Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 805: A dead forest

It didn’t take too long, and once more Noah could hear grunts and footsteps approaching their cage.

"Here we go," Kelvin murmured, the only two words that needed saying, since he already knew exactly what Noah was about to do and exactly why.

Noah didn’t answer. He let his body go loose again, boots dragging the moment hands closed around his arms, eyes tracking everything through slitted lashes while the Beastmen worked around him. Diana lay unconscious a few feet away, chest rising slow and even, completely unaware of any of this. Priya beside her, out cold the same way. The two Dreamers, gone the same way hours ago and still gone now.

Kelvin, at least, was awake enough to be scared properly, even if his body wouldn’t let him show it.

The Beastmen lifted all of them, Kelvin included, carrying the group through a tunnel Noah hadn’t seen before, the air growing thicker and warmer the further they went, carrying a smell that reminded him of something rotting in standing water left too long in the sun.

Then the tunnel opened.

Noah’s breath caught before he could stop it.

The chamber ahead wasn’t a room. It didn’t have walls in the way anything built by hands had walls. It looked like something had grown here instead, roots and vines and what might once have been animal bone all fused together into a single mass that pulsed slow and wet against the low light, veins of dull violet running through it like something circulatory, contracting and releasing in a rhythm that had no business belonging to a plant or an animal or anything with a name.

[UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED]

[CLASSIFICATION: VOID STONE — ADVANCED CORRUPTION STATE]

[ENTROPY SIGNATURE: SEVERE]

[WARNING: SUSTAINED PROXIMITY WILL ACCELERATE CELLULAR DECAY]

Noah’s stomach dropped.

’There it is,’ he thought. ’That’s what’s been doing this. Not the Beastmen’s fault. This is the actual source.’

The Beastmen dragged the unconscious group toward the mass without slowing, and near its base Noah could see old drag marks worn into the dirt, the same shape repeated over and over, trails from bodies brought here long before today and never carried back out.

The queen stood near the center of the chamber, tail sweeping once as the group approached, satisfaction plain across her feline features.

"More," she said. "The forest is generous today."

Noah stopped pretending.

He let his weight settle fully into his own legs, shrugging the Beastman’s grip off his arm before it could tighten, and every yellow eye in the chamber snapped toward him at once.

"Let them go," he said.

The queen’s ears flattened.

"You were paralyzed," she said, more surprised than alarmed.

"Was," Noah said. "Past tense."

He blinked.

He appeared beside Diana in the same instant, catching the Beastman’s grip on her and tearing it loose, and blinked again, laying her gently against the tunnel entrance, well clear of the pulsing mass. He was already moving for Priya before the nearest Beastman had even registered him gone, then the two Dreamers, four blinks in rapid succession, every unconscious body pulled safely out of the chamber’s center and stacked against the tunnel wall beside Kelvin, who was still fighting to make even his fingers twitch.

The queen snarled, raising one clawed hand toward the mass behind her.

The pulsing violet light flared brighter, faster now, almost frantic.

A screech tore through the tunnels around them, high and layered, dozens of voices joined into one sound, and the ground shuddered as something enormous began moving toward the chamber from every direction at once.

"Ash," Noah said, laying the last of the sleeping Dreamers down. "Ember. Ignite."

The ground at the chamber’s edge split open in two places at once.

Two shapes burst up through packed earth, scales a deep burnt orange, claws already digging into the dirt, twin plumes of fire curling from their jaws as they oriented on the nearest threat.

"Watch them," Noah said to Kelvin, the only order he could actually give someone who couldn’t move. "I’m ending this."

"Go," Kelvin managed, barely a whisper.

And like that, beasts started to troop into the cave, in waves of them.

The first wave of beasts were hornets. The same ones that had attacked the group earlier.

They poured through the tunnel mouths, wings a blur of gold and black, and Noah met them head on, blinking into the center of the swarm and driving a Void Barrage outward in a wide spread, purple bullets punching clean through wings and thoraxes. A dozen dropped before the rest scattered wide, and Ember rose to meet them with a plume of fire that turned three more into ash mid-flight.

Then the ground buckled behind him.

A shape hauled itself up out of a fissure, matted white fur, claws the length of kitchen knives, the same broad wrong-proportioned face Noah had already learned to hate.

It was a Yeti.

Then a second, climbing out beside the first.

"Of course there’s more than one," Noah muttered, and blinked between them before either could orient, driving Rend into the nearest one’s flank, the tearing force opening a long gash that didn’t close, the void energy layered under the strike refusing whatever regeneration it might otherwise have managed.

The first yeti swung a claw wreathed in ice. Noah caught it on his forearm, the cold biting through his enhanced resilience, and drove a straight punch into its exposed ribs that folded it half over.

Ash tackled the second one bodily, jaws locking around a forearm, fire pouring into the wound at close range, and the creature roared, thrashing without success.

The queen circled the edge of the fight, watching, something shifting in her expression from confidence into real calculation.

"You held that back," she said. "The whole time. Pretending."

"Learning," Noah said, blinking past a spine-shooter’s volley, three barbed projectiles punching into dirt where he’d been standing a half second earlier.

He caught the shooter with a barrage before it could reload, then turned to catch a fresh wave of hornets, Void Blink carrying him through their formation faster than any could track, each pass leaving fewer behind him. The pulsing mass at the chamber’s center flared harder with every wave, and Noah understood the rhythm now, felt it in his chest the way you felt a bassline before you heard the song.

’It’s calling,’ he thought, driving Rend through a Beastman’s shoulder. ’And she’s the one who decides where each wave goes. Cut off the head.’

Before he could act on it, a dozen Beastmen closed ranks around the queen at once.

They came from every direction, abandoning whatever they’d been doing a moment earlier, and Noah felt the shift in the fight’s whole shape the instant they moved, no longer scattered defenders reacting to a threat but a formation, deliberate, coordinated, every one of them converging on the same target with the same intent.

The first one reached for him with an open palm, fingers spread, and Noah twisted clear on instinct rather than analysis, some part of him flagging the motion as wrong before his conscious mind caught up.

The palm passed through the space where his shoulder had been.

He landed three feet clear and looked back at the Beastman, who reset immediately, stalking forward with the same open-palm posture, patient, deliberate.

Another one came from his blind side, low, sweeping for his legs with an open hand rather than a claw strike, and Noah blinked clear of that one too, and a third came at him high, both palms extended this time, and Noah caught the pattern properly.

’They’re not trying to hit me,’ he thought, weaving between two more attempts. ’They’re trying to touch me. Every single one of them, going for contact instead of damage.’

He caught a glimpse of one Beastman’s palm as it swept past his ear, close enough to feel the air move, and saw something faint there, a thin webbing of color running just beneath the skin, the same shade as the mass pulsing behind them.

’It spreads on contact,’ he thought, blinking clear of a fourth attempt. ’Whatever this is. Whatever they’re carrying. That’s how it works. That’s how it made all of them.’

He thought about factions on Earth, the way Eclipse held its own techniques close, VPT, chi threading, the specific disciplines that separated one group of fighters from another. Whatever these people had been before the basin took them, hunters, soldiers, mercenaries, they’d clearly shared a doctrine, and the doctrine had survived whatever the transformation stripped away. Every single one of them fought the same, moved the same, reached for the same kind of contact.

’A trade secret,’ he thought, ducking under another palm strike. ’Something they all learned together, a long time before any of this happened to them.’

He couldn’t afford to test what the contact actually did again.

He stopped dodging reactively and started moving with purpose, blinking to the outer edge of the formation instead of staying trapped inside it, and drove Rend through the nearest Beastman’s shoulder from behind before it could turn, the tearing force dropping it clean.

Another lunged for him, both palms extended, and Noah caught its wrists before contact, twisting hard enough to snap the joint, and drove a knee into its chest that sent it sprawling.

A third came low, and he met it with a straight kick that shattered its guard before its palm ever got close, following immediately with a chi-laced strike to the base of its skull that put it down for good.

The formation thinned with every exchange, Noah refusing to let a single one of them close the distance cleanly, and by the time only three remained standing between him and the queen, his knuckles were bleeding from strikes that had connected harder than he’d meant them to.

He blinked through the last gap.

The final Beastman reached for him, and Noah caught its wrist an inch from his own throat, held it there for one suspended second, and drove Rend through its chest before releasing the grip entirely.

The queen stood alone now, breathing hard, watching her last line collapse around her.

She raked for his throat, fast enough that he barely twisted clear, her claws tearing through his jacket like paper, and he didn’t give her a second attempt. He caught her wrist mid-swing, twisted hard, and drove a chi-and-void-fused punch into her ribs that lifted her clean off her feet, and before she’d finished falling he was already behind her, Rend already coiled around his fist.

"This ends here," he said.

He drove it through her chest.

Her body went rigid, the fury in her eyes flickering into something closer to shock, and then she simply stopped, the tension leaving her all at once, and she collapsed into the dirt and didn’t move again.

The pulsing mass screamed.

Not a sound any throat should have made, layered and wrong, tearing through the whole chamber and every tunnel beyond it, and every Beastman still standing anywhere in the network froze mid-motion, ears flattening, bodies going rigid like puppets whose strings had all been cut at once.

Noah turned toward the mass itself.

He blinked directly at its center and drove a Null- Chi fusion Strike into the thickest cluster of pulsing veins, purple-black energy expanding outward from the point of contact, erasing tissue and bark and bone alike in a widening sphere.

The light dimmed.

Then it went out entirely.

’Did not think that would work but chi and void naturally don’t mix so most times they cancel each other out,’

The chamber fell into total silence, the last few hornets dropping out of the air with nothing left driving them forward, the remaining Beastmen simply standing there, confused, blinking, looking around like they’d woken from something they couldn’t fully remember at all.

Noah stood in the wreckage, chest heaving, Ash and Ember settling on either side of him, both drakes breathing hard but steady.

Behind him, Diana stirred first, a small groan escaping her before her eyes fluttered open. Priya came next, blinking slow at the ceiling. The two Dreamers followed a moment later, one of them sitting up too fast and immediately regretting it.

Kelvin, propped against the tunnel wall, let out a long, shaky breath and flexed his fingers slowly.

"I think," he said, "I can actually move my hand again."

Diana pushed herself upright, one hand braced against the tunnel wall, blinking hard against the dim violet-tinged light still fading from the ruined mass ahead of them.

"What happened," she said, voice thick. "Last thing I remember, we were fighting near the fungus cluster, and then—"

"Then a bunch of angry fur people knocked you out," Kelvin said, already crawling toward her, testing his legs one careful movement at a time. "Long story. Noah handled it."

"Handled what," Priya said, sitting up slower, wincing as she rubbed feeling back into her arms. She looked past Kelvin toward the ruined mass at the chamber’s center, and her whole expression changed, professional focus cutting straight through the grogginess. "Is that—"

"Yeah," Noah said.

Priya was on her feet before she finished processing it, swaying once before catching her balance, and started toward the wreckage with her hand already reaching for a scanner that wasn’t there anymore, lost somewhere back in the earlier fight.

The two younger Dreamers came around slower, one of them groaning as he sat up, looking at the scattered Beastman bodies with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

"Are we," he started, "are those—"

"They were people," Noah said quietly. "Once. Hunters, probably. Something in this place got into them a long time before we ever showed up."

Nobody said anything to that for a moment.

Kelvin finally got his legs fully under him and made his way toward the ruined mass, crouching beside the section Noah’s Null Strike had erased, running his fingers carefully along the edge of empty space where violet-veined tissue gave way to nothing.

"This is incredible," he said, and then immediately looked embarrassed at how that had come out. "I mean. Horrifying. Incredible and horrifying. Both things."

"Which is it," Diana said, coming up slowly behind him, one hand still braced against the wall for balance.

"Both," Kelvin said again, more firmly this time. "Look at the structure. It’s not plant, it’s not animal, it’s not even clearly organic in the way either of those things are organic. It’s like something took every kind of life in this basin and forced it to keep growing together instead of separately." He looked up at Noah. "This isn’t natural corruption. This took intent. Direction. Something was shaping this on purpose."

Around the chamber’s edges, the surviving Beastmen had gone still, watching, confused, and one by one they began backing away, retreating into the tunnels without any coordination left to hold them together, no queen left to answer to, no pulse left calling them forward. Within a minute the chamber had emptied of them entirely, the last set of yellow eyes disappearing into the dark.

Noah didn’t chase them.

He watched them go, something heavy settling in his chest, and didn’t move to stop a single one.

A low growl rippled through the tunnel behind them, and Shade burst into the chamber, scales bristling, jaws already parting for a breath weapon, tracking for a threat that had already stopped existing.

He found Diana instead.

The growl died in his throat. He crossed the space in two bounding steps and pressed his head against her side hard enough to nearly knock her over, and she laughed, surprised, wrapping both arms around his neck.

"Hey," she said, voice softer now. "Hey, I’m okay. I’m okay, I promise."

Shade made a low, satisfied sound and didn’t move, staying pressed against her like he intended to remain exactly there for a while.

Priya was still crouched at the edge of the ruined mass, examining what was left of it with careful, methodical attention, murmuring something about tissue density and void saturation levels that nobody else fully followed.

Kelvin straightened, wiping his hands on his pants, and glanced toward Noah with an expression that had shifted into something more careful.

"Hey," he said. "Walk with me a second."

Noah looked at him.

"Just for a minute," Kelvin said. "Something you should probably see before we head back out."