Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 822: Athlantix - A city of beauty

"Those are Ravagers," Noah said quietly. "Interesting."

Standard EDF issue. Category four cores, the housing unmistakable even from thirty feet out, the same blaster rifles he’d seen slung over EDF operative shoulder on every mission. His mind ran the obvious question first. How does a bunch of strange aliens end up holding Earth-standard military hardware.

Then he caught himself. Lied to himself, actually, and knew it the second the thought finished.

STRANGE ALIENS?

Far from that actually.

They weren’t strange. Something about the shape of them, the proportions, the way they moved, sat familiar in a place in his memory he couldn’t immediately locate. Like a word on the tip of his tongue.

He looked around properly now that his brain had decided to actually pay attention instead of just cataloguing threats. Six of them, maybe seven, spread in a loose arc at the edge of the clearing. Tall, slender build, skin holding a faint shimmer under the tree canopy’s dappled light, somewhere between pale gold and something closer to silver depending on how the light hit it. Their hair moved slightly even though there was no wind to move it, like it was suspended in something thicker than air.

Whoosh!!!

Storm came barreling back through the treeline, another core clenched in his jaws, throwing up a spray of dust and shredded bark in his wake, and two of the aliens closest to the tree line got clipped by the edge of it, thrown clean off their feet.

The rest raised their rifles.

Noah took a bite of the fruit still in his hand, chewed, then tossed the rest of it over his shoulder without looking.

"Okay, buddy, calm down."

He stepped in front of Storm, who was already all business, wings flaring out to make himself look bigger than his already considerable size, a low growl building somewhere deep in his chest, lightning crawling faint blue along his tail, the air around them both dropping several degrees in a hurry.

Noah turned back to the aliens and smirked.

"Okay, this is clearly a mix up." He held both hands up, palms out. "I crashed here by accident."

A lie. He’d landed on purpose. Details.

"But look, we might actually be on the same side here." He tapped his own chest. "Noah Eclipse."

Nothing.

Seven pairs of large, swirling eyes stared back at him. Nobody lowered a weapon. Nobody said a word.

"Well," Noah muttered. "That usually works."

He tried again, slower this time, gesturing at the rifle nearest him. "That gear. I’ve seen it before. E, D, F?" He drew the letters out with exaggerated care, like that might somehow help. "Humans? Ring any bells?"

Silence stretched out, thick enough that he could hear Storm’s low growl underneath it, could hear his own pulse a little in his ears.

Then one of them, the tallest of the group, lowered her rifle and walked forward without any particular hurry, reached into a pouch at her hip, and tossed something small and square through the air toward him.

Noah caught it on reflex.

"Translator," he said, turning it over once before clipping it to his belt.

He tried again. This time when his mouth moved, the sound coming out of it wasn’t English at all, some fluid, layered language he had absolutely no context for, and it was disorienting in a way that made him pause mid-sentence just to make sure he was actually still saying the words he meant to say.

"I’m not here for war," he said, or whatever the device turned that into. "Just a traveler. Ended up here by accident."

The tall one tilted her head slightly, said something back, and this time the translator caught up and rendered it clean in his ear.

"We detected a massive energy signature enter our atmosphere. It vanished almost immediately after. We came to investigate."

’Wow,’ Noah thought, genuinely impressed despite everything. ’That’s fast. This planet’s huge, from what I can see, and you found the exact spot I dropped in that quick? Puts EDF response times to absolute shame.’ He glanced again at the rifle in her hands. ’Speaking of. What are you doing with standard-issue Earth gear? Is this a human settlement? Some outpost nobody briefed me on?’

"Are you with the humans," she asked. "The EDF?"

Noah blinked. "Y— yes."

Something shifted through the group. Not relaxed, exactly, but the tension in their shoulders eased a notch, rifles lowering slightly.

"Then you are welcome," she said. "Welcome to Xytheria."

It clicked.

’Oh, shit.’

He knew exactly where he’d seen a face like that before. Three years back. His first real mission as a Vanguard recruit, before any of this, before Eclipse even had a name. A planet called Nebular, a diplomatic conference between Earth and a handful of allied alien species, a communication blackout nobody could explain, and Team Seven sent in to find out why. Turned out to be nothing more sinister than atmospheric interference, or so everyone thought right up until a Harbinger pod came screaming down out of a clear sky and the whole thing turned into his second real fight.

He remembered the crystal beings. The aquatic delegates in their liquid-filled suits. And a small group of tall, luminescent people with eyes like captured nebulae, watching him with quiet wonder while he cleaned up a threat that should have leveled half the landing pad.

He remembered one of them, specifically. A young woman who’d thanked him for protecting her home.

"You’re inviting me in," he said slowly, "is that right?"

"Come with us," she said.

Noah glanced back at Storm, who had gone quiet, eyes still tracking every alien in the clearing with predatory suspicion.

"Sure," Noah said. Then, before he could stop himself, "That woman. Munachi. Does that name mean anything to any of you?"

Every single one of them went still. Looked at each other. Said nothing.

Noah decided not to push it.

---

They walked him through the jungle for the better part of twenty minutes, the trees eventually thinning into something wetter, mossier, the ground turning soft and dark underfoot. The air smelled different here, mineral and green at once, and up ahead the canopy broke entirely to reveal a wide swamp, water so still it looked like glass someone had laid flat across the whole clearing.

Noah stopped at the edge of it.

’So what now.’

The water began to part.

Not splashing, not churning, just parting, smooth and deliberate, and out of the depths rose a string of vessels unlike anything he’d seen in the EDF’s fleet catalogue, sleek and rounded, hulls the color of deep sea shadow, running lights pulsing faint blue along seams that seemed to glow from somewhere inside the metal itself rather than sitting on top of it.

Spaceships. Underwater. Both at once, without looking like a compromise for either.

Hatches split open along the nearest hull with a soft hiss, and Noah found himself being ushered toward the smaller of the vessels while a group of the aliens attempted to lead Storm toward a much larger one, a cargo-sized hatch yawning open behind him.

Storm didn’t move.

Planted all four feet in the mud, wings half spread, absolutely refusing every gentle nudge and gesture thrown his way, and the aliens working the problem kept glancing back at Noah with expressions that clearly meant a little help here.

Noah looked back at his wyvern.

"It’s okay, buddy."

Storm huffed once, gave the assembled aliens one more suspicious look, then stalked reluctantly into the larger vessel, taking up what looked like the entire bay meant for multiple smaller craft.

Noah boarded his own ship and stepped inside.

His first thought, immediate and unbidden: ’It’s like I wandered into whatever Kelvin dreams about when he actually sleeps.’

Smooth curved walls, no visible seams anywhere, soft light pulsing gently from panels embedded flush with the hull, and the whole interior had that particular quality of technology so advanced it stopped looking mechanical and started looking almost organic, grown rather than built. He couldn’t imagine Kelvin setting foot in here and not immediately losing his entire mind.

He was still smirking about it when hands guided him into a seat, and before he could ask what came next, restraints folded across his chest and shoulders on their own, auto-locking with a soft click.

BOOOM!!!

Acceleration hit him like a wall, his cheeks pulling back from his face, vision smearing into a blur of light and motion, and then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped, everything snapping back to normal like nothing had happened at all.

He looked out the viewport.

The water outside wasn’t murky anymore. Wasn’t even really water in the way he understood it, or if it was, it had been transformed into something else entirely, alive with light. Below him spread an entire city, spires of crystalline material rising from the seabed in twisting, organic shapes, catching ambient light from a thousand different sources and throwing it back in shifting colors, blue bleeding into gold bleeding into something closer to violet. Traffic moved between the spires in smooth, unhurried streams, other vessels gliding past each other with a precision that made Earth’s busiest freeways look like a demolition derby.

It was, Noah thought, looking at an underwater metropolis somehow more alive and vibrant than anything he’d seen above ground on this world, absolutely nothing like what he’d expected to find twenty minutes ago while eating fruit off a tree.

Somewhere along the journey the ship had stopped feeling like it was swimming and started feeling like it was flying, and by the time it settled smoothly onto a landing pad, Noah realized there was no water around them at all anymore. Just open air, high above a city that occupied a bubble of atmosphere sitting somewhere beneath an entire ocean, an entire world folded in on itself in ways his brain was still catching up to.

The hatch opened.

Noah stepped out onto the pad, and a voice called out from somewhere ahead of him, warm and immediately familiar.

"Noah?"

He turned, and there she was.

Munachi. Same luminescent skin, same large eyes swirling with soft color, same soft accented voice, though something in her expression shifted the longer she looked at him, a small crease of confusion working across her brow.

"What a pleasant surprise," she said, closing the distance between them with quick, light steps. "I confess, I did not recognize you at first. The white hair. And you are... taller?"

"Is that right," Noah said, smiling.

"That is right," she said, smiling back, some of the confusion melting into open delight. "It has been years."

"It’s really good to see you," Noah said, and meant it. "I never thought I’d run into you again, if I’m honest."

She reached out and took his hand without hesitation, the gesture so natural it didn’t even register as forward.

"Come with me," she said.

Behind him, Noah could hear the muted commotion of several soldiers trying, and failing, to coax Storm out of the larger vessel and toward wherever they meant to take him, but his attention had already narrowed down to exactly one thing, and it wasn’t his wyvern’s stubbornness.

"Beautiful place," Noah said, looking around properly now, taking in the spires up close, the soft hum of the city around them. "Your world."

"Thank you." Munachi’s eyes crinkled with pride. "We have not had many visitors from Earth, but our tourism minister, a position we borrowed the concept of from Earth’s own politics, insists your world is magical."

’Magical,’ Noah thought, ’is a stretch, but hey, guy’s probably working with a tourism budget and needs it to sound worth the trip. Politics. Same everywhere, apparently. Even across stars.’

"So," Noah said instead, "why underwater, though?"

Munachi tilted her head. "What do you mean?"

"I landed on solid ground," he said. "Didn’t even know it was your world until your people found me. Then I got escorted onto a ship that makes even the most advanced tech I’ve seen look like a toy, and now we’re here." He gestured at the spires around them. "Underwater."

She laughed, light and easy. "And where would you have us build, exactly? Ninety five percent of our world’s surface is submerged. The land you found yourself on is little more than scattered island chains breaking the surface here and there. Everything that matters to us lives beneath it."

Noah turned that over. ’So this is like an exoplanet built almost entirely around ocean.’ He thought of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons back in his own solar system, a small frozen world with an entire liquid ocean locked away beneath miles of ice, no surface life anyone had ever found, just dark water and whatever might be swimming in it. ’Except take away the ice sheet, give it breathable air up top instead of vacuum, and let something actually live down here instead of just theorizing about it.’

"You’ve got a pretty shielded setup, though," Noah said. "Which makes me wonder. Why join the Coalition at all? If you’re already this tucked away."

Munachi’s smile shifted into something sharper, more knowing.

"Do you believe, because we live beneath the water, that we are safe?"

Noah winced. "Right. Yeah, sorry. That was a dumb thing to say." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Harbingers can fight and hold their breath in open space. Water’s not exactly a meaningful barrier to something like that."

’Although,’ he thought, ’that jump the ship pulled getting here. Are we even still on the same planet, or did we just cross into an entirely different part of this system in the time it took my face to stop trying to peel off?’

"Do not worry yourself over it," Munachi said gently, apparently reading some version of that thought off his face. "We were not expecting visitors from Earth today. Especially not EDF."

"Fair," Noah said, then paused. "Although, if I remember right, you thanked me back on Nebular. For protecting your home." He glanced around at the spires, the traffic, the whole glowing city folded into its bubble beneath an ocean. "But this clearly isn’t Nebular. So was that your home, back then? Or is this it, and Nebular was something else?"

"Nebular was where the Coalition conference was held," she said. "It was also where my people had taken shelter, temporarily, with the assistance of the EDF and the other member species, after the harbingers first displaced us from our own world. We returned here not long after that conference. With renewed readiness for the war."

"Ah." Noah nodded slowly. "Okay. That makes sense."

They walked on, the path curving between two spires, and Noah caught sight of children playing in an open plaza below, tossing what looked like raw crystal shards between them, some of the shards spinning midair on their own, others blooming into small holographic renderings, tiny looping scenes of light hovering above outstretched palms like they were playing with recorded memories instead of toys.

"So," Noah said, watching them, "I’m guessing you’re some kind of royalty? Princess, maybe?"

Munachi laughed outright at that.

"No. I am what your EDF officers would call a civilian." Her expression softened, something more solemn passing behind her eyes. "Though because of how heavily the harbingers have purged our people over the years, we tend to know each other’s names far more thoroughly than most worlds would. That is likely why mine sounded familiar to your soldiers."

"Ah." Noah absorbed that quietly. "So where are we actually headed?"

"To meet our king and queen," Munachi said.

"But first," a new voice cut in, calm and impossibly serene, drifting from somewhere around the curve of a pillar as they climbed a wide stairway ahead, "you must meet the princess."

Noah turned.

And found himself looking at something that didn’t quite belong in the same category as beautiful, not in any way he had language ready for. Not sharp, not soft, some impossible balance between the two, features that felt less designed and more discovered, like something the universe had arrived at after a very long time trying.

"Damn," Noah muttered, before he could stop himself.