Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 775: Nyx’s Evolution

"I’m gonna go attempt something crazy," Noah said.

Kelvin’s face did about four different things in the span of one second — confusion, then alarm, then the specific excitement he got whenever "crazy" and "Noah" showed up in the same sentence.

"Wait, hold on, crazy like what—"

"Domain," Noah said.

"No, no, hey—" Kelvin was already reaching, already half a step forward, "—you don’t just *domain* mid-conversation, we were literally in the middle of unraveling a centuries-spanning conspiracy, you can’t just—"

The purple portal opened beneath Noah’s feet before Kelvin finished the sentence, void energy folding up around him in a wide silent bloom, and Kelvin’s hand closed on empty air where Noah’s shoulder had been half a breath earlier.

"—NOAH."

The portal sealed shut.

Kelvin stood alone in the dark courtyard, arm still half-extended, staring at the spot where his best friend had just been.

"He does this every single time," he said, to nobody. "Every. Single. Time."

He stood there a moment longer, then sighed, dropped his arm, and pulled out his tablet to go add three more question marks to the whiteboard he definitely wasn’t going to admit he’d already started building in his head.

Noah got swallowed by the portal and the warm air of the domain hit him first, thick with the smell of grass and distant rain, and then the noise hit second.

Six of Gail’s hatchlings converged on him at once, wings half-extended, tumbling over each other in their rush across the meadow, and he braced just in time before the first one hit his shins and nearly took him off his feet. They weren’t hatchlings anymore, not really — each one had grown to the size of a pony over the last several months, fed on category four cores until their frames had filled out into something solid and fast, but they still moved like they were half that size, still crashed into him with the same reckless enthusiasm they’d had as newborns.

"Hey — hey, easy—" He caught one under its jaw before it could headbutt his stomach, laughing despite himself. "You’re all getting too big for this."

They didn’t agree. One nipped playfully at his sleeve. Another shot a small burst of frost at his boots that he sidestepped out of habit more than urgency.

Storm came trotting over from where he’d been rough-housing with two of the older hatchlings, lightning crackling low and easy across his scales, nothing like the wrongness Noah had seen in his eyes on that mountain. Just Storm. Tail swaying, ears up, the picture of a creature who’d forgotten he’d ever been anything else.

"You’re back to normal," Noah said, reaching up to scratch under his jaw. "Good."

Storm made a pleased rumbling sound and immediately turned his attention to stealing a beast core out of Noah’s open palm before he’d even offered it, trotting off with the prize held triumphantly in his jaws while two hatchlings gave chase.

Further out, near the tree line, Ivy lay curled with Gail, the two of them sharing the shade of a wide-canopied tree, a couple of the smaller hatchlings draped across their backs half-asleep. Beyond them, in the open field where the grass grew tallest, Nyx and Ares lay together the way they always did, massive dark shapes stretched out in the sun, Ares’s tail resting loosely over Nyx’s back.

Noah smiled at all of it, the whole sprawling chaotic warmth of the place, and then he remembered why he’d come.

"Nyx," he called.

The bigger dragon lifted his head slowly, ember eyes finding Noah across the field, and after a moment he rose, unhurried, and began to walk over. Every step of it shook the ground faintly, the size difference between him and everything else in the meadow becoming obvious the moment he was upright and moving.

"Come on, buddy," Noah said, once Nyx reached him. "Walk with me."

They went together, away from the noise, past the tree line and into a quieter stretch of the domain where the grass thinned into open rock, the sky above them stretching wide and empty. Nyx matched his pace patiently, head occasionally dipping to nose at Noah’s shoulder.

Noah stopped and turned to face him.

"So," he said. "I want to try something. And I need you to hear me out before you do the thing where you look at me like I’ve lost it."

Nyx tilted his head slightly.

"I found something," Noah said, holding up the stone, the pale verdant light pulsing faintly in his palm. "It’s supposed to push you forward. Evolution-wise. I don’t fully know what it does to you specifically, and there’s a real chance it doesn’t work the way we want, and I need you to know that going in." He looked up at the massive ember eyes watching him. "But I think you’re ready. I’ve thought that for a while now."

Nyx lowered his head until his snout was nearly level with Noah’s chest.

"Yeah," Noah said quietly. "I think so too."

He pressed the stone against the scales at the base of Nyx’s neck.

The light didn’t flare so much as sink, disappearing into the dark plating like water into soil, and Nyx’s whole body went still. Then, slowly, he began to fold himself down, legs bending, tail curling in around his own body until he’d settled into a low, coiled shape against the rock, the picture of something preparing to sleep for a very long time. He exhaled once, a low breath that carried a faint wash of heat, and closed his eyes.

The red mist came next.

It rose from every scale at once, thick and slow, the familiar Red Mist Cloak but denser now than Noah had ever seen it, climbing until it wrapped him entirely, until there was no dragon left to see at all, just a shifting red cloud with something burning deep inside it, flame-shapes moving beneath the surface like they were alive on their own.

[EVOLUTION IN PROGRESS]

[ESTIMATED COMPLETION: UNKNOWN]

[DO NOT DISTURB]

Noah stood there a moment longer, watching the mist churn, and then he stepped back.

"Take your time," he said, mostly to himself, and turned away.

---

He walked back out toward the open field, past Ares, who lifted his head briefly at Nyx’s absence, sniffed the air once, and settled back down, apparently deciding whatever was happening wasn’t his business yet. Noah kept going until he found a wide flat stretch of grass, far enough from everyone that nothing would get caught in his way.

"Alright," he said to himself, rolling his shoulders. "Since I’ve got some quiet, I might as well train."

He opened the system.

[Reaper’s Harvest]

[Available Constructs: 8]

[Currently Summoned: 0]

He scrolled through the list without needing to. He knew exactly who he wanted.

[Summon: The Widow — 18,000 Void Energy]

The purple light gathered first as a seam in the air, then split wide, and something stepped through it that made every hatchling in the distant meadow go dead silent.

She unfolded to her full height, a purple hide catching the domain’s soft light, four horns arranged along her skull, a long tail sweeping out behind her for balance. Her eyes held nothing. No malice, no recognition, no awareness of Noah at all beyond a target designation.

[Summon: Kruel — 40,000 Void Energy]

The second construct came through heavier, the ground actually flexing under the weight of him as he emerged, and Noah felt it in his own chest, the sheer presence of the thing even as a hollow copy. Kruel’s four horns sat thick and dense on his skull, a fifth just barely visible pushing through, frozen exactly at the point he’d died. His hide had the same purple sheen at the edges that Noah had seen briefly right before he’d been erased, the construct material bleeding faintly through wherever the light caught it wrong.

Both of them turned to look at him.

Neither one blinked.

"Alright," Noah said, cracking his neck. "Come at me."

Kruel moved first.

There was no warning. No windup. One moment he was standing still and the next his fist was already arriving, faster than anything that size should move, and Noah barely got his forearms up in time.

BOOOM!

The impact lifted him off the ground entirely.

He hit the air moving backward at a speed that turned the meadow into a blur, grass and rock and distant tree line all smearing together, and he crashed through a stand of saplings forty meters out before his back finally found the ground and skidded another ten across the dirt.

He lay there for half a second.

’Okay,’ he thought, staring at the sky. ’That was a lot.’

He rolled up onto one knee just as the Widow arrived, faster than Kruel, already airborne in a diving lunge with her tail whipping around to catch him from the blind side. He blinked at the last possible instant, the void energy folding him three meters left, and her claws raked through empty dirt where he’d been kneeling.

Kruel was already there.

The second punch came from above, both fists together in an overhead strike that Noah barely got out from under, the ground where he’d been standing simply ceasing to be ground, a crater blooming outward in a ring of displaced earth that sent grass and stone flying in every direction.

Far off, near the tree line, two of Gail’s hatchlings bolted for their mother, burying themselves against her flank, small distressed sounds carrying across the field. A couple of the older ones, the ones that hatched first before the rest didn’t run. They planted themselves, wings flaring, low growls building in their throats, watching the fight with the particular fury of creatures who wanted to help but beneath their aggressive stance were too scared to really commit.

But applauds anyway for intent, right?

The Widow came again.

Noah caught the first swipe on his forearm and felt it rattle up into his shoulder, the strength behind it genuinely startling even though he’d known what he was summoning. He twisted away from the follow-up, blinked again, this time behind her, and drove Rend into her exposed flank.

The tearing force opened a long gash. No blood — the constructs didn’t bleed, not really, just a faint bleed of purple light where the wound sat open — but she staggered from the impact regardless, her balance genuinely disrupted.

Kruel’s fist found him before he could capitalize on it.

It caught him across the ribs and the world tilted sideways, the domain’s sky and ground trading places twice before he crashed through the edge of a low ridge, stone crumbling around him, and this time when he came to a stop there was blood in his mouth.

He spat it out. Grinned.

’There it is,’ he thought, pushing himself back up. ’That’s what it feels like.’

He’d forgotten, somewhere along the last few weeks of Yoga with Miss Brooks and folding mountains, what it actually felt like to get hit by something that could genuinely end him if he let it. The General’s fight had reminded him there was a ceiling above his own. This was the first time in a long while he’d let himself feel a threat below that ceiling instead of always being the biggest thing in the room.

’If he can do that,’ he thought, watching Kruel’s fifth horn catch the light as he turned, ’then there could be others like him. Worse. And I got comfortable.’

He blinked forward.

This time he attacked first.

He caught Kruel mid-stride with a straight punch chi-fused with void energy, the combination cracking hard across the construct’s jaw, and followed immediately with a second before Kruel’s own momentum had finished reacting to the first. Kruel’s head snapped sideways. The purple sheen along his cheek flickered, destabilized for a fraction of a second, then reasserted itself.

The Widow’s tail came for his legs.

He jumped it, came down already moving, Void Barrage firing in a tight burst that punched three holes clean through her shoulder before she’d fully recovered from the earlier gash. She growled — a sound with no real vocal cords behind it, something closer to displaced air forced through a wound — and lunged anyway, claws extended.

He blinked away from the strike and reappeared already swinging, catching her across the side of the skull hard enough to spin her half around.

Kruel’s fist came from his blind side.

Noah didn’t see it in time to dodge. He saw it in time to do something else.

He tore a void rift open directly in front of himself, the air splitting wide, and Kruel’s fist plowed straight into the tear instead of Noah’s chest. The impact reverberated through the domain anyway, a shockwave rolling outward from the rift’s edges, but Noah stood behind it untouched, grinning through the blood on his lip.

"Nice try," he said.

Kruel didn’t react to being spoken to. He simply reset, and came again, faster this time, and Noah let the rift close and caught the punch outright.

Both hands. Full grip. The impact drove him back a full meter through the dirt, his boots carving twin furrows, and he groaned through his teeth at the force of it traveling up both arms into his shoulders.

The Widow’s tail whipped in from behind, aimed at his exposed back.

He caught that too. Without looking. His left hand snapping backward on instinct and closing around the tail’s midsection while his right hand still held Kruel’s fist locked in place, and for one full second Noah stood between both Harbingers, physically restraining an attack from each of them simultaneously, his whole body trembling with the effort of it.

’I’m holding both of them,’ he thought, something wild and bright lighting up behind the strain in his chest. ’Right now. I’m actually holding both of them.’

He twisted.

He used Kruel’s own momentum, redirected it, hauling the fist sideways and down while simultaneously yanking the Widow’s tail forward, and the two constructs collided with each other, Kruel’s shoulder driving into the Widow’s flank hard enough that she was thrown clear across the meadow, skidding through grass and dirt before finally stopping against the base of the ridge.

Kruel recovered faster.

He turned on Noah immediately, both fists coming up, and Noah blinked backward, putting distance, breathing hard now, blood running freely from a cut above his eyebrow he hadn’t noticed opening.

’They’d kill me,’ he thought, watching Kruel advance, steady, unhurried, completely without fear because fear required awareness this construct didn’t have. ’Together, right now, at whatever fraction of full commitment I’m actually getting from them. If I stopped taking this seriously for even a few seconds, they would actually kill me.’

’I got lucky,’ he thought. ’On that planet. I got lucky I never had to face both of them together, not really, not like this.’

He wiped the blood from his eyebrow with the back of his hand and looked at it smeared across his knuckles.

He was smiling.

’Good,’ he thought. ’This is good.’

Kruel closed the distance again, and this time Noah didn’t retreat.

He met him head on.

The first exchange was pure violence, no finesse, fists meeting fists, and Noah took two solid hits to land one of his own, the difference in raw output still very much in the construct’s favor. But his one hit landed clean, chi and void fused together, straight into the same crack he’d already opened along Kruel’s jaw, and this time the purple sheen didn’t reassert itself fast enough to stop a visible fracture from spreading.

The Widow came back into it from the side, faster than before, clearly reading the opening Noah had left chasing Kruel, and he blinked at the exact last moment her claws would have connected, reappearing on her far side already firing Void Barrage point blank into her exposed ribs.

She staggered.

He didn’t let up.

Rend followed the barrage, opening a second gash to match the first, and he kept moving the entire time, never fully stopping, using void blinks to slip half-steps out of range whenever Kruel’s fists came looking for him, and Blinking whenever the distance closed too far to phase clear in time.

It went on like that. Minute after minute, the meadow behind him steadily more cratered, grass flattened in wide arcs from missed strikes and displaced shockwaves, a few of the braver hatchlings still holding their ground at the tree line, growling low every time Noah took a hit hard enough to visibly stagger him.

He kept getting up.

He kept hitting back.

Somewhere in the middle of it, catching another one of Kruel’s punches dead center in both palms, grunting through the impact, immediately pivoting to intercept the Widow’s tail as it whipped in from his blind side, Noah realized he was laughing.

Not from the pain.

From something underneath it. Something that had been sitting quiet and unexercised since the day he’d erased Kruel for real and started believing, somewhere in the back of his mind, that nothing below the General’s level could genuinely threaten him anymore.

This did.

Both of them, together, were reminding him exactly how far that belief had been from true.

He held Kruel’s fist a second longer than he needed to, feeling the strain burn through his forearms, and grinned into it.

"Again," he said, to no one who could actually hear him. "Come on. Again!!!!"