Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 798: A dying light

Underground, where the Sterling royalties had tracked down where One kept the people he copied his powers from, Evangeline knelt in front of the nearest cage and tore the lock apart with her bare hands.

The man inside barely reacted. He sat curled against the back wall, ribs visible through skin gone gray and thin, eyes half-lidded and unfocused, and when the door swung open he flinched at the light rather than the freedom.

"Easy," Evangeline said, reaching in slow. "You’re safe now. We’re getting you out."

He let her pull him upright, but his legs wouldn’t hold, and she caught his full weight against her shoulder while Matthias moved down the row, tearing chains and locks apart one after another, four more cages opening in quick succession, four more people who looked like they’d forgotten what standing on their own felt like.

"Do you know your name," Matthias asked the closest one, a woman with hollow cheeks and matted hair, her wrists raw from restraints that had clearly been there a long time.

She looked at him and said nothing.

"Where you’re from," he tried instead. "Any family. Anyone we can contact."

She shook her head slowly.

"How long have you been here."

"With him," she said, the first words she’d managed, barely above a whisper. "Some time. I don’t know how long. Time doesn’t mean the same thing down here."

Evangeline exchanged a look with her brother across the chamber. None of these five carried anything resembling original bloodline, no family crest, no bearing that suggested royalty or rank, just ordinary people, awakened somewhere along the way, taken from somewhere that had never once been protected by a name like Grey or Sterling.

"He didn’t need originals," Evangeline said quietly. "He just needed people. Anyone with enough in them to be worth draining."

"EDF mining worlds," Matthias said, working through it as he spoke, supporting a second freed prisoner against his side. "Settlement colonies. Places nobody’s checking in on regularly. He’s been moving through space long enough to find exactly that kind of forgotten corner and take whatever he wanted from it."

"We get them out first," Evangeline said. "Answers come after. Somebody needs to run this through EDF records once we’re clear, cross-reference missing persons from every settlement in range. That’s not our fight to solve down here."

They moved the group toward the passage they’d come in through, slow going with three of the five barely able to walk unassisted, and the corridor ahead was no longer empty.

Sek soldiers filled the passage, weapons already raised, a full squad that had clearly been alerted the moment the chamber’s containment failed.

"Behind us," Matthias said, positioning himself between the group and the incoming fire.

The first volley came fast, blaster bolts crackling violet down the narrow corridor, and Evangeline’s suit threw up a hard-light barrier just in time, the impacts scattering off it in bright sparks. She pushed forward through the barrier’s edge, repulsers built into both forearms discharging in tight, controlled bursts that caught two Sek across the chest and dropped them where they stood.

Matthias returned fire with the heavier cannon mounted along his suit’s shoulder, a single sustained beam that tore through the corridor and forced the remaining line to scatter for cover behind support struts.

"Keep them behind me," he called back to Evangeline, and she fell back to shield the five freed prisoners, her suit’s plating hardening across her back as another round of blaster fire chewed into it.

A Sek broke from cover and charged, closing fast despite the fire Matthias kept trained on it, absorbing two direct hits without slowing, and Evangeline caught it with a repulser blast at point-blank range that finally put it down three feet from where the nearest prisoner cowered against the wall.

Vel’kai soldiers joined the fight from a side passage, smaller but faster, weaving between the Sek’s heavier fire pattern, and one of them got close enough to Matthias’s flank that he had to abandon the cannon fire entirely, catching the creature’s strike on his forearm plating and answering with a hard shoulder check that sent it sprawling.

The fight ground on through the narrow corridor, both siblings giving ground carefully, methodically, never letting the line between the enemy and the freed prisoners fully collapse, until the last Sek standing broke formation entirely.

It turned and ran.

Not retreating in any organized sense, just fleeing down a side passage at a dead sprint, and Evangeline watched it go without chasing, her focus staying locked on the group behind her.

"Let it go," she said. "We’re not here for a clean sweep. We’re here to get these people out."

---

On the surface, Sophie drove her mace through a Vel’kai soldier’s chest and pulled it free in the same motion, already turning toward the next threat pressing in from her left, Seraleth’s wings cutting past overhead as she tore through a cluster of Sek with feathers loosed in a wide arc.

"They’re not slowing down," Angel called out, blood constructs coiling tight around both arms, dragging another attacker off its feet before driving a blade through its throat.

Sophie didn’t answer. Something at her side had gone warm, and she looked down to find the King’s Gaze pulsing bright blue against her hip, its single eye snapping fully open, and the color of the intensity of the light was deep, deeper than she’d ever seen it run before.

She felt her own eyes go the same color a half second later, everything around her narrowing into something sharp and singular.

"No," she said.

She turned and started running.

The battlefield bent around her as she moved, chaos rearranging itself in ways that made no sense until she was already past them. A Vel’kai soldier stumbled directly into the path of another, both of them tangling and falling before either could reach her. A Sek’s blaster bolt, aimed dead center at her back, clipped the edge of a collapsing wall instead and scattered harmlessly into rubble. Every obstacle that should have slowed her simply didn’t, luck compounding on itself in a way too consistent to be luck at all.

"LUCAS!"

She found him in the trench, still on his knees where he’d been left, and he looked up at her with a weak smile that didn’t reach the rest of his face.

"Hey," he said.

His whole body was shaking now, a fine constant tremor running through him that hadn’t been there before, and his skin had gone gray in a way that made her stomach drop the second she saw it properly.

"Something’s wrong with me," he said. "One did something. I don’t— I can feel it happening, Soph. Whatever it is."

"I know," she said, dropping to her knees beside him, hands hovering over him without knowing where to actually put them. "I know, I felt it, that’s why I’m here."

"Is that why you’re here," he said, and something in his voice had gone very quiet. "Am I going to die."

She didn’t answer right away.

"Did you see it," he said. "The Gaze. Did it show you."

Sophie looked at him for a long moment, and shook her head.

"No," she said.

"You’re lying."

She said nothing.

"Soph." His hand found her wrist, weak, trembling, but holding on anyway. "You just lied to me."

***

Kelvin’s eyes came open slow, and the first thing he registered was the pounding in his skull, a deep, throbbing ache that seemed to sit right behind both eyes at once.

The second thing he registered was the ceiling.

Woven wood, arched overhead in the same curved pattern he’d seen before he’d blacked out, thick branches bent and lashed together into something that looked less like a cage and more like the inside of a ribcage. He blinked at it for a long moment, trying to remember why that felt familiar, and then the memory of the fight came flooding back all at once, the Sek, the vines, the fungus spore, and then something bigger, something with claws that had put a hole clean through their whole formation.

He turned his head, wincing at the effort, and found the rest of the group scattered across the packed earth floor in awkward, boneless positions. Priya lay curled on her side, tablet still clutched loosely in one hand. Wren was sprawled flat on her back, one leg bent at an angle that would have been uncomfortable if she’d been conscious enough to notice. Diana lay closest to him, her head turned toward him, breathing slow and even, a thin line of dried blood along her hairline that hadn’t been cleaned.

Then Kelvin saw the last person in the room, sitting against the opposite wall with his knees pulled up, and did a full double take.

"Noah?"

Noah smiled at him from across the space, small and tired but genuinely relieved.

"Hey."

"They got you too?" Kelvin said, sitting up too fast, immediately regretting it as the headache spiked. "Wait, no, that’s not— how long have you been here? What happened to you?"

"Long story," Noah said. "Longer than we probably have time for right now."

"How long has everyone been out," Kelvin said, looking around at the sleeping bodies again.

"Five hours, maybe," Noah said. "You’ve all been down since. I’ve been conscious longer than that, but paralyzed. Only just got my body back a while ago."

Kelvin rubbed his temples, trying to force the headache into something manageable. "Okay. Okay, catch me up. What is this place. What are these things."

Noah told him. The paralysis. The wood structure that turned out to be someone’s home rather than a cell. The argument he’d overheard, structured, hierarchical, nothing like animal instinct. The queen, feline and sharp-eyed, speaking clearer than the rest of them, telling him he shared a constitution with a king they’d lost, offering to change him into one of them and rule beside her.

And the thing underneath all of it, the thing that had settled cold and permanent into his chest hours ago.

"They’re people," Noah said. "Or they were. Every single one of them. Hunters who came in here chasing something and never made it back out. She admitted it herself, more or less. Doesn’t think of it as a tragedy, though. Thinks the forest gave them something better than what they started as."

Kelvin sat with that for a long moment, staring at the woven ceiling.

"Okay," he said slowly, the analytical part of his brain visibly kicking back into gear despite the headache. "Okay, so, walking dead, basically. Except with a significantly better production budget than anything Earth ever managed to put out."

"That’s one way to put it," Noah said.

"But here’s the thing that’s bugging me," Kelvin said, sitting forward now, elbows on his knees. "A void stone alone doesn’t add up to this. Not cleanly. I’ve spent months tracking saturation patterns, and the thing about void stones is they sit undisturbed for decades sometimes. Its how I found the one we used to heal Diana. They affect their surroundings, sure, mutate beasts, warp local biology over time. But there’s a ceiling to that effect. It’s slow, it’s environmental, it doesn’t usually produce something this coherent, this organized, this fast."

"Fast being relative," Noah said. "We don’t actually know how long they’ve been out here."

"Sure, but even accounting for that," Kelvin said, "there’s something else bothering me. Human bodies don’t hold up well around sustained void exposure. That’s basic biology at this point, it’s why Awakened development is so specific and so rare, most people exposed to raw saturation just break down. Cellular decay accelerates, organ function fails, the body can’t process that much energy without something giving out first." He gestured vaguely at the woven walls around them. "For a void stone alone to produce this level of stable, functioning, organized mutation, in people, not beasts, that’s not the process I’d expect. That should have killed them long before it changed them into anything at all."

Noah frowned. "So what’s actually doing this, if not the stone."

"That’s the part I don’t have an answer for yet," Kelvin said. "Which is the annoying part. Something’s compensating for the decay somehow. Something’s letting the change happen without the collapse that should come with it." He looked around the space again, more carefully this time, cataloguing details his headache had kept him from noticing before. "This isn’t natural saturation doing this on its own. I think there’s something else going on in this forest we haven’t found yet."

"Great," Noah said flatly. "So there’s the queen, the stone, and now a third thing."

"Maybe," Kelvin said. "Maybe not a separate thing. Maybe just a different piece of the same picture we haven’t seen the shape of yet." He rubbed his eyes, wincing again at the headache’s insistence. "Either way, I don’t think we’re going anywhere until we understand more of it. You said she wants to see you again. When she decides to bring the change."

"That’s the plan," Noah said. "Or was, before you all showed up unconscious in the same room I’m being kept in."

"So we wait," Kelvin said. "For the queen. See what she actually says, see if she lets anything slip about what’s really running underneath all this." He glanced at Diana, still asleep, the dried blood along her hairline catching the dim light. "I think there’s more we’re about to find out in this forest than either of us is ready for."