Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 833: A predator

"No, Sera," Diana said again, still standing there on the pad, device hanging loose in her hand like she didn’t trust herself holding it any tighter. "It’s not okay. I need you to actually hear that. It’s not okay."

"I heard you the first—"

"I don’t think you did, actually, because you’re looking at me like I just told you the sky’s a weird color." Diana started walking, fast, and Sera had to lengthen her stride to keep up. "This isn’t a fan being a little intense, this is a grown man running a whole operation on you."

"He is simply lonely, I think, and—"

"He is simply a leech, Sera, that’s what he simply is." Diana yanked the ship’s hatch open harder than it needed. "Get in."

Sera climbed in after her, wings folding awkwardly in the low doorway, and settled across from her as the hatch sealed.

"Do you know his last name?"

"...No."

"His actual face? Not a picture he picked out and sent you, his actual face?"

"No."

"Where he lives, beyond ’a city,’ which, by the way, congratulations, that describes roughly six billion people—"

"I do not see why that matters if he is genuinely suffer—"

"Because that little conniving twat isn’t suffering, Sera, he’s fishing!" Diana’s voice cracked up loud enough that Sera actually flinched, wings twitching against the seat. "He found somebody sweet and rich in resources and stupid generous and he’s been reeling you in for months like you’re a — I don’t even have a good comparison, you’re just bait to him, that’s it, that’s the whole relationship on his end!"

"He also asked for pictures," Sera said. "Of myself."

Diana’s mouth was already open to keep going and the words just stopped coming out.

"...What."

"Pictures." Sera said it like she was clarifying a minor detail, entirely unbothered, still half distracted retying a strap on her gauntlet. "I have seen pornography before. I understood what he meant."

"He asked you for—" Diana pressed both hands flat over her own face and made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. "Sera. SERA."

"I told him no."

"Oh thank God—"

"That part is only for Noah. I decided that a long time ago." Sera shrugged, like this settled everything. "So it was an easy no."

Diana pulled her hands down slow, staring at her. "That’s — okay, good, that you said no, genuinely, thank God for that, but Sera, why didn’t you lead with that? That is not a small detail! That’s not a ’by the way,’ that’s the headline!"

"I did not think it was more important than the money, or the ice cream."

"It is EXTREMELY more important than the ice cream!"

"They felt like separate things."

"They are the SAME MAN." Diana dropped her head back against the seat, groaning at the ceiling. "One guy. One horrible, leeching little man, running two separate scams on the same sweet naive elf, and you’re out here treating each one like its own weather report."

Sera considered that a moment, wings shifting slightly.

"I did not connect them," she admitted. "I am sorry."

"Don’t be sorry, be pissed." Diana sat back up, jabbing a finger at her. "That’s the actual lesson here. Somewhere in that big kind alien heart of yours there should be room for being furious about this, not just, oh, that is unfortunate, let me reconsider my choices calmly."

"I did not carry shame around the body the way you do here," Sera said, quieter now. "So the question itself did not feel wrong to me. Only that my answer was no."

"That’s exactly what scares me." Diana’s voice softened, some of the heat easing out. "You said no because of Noah. Not because a stranger asking you for that in the first place is already a red flag the size of a building."

Sera went quiet, actually quiet, and Diana let her sit in it a second.

"On Lilivil," Sera said finally, "kindness cost nothing. No one ever ran out of it, so no one thought to take advantage of someone giving it." Her voice had gone smaller. "I did not know it could be turned into a weapon here."

"Yeah, well. Welcome to Earth, home of the emotionally manipulative little gremlin men." Diana reached over and squeezed her hand, hard, grounding. "We’re blocking him the second we land. And I’m gonna start hanging around you more, outside missions. Somebody’s gotta turn you into a mean elf girl before the next Stanley shows up."

Sera managed a small, crooked smile. "A mean elf girl."

"The meanest. You’re gonna make grown men cry just by saying no to their face."

"I think," Sera said, some spark coming back into her voice, "I would like that very much."

---

They landed at HQ a few minutes later, and Sophie was waiting near the bay doors, arms crossed, expression already apologetic before either of them said a word.

"I heard how the contract went," she said. "I’m sorry. That should never have been approved as written."

"Not your fault," Diana said, though there wasn’t much warmth in it yet, adrenaline still sitting hot under her skin.

Sam appeared behind Sophie, tablet in hand, wincing. "I’ll vet his kind of client more carefully going forward. Genuinely. That’s on me."

"Make sure you do," Diana said, already walking past him toward the interior corridors, Sera trailing behind her still scrolling through something on her device.

Diana found Kelvin in his workshop exactly where she expected, hunched over a bench covered in components, the new synthesizer unit already half disassembled in front of him.

She didn’t say anything at first. Just walked up, tilted his chin with two fingers, and kissed him, slow enough that he actually set down whatever he was holding.

"Hey," he said, a little dazed. "Hi. Hello. What was that for."

"Do I need a reason?" She flicked a strand of hair back off his forehead, smoothing it with her thumb. "There’s my beautiful husband."

"We’re not married yet."

"Semantics." She hopped up onto the edge of his bench, nudging a spare bolt out of the way with her boot. "How’d the errand go?"

"Good, actually. Regulator’s solid." He held up the case, then set it down, rubbing the back of his neck in a way she knew meant he was working up to saying something. "So. Funny story. Ran into Cora while I was out there."

"Yeah? How is she?"

"She’s—wait." He blinked at her. "That’s it? No follow up?"

"Should there be one?"

"I don’t know, I guess I built up this whole thing in my head on the way back, like, how do I bring this up casually, do I lead with it or bury it—"

"Kelvin."

"—and then you just go ’how is she’ like I told you I ran into an old coworker."

Diana laughed, genuine and easy. "Okay, tell me everything then, since you clearly need to get it out of your system."

So he did. The community meetup that turned out to be her. The catch up, the walk along the harbor, the old academy stories. And then, slower, more careful, the confession, the washing out, the faction she wouldn’t name, the streams, the wedding announcement hitting different than either of them would’ve guessed.

Diana listened to all of it without a single flicker of anything Kelvin was clearly braced for.

"That’s really sad," she said when he finished. "Poor girl. You gave her the truth about Lucas?"

"Yeah."

"Good. She earned that." Diana studied his face a second, then tilted her head. "Wait. Are you disappointed I’m not more upset right now?"

"...A little, honestly." He said it sheepish, half laughing at himself. "I don’t know, I kind of psyched myself up for you to at least raise an eyebrow or something, and you’re just sitting there being completely fine about it."

"You want me to be jealous of Cora."

"I mean, not want, exactly, I just thought there’d be some reaction—"

"Boy." Diana leaned in close, deadly serious for exactly one second before the corner of her mouth twitched. "Have you seen me?"

Kelvin snorted. "I have, yes, I proposed to it."

"I’m pretty. I’m smart. I could bench press most of your fanbase. And you," she poked him square in the chest, "spent an entire year hunting down some obscure void stone because you refused to accept I wasn’t waking up. That’s not a man who’s going anywhere."

"That was just good research."

"It was you refusing to let me die, Kelvin. Don’t downplay it now." She said, briefly pausing to look at him affectionately.

"It’s also proof I don’t have a single thing to worry about." She softened, resting her forehead against his. "I trust you, Kelvin. Completely. If I couldn’t trust you to hang out with someone you used to have feelings for and come home exactly the same person, I wouldn’t be marrying you at all. Now a lot of people may think that’s me being naive. But I feel that’s just me knowing exactly who you are."

Kelvin’s whole posture eased, something in his shoulders letting go that he probably hadn’t even noticed was tense.

"And besides," Diana added, straightening up, voice going light again, "if you ever did try anything, Ice Queen’s still very much in there somewhere. You’d find out real quick."

"Duly noted."

"Good." She hopped off the bench, already halfway to the door. "Now. I need you to track an account for me. Guy named Stanley."

"What’d he do."

"Details later." She blew him a kiss over her shoulder without breaking stride. "Just find him before I do."

---

Across the compound, Miss Brooks stood at the front of a training room packed with faction members, a holographic display behind her showing a crowd formation diagram mid-collapse.

"This," she said, gesturing at the diagram, "is what happens when you treat civilians like enemy combatants during an evacuation. Military crowd control assumes hostile intent by default. That’s not wrong, for the military, that’s the job. But you are not the military. When a crowd panics in front of you, that is not a threat you neutralize. That is a hazard you manage."

She walked the length of the room, eyes moving over each face.

"If you push a panicking crowd the way you’d push back an enemy line, you create bottlenecks. Bottlenecks kill people faster than whatever they’re running from. You create paths. You create calm through your own posture, your own voice, before you ever raise a hand." She tapped the display, shifting the diagram to a wider, staggered formation. "Riot control is different again. A hostile crowd needs containment, not corridors. You learn to read which one you’re actually facing in the first thirty seconds, because guessing wrong costs lives either way."

She kept going for another twenty minutes, walking through scenario after scenario, real incidents pulled from EDF archive footage, correcting instincts one at a time, patient even when the same mistake repeated twice from the same recruit.

By the time she dismissed the class, the light outside had shifted toward evening, and she found Sophie waiting near the entrance.

"How’d today’s group do," Sophie asked.

"Better," Brooks said. "Slowly. It’s a different muscle than combat, most of them are used to hitting a problem, not managing one."

"You’re good at this."

"I know." Brooks folded her arms, considering something before she said it. "Sophie. I don’t want this to sound rude, but I need to say it plainly. We’re thin on manpower right now, and I think I’d be more useful to you in the field than standing in this room every evening."

"You want to go back to active deployment."

"I think I could do both, honestly. Teach when I’m needed here, deploy when you’re short. I haven’t lost the instinct, I’ve just been standing behind a podium instead of using it."

Sophie studied her a long moment, something warm settling into her expression.

"You were a field soldier long before you were ever a teacher," Sophie said. "Academy Twelve, then the EDF, and you were good at it before any of us ever met you. I understand completely."

Something shifted across Brooks’s face, quiet and real, the particular kind of relief that came from being told yes before you’d fully finished asking.

She smiled, and for the first time in longer than she could easily place, it reached all the way up into her eyes.