Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 726: Dream of the endless

Kruel looked at the axe buried between his feet that lucas had thrown.

The blade had gone three inches into the alien stone, the handle still vibrating from the throw, blue electricity crackling outward from the impact point in thin branching lines. He looked at it the way you looked at something that had just told you something about the person who threw it.

He looked up at Jayden.

Jayden was already gone from where he had been standing.

He was behind Kruel’s left wing, inside the span of it, the one place the wing couldn’t sweep without Kruel folding it inward, and the Descending Dragon was at its eleventh consecutive hit, the chain between the staffs running so hot the alien air around it had gone from distorted to luminous, a faint visible glow extending a meter in every direction from the weapon.

He drove the hot staff into the joint where the left wing met Kruel’s back.

The membrane had been regenerating since Lucas tore it an hour ago. The tissue at the base of the joint was newer than the rest, softer, the biology still finishing what it had started. Jayden had been watching it regenerate for the last four minutes from the behind while Kruel was occupied with Lucas. He had watched exactly where the new tissue ended and the old began.

He hit the seam.

KRAAACK.

The joint opened. Black welling immediately, the new tissue tearing cleaner than old tissue tore, and the wing on that side dropped six inches, the structural connection between it and the muscle beneath compromised.

Kruel’s elbow came back.

Jayden ducked under it, already moving, the chain extending and wrapping around Kruel’s forearm on the backswing, and he detonated Polarity Break at the point where the chain made contact with the elbow joint. Maximum heat to maximum cold in the same location. The joint cracked along its outer edge, a fracture running an inch before Kruel’s regeneration caught it, and Kruel turned.

Jayden released the chain and ran.

Not away. Diagonally, toward Lucas’s position thirty meters out, because running away from a four horn in open ground was a death sentence and running toward your partner was not.

Lucas was already moving to meet him.

They passed each other at a dead sprint and neither of them slowed down. No words. No signal. They had worked this out in the thirty seconds they had spent on their knees looking at each other before they got up, a full plan communicated in silence between two people who had both spent years learning that overthinking in a fight was how you died in it.

Lucas went for the damaged wing joint Jayden had just opened.

Kruel anticipated it. His wing folded inward and his body turned and his fist came around for Lucas and Lucas got Valor up in a two handed block and the impact drove him back six feet, his boots carving lines in the alien stone, and he held it.

Jayden hit Kruel from behind at the same moment with both staffs simultaneously driving into the backs of his knees.

The idea was simple. Lucas absorbs the forward momentum, anchors it, gives Kruel nothing to push against. Jayden removes the structural support from below. A body with no forward outlet and no rear foundation goes down.

Kruel’s left knee touched the alien ground.

One knee. For two seconds.

Then he drove both wings down simultaneously in a single massive beat and the pressure wave from it hit both of them and the alien ground between Kruel and the two S ranks went from solid to a crater, stone fragmenting outward in a ring, and both Lucas and Jayden left the ground.

Lucas fired Valor’s charge mid-air and used the recoil to correct his trajectory. Jayden spun the Descending Dragon and used Atmospheric Ignition to generate enough thrust from the superheated air beneath him to control his descent.

They both landed. Both already moving.

Forty meters away, three Ares soldiers were trying to hold a perimeter against the remaining three horns while two of Aurelius’s wives stood over the king with weapons drawn. Aurelius was on the alien ground with his leg gone below the thigh, the stump cauterized by his own fire ability the moment the tail had taken it, his hands still running blue-orange, his jaw set.

"Let me up," he said.

"No," said the wife on his left. Her name was Thessaly and she had been with the fleet for many years and she had watched her king lose a leg twenty minutes ago and she had not moved from his side since.

"I can still fight."

"You can still die," she said. "Those are different things."

A comm crackled. A ship was coming down from the fleet, one of the smaller Ares vessels, dropping through the alien atmosphere at an angle that suggested whoever was piloting it had been told urgency mattered more than approach protocol.

Aurelius watched it descend and said nothing. His hands were still running blue-orange and his eyes were on Kruel across the battlefield and the expression on his face was the expression of a man doing the mathematics of what he could and could not do and arriving at an answer he did not like.

The three horn nearest to his position moved toward him.

Thessaly hit it with everything she had before it covered half the distance, fire running at the Ares temperature, the alien air around the strike going white, and the three horn recoiled from the heat and she hit it again before it recovered and the third hit dropped it.

She stepped back to Aurelius’s side without looking away from the field.

"The ship is thirty seconds out," she said.

"I know," Aurelius said.

---

Kruel watched Lucas and Jayden reposition.

He was reading them. Had been reading them since they got up. The way they communicated without communicating, the coordination between them that had no signal he could intercept because it wasn’t a signal, it was two people who had independently developed the same combat language and recognized it in each other.

Why wouldn’t they? They fought each other and rivaled for three years. They were practically down from the same cloth.

And that was more dangerous than strength. Strength he could measure and exceed. Coordination between two people who trusted each others capabilities completely was a different problem.

He beat his wings and went up.

Not high. Twenty meters. Enough to change the geometry, enough to make the ground irrelevant, and he looked down at the battlefield from above and read it.

The Ares ship coming down from the fleet. The king on the ground, still alive, still a rallying point. The two S ranks repositioning below him. The elf still standing over the cocooned human. The blood user on the ground, moving, not done. The telekinetic down but breathing.

He looked at the ship.

"I see,"

If the king left the battlefield alive the Ares fleet remained a coherent command structure. If the command structure remained coherent the fleet continued to pose a strategic threat regardless of what happened on the ground. If the fleet continued to pose a strategic threat the evolution he was currently undergoing would be interrupted before it completed by orbital fire he could not intercept while simultaneously managing the ground engagement.

He went for the ship.

"KRUEL’S AIRBORNE," Lucas screamed into the comm.

He threw Valor straight up.

The axe left his hand spinning at a velocity that turned it into a blue-white streak climbing toward Kruel’s position, the stored charge from the alien storm above still sitting in the blade, and Kruel saw it coming and beat his wings to move laterally and the axe adjusted.

Lucas had thrown it with a lightning string attached. Not a strong one, not enough to pull Kruel, just enough to give the axe a course correction mid-flight based on where Kruel moved.

The axe caught him across the right ankle. Not deep. But the charge in it discharged on contact and the electricity found the new wing tissue and ran through it and the right wing spasmed, the membrane contracting involuntarily from the current, and Kruel’s flight path went wrong for three seconds.

Three seconds was what Jayden needed.

He had been spinning the Descending Dragon continuously since Kruel left the ground, building the cycle, and at the twelfth consecutive hit the weapon entered what Noah’s system called Heavenly Descent and what Jayden experienced as every cell in his body understanding simultaneously that it was about to do something it could not undo.

He threw both staffs upward with the chain extended between them, the full length of it, and activated Atmospheric Ignition at the peak of the throw.

The plasma trail the spinning chain left behind it going up turned the alien air between Jayden and Kruel into a column of fire that was not fire, something past fire, the temperature differential between the Descending Dragon’s two extremes producing a thermal event that had no clean category. The column was eight meters wide and it hit Kruel from below while the right wing was still spasming from Valor’s discharge.

Kruel went sideways.

Not down. He caught himself with the left wing and turned the sideways motion into a banking arc and came around and looked down at Jayden.

Then he dove at the ship anyway.

He hit it from above with both fists and the hull buckled inward at the impact point, the Ares alloy designed for deep space debris and atmospheric friction and not for a four horn Harbinger moving at terminal velocity with intent. The ship lurched sideways in the air and its stabilizers fired trying to correct and Kruel grabbed the hull with both hands and pulled.

The sound of Ares alloy separating from itself traveled across the entire battlefield.

He tore a section of the hull free. A three meter panel, dense, trailing wiring and internal components. He looked at it in his hands and then looked down at the battlefield and threw it.

It hit the alien ground between Aurelius’s position and the three horn perimeter and the impact sent stone fragments in every direction and two Ares soldiers went down from the shrapnel and Thessaly put herself between the rest of it and Aurelius without deciding to.

The ship was still flying. Damaged, listing slightly, the stabilizers working harder than they were built to work. The pilot held the approach.

Kruel looked at the ship. Then at the ground. Then at Lucas and Jayden below him.

He came back down.

He landed between them and the king’s position. Deliberately. Making himself the obstacle between the two S ranks and the extraction point, forcing them to come through him to reach it or abandon the king to reach each other.

Lucas looked at the geometry.

’He’s smarter than this should allow,’ he thought. ’He’s managing four separate problems simultaneously and prioritizing correctly on all of them.’

He charged anyway.

Valor was back in his hand, recalled mid-flight after the throw, and he came at Kruel from the front with the full output of an hour of alien storm charge sitting in the blade and Kruel met him head on and they hit each other and the alien ground between them compressed six inches from the pressure wave of the collision alone.

Lucas took the hit across the shoulder. The collarbone went, the same one that had been wrong before, going the rest of the way, and he felt it go and hit Kruel with Valor across the jaw anyway and kept his feet.

Jayden came from behind simultaneously, Heavenly Descent still running, every strike releasing plasma arcs and cryogenic shockwaves in alternating sequence, hitting Kruel across the back in a combination that had no pause between strikes, no reset, just continuous impact at a rate that forced Kruel’s regeneration to triage.

Kruel’s tail came around.

Lucas saw it coming and did something that should not have worked. He dropped. Flat, instantly, the collarbone screaming at him, and the tail passed through the space above him and caught Jayden across the chest instead and Jayden went sideways and hit the alien ground and came up slower than before.

But while Kruel’s tail was extended, Lucas was already up.

He grabbed it.

Both hands, Valor pressed flat against the tail’s surface, and he discharged everything. Not a strike. Not a bolt. The full contents of the Lightning Battery releasing through direct contact, every joule stored across the entire engagement, the Storm Engine pulling from the alien atmosphere above to top off what was already there and releasing that too.

The discharge turned the alien air white.

Every Harbinger within forty meters went down. Not dead. Stunned, the electromagnetic pulse hitting their nervous systems, and the three horns holding the perimeter staggered and in that two second window the Ares soldiers who had been fighting them had the opening they needed and used it and three of the four three horns on the perimeter did not get back up.

Kruel’s tail convulsed. He turned and his expression had changed. Something in it that had not been there before. Not pain. Not anger.

Respect was not the right word. But something adjacent to it. The recognition of something that had found a method he had not fully accounted for.

He hit Lucas with his free hand.

BOOM.

The hit landed on the already broken collarbone side and Lucas’s world went white and he hit the alien ground and lay there with Valor still in his hand and his vision coming back in pieces.

The ship touched down forty meters away. The ramp extended. Thessaly and two other wives were already moving Aurelius toward it, the king’s hands still running blue-orange, still trying to push himself upright, his voice carrying across the noise.

"Put me down," Aurelius said.

"In a moment," Thessaly said, not stopping.

"I said put me—"

"And I said in a moment, my king." She did not look at him. "You have one leg. The moment is not now."

He stopped fighting her. He looked back at the battlefield over her shoulder, at Lucas on the ground and Jayden getting up and Kruel standing between all of it, and his hands finally stopped running blue-orange. Just stopped, the fire going out, and he looked at his own hands and said nothing.

The ramp closed behind them.

Kruel watched the ship lift off. Watched it climb. Then he looked at the two remaining figures on the alien ground and spread his wings to their full span and the damaged joint on the left side held, the regeneration having finished what the fight had interrupted.

Both wings. Full span. Fifteen meters tip to tip.

He breathed in.

Jayden got up.

His left arm was still wrong. His right arm had the Descending Dragon and the cycle was still running because he had not stopped it, had kept it moving through every hit he had taken, and the weapon was at a state it had not been at earlier in the fight, the thermal differential between the two staffs so extreme that the chain between them was luminous, a continuous visible glow running its entire length.

Lucas got up.

Valor in his right hand. Left arm not moving correctly. Three knuckles on his right hand down to bone, the white of them visible and dark with his own blood. He closed the hand anyway.

They looked at each other across the ten meters between them.

Jayden nodded once.

Lucas nodded back.

They both looked at Kruel.

---

Thirty meters away, behind the collapsed ruin wall, Sophie Reign was on her knees with both hands pressed against the sides of her skull and the King’s Gaze was on the ground in front of her glowing so blue it lit the underside of the alien clouds above her.

Her eyes were the same color.

She was turning her head. Left. Right. Like she was trying to find something in the air around her, something only she could see, her gaze moving across something invisible with the frantic focus of someone reading a map that kept changing.

Her mouth was moving.

"Lucas," she said. Her voice was barely audible. "Jayden." She turned her head. "Lila." Another direction. "Sera."

She stopped.

Her eyes went wider.

"Noah," she said.

Then quieter.

"Noah."

Then she grabbed her own head with both hands and the sound that came out of her was not a word.

"Nooooo—"