Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 782: The Amazon

The comm crackled once before Priya’s voice came through, clipped and precise the way it always was when she had numbers to deliver.

"ETA six hours," she said. "We’re holding formation about two hundred meters off your starboard side. Wind resistance is lighter than projected once we cleared the upper atmosphere, so we might shave another twenty minutes off that if it holds."

"Copy," Diana said, leaning toward the console. "Any change on the airspace clearance window?"

"Still tight," Priya said. "The gap we’ve got runs about four hours before the next EDF patrol sweep comes back through this sector. We land, we get everyone and everything off the ships, and we’re inside the tree line before that window closes. If we’re not, we’re explaining ourselves to a border patrol that doesn’t know we exist."

"We’ll make it," Kelvin said, half his attention still on a secondary display running diagnostics on something unrelated. "I’ve already got a flight path mapped that shaves the margin without pushing engine load past what either ship can handle long term."

"Send it over," Priya said. "I want to compare it against what we ran."

"Already sent it three minutes ago," Kelvin said. "Check your inbox before you doubt me next time, Priya."

There was a pause on the other end that might have been her actually checking, or might have been her deciding not to dignify that with a response.

"Got it," she said finally. "It’s clean. We’ll fold it into our nav."

"Zahir’s asleep, by the way," Wren’s voice cut in, distant, like she was talking over her shoulder rather than into the comm directly. "Just so you know. In case anyone needed him for something urgent, you’re getting me instead."

"Noted," Diana said, and something in her voice suggested she was fighting a smile.

The channel went quiet after that, the kind of quiet that settled once the actual business had been handled and nobody had anything left worth saying over an open line. Diana leaned back from the console and exhaled, rolling one shoulder like it had been sitting tense since the bay.

Kelvin didn’t look up from his display. "So," he said. "We’re just not going to talk about it."

"Talk about what," Diana said, even though she clearly knew.

"Lila," Kelvin said. He finally turned in his seat to look at Noah, who was standing near the back of the cabin with his arms crossed, staring at nothing in particular through the viewport. "You found out she went to the Purge. Actual, confirmed, she’s-inside-a-Purge-facility-right-now information. And we just got on this ship and left."

"What was I supposed to do," Noah said. "Chase her down mid-op and drag her back by the collar?"

"I don’t know," Kelvin said. "Something. Anything. She’s out there alone, Noah. Against people who used to be her actual family, whatever that word even means for her at this point. That’s not nothing."

Noah looked at him for a second. "You think I don’t know that."

"I think you left anyway," Kelvin said. "That’s the part I’m stuck on."

Diana had gone quiet, watching the exchange with an expression that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite disagreement, just careful, the way she got when she was working through something methodically before she said it out loud.

"Can I ask something," she said finally.

"Go ahead," Noah said.

"Back at Academy Eight," Diana said. "During the interschool competition. I remember Lila being talked about a lot. Prominent, in a way that stuck with people. And I remember, later, hearing what she actually was back then. A mole. Planted by her own parents."

"That’s true," Noah said.

"And she found her way back into the faction," Diana said, "after we left the Vanguard station. After all of that came out."

"Also true," Noah said, and something in his tone had gone flatter, more careful.

"So can she be trusted," Diana said. "That’s the actual question, isn’t it. Not is she okay. Did she turn."

The cabin went quiet in a different way this time. Kelvin’s jaw tightened slightly. Even the low hum of the ship’s engine seemed to sit heavier in the silence that followed.

"She hasn’t turned," Noah said.

"How do you know that," Diana said. Not accusing. Genuinely asking.

"Because I know her," Noah said. "Because every single one of us has fought beside her. Bled next to her. She’s put her body between danger and people in this cabin more times than I can count on both hands." He looked between them. "Everyone’s got their own reasons for doing what they do, their own history sitting under the surface that doesn’t always make sense from the outside. That doesn’t make her a threat. It makes her a person."

"I’m not saying she’s a threat," Diana said. "I’m asking a fair question. You’d want someone to ask it about you too, if the situation were reversed."

"I know," Noah said, and some of the edge went out of his voice. "You’re right to ask it. I just already worked through it myself, hours ago, standing in that bay, and I landed somewhere different than where you’re sitting right now."

"Where’d you land," Kelvin said.

"She’ll come back," Noah said. "Maybe with an explanation. Maybe without one that satisfies everybody. But she’ll come back, because whatever she’s doing right now, it’s not about leaving us behind. It’s about something she needs to settle on her own terms, and she’s earned the right to do that without permission from a committee."

Kelvin looked at him for a long moment, then let out a breath that took some of the tension out of his shoulders with it.

"You know," he said, "nobody gives me this vote of confidence when I go off and do something unscripted."

"That’s because," Diana said, reaching over and shoving him lightly in the shoulder, "you act like you’re the main character of some movie where you personally have to save the day. That’s the difference."

"I do not act like that."

"You and Noah absolutely act like that," Diana said.

"Protagonist of the universe," Kelvin said, grinning now, leaning into it instead of fighting it. "I’ve been called worse."

"You’ve both been called that specifically, multiple times, by multiple people. In fact you started it." Diana said, and Noah actually laughed, short and real, the first genuine sound he’d made since the bay.

"Alright," Diana said, standing and stretching, the moment settling back into something looser. "Six hours. Might as well make ourselves useful instead of standing around interrogating each other."

She and Kelvin drifted toward the front console together, dropping into the two seats side by side, and within a minute their conversation had shifted into something low and easy, half mission logistics, half something that had nothing to do with the mission at all, Kelvin saying something that made Diana laugh properly, the two of them falling into the specific rhythm two people got into when six hours together felt like an opportunity rather than a wait.

Noah watched them for a second, something warm settling in his chest at the sight of it, and then made his way toward the back of the cabin, past the storage racks, into the narrow isolated section near the rear bulkhead where the hum of the engine ran quietest.

He sat down against the wall, forearms resting on his knees.

’Lila,’ he thought. ’What are you doing.’

It had taken so long to build the trust back after everything. Months of her proving, in small ways and large ones, that whoever she’d been as a teen wasn’t who she was now. And now she’d walked straight back into the one place that trust had come from originally, without a word to anyone, without so much as a note.

’You’d better have an endgame,’ he thought. ’Something that actually explains this. Because I just told two of the people I trust most that I believe in you completely, and I meant every word of it. Don’t make me a liar.’

He sat with that for a while, the ship’s engine humming steady beneath him, and then he closed his eyes.

"Domain," he said quietly.

The purple light folded around him and the cabin disappeared.

---

The meadow hit him with warmth first, the smell of grass and distant rain, and then the noise hit second, the way it always did.

He barely got his footing before three of the hatchlings crashed into his legs at once, wings half-spread, tumbling over each other in their rush to reach him. They were bigger every time he came back, pony-sized now and still growing, and he braced against the impact and laughed despite himself.

"Hey, hey, easy—" He caught one under the jaw before it could headbutt him properly. "I was gone what, an hour? You’re all still this excited?"

They weren’t fine with the explanation. One of them shoved its head under his arm, hunting for a beast core it hadn’t kept there. Another let out a small burst of lightning that Noah jerked back on.

Storm came barreling across the field the second he heard Noah’s voice, lightning sparking low and easy across his scales, sliding to a stop that plowed a furrow through the grass and nearly took two hatchlings out along the way.

"You," Noah said, pointing at him. "You’re worse than all of them combined."

Storm flopped onto his side in response, tail thumping once, clearly requesting something without any interest in specifying what.

Noah crouched down and scratched under his jaw, feeling the low rumble of satisfaction build in Storm’s chest, and for a while he just let himself be there, in the middle of it, hatchlings climbing over his legs and Storm sprawled out taking up most of the available ground, the whole domain alive around him in a way that had nothing to do with fights or missions or anyone going missing without warning.

He found a beast core in his void storage and tossed it. Storm snapped it out of the air before any of the hatchlings could react, and the resulting scramble sent three of them tumbling into a heap that none of them seemed particularly bothered by.

"You’re a menace," Noah told him.

Storm’s tail thumped again, pleased with himself.

He wandered further out eventually, past the tree line, toward where Nyx’s cocoon still sat in slow, churning silence, the red mist thick and unreadable, exactly as it had been every time he’d checked.

He stood in front of it for a moment.

"Still nothing," he said quietly. "Take your time."

He meant it. He wasn’t in a hurry for this one, not really, even with everything else building around him. Some things needed the time they needed.

Ares lifted his head from where he lay in the open field, ember eyes tracking Noah’s approach, and made a low questioning sound that Noah had learned, over months, meant something close to if Nyx was doing okay in there.

"He’s fine," Noah said, crossing to sit beside him in the grass. "Just cooking."

Ares huffed, a small puff of heat curling from his nostrils, and settled his head back down, apparently satisfied with that answer.

Noah sat there for a while, one hand resting against Ares’s flank, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the warmth radiating off him even at rest. Ivy wandered over eventually, curling up on his other side without asking, and for a stretch of time that had no clean edges, Noah just sat between Ares and Ivy and let the domain be quiet around him.

’This is the part nobody sees,’ he thought, the same thought he always had here, and it never got old thinking it. ’All the fighting, the missions, the politics. None of it looks like this. None of it feels like this.’

Eventually he stood, brushed the grass off his pants, and found an open stretch of flat ground away from the sleeping dragons and the hatchlings still rough-housing near Gail’s den.

He planted his feet.

’Alright,’ he thought. ’Let’s actually work.’

He’d been thinking about it since the fight against Kruel and the Widow constructs, the way his body had felt slower than it should have, the gap between what he could theoretically do and what he could actually execute under real pressure. VPT strikes had always been about concentration, taking a spread of force and collapsing it down to a single devastating point. He was good at it. He wasn’t good enough.

He threw the first strike into open air, no target, just testing the shape of it, watching the way the air itself seemed to compress around his fist for a fraction of a second before releasing.

Clean and standard.

He tried it again, this time weaving a thread of chi through the technique, the white energy threading itself into the void-based strike, and felt immediately how much harder it was to hold both disciplines steady at once. The chi wanted to spread. The VPT wanted to collapse inward. Making them cooperate instead of fighting each other took a level of control he hadn’t fully developed.

He threw the strike a third time, chi and void together, and this time the air in front of him cracked audibly, a small concussive pop that rippled outward and knocked loose grass flat in a three-meter radius.

’There,’ he thought. ’That’s the shape of it.’

He kept going. Strike after strike, adjusting the ratio between the two energies each time, sometimes leaning too hard into the chi and watching the effect diffuse into something soft and ineffective, sometimes leaning too hard into the void and losing the precision that made VPT worth using in the first place. He found the balance slowly, through repetition, through failure, the same way he’d found everything else worth having.

Storm wandered over at some point and settled a few meters away, watching with the patient curiosity of a creature who had nothing better to do and found this mildly interesting. A couple of the hatchlings drifted over too, keeping a respectful distance once they realized the strange popping sounds coming off Noah’s fists weren’t a game they were invited to.

He lost track of how long he worked. Time moved differently in the domain, always had, and by the time he finally stopped, his knuckles ached in a satisfying way and the ground around him was scorched in a loose ring from strikes that had gotten away from him early on before he’d found his rhythm.

He sat down in the grass, breathing steady, and let himself just exist there for a while, Storm’s head eventually settling into his lap the way it always did when Noah stopped moving long enough to allow it.

’Okay,’ he thought, looking up at the domain’s endless soft sky. ’We should probably head out. They’ll be close by now.’

He scratched behind Storm’s ear one more time, stood, and looked around at all of it, the meadow, the hatchlings finally settling down near Gail’s den, Nyx’s cocoon still churning quietly in the distance, Ares and Ivy curled together in the open field.

"Domain," he said.

---

The cabin was dim when he came out of it, most of the interior lighting dropped to its low overnight setting, and quiet in a way it hadn’t been six hours ago.

He looked toward the front console.

Kelvin and Diana had both fallen asleep in their seats, the low hum of the engine apparently doing exactly what it was built to do to two people who’d been running on adrenaline and stress for most of the day. Kelvin’s head had tipped sideways at some point and come to rest against Diana’s shoulder before sliding further down, ending up in her lap entirely, one of his mechanical arms hanging loose off the armrest. Diana’s hand rested on top of his head, fingers still curled loosely in his hair like she’d been running them through it before sleep caught her too.

Noah stood there for a second, something warm and quiet settling in his chest at the sight of it.

’Wow,’ he thought.

He walked past them slow, careful with each step, avoiding the loose panel near the second row that always creaked if you weren’t paying attention to it, and made his way to the forward viewport.

He looked out.

Green stretched in every direction below, unbroken and endless, canopy layered so thick in places that the ground beneath it was nothing but guesswork, the whole expanse catching the last light of the day in shades of deep, saturated color that no city ever produced.

They were here.

The Amazon.