Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 781: The lost sheep

[ALERT : This is a token to get 10 FPS for the first 10 people. It’s what I was able to get resolved by Webnovel. I’m truly sorry for any inconvenience

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The bay had that churn of last-minute prep, boots on metal, straps getting cinched twice, someone shouting a supply count across the hangar that nobody bothered answering directly. The Eclipse transport sat beside the Dreamers’ sleeker vessel, both crews moving in the restless rhythm people fell into right before departure, checking things they’d already checked because standing still felt worse than moving.

Diana had a case open on the ramp, running her thumb down a checklist, mouthing numbers to herself. Kelvin was crouched by the loading terminal, one mechanical arm plugged straight into the port, the panel above it blinking through diagnostics he wasn’t fully watching. Zahir leaned against the Dreamers’ hull talking to Boran, who laughed at something and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to rock him sideways. Priya circled the ship once, twice, muttering something about weight distribution under her breath, tablet held close to her chest like it might run off without her.

Mara came down the ramp with a crate under each arm and stopped halfway across the bay.

"Hey," she said. "Where’s the blonde one. Tall. Was glaring at Wren the whole first meeting."

"Lila," Diana said, not looking up from her list. "She said she’d be here."

"Haven’t seen her," Kelvin said, still half in the terminal, half not.

Noah, halfway through zipping his jacket, went still.

"Since when."

"Couple hours, maybe." Kelvin looked up properly this time. "Haven’t actually clocked it, I’ve been dealing with the flight manifest."

"Clock it."

Kelvin pulled up something on his tablet, scrolled, frowning at whatever he found.

"She’s not in her room," Noah said. "I’ll check."

He was already moving toward the exit before he finished saying it, and by the time the last word left his mouth he wasn’t there anymore.

He came out in Lila’s quarters. The bed was made, sheets pulled tight the way she always left them, some habit she’d never explained. Nothing on the desk out of place. No note propped against the lamp, nothing tucked under the pillow, nothing that told him a single thing.

He blinked to the training bay. Empty, the overhead lights running at half power, dust drifting slow through one shaft of it near the window. He blinked to the common area next, and a Dreamer he didn’t recognize flinched hard enough to drop the mug she was holding, the crack of it against the floor loud in the sudden quiet. He blinked down the residential corridor, and a junior faction member coming the other way pressed flat against the wall on pure instinct before his brain caught up with what had just moved past him.

Word was traveling through the facility faster than Noah could outrun it. People stepped into doorways as he passed, drawn by the sound of him appearing and disappearing three, four, five times in the space of a minute, and none of them had anything to offer him except the same confused expression, like they were all asking the same question he was and none of them had an answer either.

He came back to the bay.

"She’s not anywhere," he said. "I checked everywhere I can think of."

"Give me a second," Kelvin said. His second arm unfolded from where it had been tucked against his side, extending, the panel at the wrist sliding open, and he plugged it directly into the terminal alongside the first. "I can pull internal logs, see when she actually left the building."

His eyes went green.

Not all at once. It started at the edges, a faint wash of color bleeding in from the corners like something waking up behind them, and by the time it settled fully his gaze had gone distant, unfocused, tracking something that wasn’t in the room with the rest of them.

Nobody said anything while he worked. Diana had stopped checking her list. Zahir had gone quiet mid-sentence, Boran’s hand still resting on his shoulder from the last joke neither of them had finished laughing at.

"A little over two hours ago," Kelvin said finally, voice flat, still somewhere else. "She left through the main corridor. Didn’t badge out through security, just walked past the checkpoint like she owned the place, which, I guess, technically."

Noah crossed to him and grabbed his arm, pulling him a few steps back from the others, away from the Dreamers still watching, close enough now that whatever came next stayed between the two of them.

"You think she stowed away," he said, low. "On Lucas’s ship."

"Why would Lila—" Kelvin started, and then stopped himself mid-word, his eyes flicking back into focus for just a second. "Oh. Wait. It’s Lila."

He went distant again immediately.

"Their ship left an hour ago," he said. "If she got on board before that, she’d be on the loading manifest. I had eyes on it the whole time it was compiling."

A pause. Long enough that Noah’s jaw tightened waiting on it.

"She’s not on it," Kelvin said. "Nowhere on the list. She wasn’t there."

"Then where."

"Give me a second." His eyes tracked something invisible, back and forth, the green in them pulsing faintly with whatever data was moving through wherever he was actually looking right now. "She never took her comms. I can see the signal sitting dead in her room. Hasn’t moved since before she left."

"Find her tracker, then. The one in her earring."

Kelvin’s jaw tightened.

"That’s the thing," he said. "It’s reading like she’s still in the facility. Right now. This exact second."

"That’s not possible, I just checked every—"

"I know," Kelvin said, and looked at him directly this time, green fading halfway back toward normal. "Which means she found it. Took it out. Left it somewhere on purpose. That’s not an accident, Noah. That’s deliberate."

Something cold settled behind Noah’s ribs and stayed there.

Kelvin’s eyes went distant again, hunting. "She accessed a couple of internal systems before she left, though. The logs are still sitting there, nobody scrubbed them." He scrolled through something only he could see. "An address. A couple shipping company names."

"Shipping companies," Noah said. "What would she need with shipping companies."

"I don’t know yet, give me—" He stopped mid-sentence, his whole body going still.

"What."

"Public transit logs. Traffic cams across the district." His hands moved fast now, both of them, fingers tapping against nothing, pulling data only he could see. "She used a private shuttle a couple hours ago. Pulling the route now."

Noah didn’t say anything. He just watched Kelvin’s face while something loaded in front of him, watched the small muscles around his eyes tighten one at a time.

"Dropped her at a bay," Kelvin said slowly. "Industrial district. Hold on, let me cross reference the address she pulled earlier."

He typed something else. Went completely quiet.

"Kelvin."

"One second."

The bay had gone still around them. Even Boran had stopped talking. The Dreamers near their own ship were watching now without pretending not to, sensing something wrong in the shape of the silence even without hearing a single word of it.

Kelvin’s face did something Noah hadn’t seen it do before. Not fear, not quite. Flatter than that. Careful, the way a man’s face went careful when he was deciding exactly how much of what he’d just found he actually wanted to say out loud.

"Oh," he said quietly.

"What."

He looked up from the tablet, the green in his eyes fading out completely now, leaving something much more human and much more worried behind.

"Noah," he said. "I think she’s gone and done something a lot worse than stow away."

**

**THREE HOURS EARLIER**

A blonde woman walked toward a warehouse with her head low and a piece of gum working slow between her teeth.

The district had gone quiet the way industrial zones did after dark, everything shut down except the buildings nobody advertised, corrugated steel and dead streetlights and machinery humming somewhere it shouldn’t have been running at all. She didn’t hurry. Didn’t check behind her. Just walked, hands in her jacket pockets, boots quiet against cracked pavement, toward a warehouse with two guards posted outside a steel door painted over so many times the original color didn’t matter anymore.

One of them clocked her from thirty feet out and straightened.

"Restricted area," he said. "Turn around."

She kept walking.

"Hey." The second guard’s hand went to his hip. "You deaf? Turn around."

She stopped six feet from them, popped her gum once, and smiled.

"Hey boys," she said.

Her fingers moved, barely, two of them flicking sideways like she was brushing dust off her sleeve. The first guard left the ground.

He hit the support beam behind him hard enough that it bent, his body folding around the metal in a shape a spine wasn’t built to make, and he slid down it and didn’t get up. The second guard had his weapon half raised before she’d finished the motion, and she was already inside his reach, one hand closing around the barrel and wrenching it sideways while her other palm caught him under the jaw.

He went down too.

The steel door in front of her didn’t open on its own. She put her palm flat against it and pushed, and the locking mechanism inside tore itself apart with a grinding shriek before the door gave way and swung wide.

Six men inside turned at the sound, half of them already reaching for weapons, dark chi bleeding out around their knuckles in thin red threads that pulsed like something alive.

"Who the hell are you," one of them said.

She didn’t answer. She just kept walking, gum still working slow between her teeth, and the nearest man threw a punch coated in that dark red light straight at her head.

She wasn’t there when it landed.

She’d stepped through the moment before it, close enough to feel the energy coming off his fist, and drove her palm into his sternum with enough force behind it that he left his feet entirely, sailing backward into a stack of crates that came apart around him in a shower of splinters.

The other five came at once.

She raised one hand, fingers spread, and the air around her thickened, a visible shimmer spreading outward in a rough circle that swallowed all five men inside it. Their movements slowed, arms dragging through the air like they were fighting through water, and she moved through the middle of them at full speed, untouched by whatever she’d just done to the space around her.

She caught the first one by the collar and drove her knee into his ribs twice before he’d even finished raising his guard. The second, she grabbed by the wrist mid-swing and used his own momentum to redirect the punch into the third man’s temple, both of them crumpling together.

A length of pipe came loose from somewhere behind her. She felt it more than saw it, and without turning around, she flicked her wrist, and the pipe changed direction mid-flight, curving back toward the man who’d thrown it and catching him across the back of the skull.

The fourth man got a shot in. Barely. His fist connected with her shoulder, dark chi burning through the fabric of her jacket, and she staggered half a step before her hand shot out and closed around his throat.

She lifted him.

His feet left the ground, kicking, hands scrabbling at her wrist, and she looked at him with the same mild expression she’d worn the entire time, gum still moving in her mouth, and then she threw him into the fifth man hard enough that they both went through a support wall.

More were coming now, drawn by the noise, boots pounding across the warehouse floor from somewhere deeper inside, and she turned toward the sound with her head tilted slightly, working the gum, waiting.

A dozen of them poured out from a side corridor, weapons up, and the first shots came fast, blasters charging with that low whine before firing streaks of energy across the room. She didn’t dodge them so much as step past where they’d already been, the field around her thickening again, time dragging for every single one of them while she moved through it clean and unbothered.

She caught a man by the forearm as he swung a length of pipe at her head and used her grip to turn the strike, the pipe punching through his own chest instead of hers, out through his back, and she let go and let him fall.

Two more rushed her at once. She sidestepped the first, drove a strike into his throat with two fingers extended, vpt pulsed once through her fist, and the man behind him took her boot across the jaw before he’d even registered the first one going down.

She lifted an empty crate off a stack beside her, one hand, no visible effort, and swung it into a man’s skull with enough force that the crate shattered and he didn’t get back up.

By the time it stopped, most of them stopped, the ones still breathing groaning somewhere on the floor, and the warehouse had gone quiet except for her boots against concrete and the low hum of something electrical sparking loose overhead.

A man stepped out from the back office, older than the rest, gray at the temples, a scar running along his jaw that had healed wrong a long time ago. He looked at the bodies scattered across his floor and then at her, and something in his face shifted from anger into something closer to disbelief.

"Who are you," he said. "You have any idea whose place this is?"

She smirked and looked up at him, gum still working slow.

The man’s eyes went wide.

"Wait," he said. "I know that smile."

He took a step back.

"Agent Rowe."