Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 817: Stabbed from the back - A nightmare

The cool night air cut across Seraleth’s face as she held a steady glide two hundred feet above the industrial district. Down below, the dark outlines of warehouses, shipping docks, and quiet rail yards stretched out toward the river in a grid of rusted steel and overgrown concrete.

A contract from a weapons tycoon had brought them to this sector: four crates of military-grade void-energy weapons hijacked from a private vault three nights ago. The pay was exceptionally high, and with the rest of the Eclipse team split up across four different sectors to cover ground faster, Seraleth had taken the docks. It was supposed to be a standard sweep-and-clear.

Her wings shifted behind her with the fluid motion of her shoulders, catching a rising thermal off the harbor. Deep auburn and burnt-orange feathers caught the dim amber glow of distant streetlights, the dragon-scale framing along the base of her spine flexing beneath her shirt. Faithful Feathers felt less like a relic and more like a limb she had simply been born without until now, reacting to her thoughts as smoothly as her own arm.

She adjusted her earpiece, banking low over a stretch of warehouse rooftops, her eyes methodically scanning the dark alleys between the buildings.

"Kelvin, I’m looking but I can’t find anything," she said, cutting through a bank of low fog. "Can you widen the search radius, see if they’re around the—"

There was static.

"Kelvin?"

Nothing came back.

BOOM!!!

A fist the size of a fridge door caught her from above, double-axe-handled straight down between her shoulder blades, and the sky flipped over itself as she went from flight to freefall in a single violent instant. The atmospheric pressure from the blow folded her spine like a pocketknife, instantly sending her into a terrifying, supersonic dive.

She hit a rooftop three stories below and the whole structure buckled under her. Concrete and rebar exploded outward in a cloud of dust and debris as her body shattered through the tile roof, smashed through two interior floors of timber and steel, and slammed into the solid foundation bedrock beneath the warehouse.

The shockwave blew out every window in a two-block radius.

She lay there a second in the dark crater, ears ringing, chest screaming. The dense muscle and reinforced bone of her frame were the only reasons her internal organs hadn’t turned to liquid on impact, but the shock left her tongue tasting of iron and her lungs gasping for air that wouldn’t come.

She forced her knees under her, coughing up a dark splash of blood onto the crushed bedrock, and dragged herself upright amidst the falling dust.

Across the wreckage, a shape was pulling itself free of a second collapsed rooftop, gray hide catching the streetlight in dull patches through the shattered ceiling. It drew itself up to its full twelve-foot height, bone plates shifting along its back, and with a wet, nauseating crack, wings unfolded from its spine, wide, leathery, and veined with pulsing black fluid, something no Three-Horn should have had.

Seraleth’s breath caught.

"That’s not right," she said, mostly to herself, backing up a step through the rubble, feathers already shifting along her shoulders into hardened, razor-sharp blades. "You’re a Three-Horn. You’re not supposed to have those."

The Harbinger didn’t answer.

It rushed her instead. Its leathery wings snapped once, creating a localized vacuum that blew the remaining brickwork clean off the walls, cutting the distance faster than legs alone could have managed.

Seraleth threw herself sideways, snapping her left wing forward to catch the concrete floor and launch herself clear. Feathers loosed in a wide fan as she went, spinning into three separate vectors through the dust. Three of the steel vanes found the joint at its shoulder, driving deep into the gray hide before it barreled past her.

It didn’t slow.

It turned, wings cracking again, and caught her across the ribs with a backhand that lifted her clean off the ground. The heavy leading edge of the wing struck with the force of an armored vehicle, launching her through the warehouse’s rear brick wall, across fifty yards of open alley, and deep into the concrete structure of the street outside.

She hit the asphalt hard, sliding thirty feet through cracked pavement, and was moving again before she’d fully processed the pain, rolling clear of a descending stomp that turned the spot she’d been lying in into a crater of pulverized rubble.

"Okay," she said, breathing hard, blood running down her chin as she rose into a low, stable stance. "Okay, that’s how we’re doing this."

It came at her again, its massive gray feet tearing up the road, and this time she didn’t retreat.

The Harbinger drove a straight right punch toward her face, moving so fast it compressed the air in front of it into a visible cone.

She caught the incoming punch bare-handed.

The kinetic energy transfer was horrific. The impact drove her boots two feet back through cracked pavement, her whole arm screaming under the force, bones groaning under micro-fractures, but she held. The strength inside her matched the Harbinger’s city-crushing mass with sheer, concentrated density.

She wrenched the fist sideways, planted her rear foot into the sub-soil, and drove her own elbow up into the creature’s extended forearm hard enough to buckle the joint.

CRACK.

Gray bone burst through the hide in a fountain of thick, black fluid.

The monster didn’t flinch. Instead, before Seraleth could step clear, pale tendrils of regenerative tissue sprouted from the open tear, weaving across the fracture like biological thread, pulling the broken joint back together within two seconds.

Head and heart only. Nothing else stops it.

She ducked under its next wild left hook, close now, inside its reach where its massive arms lost their leverage. She flared her left wing and drove five feather projectiles point-blank into its exposed bicep, burying them to the hilt.

Thoom.

Thoom.

Thoom.

Each one hit like a fired round, punching deep into the muscle belly, and she willed the internal kinetic charges built into the feathers to detonate.

The blast blew the arm inside out, shredding gray hide and spraying liquefied flesh out the back of its shoulder. She kicked off its chest, using the recoil to leap backward, and called the embedded blades back toward her hand.

The Harbinger clapped its heavy palm into its chest and beat its remaining good wing forward at once.

BOOM.

The shockwave that rolled outward caught her returning feathers mid-flight, the violent displacement of air blasting them off course. Three of them clattered uselessly against a nearby building wall instead of returning to her grip, embedding deep into the brickwork.

"Oh, you’re clever," Seraleth said, her vision swimming in red, and didn’t get another second to appreciate it before the creature closed the gap again.

Using its wing for a sudden burst of speed, it caught her across the jaw with its left fist.

Her head snapped sideways, teeth shattering, blood spraying into the night air. She staggered two steps, the world spinning in dizzying circles, before catching herself. Something in her chest went cold and focused now, all the earlier caution burning off, replaced by the lethal clarity of a veteran pushed to the brink.

She came back swinging.

A straight punch, every ounce of her physical weight behind it, caught the Harbinger square in the chest and there was a reverb to the punch. The gray hide caved in, and the creature actually staggered, its massive wing flaring wildly for balance. She followed immediately, driving a knee into its ribs hard enough to feel bone yield and crack under the impact.

It grabbed her by the throat.

Its thick, gray fingers clamped down like an iron vise, crushing her windpipe. Seraleth didn’t panic. She kicked off its chest with both boots to break the grip, twisting free in midair.

As she hung in the air above it, she reached deep into the core of Faithful Feathers.

Twenty-four hardened vanes detached from both wings at once. Instead of scattering as projectiles, they flew into the narrow space between her and the monster, aligning tip-to-tail, interlocking their sharp edges until they formed a solid, seven-foot mechanical lance of deep orange and green steel.

She caught the forged shaft with both hands, landed on the cracked asphalt, and drove the lance upward with everything her frame could exert.

The point entered beneath the monster’s lower jaw, punching through its tongue and blowing out through the top of its snout, locking its jaws shut with a spray of dark fluid.

The Harbinger thrashed wildly, its sheer physical weight lifting Seraleth two feet off the ground as she held the lance fast. Seraleth used the height, vaulting over its head, and landed square on its broad, armored shoulders. She let go of the lance, wrapped her long arms around its thick neck, and drove her fingers directly into its eye sockets, gouging deep toward the brain stem.

The monster roared, a muffled, wet sound through the steel lance pinning its mouth, and flew straight up into the night sky.

It cleared two hundred feet in two seconds, its heavy wing beating violently against the wind, before flipping upside down and plunging nose-first back toward the street to crush her beneath its weight.

The road rushed up to meet them at terrifying speed.

Seraleth didn’t release her grip until the last possible second. She pulled her hands free from its eyes, reached down, and grabbed the main structural joint of its left wing where it met the spine.

She braced her knees against its back, locked her jaw, and pulled with every muscle fiber in her body.

CRACK-SNAP.

She ripped the entire wing out of its socket in a shower of black fluid.

The Harbinger lost all aerodynamics mid-air, rolling out of control, and smashed into the street sideways. They hit the ground together, a storm of shattered asphalt, dust, and pulverized curb stone, digging a fifty-yard trench down the center of the avenue before grinding to a halt.

The creature thrashed in the crater, pale tendrils already sprouting from the empty wing socket, trying to reconstruct the limb while its hands tore at the lance stuck through its jaw.

Seraleth didn’t let it recover.

She dragged herself over its torso, her left side bleeding freely, her shoulder dislocated and hanging loose, but her eyes were cold, clear, and focused. She reached out with her mind, and the scattered feathers stuck in the surrounding walls pulled free, flying through the air to reform her wings in a flare of auburn light.

She brought her wings forward, wrapping them tightly around her right arm, interlocking the feathers until they formed a heavy, reinforced gauntlet of solid, razor-edged steel.

She mounted the monster’s chest, raised her arm, and brought her gauntleted fist straight down into its forehead.

Boom.

Gray bone cracked. The impact echoed down the empty street, driving the creature’s head an inch into the concrete beneath it.

The monster thrashed, its powerful legs kicking out and tearing three-foot gashes in the road, but Seraleth held her position with sheer balance and leverage.

Boom.

She hit it again, harder, the steel blades driving deeper through the frontal plate.

Boom.

Boom.

She kept hitting it, five times, six, driving her elbow down over and over until the skull beneath her had stopped being anything that could get back up, until the gray bone gave way to dark, thick fluid and the thrashing limbs beneath her twitched and went completely still.

Only then did she let the gauntlet loosen, the feathers uncurling back into wings as she fell onto her knees in the crater. Chest heaving, blood dripping off her chin onto the shattered concrete.

She laughed.

Short, ragged, disbelieving, the sound of a veteran who genuinely hadn’t been sure she’d get to make it out alive.

Footsteps approached from behind, slow and deliberate over the broken glass and gravel.

She lifted her head, catching a flash of blonde hair crossing into her peripheral vision, and something in her chest loosened with profound relief.

"Thank God you’re okay," she said, voice rough and torn. "Li—"

A massive clawed hand punched through her chest from behind.

The pain didn’t arrive right away. Just pressure, sudden and total, a sudden cold emptiness in her core. Seraleth looked down, her eyes widening in disbelief, and saw five gray fingers wrapped around something dark and wet and still beating, understanding, distantly, that it was her own heart before the world tilted sideways.

A second Harbinger, identical to the first, untouched and unblemished, loomed behind her.

And standing directly in front of Seraleth’s crumpling body was Lila, her hands loose at her sides, her expression completely empty, doing nothing at all as the second monster withdrew its hand and let Seraleth fall face-first into her own blood.

"Nooooo!"

Sophie’s scream tore across the open air from a drop-ship descending above, close enough now that its searchlights caught all of it clearly: Lila standing directly beside the body, untouched, as the second Harbinger stepped up behind her like a silent bodyguard.

"How could you," Sophie screamed, the ship’s engines whining as it dropped too fast toward the ground. "How could you, Lila!"

Then violently, something strange happened.

As they moved closer to the scene in the ship, Sophie was getting further away from Lila. It was as if, the distance grew longer the closer they got.

Then Sophie’s eyes snapped open.

They glowed blue in the dark of her room, and on the nightstand beside her bed, the King’s Gaze pulsed the exact same color, its single eye already open, already burning, already awake before she was.