Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 785: Almost unbeatable

The trees had opened into something almost pleasant, wide gaps in the canopy letting real sunlight down for the first time since they’d landed, dust motes hanging gold in the shafts of it, and the mood had loosened along with it. Somewhere behind them a bird Noah couldn’t name called out three notes and went quiet, and for the first time in hours the jungle felt less like something waiting to eat them and more like a place people could actually walk through.

"So," Priya said, walking backward for a stretch so she could face Kelvin properly, tablet tucked under one arm. "Once this is over. Assuming we all survive whatever’s generating that signature. I want full access to your research on the beast surge correlation. Everything. Raw data, not the summary you gave us at the meeting."

"That’s a big ask," Kelvin said, grinning, both mechanical arms folded loosely behind his back the way they did when he wasn’t actively using them for anything. "Raw data’s basically my diary."

"I’ll trade you," Priya said. "My void concentration mapping for the other three sites. You’ve only seen the basin readings, and I promise you the eastern site data is going to make you rethink at least one of your assumptions about baseline decay."

"Now that," Kelvin said, "is a much better offer than anything Diana’s given me all week."

"I gave you a kiss this morning," Diana said, not looking up from her scanner, though there was a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.

"A kiss isn’t raw data, Diana. I can’t cross-reference a kiss against anything."

"You’re an insufferable man."

"I’m a brilliant man who happens to also be insufferable. There’s a difference and I’d appreciate the distinction."

Mira laughed, walking a few steps ahead with Zahir close beside her, their hands loosely linked, swinging gently between them the way people’s hands did when they’d been together long enough that touching wasn’t a decision anymore, just a habit their bodies fell into.

"If this partnership goes well," Mira said over her shoulder, "there’s talk of expanding it. Joint operations across both cardinals. Shared intelligence networks, maybe even shared training rotations eventually."

"I’d like that," Priya said, and there was real warmth in it, the specific warmth of someone who’d spent most of her career being the smartest person in whatever room she was in and had finally found people who could actually keep up. "I don’t get to talk to anyone who actually understands—"

Her foot came down on nothing.

The ground gave way in a wide collapsing circle, leaves and packed earth folding downward all at once, and Priya’s arms pinwheeled as the world dropped out from under her, a startled sound tearing out of her that wasn’t quite a scream.

Noah blinked.

He caught her mid-fall, one arm locking hard around her waist, the void energy folding them both back onto solid ground three feet from the hole a half second later, her whole body shaking against him, tablet still clutched white-knuckled in one hand like some part of her brain had refused to let go of it even in freefall.

"You’re okay," Noah said, holding her steady while her legs found their footing. "You’re okay, I’ve got you, breathe."

But the ground had gone unstable across a wider radius than just her single misstep, and six feet away Mira’s footing slid out from under her at the exact same moment, a second section of earth crumbling away beneath her boots.

She didn’t have time to scream. One second she was there, hand still loosely linked with Zahir’s, and the next his hand was closing around empty air.

Noah reached, too far, already moving, but the drop had opened faster than even he could cross it, and Mira vanished into the dark below with a wet, ugly sound of impact that stopped every conversation in the group at once, like someone had reached out and cut the sound entirely.

"MIRA!"

Zahir was at the edge before anyone else had processed what happened, dropping to his knees hard enough that Noah heard the impact, peering down into a pit maybe eight feet deep, and whatever he saw made his face drain of every trace of color it had.

Stakes. A dozen of them, sharpened to points, driven upright into the pit floor at staggered angles, positioned close enough together that falling in guaranteed contact with at least two of them. Mira lay across a pair of them now, one driven through her thigh, one through her side just below her ribs, blood already spreading dark and fast across the fabric of her shirt.

"Get me down there," Zahir said, and his voice cracked clean in half on the last word.

Boran didn’t wait for anyone to give further instruction. He dropped into the pit himself, testing his footing carefully before committing his full weight, and lifted Mira free of the stakes with a gentleness that seemed almost impossible coming from someone his size, one hand cradling her head, the other supporting her back, passing her up into the hands reaching down from above like she weighed nothing at all.

They laid her out on flat ground, Priya immediately clearing space, Kelvin’s arms already scanning before anyone told him to.

Mira was conscious. Breathing fast and shallow, one hand clutching at Zahir’s sleeve hard enough that her knuckles had gone white.

"I can’t," she said, teeth gritted against something that clearly hurt more with every second. "I can’t heal this. Something’s wrong, I’m trying and it’s not responding, it’s not—"

"Don’t push it," Zahir said, pressing his own palm flat against the wound at her side, blood already welling up between his fingers. "Don’t push it, save your strength."

Kelvin crouched beside them, sensor array humming along the length of the stake wound before it had even been fully cleared.

"There’s something on the stakes," he said, and the easy banter from ten minutes ago was gone completely from his voice now, replaced with something flat and careful. "Coating. Chemical residue, I’m reading a compound I don’t have a clean match for anywhere in the database. It’s foreign, whatever it is, but I’m picking up hemotoxic markers, definitely, and layered underneath that, something that’s actively suppressing regenerative function at a cellular level." He looked up at Zahir. "That’s why she can’t heal herself. It’s not that the wound’s too severe for her ability. Something in that compound is actively blocking the ability from working at all."

"For a place that’s supposed to be untouched," Diana said slowly, still looking around at the pit, at the precise angle of the stakes, "this is human made. Somebody dug this hole. Somebody sharpened these and set them exactly where a person’s weight would carry them onto more than one."

"And recently," Priya said, crouching low at the pit’s edge, running one finger along a cut mark on the nearest exposed stake. "Look at this. That’s not weathered wood. Rain out here would’ve softened these edges within days. This is a week old. Maybe less."

Zahir looked up at all of them, Mira’s blood already soaking through the strip of fabric he’d torn from his own sleeve and pressed hard against her side.

"I have to turn back," he said. "I need real medical support, something that can identify and counter whatever this actually is. I can’t do that out here."

"Go," Noah said immediately, already crouching to help lift her. "Now. Don’t wait on us. We’ll handle whatever’s ahead."

Zahir gathered Mira up into his arms, her head tucking against his shoulder, and for one second something passed between him and the rest of the group standing there, gratitude and guilt tangled up together so tightly neither emotion had room to be its own thing, before he turned and started moving fast back the way they’d come. Two of the younger Dreamers fell in beside him without being asked, weapons up, covering his flanks.

The remaining group stood in the quiet aftermath, the mood from ten minutes ago completely gone, replaced by something heavier that none of them had the words for yet.

"Keep close," Noah said finally, looking around at what was left of them. Priya. Kelvin. Diana. Boran. Wren. Two more Dreamers he didn’t know well enough yet to have names ready for on instinct. "The jungle’s gone quiet. Could mean nothing. Could mean something’s watching us decide what happens next."

They moved on.

---

Nobody talked much for the next hour. The easy back and forth from before had drained out of the group entirely, replaced by the tight, economical communication of people who’d just watched something go badly wrong and hadn’t fully processed it yet.

Then something happened.

It came without warning, dropping from a tree limb thirty feet up with a roar that shook loose leaves across a wide radius, the sound of it landing hard enough that Noah felt the impact through the soles of his boots before he’d even turned to face it.

[BEAST DETECTED]

[NAME: YETI]

[CLASS: UNKNOWN]

[RANK: CATEGORY 5]

Noah’s stomach dropped before he’d even fully processed what he was looking at.

’Cat five,’ he thought. ’There it is.’

He wasn’t shocked, not really. That was the part that sat worse than shock would have. He’d been hoping against hope this exact notification wouldn’t fire, that they’d get through the whole expedition running on the same luck that had carried them past two encounters already without anything catastrophic finding them. But luck like that had a ceiling, and apparently the jungle had just decided their subscription was over.

Nine feet of matted white fur, claws the length of kitchen knives, a face that carried something almost human in its proportions and something completely, deeply wrong in every other way, eyes set too far apart, jaw hinged in a way that suggested it could open far wider than it needed to for eating.

"I had a spike," Kelvin said, weapon already raised, voice tight. "But I didn’t clock it until it actually landed. This thing’s hiding its own signature somehow, and I don’t like that I don’t know how."

"Wait," Diana said, staring, shield already forming around her arm on reflex. "What is that."

"A yeti," Noah said, and even he sounded like he didn’t fully believe the word coming out of his own mouth.

"A yeti?" one of the younger Dreamers repeated, half laughing, half horrified.

Those were supposed to be folklore. Old campfire stories from before the Harbinger incursions, before the world had learned what real monsters actually looked like and stopped needing invented ones. And yet here it stood, breathing steam into the humid air, watching all of them with an intelligence that sat uncomfortably behind its eyes.

Then again, Noah thought, he kept dragons in a pocket dimension he could walk into whenever he wanted. The universe had stopped needing his permission to be strange a long time ago.

The yeti didn’t wait for anyone to finish processing any of it. Its claws flashed, and shards of ice tore through the air faster than anything that size should have been physically capable of throwing, each one the length of a forearm, edges catching what light made it through the canopy.

One of them caught a young Dreamer square in the chest.

His name was Corran. Noah had learned it two hours ago, during the walk, some throwaway comment about growing up on a farming settlement three sectors over, a joke about hating the humidity here worse than home.

He didn’t have time to make a sound. The spike went straight through him, and before anyone could move, the yeti had already crossed the distance between them, faster than a creature that size had any right to move, wrenched the ice free with one hand, and closed its jaws around his head in a single motion that ended everything at once.

"NO—"

The sound that came out of Boran wasn’t quite a word. He was already moving, roaring, driving his full weight into a shoulder charge that would have leveled most things they’d fought so far.

The yeti backhanded him without fully turning to face him, almost lazy about it, and Boran left the ground entirely, crashing through two full trees in a spray of splintered bark before finally coming to rest in a tangle of broken branches, groaning but alive.

Kelvin fired.

The cannon blast tore across the clearing, and the yeti raised one clawed hand almost casually, ice forming instantly into a curved wall that absorbed the shot completely, the impact scattering into fragments that hissed and steamed against the humid air. It retaliated immediately with a spray of ice shards, six of them at once, and Kelvin’s targeting systems lit up bright across his display, his weapon arm swinging in a tight controlled arc that shot every incoming spike out of the air a half second before any of them could connect.

"It’s not going down easy," Diana said, shield fully up now, orbital fragments spinning into their rotation. "It’s got to be at least cat 4, right?"

"Clear," Noah said.

He fired a void barrage, tight and focused, the purple bullets cutting through open air, and the projectiles punched clean through the ice constructs the yeti had thrown up to defend itself, forcing it to abandon the stance entirely and lunge sideways, already stalking toward another Dreamer before the smoke had finished clearing.

Noah moved to press the advantage.

Something at the tree line caught his eye.

A pair of yellow eyes, glowing faint in the shadow beneath the canopy, unmoving, watching everything happening with a stillness that didn’t belong to prey.

"Hey," he called out, already sprinting toward it, void energy pulling him faster than his legs alone could carry him. "Who are you?"

Whoever it was ran.

Fast. Faster than Noah had expected from something on two legs, weaving between trunks with a fluid economy of motion that told him this wasn’t the first time they’d run through this exact stretch of jungle, and for half a second the pure speed of it actually impressed him before the frustration of losing ground took over completely.

"Kelvin," he said over the comm, still sprinting, branches tearing at his jacket. "I’ve got something watching us from the tree line, I’m giving chase. Can you handle the yeti without me?"

"Affirmative," Kelvin said, and Noah heard the shift in his voice, focus locking down hard.

Kelvin’s nano suit rippled across his shoulders, plating thickening, reconfiguring, and he closed the distance on the yeti with both arms firing in tandem, three solid rounds landing across its flank before it caught his cannon arm in one massive clawed hand and ripped the weapon clean off the socket with a shriek of tearing metal.

Kelvin didn’t flinch. A replacement extended instantly from the housing built into his shoulder, already charging, and the yeti caught that one too, closing its jaws around the barrel and biting down until the metal groaned under the pressure.

Shade unmasked and tackled it from the blind side.

The yeti sidestepped at the last possible instant, catching Shade with a backhand that sent him tumbling hard into a tree trunk, bark exploding outward from the impact, and then it was on him fast, jaws snapping toward his throat. Shade twisted enough at the last second to get a clean angle and released his breath weapon point blank, corrosive acid bubbling and hissing across the yeti’s face and chest in a thick green cloud.

For one hopeful second it seemed to actually work. The whole clearing filled with a rolling white mist as the acid interacted with whatever was running through the creature’s biology, steam and frost pouring off it in confused, competing directions.

When the mist finally cleared, the yeti was fine.

Ice was melting off patches of its fur where the acid had touched it, thin rivulets running down through matted white, but the flesh beneath showed no damage at all. No burns. No open wounds. Nothing.

"I’m starting to think handling this was a stretch," Kelvin said, breathing hard, watching the remaining Dreamers regroup and charge back in together, weapons blazing, blades flashing in overlapping arcs, every single strike either deflected outright or absorbed by ice that reformed across the creature’s hide faster than anyone could keep pace with.

The yeti moved through all of them like they were barely an inconvenience, catching one Dreamer’s blade in its bare hand and shattering it with a squeeze, backhanding another clear across the clearing hard enough that she skidded twenty feet on impact and didn’t get up right away, ice forming and reforming across its own body faster than the group’s combined output could strip it away.

Diana watched three more of her shield’s fragments clatter uselessly against its hide, the impacts doing nothing but scattering into frost that melted a moment later.

She stood there for a second, chest heaving, watching the fight collapsing into something that had stopped looking like a battle and started looking like a massacre in slow motion, everyone giving everything they had and the creature simply absorbing it, adapting, healing faster than any of them could damage it.

"Fuck this," she said.

And threw her shield aside.