Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 786: Beastmen

Diana threw her shield aside and it hit the ground somewhere behind her, forgotten before it finished rolling.

"Stop," Kelvin said, watching her face change. "Diana, whatever you’re about to do, don’t push past your limit, you don’t need to—"

She wasn’t listening.

She crossed the last few feet toward the yeti at a dead sprint, and it swung a claw at her without hesitation, the same casual violence it had shown swatting Boran through two trees, and Diana didn’t dodge it. She let it connect, took the hit across her forearm hard enough that something in it cracked, and used the half second of contact to close her palm flat against the creature’s chest.

The yeti stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped, mid-motion, one arm still raised, claws frozen an inch from finishing the swing that should have taken Diana’s head off.

Its eyes went wide.

A sound came out of it that none of them had a word for, something between a growl and a whimper, low and confused, the sound of something enormous suddenly discovering its own body no longer belonged to it.

"Diana," Kelvin said again, sharper now, stepping toward her. "That’s enough, pull back—"

She didn’t pull back.

Her hand stayed flat against its chest, and her eyes had gone somewhere distant, focused entirely inward, on whatever she was actually doing rather than on the creature in front of her. The yeti’s raised arm began to shake, not with effort, with something worse, the visible strain of a body trying to obey commands that simply weren’t arriving anymore.

Its knees buckled.

It didn’t fall. It sank, slow and controlled, like something being lowered rather than something collapsing, and the whole time its eyes stayed open, tracking, aware, the intelligence behind them very clearly still present and very clearly understanding, second by second, that something had gone catastrophically wrong inside its own body.

It grunted. Low, guttural, pained in a way none of the ice or the claws or any of the fight before this had produced from it.

Then its eyes rolled back, and it went still, and stayed still.

She let her hand drop.

The clearing was silent except for everyone’s breathing.

"Diana," Priya said carefully, "what did you—"

"It’s fine," Diana said, cutting her off, her voice thin, drained in a way that suggested fine wasn’t quite the right word. "We need to keep moving."

Nobody argued. The group fell into formation almost automatically, Boran limping in from the treeline with one arm hanging wrong at his side, and they pushed forward, the yeti’s body already behind them within a few dozen steps, the whole exchange happening in fragments, tossed back over shoulders while boots kept moving through undergrowth.

"A yeti," one of the Dreamers said, glancing back once. "In this climate. What’s a creature built for snow and cold even doing out here."

"It shouldn’t survive here," Priya said, walking fast, not looking back a second time. "The humidity alone should be lethal to something with fur that dense. There’s no way this evolved naturally in this basin."

"Unless something’s keeping it viable," Kelvin said quietly, falling into step beside her. "The same something generating that energy signature."

Nobody had an answer to that, and nobody had the breath left to chase it further right now. They kept walking, the immediate crisis folding into the exhausted rhythm of covering ground, checking on Boran’s arm as they moved rather than stopping to do it properly.

Behind them, once the last of the group had passed out of sight through the trees, a hand emerged from the treeline where the body had been left.

Easily the size of a car door, it closed around the yeti’s ankle without a sound and dragged the massive body backward into the underbrush, disappearing beneath the canopy as smoothly as if it had never been there at all. Within seconds there was nothing left in the clearing but a wide smear of frost, already melting slow into the soil, and no one left to see it happen.

---

Noah blinked.

The chase had carried him deep, further than he’d realized, the yellow-eyed figure weaving between trunks with a fluid economy that told him this ground was familiar territory to whoever this was. He gained on it once, twice, closing the gap enough to almost see a shape behind the eyes, and then it vanished around a wide trunk and Noah blinked straight through the space, appearing directly in its path, already throwing a punch aimed at where the eyes had to be.

The figure ducked.

Noah felt the fist connect with nothing but air, his own momentum carrying him half a step forward before something hit him.

He didn’t see it coming. One second he was mid-swing, and the next the ground was under him, sky spinning overhead, and he was lying flat on his back with no memory of the impact that had put him there.

He tried to sit up.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, focused this time, willing his arm to move, and it stayed exactly where it was, limp against the jungle floor.

[BEAST DETECTED]

[NAME: BEASTMAN]

[CLASS: HUMANOID]

[RANK: UNKNOWN]

The system text hung there while Noah lay frozen, staring up at the canopy, panic climbing his throat as he tried and failed to command any part of his own body to respond.

A shape leaned into view above him.

Tall, broad, covered in matted brown fur from the neck down, a face that carried something almost primate in its structure but sharper, more deliberate, eyes glowing pale yellow the way they had from the tree line.

"Leave our forest alone," it said.

The voice was low, guttural, each word formed with obvious effort like human speech wasn’t natural to whatever mouth was producing it.

Then it threw its head back and cried out.

The sound carried, high and layered, echoing off unseen trunks in every direction, and within seconds the underbrush around them began to move. More shapes emerged, furred and humanoid, some smaller, some larger than the one standing over him, converging from every side.

"What did you do to me," Noah managed, the words coming out strained, his whole body still refusing every command he sent it. "Why can’t I move."

Nobody answered.

Hands closed around his arms and legs, lifting him without effort despite his full weight, and he felt himself carried toward the nearest trunk. The bark was rough enough that he expected impact.

Instead the bark simply opened.

A seam split down the tree’s surface like a curtain parting, dark space beyond it, and they carried him through, and the moment his body crossed the threshold the seam closed behind him with a sound like something breathing out.

He was gone.

---

"What did you do to it," Wren said, matching Diana’s pace, glancing sideways at her as they pushed through a stretch of thinning undergrowth. "It looked like it was in agony before it went down. What actually happened?"

"Momentum nullification," Priya said, a few steps ahead, tablet already back in her hands even mid-stride, working through it out loud. "That’s her known ability, the same principle behind her shield’s core function I presume. I’m thinking she starved its brain of blood flow. Or maybe stopped the heart directly."

"No," Diana said, eyes forward, boots steady over uneven ground.

Wren looked at her. "Then what."

"I tried the heart first," Diana said, her voice flat, matter-of-fact in a way that made it worse rather than better. "Its heart’s too powerful. Too much muscle mass to overpower cleanly, it would’ve taken too long, and it would’ve kept fighting the whole time I was working on it."

"So what did you actually do," Boran said from behind them, still favoring the arm, but keeping pace.

Diana didn’t slow down.

"I didn’t target an organ," she said. "I went inside it. Everywhere at once. Every place in its body where something needed to keep moving to keep it alive, I just stopped it. All of it. Blood. Nerve signal. Muscle twitch. Every process running underneath the surface that it never had to think about because it just happened automatically." She kept walking. "None of that stopped being real to it. It was still awake in there. Still aware. It just couldn’t do anything with any of it anymore, because nothing inside it was allowed to move."

The group had gone quiet around her, footsteps the only sound for a stretch.

"You gave it a full body lobotomy," Kelvin said slowly, from somewhere near the back, "except it stayed conscious through the whole thing."

"Essentially," Diana said.

"You can do that?" Kelvin said. Not horrified exactly. Something closer to genuine, unsettled awe. "Of course you can do that."

The Dreamers exchanged glances as they walked, and at Diana’s back, expressions none of them bothered hiding.

"Why would you do that," one of them said finally, quiet, careful. "There were other ways. You could have just—"

"It killed Corran in about two seconds," Diana said, cutting him off, her voice not raising at all, which somehow made it land harder than if it had. "I didn’t have a lot of interest in giving it a clean death."

Nobody had a response to that. They kept moving, the jungle swallowing the silence around them, everyone still stealing glances at Diana that she either didn’t notice or chose not to acknowledge.

[Xoxo124]: okay WHAT did diana just do

[nova_watcher]: full body lobotomy while it was still conscious???? im gonna be sick

[GreyStormFan]: shes always been terrifying but this is a new level

[PithonElite_07]: momentum nullification at that resolution is genuinely one of the scariest abilities ive ever seen described

[VoidKingFan12]: shes on lucas’s level. shes on lila’s level. maybe past both of them honestly

[StreamUser_847]: eclipse has THREE people who could casually end your life in the most horrifying way possible and we just found out about the third one today

[user_Jace91]: who’s actually the deadliest in that faction at this point. genuinely asking

[ArcadeGuru]: noah obviously

[GigaRoseSimp]: yeah but noah at least fights you head on. lila and lucas and now diana all have these methods that just feel WRONG

[nova_watcher]: keep in mind the ice queen could stop everyone’s heart if she wanted to. she CHOSE not to with the heart because it would take too long. sit with that for a second