Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 839: Grey bleeds blue

Lightning wreathed around Lucy’s arms as she tore through the palace corridor, boots skidding hard on polished stone.

"Lock this place down!" she screamed, voice cracking off the walls, echoing through every archway she passed. "Nobody in or out until I say otherwise! I want every exit sealed, now!"

Guards scrambled into motion behind her, boots pounding stone, comm chatter exploding across every channel at once, orders barked and half finished as the palace’s security protocol kicked into gear all around her.

She rounded a corner hard enough to nearly take a servant off her feet.

"Where’s the Lieutenant!" she shouted, grabbing the nearest guard by the shoulder. "Hendricks. Where did he go!"

"He, ah—" The guard’s eyes went wide, scrambling to catch up with the urgency in her voice. "He said he was heading toward the eastern landing platform, my lady, not long ago, said he wanted to check on his transport before departure—"

Lucy didn’t wait for the rest of it. She was moving before he finished, sprinting through the archway toward the outer courtyard, lightning building brighter around her shoulders with every stride, and burst out through the palace’s side doors into open air.

She didn’t stop at the platform.

She launched straight up, wings of raw current crackling off her back, lightning trailing behind her like a comet’s tail as she cleared the palace roofline and kept climbing, scanning the horizon in every direction.

No ship. No engine trail. Just empty sky and the sinking, sick certainty already settling into her chest.

She banked hard, sweeping wider, searching.

---

Damien found Vivian in the garden, sitting quiet on the stone bench where she’d retreated after breakfast, staring at nothing in particular, hands folded tight in her lap.

He sat beside her without a word at first, letting the silence settle before he finally spoke.

"They’ve got healers looking at him," he said gently. "EDF sent people, said they might actually have a treatment. I thought you’d want to see for yourself before we let ourselves hope too hard."

Vivian looked up at him slowly, something cracking open behind her eyes, a fragile kind of hope she’d been rationing carefully for weeks now, doled out in small, guarded amounts because the alternative had already broken her once.

"You’re certain this isn’t another dead end."

"I’m not certain of anything anymore," Damien admitted. "But Maren’s reviewing their data herself before anything touches him. We’ll know soon."

Vivian nodded and rose, smoothing her robes, and they set off together toward the medical wing at an easy, unhurried pace, her arm looped through his, both of them quiet, both of them carrying the same fragile weight between them like something that might shatter if either one moved too fast.

They’d made it halfway down the long eastern corridor when the alarms tore through the palace.

Guards broke into a dead run past them in both directions, shouting orders, sealing doors, boots hammering stone. Vivian’s grip on Damien’s arm went white-knuckled.

They ran.

Past guards scrambling to secure checkpoints, past servants pressed flat against the walls in confusion, both of them abandoning any pretense of composure now, robes streaming behind them as they tore toward the medical wing, Damien’s mind already racing through every worst possibility and rejecting none of them fast enough.

The first body waited outside the outer checkpoint. A guard, sprawled against the wall, throat opened clean, blood pooled dark and already cooling beneath him.

Vivian’s breath caught.

They kept moving, past a second guard slumped just inside the doorway, past a third crumpled near the nurses’ station, none of them showing any sign they’d had time to raise a weapon, all of it done fast and clean and without mercy.

The cryo chamber doors hung half torn from their frame.

Damien reached it first and shouldered through the wreckage, and what greeted him inside stopped his heart cold for one full second. Both visiting EDF healers lay motionless near the far wall, throats cut with the same brutal efficiency as the guards outside, blood soaking slow into the floor tiles in spreading dark pools.

Only Maren remained, scrambling backward across the floor on her hands, blood streaked along one temple, eyes wide with pure animal terror, putting distance between herself and the two figures standing over the ruins of the room’s central console.

Dark blue flame wreathed both of Mr. Reign’s forearms, cold-edged, curling like smoke that had forgotten how to rise. Beside him, his wife stood with red and white energy crawling slow up both hands, twin threads of it pulsing steady, patient, like something feeding.

Dark chi. Arthur’s technique.

Damien’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.

"Get away from my son!" Vivian’s scream tore loose, raw and absolute, already moving before the last word left her mouth, closing the gap in a blur before either intruder could fully turn to meet her.

Damien broke the other direction, lightning igniting bright along both arms, and simply wasn’t where he’d been standing a heartbeat later, reappearing directly in front of Mr. Reign in a sharp crack of displaced air. His fist connected before Reign’s flame had fully risen.

The blow sent him through the wall.

Plaster and support beam exploded outward, and Damien followed through the same gap he’d carved, breath already ragged with something far past ordinary anger, something that had been sitting dormant in him for months finally allowed off its leash.

Reign hit the far wall of the adjoining room and rebounded off it, catching himself midair with a burst of dark flame under his boots, and came back fast, trailing blue fire behind him like a lit fuse.

Damien caught the counter-strike on his forearm, flame scorching straight through his sleeve, and answered with an elbow to the jaw hard enough to crack audibly through the room.

Back in the chamber, Vivian met Mrs Reign head on. Vivian carried no ability of her own anymore, nothing since the day Arthur’s people had stripped it from her, but she had two advantages . One, she was a Grey and by any standard was no ordinary human. And two, years of raw physical conditioning still made her fast, faster than anything human had any business being, and she closed the distance in a blur.

Mrs. Reign matched her stride for stride. Red and white light crawled brighter up both her arms with every exchange, dark chi bleeding into her muscles, augmenting her speed until she could keep pace with Vivian’s own enhanced reflexes without any real power of her own behind it at all, only borrowed force layered thin over ordinary bone and sinew.

Mrs Reign caught Vivian’s wrist mid-strike and twisted hard.

Vivian broke the hold with a sharp rotation of her whole body and drove her palm into Mrs Reign’s sternum, sending her skidding back across shattered glass.

"You’re fast for someone with nothing left," Mrs Reign said, wiping blood from her lip.

"I am a Grey," Vivian said. "You’ll tire before I do."

Mrs Reign surged forward again anyway, red-white light bleeding brighter around both fists, refusing to test that theory out loud.

Through the hole in the wall, lightning tore loose and struck Reign square in the chest, throwing him into the corridor beyond, plaster raining from a ceiling groaning under the strain. Damien advanced without slowing, catching Reign’s next strike and twisting the arm until something popped wet and loud.

Reign screamed, staggering, and Damien drove a knee into his ribs hard enough to lift him briefly off his feet.

"You held me for months," Damien said, voice low, twisting harder. "I have thought about this exact moment for every single one of those days."

"Months." Reign spat blood, and despite the pain something ugly curled at the edge of his mouth. "Enjoy them while you can, Damien Grey. When we’re finished here, we’ll see you back in chains soon enough. All of you."

Something in Damien’s face went very still, and the fury that followed had nothing careful left in it.

Then the red-white energy his wife carried bled visibly into his own dark flame, the two disciplines fusing, the air around him dropping in temperature despite the fire still curling off his arms. He came at Damien with speed that hadn’t existed a moment earlier, and the first blow landed clean, throwing Damien through a support column, the ceiling above groaning, cracking, showering the room in fresh debris.

Vivian’s head snapped toward the sound, and Mrs Reign used the opening, driving a chi-coated fist into her side hard enough to send her sliding into a bank of dead monitoring equipment.

Both Reigns straightened, breathing hard but upright.

Damien pulled himself up out of the rubble, lightning arcing wild and unstable around both fists, something in his eyes gone harder than it had been at breakfast that morning. He looked across the wreckage at Vivian.

She met his eyes, and something passed between them, wordless, decades of marriage compressed into a single shared look, and they moved at the same instant, closing on their targets with a coordination that hadn’t needed rehearsing.

Damien came in low, sweeping Reign’s legs with a lightning-charged kick, and when Reign leapt the sweep, Damien was already airborne to meet him, driving both fists downward in a hammer strike that Reign barely angled away from, the near-miss cratering the floor tile where he’d been standing.

Reign dropped low and drove his palm flat against the floor. Dark blue flame spread outward from the point of contact in a widening ring, and Damien leapt clean over a support beam to avoid it, landing hard on a supply cart that collapsed under him.

Reign followed the momentum, and his fist connected, catching Damien across the jaw hard enough to spin him half around.

Meanwhile Vivian adapted her rhythm against Mrs. Reign, no longer trading blows head on but circling, using debris and broken equipment to force her opponent to break stride every few strikes, betting that a woman running purely on borrowed chi would tire and stumble sooner than a body that had earned this speed the slow way. She feinted left, drew a strike wide, and drove an elbow into Mrs Reign’s throat, staggering her back into the ruined console.

But the fused energy kept compounding, both Reigns drawing on something deeper the longer the fight ran, their strikes sharpening, the balance tipping slow and steady away from the two originals.

Damien took a blow to the ribs that folded him half over.

Vivian took a chi-laced strike across the shoulder that sent her sprawling into shattered glass, blood welling fast along her arm.

She looked up. Damien was already looking back at her, blood on his own face, breathing hard, both of them thinking the same thing at once.

They stopped separating targets and converged.

Damien caught Reign’s next strike and held it, using his full weight to drive him backward, step by step, away from the inner chamber door, lightning crawling brighter across both of them with every stride. Vivian broke off from Mrs. Reign entirely and closed on Reign’s exposed flank the instant Damien’s grip forced an opening, driving a strike into his side that folded him half over.

Mrs. Reign rushed to close the gap between them, but Vivian was already moving to meet her, catching her mid-charge and using her own momentum to slam her bodily into her husband, both Reigns tangled together and driven back through the doorway they’d first entered by.

Damien pressed forward, lightning gathering thick around both fists, and drove a final blow into the tangle of them that sent both Reigns skidding clear out into the corridor beyond, well clear of the cryo chamber, well clear of Lucas.

Before Damien could move to capitalize, before either of them could close the last few feet and finish it, shadow began pulling around both intruders, thick and unnatural, rising from the floor itself and wrapping around their fallen bodies like something reaching up to reclaim what belonged to it.

Mr. Reign’s head lolled sideways, blood running from his mouth, and he managed a faint, ragged smile through it.

"So long," he said.

The shadow closed over both of them in a single motion and dragged them down into the floor, vanishing entirely, leaving nothing behind but the ruined room and two scorched, cracked patches of stone where they’d been standing.

Silence fell hard across the wrecked wing.

Damien stood amid the wreckage, chest heaving, staring at the empty corridor. Behind him, through the still-intact inner door, Lucas’s cryo unit hummed on, untouched, undisturbed.

Vivian crossed to him slowly, favoring her injured arm, and leaned into his side without a word.

Footsteps thundered down the hallway a moment later, Lucy’s voice already carrying ahead of her, sharp with fear, before she’d even reached the shattered doorway.