Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 819: Bait

The team was already in the air in minutes.

Two ships cutting through the Eastern Cardinal sky, engines still warming, and Kelvin had four screens open across his forearm display before anyone had finished strapping in.

"Okay, we’ve got two draws. Both huge. Both warehouses, which, side note, if I’m a secret evil organization the last thing I’m doing is putting my death portal somewhere with a loading dock and a forklift, but sure, go off, I guess subtlety died with everyone’s dignity this year."

Seraleth leaned over his shoulder, wings tucked against the ceiling. "Focus."

"I am focused. I’m the most focused I’ve ever been, this is what focused looks like on me, you’ve just never seen it because usually I’m focused on something that doesn’t involve the possible end of the world." He pulled the map wider, two red points blinking against the grid, both sitting deep in the industrial district. "Look at this. Two draws, both massive, both reading thousands of cores worth of output each. Not portal-for-a-guy-to-walk-through. Portal for a parade."

Marcus, strapped in across from him, didn’t look up from checking his blaster. "That a lot?"

"That’s a lot. That’s a ’somebody’s been building this for a while and hiding it very well’ lot." Kelvin scrubbed a hand down his face. "You remember the last time. Three years ago. It wasn’t one hole in one wall. It was like six of them, all at once, all in places that mattered. Government building. Two hospitals. The comm relay tower downtown. Choked the whole city in about four minutes before anyone even understood what was happening." He looked at the screen again. "This isn’t that. Two draws. Same neighborhood. Feels smaller and somehow worse."

"Worse how," Reyna said.

"I don’t know yet, that’s the worse part." He hit the comm before she could push. "Angel, you there?"

A beat of static. "Go."

"Two confirmed energy draws, south industrial district, signature’s consistent with portal tech, and I mean consistent the way a fingerprint is consistent, this is the same tech. If this is Purge and it’s building toward another Harbinger push, EDF needs to know now, not after somebody’s cousin posts a video of it."

"Copy. Relaying now."

The comm cut.

Kelvin sat back and stared at the ceiling for a second like it owed him an explanation.

"I destroyed the last set of these," he said, mostly to himself. "Personally. Took me a month to build a scanner that could catch a draw like this happening anywhere in the solar system, and I burned through actual thousands of cores just running that array for one clean scan. So somebody’s out here rebuilding portal infrastructure at a scale that should’ve had my scanner losing its mind, and it didn’t say a word to me. Not a peep. Nothing." He shook his head slowly. "Either my scanner’s broken, which, insulting, or somebody found a way around it, which is worse, because I built that thing to be un-around-able. That was the whole point. I named it that in my head. The Un-Around-Able."

"You did not," Marcus said.

"I absolutely did, and I stand by it."

The ship began its descent.

They landed two streets back from the nearer target, engines dropping to a hum, and the four of them stepped out into a district gone quiet which could only mean that something was about to happen in it.

Kelvin’s two mechanical arms unfolded from his spine and hung at his sides, humming low. Standard Eclipse gear on all of them, matte black plating, and each carried a Ravager blaster slung across the chest, category four cores glowing faint blue in the housing.

"Okay so my plan," Kelvin said, crouching behind a stack of shipping containers, "is that we don’t die. That’s step one. Step two is everything after that."

"Groundbreaking strategy," Reyna said.

"I went to school for this."

They moved to the edge of the lot. Light spilled out of a gap torn in the warehouse’s east wall, not electric, something with more weight to it, purple-white and pulsing like it was breathing. Through the gap, crates drifted in a slow unbroken line toward something none of them could fully see.

Kelvin’s comm crackled.

"Same visuals over here." Diana, flat, no wasted words. "Crates, open portal, warehouse two."

"Copy," Kelvin said, then immediately, quieter, to himself: "I hate that word. Copy. Makes me feel like a fax machine."

Sophie’s voice cut through next. "Go in now. Cause as much disruption as you can until Angel’s people show up."

"And listen," Miss Brooks added, "EDF’s moving, but they’re handling civilian evac first in case this turns into another Kruel situation. So for right now, until reinforcements land, it’s just you."

Kelvin exhaled through his nose and looked at the warehouse. At the light bleeding out of the gap in the wall. At Seraleth beside him, wings already shifting, restless.

"What’s the play," Seraleth said.

"If Noah or Lucas were here," Kelvin said, "they’d already be through that wall and probably halfway to getting yelled at by somebody’s like Sam who handles our damages."

"Fine by me," Seraleth said, and stood.

Her wings spread to full span and she went straight up, no windup, gone before Kelvin finished blinking.

She came down through the roof.

BOOM!

The impact tore a crater through corrugated steel, sent a shockwave rolling across the warehouse floor, crates toppling, the portal’s glow flickering under the force of it. Dust hung thick in the air where she landed low, one hand still on the ground.

Then the shapes came out of the dark. Black-clad, faceless behind matte visors, red-white energy crawling up their forearms like something alive and feeding.

Dark chi.

Seraleth straightened up slow. Rolled one shoulder. Smirked.

"Alright," she said. "Let’s go."

The first agent came at her low, a strike wrapped in red-white current aimed at her ribs, and she caught his wrist and used his own momentum to swing him into two more behind him. A fourth fired a bolt of the same energy from his palm and she tilted sideways, let it graze past close enough to singe feathers, and a hardened blade shot from her wing and caught him through the shoulder.

He screamed and dropped.

More came. Kelvin counted twelve before he stopped counting and just moved.

He dropped through the hole Seraleth made, all four arms unfolding around him, and the first agent to turn on him got a fist to the jaw that sent him spinning into a support beam.

"You know what this reminds me of," Kelvin said, driving his elbow into a second agent’s throat, "it reminds me of that one Batman issue where he fights like forty guys in a hallway and it’s supposed to be one continuous shot, except I don’t have a hallway, I have a warehouse, and I don’t have a cape, I have arms that used to belong to a vending machine—"

"Kelvin," Marcus said, dropping in through the gap behind him.

"I’m working and talking, those aren’t mutually exclusive—"

His second arm reached sideways, fingers brushing a fallen agent’s discarded blaster, and it lit up and fired itself into the crowd before Kelvin had finished the sentence.

"Show off," Marcus said.

"I contain multitudes," Kelvin said. "Multiple arms, multiple multitudes, it’s very efficient."

Marcus went into the crowd like he’d been built for exactly this. Ducked under a swing, drove two fingers using VPT under an agent’s collarbone, and the man’s arm went dead at his side before Marcus finished the motion that put him on the ground with a knee to the sternum. He spun without stopping, caught a second agent’s wrist, twisted it past the joint’s limit, and the scream that followed gave him the half second he needed to line up a strike that dropped him.

Reyna worked lower and faster, sliding under a blast of red-white energy, coming up inside an agent’s guard, three strikes to the ribs so quick the sound blurred into one crack. He folded. She was already moving to the next, palm strike to the sternum, elbow to the temple.

"Twelve down," she called, not even breathing hard. "How many more of these guys did they bring, a whole warehouse’s worth?"

"Statistically? Probably yes," Kelvin said, catching an incoming punch on one arm and driving a fist through an agent’s chest plate with a second. "This feels like a lot of guys for what’s supposed to be a routine cargo run. Nobody staffs a delivery job like this unless the delivery is extremely illegal or extremely fragile."

"Or both," Seraleth said, dropping from the air and grabbing two agents by their collars, slamming their heads together before either reacted.

"Or both, sure, that tracks, that tracks with basically everything that’s happened to us in the last two years."

More agents poured from deeper in the warehouse, red-white light climbing their arms in near unison, like something further back was feeding all of them from one source.

"They keep coming from the back," Seraleth called, wings snapping open and closed, feathers loosing in short bursts. "Something’s feeding them."

"The portal," Kelvin said, scanning it from across the floor. The purple-white light pulsed steady, crates still drifting through in an unbroken line despite the chaos around it, like the fight wasn’t even registering.

An agent lunged at him from the side. He caught the strike on one arm, grabbed the man’s collar with a second, and a third arm reached past him entirely to yank a support cable off the wall, sparks arcing down onto a cluster of agents behind him.

"That’s cheating," Marcus said, ducking a blow and driving his palm into an agent’s nose.

"That’s engineering. There’s a difference. The difference is I went to school."

They fought like that a long while, minutes bleeding together, debris and worse slicking the floor, Seraleth carving violent arcs through the air, Marcus and Reyna working the ground in tandem, catching each other’s blind spots without a word between them, Kelvin’s four arms moving independently — one blocking, one striking, one reaching for whatever piece of tech was nearest, one keeping half an eye on the portal.

An agent caught Reyna’s forearm with red-white current and she hissed, staggering.

"You good?" Marcus called.

"Fine," she bit out, and drove her good arm into his throat hard enough that he stayed down all through vpt. .

Eventually the flow of agents slowed. Fewer rising to replace the ones dropping. Kelvin caught his breath against a support beam, chest heaving.

"I’m going to try and connect to the portal," he said. "See where it leads. I need cover."

Seraleth wiped blood off her lip with the back of her hand. "Go."

"We’ve got you," Marcus said, already repositioning.

Kelvin walked toward the portal, stepping over bodies, eyes starting to shift, green light bleeding in where white had been, the same green racing down both his prosthetic arms and into the mechanical ones behind him.

"Purge," he said, "meet Pithon."

His hands touched the edge of the light.

---

Two districts over, Diana’s team hit their warehouse from the ground. No dramatic entrance. Just Shade, unmasking for half a second in front of a Purge agent’s face, black scales catching what light there was, teeth bared, and the man stumbled back into a crate before Shade’s tail caught him across the chest and put him into the wall. Then Shade was gone again, nothing but displaced air.

"Left side," Diana called, and the two Eclipse members flanking her split without question.

She kept the Shoal Shield up instead of reaching for nullification, fragments locked into a tight defensive ring, and when an agent came at her with both fists wrapped in red-white current, she let him hit the shield dead on.

The shield swelled, doubling in the half second of contact, and his own strike bounced him backward off it like he’d hit a wall made of tide.

"Nice," one of her people said.

"Don’t get used to it," Diana said, already turning to catch a second strike on the shield’s edge.

Lila moved through the chaos like none of it touched her. She lifted a hand and three agents rose off the ground at once, limbs flailing against pressure they couldn’t fight, and with a flick of her wrist sent all three into each other hard enough that none got up.

An agent charged her from behind. A small dome of distorted air snapped into place around him mid-stride, and he froze there, one foot lifted, energy caught mid-crackle around his fist.

"Rude," Lila said, not even looking, and walked past him to catch a different agent with a shove that put him through a stack of empty containers.

The field dropped a second later and the frozen man stumbled forward into open air, thrown by the sudden return of time, straight into a fist from one of Diana’s people.

"Left flank’s clearing," Diana called.

"Same here," Lila said, slamming another agent into the floor with her mind and not her hands.

---

Back at the first warehouse, Kelvin’s eyes had gone full green, both hands and all four mechanical arms lit with current, and where his spine met the portal’s edge the connection had gone deep, arms locked rigid, plugged into something vast and cold and moving.

He saw fragments first. Coordinates. Signal repeaters. A logistics ledger scrolling faster than any human eye should track, his mind keeping pace anyway because right now it wasn’t entirely just his own.

Then he saw something else.

"Oh," Kelvin said. "Oh wow."

Seraleth glanced over from where she’d just put a fifth agent down. "Kelvin?"

"You guys," he said, voice distant, still half inside it, "you are not going to believe this."

He pulled back. The disengage hit him like stepping off a treadmill running twice his speed, and he staggered, one hand hitting the wall, breathing hard, green fading slow from his eyes.

He didn’t get time to explain.

More agents dropped through the gap in the roof, a fresh wave, and Kelvin straightened fast, all four mechanical arms reconfiguring at once, plating sliding and locking, the forward two fusing at the wrist into something wide and curved.

"Everybody down," he said.

Marcus and Reyna dropped flat. Seraleth’s wings folded low behind a fallen crate.

The modified arm crackled, electricity coiling around the curved housing in a tight spiral, and Kelvin swung it in a wide arc, releasing a boomerang of current that carved a glowing path through the air, hit the first wave, curved unnaturally around a support column, caught a second cluster on the way back, and returned to his outstretched hand like it had never left.

Every agent still standing dropped where they were.

"Fall back," Kelvin said, already moving. "I put a self-destruct on the portal generator. We need distance before it goes."

He hit the comm.

"Diana, tell your people to fall back too. Now, not in a minute, now."

"Copy," her voice came back, breathless, already moving.

They cleared the building at a dead run, out through the hole in the wall, past the shipping containers, and didn’t stop until real distance sat between them and it.

Behind them the warehouse folded inward in a soundless collapse of light, structure crumbling like something had reached in and pulled the floor out from under it.

"What did you find," Sophie’s voice, tight, over the comm.

Kelvin looked at the smoking wreck. At Seraleth, blood on her lip, wings still half spread. At Marcus and Reyna, bruised, both still upright.

"It’s better if I show you," he said.

---

Fifteen minutes later they touched down at HQ.

The debrief room filled fast. Sophie stood at the head of the table instead of sitting, Miss Brooks beside her, arms crossed. Diana and Lila came in still dust streaked. Marcus and Reyna dropped into chairs like their legs had finally been given permission to quit.

Kelvin stood at the front, one screen pulled up behind him.

"So," he said. "Let’s start with what doesn’t make sense, which, fair warning, is going to be most of this."

Nobody said anything.

"Portal tech, running routine cargo movement, undetected, probably for a while now. I’d say three years. I destroyed the last set of these. Built a scanner specifically to catch this exact signature anywhere in the solar system, burned through thousands of cores keeping that array running. Somebody rebuilds this at scale, runs it long enough to move crates through like it’s a delivery route, and my scanner never says a word." He shook his head. "Doesn’t happen by accident."

"Maybe they got careful," someone near the back offered. "Since you destroyed the last ones."

"That’s what I thought too. Initially." Kelvin’s mouth twisted. "But thanks to the Auxiliary Assistant, if I wasn’t the best hacker on the planet before tonight, I am now the greatest hacker in the universe. Cracked it clean."

He tapped the screen.

A planet appeared, dull red, rust-colored clouds churning across a surface that looked wrong in ways nobody could immediately name.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Kelvin said. "This is planet Arthur."

Silence.

"Our old man," he said, "is very much alive."

The room went still in a way that had weight. Marcus sat forward. Reyna’s mouth opened and nothing came out. Miss Brooks’s arms uncrossed slowly, like she needed them for balance.

Sophie didn’t react the way the rest did. Neither did Seraleth. They traded one look, brief, unsurprised, the kind that said this only confirmed something already sitting in both of them since Vel’kai.

"How," Diana said.

"I don’t know yet," Kelvin said. "I need time. We all do." He rubbed his face with his real hand, the mechanical arms hanging loose now, powered down. "Arthur’s alive, One’s out there doing whatever One does, that’s two people with god complexes and zero interest in anyone else’s survival, both active at once."

He laughed, short, no humor in it.

"Why can’t the universe give us a father and son duo that just wants world peace," he said. "Is that so much to ask. One hobby. Gardening. Anything."

"That sucks," Marcus said.

"It really does," Reyna agreed.

Sophie held a hand up before the room could pile on further. "Everyone get some rest. We reconvene once we’ve had real time to think this through. Nobody’s making calls tonight."

The room emptied slow, people peeling off in twos and threes, adrenaline finally letting go of everybody at once.

In the hallway, Diana caught up to Lila.

"Hey," Diana said. "Nice work out there today."

Lila glanced over, eyebrow up.

"You had the team’s back," Diana added.

"What’s that supposed to mean," Lila said. "I’m always behind everyone’s back."

Diana looked at her a second too long, something unreadable crossing her face, then just nodded.

"Shade," she said. "Come on."

For half a second the air beside her shifted, black scales catching hallway light as Shade unmasked just long enough to walk past Lila, close enough that Lila had to step