Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 840: Burn the Ark

Kelvin sat cross-legged on the floor of the common room, back against the couch, and the thing spinning slow between his hands didn’t look like a Rubik’s cube so much as an argument someone had built out of one. Faceted panels shifted independently across a shape that kept reconfiguring its own geometry as his fingers moved, green light bleeding from his eyes and both his hands, tracing thin circuit lines up his forearms every time a piece locked into place with a soft click.

Sera watched him from across the room a while before she finally leaned over toward Diana.

"What is he doing."

"Cube." Diana didn’t look up from her tablet right away. "Well, cube’s underselling it at this point. His dad gave him a real one when he was a kid, standard six-sided thing, and Kelvin solved it so fast his dad basically stopped being able to keep pace with him by the time he was nine. So now he builds his own. That one’s got something like four billion configurable states, last I heard, because apparently normal complexity stopped being interesting to him around age eleven."

"Four billion."

"Give or take. He redesigns the internal logic every time he gets good enough to solve whatever version he’s currently on, which happens embarrassingly fast, so he just keeps making it harder for himself. It’s less a puzzle at this point and more a hostage negotiation between him and his own brain."

Sera watched him a moment longer, green light pulsing steady across his hands, expression somewhere between focused and hollowed out.

"It is his stress thing," Diana added, quieter now. "Gives the part of his mind that won’t shut off something to chew on, so the rest of him gets a break."

"Should I go speak with him."

"No." Diana said it simply enough that it wasn’t really up for debate. "If he’s not talking, he’s not ready to talk. You go over there right now, best case he humors you for five minutes and slides right back into his own head anyway. Worst case you interrupt whatever this is actually doing for him and he’s got nowhere left to put it."

Sera settled back, unconvinced but willing to trust it, watching Kelvin’s fingers move faster now, three panels rotating at once, his jaw tight with concentration that had nothing to do with puzzles anymore.

Brooks found Sophie near the west corridor, catching up with the brisk energy of someone eager to close out a job well done.

"Got a minute? Wanted to walk you through the contract properly before I log it."

"Always."

"Bandit reports checked out clean, for once, actual numbers, actual camp, nothing exaggerated. We took the position without firing a shot, recovered what they’d been skimming off supply routes, handed it over to local authorities before sundown." Brooks’s tone carried real satisfaction. "Marcus and Reyna worked the approach exactly the way I’d have wanted, patient, controlled, no wasted movement. Good instincts, both of them."

"That’s exactly what I wanted to hear."

"One thing worth flagging. Found EDF surplus gear on one of the bandits. Older stock, standard issue, nothing dramatic, but it shouldn’t have ended up in civilian hands that easily. Might be worth tracing eventually, though I wouldn’t call it urgent."

"Noted. Good catch." Sophie exhaled. "Honestly, Brooks, you don’t need to bring me every debrief this thorough. You’ve got more field experience and better instincts than almost anyone in this building. If you make a call out there, I trust it."

"Old habits," Brooks said, something almost embarrassed in it. "Chain of command doesn’t exactly switch off just because I changed uniforms."

"Fair enough." Sophie’s smile faded fast, something else settling behind her eyes. "Actually. Wait. I need you on something. Not the bandit thing. Something bigger. Not out here, though. Gather anyone else you pass on the way."

---

They gathered in the workshop a few minutes later, door sealed. Sophie kept it short.

"Lucy just called. My parents got onto Raiju posing as EDF healers, went straight for Lucas. Damien and Vivian fought them off, hard fight, but there was no sign of Hendricks anywhere by the time the alarm went up. He walked them in personally. Vouched for them by name."

Brooks went very still.

"Say that again. Slowly."

"Hendricks brought Purge agents into the Ark’s own custody chain and got them onto Raiju."

"That’s not possible." Brooks said it flat, immediate, the kind of reflexive denial that came before the mind actually caught up. "The Ark’s screening isn’t the academy’s screening, Sophie. You don’t walk credentials through that building on charm and a good cover story. Every officer above a certain rank gets vetted continuously, not once at intake. If Hendricks is compromised, that means whatever process is supposed to catch exactly this either failed completely or never existed the way we’ve all been told it does."

"Or he’s good enough that it doesn’t matter how tight the process is," Kelvin said. "I’ve built security systems. The best ones don’t get beaten by brute force. They get beaten by someone the system already decided to trust."

"That’s almost worse," Diana said. "That’s not a hole in the wall. That’s someone the wall was built to let through."

"Which is the actual problem," Sophie said. "If Hendricks got in that clean, that trusted, for however long he’s been sitting in EDF command—"

"Then who else," Sera said quietly.

The room went still around that.

"That’s the question nobody’s going to want to answer," Brooks said. "You start asking who else, you’re not investigating one man anymore, you’re auditing the entire command structure of the strongest military body in the Milky Way. That’s not a quiet inquiry. That’s the kind of thing that ends careers, starts real panic, maybe even gets people killed trying to protect themselves before the truth comes out."

"So we don’t ask it," Diana said, testing the shape of that out loud like she didn’t like it either.

"I didn’t say that."

"Then what are you saying."

"I’m saying we don’t ask it loud." Brooks stood, pacing now, hand pressed to her jaw. "This isn’t an academy mole we’re talking about. Everyone already braces for that, half expects it, the Purge has proven it can slip children into schools for years. Nobody’s braced for this. If word gets out that a Lieutenant that close to the Supreme General’s own staff might be compromised, and it turns out to be wrong, that’s not embarrassing, that’s the kind of accusation that could fracture command trust across the entire institution during a war we’re already struggling to win."

"And if it’s right and we sit on it," Sophie said, "he keeps operating. He already helped get my parents onto Raiju. What’s he clear to walk into next?"

"I know." Brooks stopped pacing. "I’m not saying wait and do nothing. I’m saying we don’t hand this to anyone who doesn’t already have a reason to actually believe us over him."

"Do you have someone like that," Kelvin asked.

"A few. People I trained under, people who owe me enough not to laugh me out of a room the second I say his name." Brooks exhaled slowly. "I’ll reach out tonight. Quiet channels only, nobody official, nobody who reports directly up any chain that could reach him. If there’s a way to actually verify this without lighting the whole Ark on fire in the process, that’s how we find it."

"And if there isn’t," Diana said.

"Then we’ll have a much harder conversation later." Brooks was already moving toward the door. "One thing at a time. I’ll be in touch the second I have anything real. Don’t move on this without me."

The door sealed behind her, and the room sat in her absence a moment before anyone spoke again.

"So," Diana said eventually, dropping into a chair across from Kelvin. "Lila."

"We have her locked up," Kelvin said, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes. "Sedated. That’s as far as the plan goes right now."

"That’s not a plan, Kelvin, that’s just a delay wearing a plan’s clothes."

"I’m aware, Diana. Thank you for that."

"We need to actually decide something," Sophie said, sitting on the arm of the couch, arms crossed tight. "Not just leave her down there indefinitely and hope this resolves itself while we’re not looking."

"Or," Sera said, "we consider that we might be wrong about all of it."

Diana’s head turned sharp. "Wrong how, exactly. Her parents fed the Sterlings One’s location, that’s confirmed. Her parents are Purge, founding level, not some low rung nobody. And now Sophie’s own parents just tried to reach Lucas on Raiju while he’s completely defenseless. You want to sit here and tell me Lila’s just some innocent bystander caught in the middle of all that?"

"I want to say we don’t actually know that," Sera said, steady despite the pushback rising against her. "We know she lied about where she went that day. We know her family works for the Purge. We do not know, for certain, that she herself is working with them right now. Those are two different facts, and we keep speaking about them as though they’re the same one."

"They lined up pretty conveniently, though, didn’t they."

"Convenient is not the same as proven."

"It’s close enough that I’m not willing to risk this entire faction on the gap between the two."

"Both of you, please." Kelvin dragged both hands down his face. "Can we just, for one second, remember that whatever she turns out to be, she’s still someone we’ve bled beside. That has to count for something in how we handle this conversation, even if it doesn’t end up changing what we ultimately decide to do about her."

"It counts for why we haven’t just gotten rid of her outright, Kelvin," Diana said. "It doesn’t count for pretending the evidence isn’t sitting right there."

"Nobody said pretend—"

"We are burning a bridge we may never get back," Sophie said, cutting through both of them, quiet enough that it actually landed and stopped the room. "If we’re wrong. If she really is what Sera still believes she might be, and we treat her like an enemy long enough, there won’t be a version of her left willing to come back to us, even once the truth eventually clears her."

Nobody had a ready answer for that.

"So what do you actually want to do," Diana asked finally, some of the heat draining out of her voice.

"I want to talk to her," Sophie said. "Properly. Not shouting through a locked door like we did earlier. Face to face, like people who used to trust each other."

"Then let’s go," Kelvin said, already standing, cube left behind on the table, still humming to itself.

He led them down through the faction’s lower corridors, past levels none of them frequented often, stairwells narrowing, lighting dimming with every floor, until they reached a sealed door he unlocked with a palm pressed flat against a panel that lit green beneath his touch.

Beyond it, the space opened into something none of them had ever seen before. Reinforced walls stretched further than the footprint of the building above should have allowed, a low corridor lined with containment cells built directly into the bedrock.

Sera stopped just past the threshold, genuinely startled. "I had no idea this existed."

"That’s because it was meant to stay that way," Kelvin said, voice quieter than usual, footsteps echoing off stone that swallowed most of the sound. "Built it year ago. Redundancy, in case anyone ever managed to get past HQ’s main security and needed somewhere to fall back to besides straight through the building itself. This whole level is a prison, essentially. Last resort."

Sophie looked around at the scale of it, the reinforced walls stretching further than seemed remotely necessary for one detained faction member. "This looks like it was built for something a lot bigger than a single person."

"It was."

"For what."

Kelvin’s jaw tightened. "Harbingers."

Nobody said anything after that or asked why he wanted to trap Harbingers instead of doing what anyone in their right minds would do with one.

They walked further in, past empty cell after empty cell, footsteps the only sound in the whole corridor, until they reached one lit with a soft energy barrier humming pale blue across its opening.

Lila sat inside, awake, upright against the far wall, watching them approach with an expression that held nothing at all. No smile. No fear. No anger. Just flat and still and waiting, like she’d known exactly how long it would take them to come find her.

Sophie stepped forward first, stopping just short of the barrier.

"We need to talk."