah, unhurried. "But I am not a threat you end. I am a truth you face. Everything you’ve built, everyone you’ve gathered, every blade you’ve collected and dragon you’ve tamed." He kept walking. "None of it changes what your species is. Small. Brief. Painful."

He stopped five meters away.

"Existence itself is pain," Kruel said. "You either conquer that pain or you face its cruelty. Your species has been facing its cruelty since the first of you looked up at the sky and understood it didn’t care." He looked at Noah. "I am the cruelty made efficient. I remove the pretense. The hope. The stories you tell yourselves about how this ends with humanity surviving and thriving and spreading across stars." His voice didn’t change. Still level. Still conversational. "It ends here. Today. With everyone you brought to this planet. And when I’m done there will simply be fewer humans in the universe and the universe will continue not caring."

Noah looked at him.

’No white lines,’ he thought. ’Still no white lines.’

"You done?" Noah said.

Kruel moved.

The speed of it was Lucas speed. That was the only honest comparison, the thing that lived at the top of human capability before you got into territory that required different categories, and Kruel was at that speed without trying and probably faster than that when he was trying and Noah blinked sideways and the fist that had been aimed at his face went through the ruin wall instead.

The wall ceased to exist.

Not damaged. Ceased. The force of the missed punch converting the stone into powder that expanded outward in a cloud.

Noah came back with the Gorrauth Blade from Kruel’s blind side and got it across his shoulder and the black blade opened grey hide and the crimson mist went into the wound and Kruel made a groaning sound again, the one below pain, and grabbed Noah’s wrist.

He pulled.

[-900 HP ]

[Void Striders activated]

The Void Striders fired the moment the pull started, giving Noah an opposite vector, but Kruel had committed his full strength to the pull and full strength was not something the Void Striders could fully counter and they went, both of them, moving at a speed that turned the landscape into something that passed rather than stood still.

Through ruins.

The structures that had been standing for centuries went through rather than around them, the stone and mortar and whatever this civilization had built their buildings from offering approximately nothing as resistance.

Through the cliff face at the ruin’s edge.

The cliff face had more mass than the ruins and it registered. A sound like the planet objecting, a crack that ran from the point of contact upward to the cliff’s peak and the peak came off and started falling and they were already past it and into the alien forest beyond.

The black trees.

Dense, the trunks wide and dark, the forest floor thick with something that wasn’t moss but served the same purpose, and Kruel dragged Noah through them at a speed that converted each trunk into a brief resistance and then debris, and the trench they carved stretched backward through the cliff face and the ruins and across the waterline to where they had started, a canyon several kilometers long that the planet would carry forever.

By the time Kruel’s momentum finally resolved itself against the terrain they were miles from where they had begun.

Noah looked back at the trench.

At the cliff with its peak missing.

At the ruins visible as a distant line against the alien coastline.

[