Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 814: Lemon to lemonades

The duo got on again as the disc drifted onoward from the settlement gate, and Hendricks let the silence sit a moment before he spoke again.

"You’ve said very little about the actual reason for this trip, my lord," he said. "Beyond the mining operation."

"Because the reason has several layers, and you tend to get distracted if I give you all of them at once."

"I’ll manage, my lord."

She looked at him sideways, considering that, and something in her expression settled into the quieter register again, the one that meant she was actually thinking rather than performing.

"The General," she said. "He’s gotten closer to the boy than I can allow."

Hendricks kept his eyes forward. "Closer how, my lord."

"Closer in the way that matters," she said. "Fondness. Respect. The kind of attachment that produces protection whether either of them intends it. That was never supposed to happen. That’s why his parents never came back for him, Hendricks. I made certain of that years ago, long before any of this became necessary. A boy with no family behind him stays easier to move. A boy who finds a substitute for family in someone with that man’s reach becomes a different problem entirely."

"You engineered his isolation."

"I curated it," she said. "There’s a difference. And now this new little affection between them undoes years of careful work in a matter of weeks. It doesn’t bode well for me at all."

Hendricks was quiet for a stretch, the disk carrying them low over the last stretch of open sand before the settlement’s outer wall.

"The boy himself," he said eventually. "Noah. He’s proven rather unpredictable too, hasn’t he. He’s come a long way in a short time. Done things that have, if I’m reading your reactions correctly, actually surprised you on occasion."

"You noticed that."

"I notice most things, my lord. It’s the one skill I’ve never had to borrow from anyone."

Gigarose let out something that wasn’t quite a laugh.

"I can’t see the future," she said. "Whatever the priests of the old order used to whisper about me, that particular gift never belonged to me. What I can do is craft a path and set someone walking it before they know they’re walking anything at all. Deliberate pathways. Careful ones." She paused. "And somehow he keeps finding his own way off them anyway."

"That must be frustrating."

"It’s fascinating," she said, correcting him without heat. "There’s a difference there too. All the same, provided he keeps that man at arm’s length, keeps himself from finding anyone else built like the General is built, he still arrives exactly where I need him to arrive. The path bends. It doesn’t break."

"That’s an interesting distinction to hold onto," Hendricks said. "Given how close he’s already gotten."

"I’m aware."

"And the Harbingers," Hendricks continued, careful, testing the ground. "Their numbers keep climbing. Their strength alongside them. The reports Kross reads into the record every quarter get worse, not better. If your boy’s path takes time to walk, and their strength doesn’t wait for him to finish walking it—"

Gigarose laughed properly this time, sharp and delighted.

"If it weren’t for me," she said, "the Harbingers would have finished this species off a very long time ago, Hendricks. Long before your Supreme General ever fused himself into that armor. This species intrigues me. Out of every one I’ve watched rise and fall across however long I’ve been doing this, humanity has shown the single greatest propensity for absolute, glorious chaos. I’m not simply watching it happen. I’m the reason it hasn’t happened faster."

The disk slowed as they crossed into the settlement proper, and a pair of figures stepped out to meet them near a gate, tailored coats immaculate despite the dust hanging thick in the air.

Both Rowes bowed low.

"We weren’t expecting you," Mr. Rowe said, straightening.

"I came of my own volition," Gigarose said, stepping off the disk without waiting for it to fully settle. "How’s the old man faring?"

"Still recovering," Mrs. Rowe said. "From the wounds his son inflicted four years ago."

"Mm." Gigarose tilted her head. "How poetic. The tree falls by its own fruit."

Neither of them had a response ready for that.

"And the other half of your little partnership," she said. "The Reigns, was it?"

"Securing the remainder of Arthur’s design," Mr. Rowe said. "Precisely as instructed."

"How wonderful," Gigarose said. "Everyone doing exactly as instructed. Now." She folded her hands behind her back and looked between the two of them. "Is there anything either of you would like to share with me. Anything on your minds. Ambitions, perhaps."

Mrs. Rowe said nothing, but her husband stepped forward, chin lifting slightly.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "we do have an ambition."

"Go on."

"We intend to take the seat," he said. "Ruling body of the Endless. The Purge alongside it. Arthur was never suited to hold either properly, not truly, not in the way the work demands. He let sentiment cloud decades of planning. He kept a son close when the son should have been discarded the moment his loyalty came into question. He let old grudges against seven men dictate strategy that should have been about the species as a whole." He spread his hands slightly, apologetic in tone if not in substance. "We loved him, in our way. But love isn’t leadership."

"He built the network you’re standing inside of," Gigarose said. "You understand that."

"We understand that a foundation and its architect aren’t the same thing," Mrs. Rowe said, finding her voice now, smooth and unbothered. "A house doesn’t require the man who laid its first stone to remain in it forever. We intend to finish what he started. More efficiently. Without the sentiment that nearly cost him everything."

Gigarose listened to all of it without interrupting, her expression pleasant, faintly curious, the way someone listened to a child explain a plan for a lemonade stand.

"I see," she said, when they’d finished. "So how might I be of assistance."

Mr. Rowe’s mouth curved.

"We’ve heard things," he said. "Among the inner circle. Whispers that you and Arthur go back further than any of us properly understand. That you helped shape him into what he became. It isn’t foolish, we think, to assume you’re his benefactor. His true one." He inclined his head slightly. "We’d like that same gracious hand extended to us."

Gigarose smiled and glanced at Hendricks, who kept his face perfectly still.

"I see," she said again, softer this time. "Well. If that’s the case, I’d like to see what I’d actually be extending my hand to first. Show me what you’re capable of."

Both Rowes straightened at that, something eager moving through them, and Mr. Rowe gestured toward a nondescript structure near the settlement’s center.

"Three years ago," he said, "we accomplished something extraordinary. Some might call it insanity. We’d like you to see it yourself."

They led her toward the supposed mine structure, an elevator hidden in plain sight beneath what looked, from the outside, like a supply depot, and the doors closed around all four of them, dropping fast, deeper than any mining shaft had any business running.

The doors opened onto a wide underground chamber, lit cold and even, dozens of workers moving between stations, scientists in sealed suits monitoring banks of instruments that hummed low against the stone.

At the chamber’s center, chained and ringed by a dark, pulsing barrier of chi, stood something the workers gave a wide, deliberate berth.

"This is our ambition," Mr. Rowe said, leading her closer. "What we achieved with Arthur once, taken further than he ever dared push it himself." He gestured with something close to pride. "Here lies a FIVE HORN,"

Gigarose walked toward it.

It stood roughly the size of a standard Harbinger, slender through the frame, gray scale catching the cold light in dull, uneven patches.

A scientist near the barrier’s edge stepped forward fast. "Ma’am, that’s perpetuated dark chi, you shouldn’t—"

She walked through the barrier without slowing.

The scientist’s mouth stayed open around the rest of the sentence, and nobody in the chamber said another word.

She stopped just short of the creature, its head bowed low, hands and legs and tail bound by thick alloy links forged from something that had clearly cost more than the rest of the facility combined. It had to be high grade density beast alloy.

The creature’s eyes opened.

Gigarose reached out and placed a palm against its face.

Her expression opened into something close to rapture.

"So much rage," she said, voice low, almost reverent. "So much hate. So much destruction packed into one body." She tilted her head, studying it the way someone studied a painting they’d waited years to finally stand in front of. "You’re worse than your contemporary. What was his name. Kruel?"

The Harbinger moved.

The whole chamber shook as it rose to its full height, chains groaning, links straining but holding, workers stumbling back from their stations, instruments shrieking alarms nobody moved fast enough to silence.

Gigarose stood with her hands folded behind her back, looking up at the thing towering over her now, five horns catching the cold light in a jagged crown.

She looked, standing there, like a child staring up at an adult for the very first time.

***

The elevator carried them back to the surface, and the moment the sky opened above them, Gigarose lifted off the ground without ceremony, boots leaving a faint dusting of loose sand behind before that too settled. Hendricks rose beside her, and below, the Rowes stood at the edge of the depot entrance, watching the two of them climb.

"Isn’t it fascinating," Gigarose said, looking down at the settlement shrinking beneath her.

"My lord?"

"Humans," she said. "Some of them, at least. They’ve found good use for their own problems. What’s the quaint little phrase they use." She tapped a finger against her chin, pretending to search for it though she’d known it the entire time. "Turning lemons into lemonade."

"Indeed," Hendricks said, glancing back down at the two small figures still watching from below. "The true capacity of this species is remarkable. A chained monster of ruin, kept as a private asset. Not many civilizations would think to try it. Fewer still would survive the attempt."

"They’re not the first to try," Gigarose said. "They’re simply the first I’ve watched actually stay alive long enough to matter. Either ways, I know how this is going to end for them and I just can’t wait!!"

"So," Hendricks said, careful, testing the shape of the question. "Would you truly back them."

She laughed, light and unbothered, drifting a little higher.

"I’d have to hear what the Reigns have to say first, wouldn’t I," she said. "I can only imagine they’ll be vying for that same throne. Two ambitious little families, both convinced they’re the rightful heir to a dying man’s empire, both coming to me separately expecting the same generous hand." She tilted her head back, looking up at the darkening sky rather than down at either of them. "This is all just so much fun."

She said it the way a teenager said something delighted and slightly wicked, bright and quick, no weight behind it at all, the kind of sentence that belonged to someone half her apparent age rather than whatever she actually was underneath it.

"Yes," Hendricks said, matching her tone as closely as thousands of years of practice allowed. "This is fun."

Below them, the Rowes were still watching, small and pale against the dark ground, and the two figures above them folded into particles of pink and gray light and were simply gone, leaving nothing behind but settling sand and a chamber deep underground where something enormous had just been reminded, for the first time in longer than it could measure, that it was not the most dangerous thing in the room.