Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 807: The only choice

"You can’t be serious!"

Sophie’s voice cracked down the hallway before she’d even fully stepped through the door, echoing off stone walls that had heard a lot of raised voices over the last two days but none quite like this one.

Lucas sat on the edge of a wide bed, hands resting on his knees, and he looked up at her with the tired patience of a man who’d already had this conversation once today and knew he was about to have it again.

"Sophie—"

"No," she said, crossing the room fast, dropping to her knees in front of him so their eyes were level. "Don’t Sophie me. Not for this."

Angel came in behind her, arms crossed, jaw tight. Seraleth followed last, wings folded close behind her and the three of them arranged themselves around him in a loose semicircle, the same formation they’d unconsciously fallen into every time they’d cornered him over the last two days trying to talk him out of something none of them had actually said out loud yet.

"You don’t have to do this," Angel said. "That’s the whole point we keep making. There are other options."

"Name one," Lucas said.

Nobody answered right away.

"The Grey healers explained the risks to us directly," Seraleth said instead. "This isn’t a guaranteed thing, Lucas. It’s fifty-fifty. A coin flip. You could wake up on the other side of this, or you could just." She stopped, swallowing hard. "Or you could not."

"I know the odds," Lucas said.

"Then why," Sophie said, voice breaking slightly.

The door opened again, and Lucy stepped through, still in the same blue armor she’d been wearing for most of the last two days, dark circles carved deep under her eyes.

"It’s his best chance," she said.

"You’re supposed to be on our side," Angel said, turning on her.

"I am on your side," Lucy said. "I’ve spent the last two days going through every scrap of research my healers have on cellular deceleration. This isn’t me giving up on finding something better. This is me telling you the science actually supports it. Slowing his cellular activity down close to static could buy him months, possibly longer, time we don’t currently have any other way to give him."

"His cells are aging faster than the process was ever designed to handle," Sophie said, standing now, facing Lucy directly. "You know that. Whatever One did to him isn’t a normal decline the technique was built to manage. Even with cryo slowing things down, we’re still talking about a small window. Not years. Not even close to it."

"I know," Lucy said quietly.

"Then how is this his best chance," Sophie said. "How is buying a handful of extra weeks better than nothing."

"Because nothing is what we currently have," Lucas said.

Everyone turned to look at him.

"I’ve made my decision," he said, and something in his voice had gone flat and final in a way none of them had heard from him before. "I need all of you to let me have this."

Sophie’s eyes filled, and she didn’t bother hiding it this time.

"This could be the last time we ever talk to you," she said.

"I know," Lucas said.

He stood, slow, careful, joints that shouldn’t have belonged to someone his actual age protesting the movement, and crossed to her first, pulling her into a hug that she returned with both arms locked tight around him.

"Hey," he said, quiet, just for her. "You guys remember what I told you. Don’t tell Noah yet. He’s got enough on his plate right now, and there’s nothing he can do about this from where he is. Let him find out when there’s actually something to tell him."

He moved to Seraleth next, and she held on longer than Sophie had, her wings curling forward slightly like she was trying to shield him with them even now.

Then Angel, quick and fierce, her jaw working hard against whatever she wasn’t letting herself say out loud.

"Take care of everyone for me," he said, looking at all three of them at once. "That’s the job now. Not me. You three."

They left the room one at a time, each of them stopping at the door for one last look back before they made themselves keep walking, and the sound of their footsteps faded down the hall until it was just Lucas and his sister left in the room.

Lucy folded her arms.

"Are you sure about this," she said.

"Yes," Lucas said. "You’re the one who’s hesitating."

"Maybe there’s another way," she said. "Maybe if we had more time to actually search—"

"There isn’t time," Lucas said gently. "That’s the whole problem, Lucy. Every day spent looking for a cure that might not exist is a day this team isn’t spending doing the thing that actually matters right now. Hunting One down. Finding out where Arthur’s hiding, if he’s even really alive. Putting a stop to whatever comes next before it costs someone else what it’s already cost me." He held her gaze steady. "With me on ice, you all get to focus on what actually needs focusing on instead of splitting time between two impossible problems."

Lucy’s composure finally cracked, and she pulled him into a hug hard enough that he grunted slightly from the force of it.

"This is my fault," she said into his shoulder. "I should have gotten to you faster. I should have hit him harder, sooner, before he ever got the chance to—"

"It’s war," Lucas said. "There are losses in war. I just happened to end up on the casualty side of it this time instead of the other."

He held her a moment longer, and when he finally pulled back, there was a single tear tracking down his own face that he didn’t bother wiping away.

"I’m going to miss you," he said. "I think."

---

The hallway outside his room stood lined with soldiers in blue armor, rows of them stretching the full length of the corridor, every one of them standing at attention with heads bowed low.

Damien waited at the front, tears already running freely down his face, no attempt made to hide them now.

"Your mother will be back soon," he said, voice thick. "She’s going to be furious she wasn’t here for this."

"That’s her problem now," Lucas said, and managed something close to a real grin despite everything.

Damien let out a wet, broken laugh, and fell into step beside him, Lucy on his other side, her own face set like something carved from stone, giving nothing away even as her hand found her brother’s and held on.

They walked the full length of the corridor together, past every bowed head, past hall after hall Lucas insisted on walking through himself rather than being carried, until they reached a grand door at the end, a massive shield emblem worked into the metal above it, catching the light.

"This is for you," someone said quietly as the doors began to open. "Same as you fought for Earth, and for Raiju both, we protect you here now. At all times, for as long as it takes."

Inside, the room hummed with quiet activity, scientists already stationed at consoles, screens flickering with readouts Lucas didn’t fully understand and didn’t need to. At the center of it all sat a pod, sleek and pale, cables running from it into a bank of monitors along the far wall.

"I need a minute," Lucas said, and Lucy and Damien both let go of his hands.

He turned toward the open doorway, toward everyone gathered there, and looked at them for a long moment.

"Wow," he said, and something almost like his old humor crept back into his voice. "I thought I’d have a whole speech ready for this. Turns out I’ve got nothing."

Behind everyone, he could see the girls balling their eyes out with streams of tears. Sophie, Sera and Angel, all holding onto each other tightly.

He stepped into the pod.

Two technicians moved forward gently, securing the straps across his shoulders and chest, and the interior settled around him soft as a pillow, molding itself to fit.

He smiled.

"Beginning cryo sequence," one of the scientists said, and the machine hummed to life around him.

"He should reach static cellular activity within the minute," another said, glancing toward Damien. "Or as close to it as we can manage given the circumstances."

Damien nodded once, silent, unable to trust his own voice.

Sophie, Seraleth, and Angel stood together near the back of the room, hands clasped tight, watching through the pod’s clear surface as Lucas’s eyes grew heavy, then heavier, until they finally closed.

He stopped moving.

The room stayed still around him.

One by one, the guards began filing out, their duty complete for now, nothing left to protect but a body settling into stillness. Angel went first, unable to look at the pod any longer. Seraleth followed a moment later, wings drooping.

Damien passed Sophie on his way out, and she caught his arm, pulling him close, walking him out together, his shoulders shaking silently the whole way.

Lucy stayed.

She stood alone in the room, staring at her brother’s face through the pod’s cold surface, unmoving, frozen somewhere between sleep and something worse.

"One," she said quietly. "You’d better hope I don’t find you."

---

Somewhere far away from Raiju, far from anything the Conclave counted as its own, on a barren, red-sand world where the wind never seemed to fully stop, a boy staggered forward with his coat torn to ribbons and one sleeve gone entirely.

Sand scoured his exposed skin raw with every gust, and the sky above him hung low and colorless, a bruised haze that gave no clean horizon to walk toward, only the wind itself, howling in one direction and then another, offering him nothing to trust and nothing to follow.

He fell for the third time in as many minutes.

He caught himself on both hands, palms scraping against rock buried under a thin shifting skin of dust, and knelt there a moment, breathing hard, before forcing himself back upright the same way he’d forced himself upright every time this ground had tried to keep him down.

’Hiro Shima,’ he thought, the name looping through his skull in rhythm with his own labored footsteps. ’Hiro Shima.’

He’d fled through shadow after shadow, jumping blind from one dark pocket to the next in a way he’d never once had to before, no destination in mind, just distance, just space between himself and a man who hit like something that had been fighting since before civilizations learned to write their histories down. The ability had finally failed him somewhere over this plain, the shadow beneath his feet simply refusing to answer anymore, drained past whatever reserve he’d been drawing from, and he’d hit the ground running and hadn’t fully stopped since.

’A god must fall before he can rise,’ he told himself, staggering forward another dozen steps into the wind. ’This is not defeat. This is refinement. Fire tempers steel. I needed to know my own edges before I could sharpen them properly.’

He believed it completely, the way he believed everything he told himself, without room left over for doubt to actually live in the sentence.

’He caught me off guard. That’s all it was. An unaccounted variable, nothing more. No god arrives fully formed on his first day. Even I required time to become what I am now. This is simply another version of that same process.’

He fell again.

This time it took longer to get back up, his arms shaking under his own weight, blood from a dozen shallow cuts mixing into the dust clinging to his skin, and for one long moment he simply knelt there in the howling wind and let himself feel, briefly, exactly how much it hurt.

Then he stood.

’I am One,’ he thought, pushing forward again, one staggered step following another. ’The only success among many failures. My father tried and tried and tried across centuries and produced nothing worth keeping until he produced me. Every one of my siblings wore his face and none of them were real. I am the only proof any of it ever worked.’

’This planet does not know that yet. This wind does not know that yet. But it will learn, the same way everything eventually learns.’

He kept walking, dragging one foot after the other through sand that shifted and swallowed his boots with every step, and somewhere in the haze ahead, faint and distant, he saw light.

Faint at first, distant, smeared by the dust hanging thick in the air, but unmistakably light, artificial, the kind of glow that meant something built rather than something natural.

He picked up his pace.

His legs screamed at him for it, every joint in his body protesting the sudden demand, but he pushed through anyway, staggering faster now, breath coming in ragged pulls that tasted of iron.

’Shelter,’ he thought. ’Or people. Either one serves.’

The light resolved slowly as he closed the distance, taking shape out of the haze one detail at a time, and his stomach did something strange when the outline finally clarified enough to read properly.

’Is that a ship.’

It was massive, far larger than anything he’d expect to find on a presumed dead world like this one, hull curved in a way that suggested purpose rather than wreckage, running lights still active along sections of its length despite the storm battering it from every side.

He heard sounds before he reached it.

Voices, or something like voices, deep and guttural, carrying strangely through the wind, layered under a low mechanical hum that felt less like engines and more like something breathing.

He kept moving, faster now despite his body’s protests, and shapes began resolving out of the haze near the ship’s base, tall figures moving in loose formation, patrolling, working, existing in numbers he hadn’t expected to find anywhere on a world this hostile.

Something lit up behind his eyes. It was hope cutting straight through the exhaustion.

’A hidden civilization,’ he thought, and felt something close to joy for the first time since the fight that had put him on this ground. ’I know I travelled far to get here. Could this be another defenseless world? Something even the Sterlings never recorded in all their careful archives?’

’All I need do is what I already did to the Sek. What I already did to the Vel’kai. Show them exactly what standing against me costs, and let the rest arrange itself the way it always does.’

He straightened despite the pain, pulling what remained of his torn coat tighter around his shoulders, some vestige of pride refusing to let him arrive looking as broken as he actually felt.

He kept walking toward them, and the shapes grew clearer with every step, tall, easily eight feet at full height, moving with a heavy, deliberate gait that ate ground faster than their size should have allowed.

He stopped.

Not by choice. His whole body simply refused to take the next step, some ancient, animal part of him recognizing something before the rest of him had finished processing what he was actually looking at.

Gray hide, thick and cracked like old rhino skin stretched over something built for war rather than survival. Shoulders too broad for any human proportion, arms ending in hands that carried claws instead of fingers. And rising from their skulls, unmistakable even through the haze, curved and jagged and impossible to mistake for anything else.

Horns.

Two, on the nearest one. A second, further back, carried more.

’No,’ he thought, the word arriving small and useless against the size of what he was seeing.

’No, that’s not possible. That’s not—’

The wind shifted, clearing a wide gap in the haze for one brief, merciless second, and he saw them properly, dozens of them, more, an entire encampment of towering gray figures moving in loose but purposeful patterns around a ship that had clearly been built to carry more of them than any single vessel should reasonably hold.

"Har...."

His breath caught somewhere in his chest and refused to move.

"Harbingers?" he said, and his own voice came out thin, stripped of every certainty he’d carried across every step that had brought him here.