Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 783: Into the Jungle

The ships came down through a gap in the canopy that Priya had spotted from six hundred meters up, a rare seam in the unbroken green where an old lightning strike had cleared enough space for two hulls to fit without clipping branches on the way in. Even so, the landing wasn’t gentle. Noah felt the ship shudder as it dropped the last thirty feet through humid air thick enough to taste, the engines whining against the resistance of it, and when the ramp finally lowered, the heat hit him like a wall.

It wasn’t the dry heat of the Vanguard mission or the burning red of that other planet’s surface. This was wet, heavy, alive in a way that made his shirt stick to his back within seconds of stepping onto the ramp. The air smelled of rot and growth in equal measure, sweet decay layered under something green and sharp, and somewhere far off a chorus of insects was already screaming at a pitch that hadn’t existed a moment ago and now felt like it had always been there.

"Careful stepping off," Boran called from the Dreamers’ ship, already halfway down his own ramp with a case balanced on one shoulder like it weighed nothing. "Ground’s softer than it looks. Lost my footing twice just walking the perimeter before you landed."

Kelvin came down behind Noah, immediately swatting at something near his ear. "This place is actively trying to eat us. I want that on record before anything else happens."

"Noted," Diana said, stepping past him with a case of her own, scanning the tree line with the flat, assessing look she got whenever a new environment demanded a threat inventory before it got a proper welcome.

A camp was already up by the time they reached it, maybe forty meters from the landing site, a cluster of reinforced tents arranged around a central clearing that someone had clearly burned back with controlled fire rather than machetes, the char marks still visible on the nearest trunks. A woman came out from between two of the tents at the sound of their approach, tall, sun-worn, dressed in gear that had clearly seen weeks in this environment rather than days.

"Priya," she said, raising a hand in greeting that was more relief than formality.

"Kesh," Priya said, crossing to meet her, the two of them clasping forearms briefly before letting go. "Tell me you’ve got good news."

"I’ve got news," Kesh said. "Whether it’s good depends on your definition."

She led them into the largest tent, where a table had been set up with a rolling holographic display showing a topographic map of the surrounding basin, dense with markers Noah didn’t yet understand.

"Beast activity’s been climbing steadily since I got dropped in here two weeks ago," Kesh said, pulling up a secondary overlay that turned half the visible map red. "Not just frequency. Density. I’m seeing overlapping territories that shouldn’t overlap, species that shouldn’t be sharing hunting ground crossing paths without the usual friction you’d expect. Something’s pushing them together instead of letting them spread out the way undisturbed populations normally would."

"Pushing them how," Diana asked.

"That’s the part I can’t answer from the outside," Kesh said. "But there’s a signature at the center of all this." She tapped the display, and a single point deep in the basin’s interior pulsed steady and bright, distinct from everything around it. "Sustained and consistent. Not natural, not anything I’ve got a clean read on. It’s been running the whole two weeks I’ve been monitoring, never fluctuating, like something’s just sitting there generating output and doesn’t care who notices."

Kelvin was already crouched by his own equipment, a compact scanner unfolding from one of his mechanical hands, and after a few seconds his face changed.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "I’ve got it too. Whatever that is, it’s real, and it’s big enough to bleed through interference this thick." He looked up. "This isn’t a small source. Whatever’s generating it has been running unbothered for a long time."

Noah felt it before Kelvin finished the sentence.

It came in low, a pressure behind his sternum that didn’t belong to the heat or the humidity, something ambient he could feel the way you felt a bassline through a wall before you could make out the actual song. He didn’t say anything about it out loud, not yet, but the system flickered at the edge of his vision unprompted.

[UNKNOWN ENERGY SOURCE DETECTED]

[SUSTAINED SIGNATURE — HIGH MAGNITUDE]

[RECOMMENDATION: INVESTIGATE AND DISCOVER]

’That’s not a small thing either,’ he thought, looking at the pulsing marker on Kesh’s display. ’Whatever that actually is.’

"We move toward it," Priya said, already rolling the map to plot a route. "Carefully. We’re not walking in blind, and we’re not rushing toward something we don’t understand yet. But that’s the objective."

---

They set out an hour later, the sun already dropping toward whatever passed for a horizon under three layers of canopy, most of the group falling into loose formation as they pushed through undergrowth that fought back at every step. Wren had shifted early, taking the shape of something low and fast that moved through the brush ahead of the group scouting a path, occasionally reappearing at Priya’s shoulder in human form just long enough to report before vanishing back into whatever she’d become.

Two stream drones hovered a respectful distance overhead, quiet, patient, feeding footage back to whatever audience was watching a joint Eclipse-Dreamers expedition hack its way through unexplored jungle in real time.

Mira walked near the middle of the group, close enough to Noah that it took him a few minutes to realize she’d angled herself that way on purpose.

"So," she said, conversational, easy, the kind of tone that made whatever came next feel less invasive than it actually was. "I have to ask, because I know the audience is dying to know and nobody else seems willing to."

"Here we go," Kelvin muttered from somewhere behind them.

"Your relationships," Mira said, glancing at Noah with genuine, open curiosity rather than anything unkind. "How does it actually work? Practically, I mean. Everyone’s heard about it but I don’t think anyone actually understands the mechanics."

"There aren’t really mechanics," Noah said. "It’s just relationships. Same as anyone else’s, just more of them."

"But how do you divide time," Mira pressed. "With four people, surely someone feels left out eventually."

"We talk about it," Noah said. "A lot. That’s basically the whole mechanic."

"And they’re all fine with it? Genuinely?"

"They’re not just fine with it," Noah said. "They chose it. All of us did, together."

Mira nodded slowly, filing that away, and then her expression shifted into something with a bit more of an edge, curiosity sharpening into something closer to pointed.

"Speaking of them," she said, tilting her head slightly, small and innocent in a way that didn’t quite match the timing of the question. "Where’s Lila?"

The camera drone overhead adjusted its angle almost imperceptibly, catching the moment.

"She had an emergency to handle," Noah said, keeping his voice level.

"Is that the same emergency that had Sophie, Seraleth, Lucas, and Angel leave the faction earlier today?" Mira asked. "We heard about that. Word travels fast when four members of a faction that public suddenly vanish on short notice."

Noah opened his mouth to answer.

"How about we focus on the mission," Diana said, stepping in smoothly enough that it barely registered as an interruption at all, more like the conversation had simply continued in a different direction. "We’ve got a live energy source to reach before dark makes that significantly harder."

Mira held her gaze for a second, clearly recognizing the redirect for exactly what it was, and then let it go with an easy smile, the kind of smile that suggested she’d file the question away for later rather than actually drop it.

"Fair enough," she said. Then, without missing a beat, she pivoted entirely. "Diana, can I ask you something instead?"

"You can ask."

"We heard about Kruel. The attack on the Eastern Cardinal, two years back. That your head was—" she paused, choosing the word carefully, "—badly injured. And that your fiancé managed to bring you back from it."

"Boyfriend," someone corrected from further back in the group, and Diana’s jaw tightened.

"He is my fiancé," Diana said, flat and immediate. "Soon to be husband. And yes. Thanks to his brilliance, I’m alive, and fully capable, if that’s actually what you’re asking,"

A section of the ground beside her rippled, and a dark shape unmasked itself out of nothing, scales catching what little light filtered down through the canopy, pale amber eyes sweeping the group once with an expression that read, even on a dragon’s face, as deeply unimpressed.

Half the Dreamers actually flinched.

"Was he just there," Boran said, staring. "This whole time?"

"He goes where I go," Diana said, not looking at him, one hand already resting against Shade’s flank like the gesture was automatic.

"We had no idea," Wren said, reappearing at the edge of the group, staring at Shade with something between fascination and alarm. "That’s not something you mention up front?"

"He mentioned himself," Diana said. "Apparently he felt like it."

Shade gave the assembled Dreamers one more slow, disapproving look before folding back into nothing, the space where he’d been standing rippling once and then settling into ordinary jungle floor like he’d never been there at all.

The drone overhead had caught every second of it.

[Xoxo124]: didnt even realize this would be a co op. read theyre a big shot in the southern cardinal

[GreyStormFan]: WAIT THE DRAGON WAS JUST THERE THE WHOLE TIME??? invisible???

[nova_watcher]: diana absolutely ATE with that fiancé line lmaooo

[PithonElite_07]: shade’s masking ability is genuinely the scariest thing eclipse has and nobody talks about it enough

[user_Jace91]: mira really tried it with the lila question and got shut down so fast

[StreamUser_847]: eclipse team dynamic is unmatched, they just roll with everything

[ArcadeGuru]: does anyone actually know why sophie lucas sera and angel left today? that’s been bugging me since this morning

[VoidKingFan12]: probably classified faction stuff, they never explain everything

[GigaRoseSimp]: forget all that im still stuck on the dragon just APPEARING out of nowhere

The chat kept scrolling, opinions layering over opinions, and the group kept moving, the brief tension of the last few minutes dissolving back into the general rhythm of the trek.

---

The canopy thickened ahead of them into something that made even Wren, back in human form now, slow her pace.

Webbing hung between the trees in sheets, thick and gray-white, strands as wide as rope crossing at angles that suggested purpose rather than accident, layered so densely in places that the path forward simply disappeared into it.

"That’s not natural," Priya said quietly, tilting her head back to trace where the webbing climbed up into the canopy itself, vanishing into shadow far overhead.

"Nothing about this basin has been natural since we got here," Kesh said, though she’d stayed behind at camp, her voice only present through the comm now. "Watch yourselves."

Two of the younger Dreamers raised ravager blasters, the weapons humming as they charged, and fired in short controlled bursts into the thickest section of webbing ahead. The energy tore through, scorching black lines through the strands, but the gaps closed almost as fast as they opened, fresh silk bleeding out from severed ends to knit the damage back together.

"That’s not working," one of them said, lowering his weapon.

"Let me," Boran said.

He stepped forward, cracked his knuckles once, and drove both hands into the wall of webbing, gripping and pulling with his full weight behind it. The strands groaned, resisted, and then tore, whole sections coming away in his fists with a sound like something ripping muscle from bone. He kept going, methodical, brute force succeeding where energy weapons hadn’t, carving an actual gap wide enough for the group to move through.

"Show off," Wren muttered, though there was clear affection in it.

They pushed on through the gap Boran had opened, boots sinking into damp earth thick with old shed webbing, and the deeper they went the more the light changed, filtering down through layers of silk overhead until everything took on a pale, filtered quality that made the whole place feel underwater.

A screech came without warning.

It tore through the quiet from somewhere close, high and grinding, and the ground beneath them shuddered a half second before the first shapes burst up out of concealed burrows on every side.

[BEAST DETECTED]

[NAME: OBSIDIAN FANG WEAVER]

[CLASS: ARACHNIDIA]

[RANK: CATEGORY 3]

They were massive, armored bodies segmented and plated in overlapping black chitin, each one easily the size of a large vehicle, multiple clawed legs digging into the earth for purchase as they emerged, mandibles the length of short swords clicking open and shut in front of pale, clustered eyes. A curved tail arced up over the back of each one, ending in a barbed stinger that dripped something dark and viscous.

Six of them. Then eight. Emerging from every direction at once.

"CONTACT," Priya shouted, already backpedaling, and the group snapped into motion.

Zahir stayed where he was, arms loose at his sides, watching his people move with the quiet satisfaction of someone who’d trained them himself and trusted every single one of them to handle exactly this. Beside him, Mira had gone still too, tracking the fight with a healer’s eyes rather than a fighter’s, already calculating who might need her before the dust settled.

Boran was moving before the second one had fully cleared its burrow, closing the distance in three long strides and driving his shoulder into the nearest weaver’s flank with enough force to knock the whole armored body sideways, its legs scrabbling for purchase it didn’t find. He followed with a strike from both fists together, driving down onto its exposed joint where leg met body, and the chitin cracked audibly under the impact.

Wren shifted mid-stride, her human shape dissolving into something low and fast and clawed, a hybrid form built for exactly this, tearing into the flank of a second weaver with speed the arachnid couldn’t track, opening three shallow gashes before it managed to bring a leg around and catch her across the ribs, sending her tumbling but not stopping her, already rolling back to her feet and shifting again, this time into something with wings, lifting clear of a stinger strike aimed at where she’d just been.

Two more of the younger Dreamers worked in tandem, one laying down suppressing fire with a ravager blaster while the other closed in low, driving a blade coated in something crackling and electric up through the softer plating along a weaver’s underside. It shrieked, legs curling inward, and went still.

Priya hung back near the rear of the group, tablet already up, calling out targeting information and formation adjustments in a rapid clipped voice that the rest of the team responded to without hesitation, her role clearly less about direct combat and more about keeping the whole engagement coherent.

Noah took a step forward toward the nearest weaver, and Boran was already there, cutting between him and the target without breaking stride.

"We’ve got it," Boran said, not unkindly, already swinging.

Noah pulled back half a step, glancing at Kelvin, who’d raised one mechanical arm toward the fight only for one of the younger Dreamers to wave him off entirely, sprinting past to intercept a weaver that had circled around toward their flank.

"I’ve got this one!"

"I was going to help," Kelvin said, mostly to himself.

"They’ve got it," Diana said, watching with an expression somewhere between amused and mildly offended on their behalf, Shade’s tail flicking once from the shadows beside her without him ever fully unmasking.

The fight kept moving, weaver after weaver going down under coordinated strikes, Wren tearing through one after another in whatever shape suited the moment, Boran anchoring the center of the fight like a wall nothing could push through, the younger Dreamers weaving in and out with blades and blasters in a rhythm that looked practiced, drilled, the product of actual time spent fighting together rather than raw talent alone.

Noah stood back with Kelvin and Diana, arms crossed, watching an entire engagement unfold without laying a single hand on it.

"This is weird," Kelvin said. "I don’t like this."

"Let them have it," Diana said. "They’re good."

"I know they’re good," Kelvin said. "I just feel useless."

The last weaver went down under a combined strike, Boran’s fist and a blade through its throat joint simultaneously, and the clearing went quiet except for the group’s own heavy breathing and the distant chorus of insects that had never actually stopped.

Priya lowered her tablet slowly, surveying the fallen arachnids scattered across the torn earth.

"Well," she said. "That was something."

Noah stepped forward, looking at the bodies, the webbing still hanging heavy overhead, and something in the pit of his stomach told him this wasn’t over, that eight was a strange number to stop at, that something this coordinated wouldn’t just vanish because the first wave had been dealt with.

He smirked slightly, more for himself than anyone watching.

"Just to be sure they don’t come back," he said.

"Ash. Ember. Ignite."

The ground at the center of the clearing split open, a thin seam of faint purple light bleeding up through the cracked earth for one brief, flickering second.

Then it turned red, burning, spreading outward in a fissure that ran the length of the fallen weavers’ bodies, and the whole clearing began to glow.