Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 821: Struggle across stars

Space didn’t have air, and Noah had learned the hard way exactly how long he could go without it.

Twelve hours. That was the ceiling. Somewhere past hour eleven his lungs started sending him increasingly insistent messages about the number of terrible decisions that had led him to this point, and somewhere past hour twelve those messages stopped being polite. He’d found that out the slow way, floating in open void with nothing but stars in every direction, One’s trail gone cold three systems back and his own good sense arriving a little too late to stop him from testing it.

So now there was a system. Fly until his lungs started complaining, find something with breathable air and put down for a few hours, or if nothing was close enough, drop into his domain and let time do what time did in there while his body caught up outside it. Then back out. Back on Storm. Back to tracking a signature that kept thinning the further out they went, like chasing smoke down a hallway that never ended.

He didn’t know how many worlds that had been so far. He’d stopped counting somewhere around world five, mostly because counting implied he had any real sense of where he was, and he didn’t. Not anymore. Somewhere past the edge of anything the EDF star charts had ever bothered mapping.

Storm didn’t seem to mind. Storm never seemed to mind anything, which Noah had decided months ago was either the wyvern equivalent of profound spiritual peace or a complete absence of long-term memory. Possibly both.

The sky below them was blue. Genuinely, normally blue, which after the last two worlds felt almost offensive in how ordinary it looked.

Then it wasn’t sky anymore. It was a streak.

BOOM!!

Below the sky, if anyone was out site seeing, they’d see something come down out of that blue trailing current, crackling blue-white and hot enough that the air around it screamed, and it hit the ground hard enough to throw a crater fifty feet wide, dust and shattered stone kicking up in a ring that rolled out and out before finally settling.

Where the impact site cooled, it didn’t cool evenly. Half the crater’s edge sat black and smoking, scorched bark curling off trees that had been standing a second ago. The other half sat under a layer of frost that hadn’t been there before the impact either, thin ice creeping up blades of grass like the ground itself couldn’t decide what temperature it wanted to be.

In the middle of it, Storm shook himself out like a dog climbing out of a lake, wings snapping wide then folding tight, throwing off sparks and ash in every direction.

Noah pulled himself up off the wyvern’s back, boots crunching on half-scorched, half-frozen dirt.

"Okay," he said, brushing soot off one shoulder. "So, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I really think it’s time we had a talk about your reentry technique."

Storm ignored him, already nosing at a patch of singed feathers along one wing, working through his own cleanup with the single-minded focus of a cat that had just done something embarrassing in front of company.

"I don’t know how many light years we’ve put behind us at this point," Noah continued, crouching to inspect a crack running through a nearby boulder, "but you’d think, somewhere in there, you’d have picked up the concept of landing gently. Just once. For variety."

Storm lifted his head, gave him a look that managed to convey total indifference and mild offense at the same time, then went back to grooming.

Noah laughed under his breath. "Yeah, yeah. I know you’re smart, buddy. I’ve seen you do genuinely clever stuff. And then I watch you try to land and it’s like watching someone with one brain cell try to parallel park a bus."

Storm made a low sound in his chest that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite anything else, and kept licking soot off his own wing.

"Anyway." Noah straightened, rolling his shoulders, and took a breath.

Full lungs. Real air, cool and a little smoky from the crater but breathable, no burn, no thinness that made his chest work overtime.

"Good news," he said. "We can breathe on this one. Not bad, boy."

He looked around properly this time. Thick forest in every direction past the crater, trees with bark that shimmered faintly silver where the light caught it, the kind of quiet that only existed on a planet that hadn’t seen a war yet. No skyline. No structures he could see from here. Just green and silver and the smell of char slowly giving way to pine.

"Although." He put his hands on his hips. "Which world are we actually on. That’s the real question, isn’t it."

Storm didn’t answer, because Storm was a wyvern and had never once answered a question in his life, but Noah kept talking anyway, mostly because the alternative was silence and he’d had more than enough of that the last few weeks.

"What solar system, even. You don’t exactly come with navigation built in, do you. No little star map behind those eyes. Just vibes and whatever direction smells the most like a fight." He crouched again, running a hand along a patch of frost creeping up a fallen branch, cold enough to sting his fingers even through the glove. "How many worlds is this now. Eight? I want to say eight. Might be nine. I stopped keeping a tally around the one with the purple oceans, which, side note, gorgeous planet, absolutely nobody home, ten out of ten, no notes."

He stood, wiped his hand on his thigh, and looked at Storm properly.

"You keeping count, boy? Because I sure as hell am not."

Storm finally lifted his head fully, wings settled now, soot mostly gone from his hide, and fixed Noah with a stare that held all the warmth and communicative depth of a brick.

"Right," Noah said. "Didn’t think so."

He turned in a slow circle, taking in the treeline, the frost, the scorch marks, the total absence of anything resembling a road or a light or a sound that wasn’t wind moving through leaves.

Wherever they’d landed, it was quiet and seeme untouched. Probably the kind of place that hadn’t had a reason to be afraid of the sky yet.

"Alright," Noah said, rolling his neck until something in it popped. "We’ve got a couple hours before I need to get back in the air. Let’s find you something to eat, big guy, because I know for a fact you haven’t eaten anything that wasn’t asteroid dust in about two days."

Storm’s head came up fast at the word eat, the way it always did, like the concept alone could summon him out of whatever half-asleep grooming trance he’d wandered into.

Noah reached into his domain and pulled out a cat four core, purple energy folding around his palm for a second before the thing solidified there, dense and faintly glowing, about the size of a fist.

"Go get it!!" Noah said, and tossed it hard with effort.

Whoosh!!

Storm shot after it before the core had even finished its arc, wings snapping open, and the forest in front of him simply stopped existing. Trees didn’t fall so much as vanish, splinters and bark and entire trunks thrown wide in a spray that carved a path straight through the treeline, wide enough that Noah found himself thinking, not for the first time, that you could probably land an Airbus down the middle of it.

"Well," Noah muttered, watching the destruction roll on ahead of him. "That settles that. Now why didn’t I pack any food for myself?"

He put his hands in his pockets and started walking.

The trail Storm left behind cut a straight line through the forest, silver-barked trees reduced to stumps and scattered wood on either side, the smell of sap thick in the air. Noah walked it slow, in no hurry, boots crunching over splinters and broken branches.

His mind wandered, the way it did whenever there wasn’t a problem in front of him to keep it occupied.

’Lucas.’

He didn’t try to stop the thought. Hadn’t been able to for weeks, honestly, not really.

’First time it was Arthur.’ Months. Lucas trapped in some shadow dimension Arthur pulled up specifically to make him disappear, and Noah hadn’t been able to do a single thing about it while it was happening. Just wait, pray something came up. Track Arthur and fail, and search again.

’Now it’s One.’

Same story, different monster. And this time around, Noah had been somewhere else when it happened.

’I felt it. The day we met him. The day he turned on Arthur.’ Something in Noah’s chest had gone tight and wrong the second he laid eyes on One, some instinct screaming that this one was going to be a problem eventually, and Lucas had felt it too, he’d said so afterward, quiet, almost embarrassed to admit it. They’d both known.

Neither of them had done anything about it. Because what were you supposed to do with a feeling like that.

’And then I picked the Amazon instead of Raiju.’ That was the part that actually sat wrong in his stomach, the part he came back to more than any of the rest of it. He’d made a call. A reasonable one, at the time, split the team, cover more ground, and Lucas had gone to Raiju without him, and One had been waiting there with something Noah hadn’t been quick enough to see coming or close enough to stop.

’I wasn’t there.’

He kicked a fallen branch out of his path, harder than it needed.

’Doesn’t matter now. I’ll find him.’ The thought settled into something steadier, something with an edge to it. ’I’ll find One, and whatever he did to Lucas, I’ll make him reverse it. However that has to happen.’

A whoosh cut through the trees ahead, and Storm barreled back through the gap he’d made, jaws locked around the core, still trailing splinters and shredded bark in his wake like a dog that had just demolished a couch and brought back a slipper as a peace offering.

Noah didn’t stop walking even as projectiles of splinters and Storm’s own Ice launched towards him.

He didn’t dodge, exactly. Or he did, but not in a way that looked like dodging. He was moving too fast for anyone to really see what he was doing.

Splinters the size of his forearm sailed past his shoulder, his hip, one close enough to his ear that a lesser man would’ve flinched, and Noah just kept his hands in his pockets and his stride even, weaving without ever appearing to weave, like the debris was choosing to miss him instead of the other way around.

"You know," he said, watching Storm crunch down on the core in three bites, "I gotta say, I got lucky with you."

Storm ignored him in favor of chewing.

"I mean it. Ivy would’ve tapped out four systems ago, no shade to her, she’s just not built for this kind of distance, she’d have wanted six naps and a spa day by planet three." He crouched, plucked another core out of his domain, this one glowing a shade darker. "Nyx has the power for days but he doesn’t have the speed, not for this. Not for crossing this many systems without a ship." He turned the core over in his hand. "Honestly? Might just be a Blizzard Monarch thing. Something about your bloodline that says sure, let’s cross a galaxy for fun, why not."

Storm’s head swiveled toward the new core, ears, or whatever the wyvern equivalent of ears were, pricking forward.

"And you." Noah smirked. "You’ve got the attitude for it too. Everything’s a race to you, isn’t it. Everything’s an opportunity to go faster, hit harder, prove something to nobody in particular."

He tossed the second core.

Storm was gone before it landed, another stretch of forest disappearing behind him in a spray of wood and dust, and Noah just shook his head and kept walking, following the new trail at his own unhurried pace.

The forest thinned out ahead into something more open, a clearing scattered with low brush and a scatter of boulders half sunk into the ground. In the middle of it stood a tree unlike the others, taller, its bark a deep bronze instead of silver, branches heavy with clusters of fruit that glowed faint gold even in daylight, like they’d swallowed a piece of the sun each.

Noah stopped and looked up at it.

"Well, hello."

He blinked.

One second he stood at the base of the trunk, the next he was crouched on a high branch near the top, close enough to reach out and close his hand around one of the glowing fruits, its skin warm against his palm, heavier than it looked.

He turned it over once, examining it, then dropped back down to the ground in a single easy fall, landing without a sound, knees barely bending to absorb it.

He took a bite.

Sweet. Almost too sweet, syrupy in a way that coated his tongue, but not unpleasant. He chewed, swallowed, and glanced back up at the tree with something like approval.

"Not bad," he said, mostly to himself. "Might grab a few more of these before we head out, Storm, you want—"

Light hit him from four directions at once.

Not sunlight. Something narrower, more deliberate, thin beams cutting through the clearing and converging on exactly where he stood, steady and unblinking, the kind of light that came from something aiming rather than something simply shining.

Noah went still, fruit halfway to his mouth, and looked around slowly, unbothered, tracking each beam back toward wherever it originated without finding a source in any of them.

He lowered the fruit.

"Hmm." He tilted his head slightly, studying the nearest beam like it might explain itself if he looked at it long enough. "Didn’t sense you guys."