Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 795: Kneel before One

A whining sound cut through cloud cover before anyone saw the shape behind it, and every head on the ground snapped skyward at once.

"He’s the one," Lucy said, teeth gritted.

"On my mark," Lucas said, already launching off the ground. Valor left his hand in a wide arc as he went, spinning out low across the battlefield and discharging lightning into every Sek still standing in its path, the ground scorching black in a long ugly line. He was airborne before the axe finished its circuit back to his grip, Lucy a half second behind him.

They split as they closed the distance, Lucas curving left, Lucy right, coming at the blue streak from two sides at once.

They never got their pincer.

One was on Lucas before Lucas had finished his turn, already there, fist connecting with his ribs hard enough that the sound of it cracked across the open air like a gunshot. Lucas left the sky entirely, hurled backward and down, and hit the scorched ground with an impact that threw dirt and ash twenty feet in every direction.

The same instant, Lucy’s swing found nothing.

One had already moved.

To anyone watching from the ground, it looked like he’d done both at once, hit Lucas and simply been in front of Lucy a heartbeat later, no visible gap between the two, but Lucy felt the truth of it in the half second her fist passed through empty air where he should have been, the sheer wrongness of a body that fast.

He was already swinging at her by the time her mind caught up.

Lucas hit the ground and rolled, coughing, blood spraying from his mouth in a thin dark line, and he forced himself up onto one knee, chest heaving.

"This guy," he said, spitting more blood into the dirt. "He hits as hard as Noah."

He came back up fast, and this time when the siblings closed on him together, they got their hits in.

Lucy caught him across the jaw with a lightning-wrapped fist that snapped his head sideways, and before he’d finished recoiling from it Lucas was already there, Valor driving into his ribs with the full weight of the swing behind it. The impact sent One skidding backward through open air, boots carving a scorched trench through the ground where he finally came to a stop.

He straightened slowly.

Reached up, unclasped the dark cape at his shoulder, and let it fall.

"Enough of that," he said.

Lucy hovered a short distance off, chest heaving, lightning still coiled around both fists.

"You don’t have to do this," she said. "Whatever your father built you to be, whatever he told you strength was, you don’t have to keep walking his road. It ends in ruin, One. It already ended him."

One tilted his head, watching her with something that wasn’t quite interest.

"If you came to pray," he said, and turned slightly, gesturing without ceremony toward the ridge behind him, where a crude but massive statue rose out of the churned earth, dark stone shaped roughly into his own likeness, arms spread wide over the shattered district. "You’re facing the wrong direction."

He turned back to her.

"If you came to kneel, get on with it. I don’t have patience for anything in between."

Lucas landed beside his sister, wiping blood from his chin.

"He’s convinced," he said quietly. "Beyond any doubt. There’s no getting through to that."

"I was afraid of that," Lucy said. "He’s too far gone to hear reason."

Two shapes broke through the cloud cover above them, gold plating catching the light, and a wide column of energy tore down toward One’s position, a straight beam wide enough to swallow a building.

He was gone before it landed, reappearing thirty feet clear, watching the scorch mark it left with mild irritation.

"I should have finished all of you the first time," he said, and blasted toward the mechs.

"Thank you, Lucy," Evangeline’s voice cut through the comm, clipped and formal. "This one’s ours now."

The two Sterling war-puppets closed on him from opposite angles, fists trailing threads of pale energy, and for the first several exchanges they actually landed something, one catching him across the shoulder hard enough to spin him, the other driving a strike into his back that staggered his next step.

One caught the next strike bare-handed, absorbing it without giving ground, and drove his palm into the puppet’s chest hard enough to buckle the plating.

"Interesting," he said, examining his own hand. "One of your pilots got too close while I was going through their fleet. Whatever this power actually is, it’s weak. But intriguing."

He snapped his fingers.

The puppet he’d just struck went still for half a second, and then turned, gold plating catching the light as it pivoted away from its own formation and lunged at Lucy instead, threads of pale energy trailing from its fists exactly the way Evangeline’s people used them.

"Should’ve expected that," she muttered, more to herself than to him. "You never stop taking, do you."

"I can take anything I’ve touched," One said, already turning away from her, already walking toward Lucas. "That’s rather the point of me."

Lucas didn’t wait for him to finish crossing the distance. He surged forward himself, Endless Storm cycling hard, Valor’s edge running white-hot with charge pulled straight from the sky, and swung with everything the weapon had ever been built to hold.

BOOM.

The impact hit One’s raised forearm and the shockwave of it flattened grass in a thirty-meter radius, cratering the ground beneath both their feet.

One’s arm held. Unmarked.

Lucas didn’t stop. He spun the axe into a horizontal follow-through aimed at the ribs, and One caught the haft with both hands this time, using Lucas’s own momentum to redirect the swing wide and drive a knee into his stomach.

Lucas folded around the impact, air leaving him in a single violent burst, but his hands never left Valor, and he wrenched the axe free even doubled over, bringing it up in a rising strike that caught One under the jaw.

One’s head snapped back.

BOOM.

The follow-through detonated against nothing but open air where One had been a half second earlier, and Lucas felt the strike land a heartbeat too late to matter, One already inside his guard, already driving an open palm into his chest that sent him skidding backward across scorched earth hard enough to leave a trench.

Lucas came up swinging before his boots had fully stopped sliding, Valor’s edge discharging in a continuous arc now, strike after strike, aimed at every joint he could reach, the same VPT technique that had never once failed to find purchase on anything built to break.

One’s shoulder took one clean.

BOOM.

He didn’t stagger.

His neck took the next, the exact point where joint met the base of the skull.

His head snapped sideways, and he rolled it back into place, unbothered, and looked at Lucas with the first flicker of something that might have been genuine interest.

"Better," he said.

Lucas pressed forward, refusing to give him room to reset, storm energy building continuously along the blade now, hit after hit landing somewhere real, and for a handful of seconds it actually looked like something was working, One’s footing shifting back a half step at a time under the sustained assault.

Then he stopped giving ground.

He caught Lucas’s next swing with one bare hand, fingers closing around the haft mid-strike, lightning crawling wild and useless across his forearm, and for one suspended second the two of them stood locked together, neither moving.

"You hit harder than anything I’ve faced since I trained with my late father," One said. "That’s not a compliment I give lightly."

"I don’t want to kill you," he said, swinging. "You understand that, right? Whatever you’ve become, whatever your father made you, I’m not trying to end you."

One caught the swing on his forearm.

BOOM.

The shockwave flattened grass in a thirty-meter radius, cratering the ground beneath both their feet. His arm held. Unmarked.

"Delusion," he said. "You think you’re capable of ending anything here. You think restraint is a kindness I require from you." He tilted his head slightly, almost gentle about it. "You don’t pose a threat to a god, Grey,"

Lucas let Valor go.

He threw it wide, spinning it out in a long low arc that curved back around behind One’s blind side, and closed the distance himself with both fists, lightning burning bright along his knuckles. One tilted his head a fraction of an inch, letting the first punch pass by his ear, and caught the second on his open palm without appearing to look at it.

Valor completed its arc and swung in from behind.

One bent his head aside, unhurried, the axe’s edge passing close enough to part a lock of his hair, and the weapon sailed back into Lucas’s open hand a half second later like it had never left him at all.

"You’re fast," One said. "I’ll grant you that."

"You have no idea," Lucas said, and vanished.

He reappeared three feet to the left, already swinging, and One was already there to meet him, both of them leaving ghosted afterimages hanging in the air where their bodies had been a fraction of a second earlier, the two shapes blurring and reforming across the scorched clearing faster than the human eye could properly track. Lucas closed, feinted, closed again, and One met every approach with the same maddening ease, catching a fist here, letting a kick pass a hair’s width from his ribs there, never once looking rushed.

Then Lucas caught him clean.

A straight punch, full weight behind it, chi burning white along his arm, connected with One’s jaw and sent him skyward, and Lucas was already airborne after him before the momentum finished, meeting him at the apex.

They collided mid-air.

The exchange that followed had no clean rhythm to it, both of them throwing everything at once, fists meeting fists in a rapid stuttering collision that split the air around them into visible shockwaves, ripples of displaced pressure spreading outward with every contact. One caught a rib strike and answered with one of his own that Lucas barely deflected in time. Lucas drove a knee up and One twisted around it, retaliating with an elbow that clipped Lucas’s shoulder hard enough to spin him mid-air.

They broke apart, both falling, both catching themselves before impact, boots skidding twin trenches through the scorched earth as they came to a stop facing each other again.

Lucas was breathing hard. One wasn’t breathing hard at all.

"Still convinced I’m delusional," Lucas said, wiping blood from his lip.

"More convinced by the second," One said, and raised one hand.

Something gathered in his palm, faint and gold, glowing with a soft pulse that had nothing to do with lightning or shadow or anything Lucas had catalogued from him so far. He crossed the remaining distance before Lucas could fully process the shift, and pressed that glowing hand flat against his chest.

Lucas’s legs went out from under him.

Not pain, exactly. Something deeper, a weight settling directly into his bones, into whatever kept a body upright without needing to think about it, and he hit his knees hard, both hands braced against the scorched ground, gasping.

"What," he managed, "did you—"

"You’ll live," One said, standing over him, unbothered. "For now."

Lucas stayed on his knees, shaking, refusing to go fully down, one hand still white-knuckled around Valor’s haft even as everything else in him screamed to let go.