Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 842: Getting stronger

Far off in a distant solar system, Noah was walking shirtless through a bush with a handmade hardwood container in hand.

The container was rough work, admittedly, three days of whittling with a knife he’d fashioned from a piece of scrap metal off Storm’s old crash site, but it held water without leaking and that was the only standard that mattered out here.

He moved through waist-high scrub, brushing aside branches heavy with clusters of small orange fruit, the skin thin enough that his thumbnail split it clean without any effort at all. He’d learned three days in that the orange ones were safe, sweet, almost citrus. The purple ones two clearings over made his stomach cramp for six hours and he had learned that lesson exactly once.

He picked six of them, dropped them into the container, and kept walking toward the stream.

The planet ran a deep green across most of its surface, forests taller than anything he’d seen on Earth, trunks wide enough that three of him standing shoulder to shoulder wouldn’t circle one. The bark ran grey-brown and cracked in long vertical seams, and above him the canopy filtered the sunlight down into shifting gold patches that moved slow across the ground as wind up top stirred the leaves. The air smelled like wet stone and something faintly sweet, some flowering thing he still hadn’t found the source of.

He’d been here five days now, or what he was counting as five days based on the light cycle, which ran a little longer than Earth’s but not so different that it threw his internal clock off badly.

A hut sat in a clearing near the stream, a lean-to really, four supports lashed together with vine and a roof of broad leaves layered thick enough to shed rain. He’d built it the first evening, mostly because sleeping exposed felt wrong even on a planet this quiet, some old instinct from years of always needing a defensible position.

He set the container down beside a fire pit and crouched to check the coals from that morning. Still warm. Good.

Storm crashed through the treeline a moment later.

Not dramatically, not this time, just the usual controlled chaos of a wyvern who didn’t understand the concept of quiet arrival, branches snapping, leaves scattering, and in his jaws hung something that looked distantly like a boar if a boar had been crossed with something reptilian, scaled hide along its back, six legs, easily the size of a large dog.

"There he is." Noah stood, wiping his hands on his pants. "Was starting to think you got lost."

Storm dropped the carcass at his feet and sat back on his haunches, looking extremely pleased with himself.

"Good boy." Noah crouched down and examined the kill, checking the wounds, the way Storm always went for a clean throat strike rather than mangling the whole thing. "Clean kill. I appreciate that. Makes my job easier."

He got to work and it took him the better part of twenty minutes to properly dress the animal, something he’d gotten faster at over the past couple weeks of doing this exact routine on one planet or another. He built the fire back up with dry branches he’d gathered the evening before, skewered strips of meat on sharpened sticks, and set them over the flame.

Storm watched the whole process with the patient intensity of something that had done this before and knew exactly how it ended.

"You know," Noah said, turning a skewer, "for a creature who eats beast cores like candy, you sure do love watching me cook regular meat."

Storm’s tail thumped once against the dirt.

"Don’t give me that look. You get your core in a second, don’t rush me."

He reached into his void storage and pulled out a category four core, tossing it toward Storm’s open jaws, and the wyvern snapped it out of the air and swallowed it whole, a faint blue glow visible through his scales at the throat for a moment before fading.

The meat took another ten minutes, and Noah ate slow, sitting cross-legged by the fire, juice from the orange fruit dripping down his wrist as he alternated bites. It wasn’t Earth food. Wasn’t close, honestly, the meat had a mineral taste that never quite went away no matter how he cooked it, but it filled him up, and that was the whole job description out here.

He’d figured out the water situation by day one, thankfully, the stream running clean enough that his enhanced constitution handled whatever was in it without complaint. The fruit situation took slightly longer and one very unpleasant afternoon. But two days in, he had a functioning camp, a reliable food source, and a general sense of the terrain within a few miles.

He wasn’t leaving yet, though. Hadn’t planned to when he first landed, and the reason for that sat heavy enough in the back of his mind that he thought about it now, chewing slowly, staring at the fire.

He’d caught sight of it his first morning here, half-buried under overgrowth on the far side of a ridge about four miles out. A Harbinger dropship, the hull scorched and cracked in a way that suggested a hard landing rather than a controlled one, and around it, spread across a wide clearing, more of the same. Six dropships total, all showing similar wear, all clearly down for a while, months at least, maybe longer.

No Harbingers anywhere near them.

That detail bothered him more than the ships themselves did. Six dropships, no crew, no wreckage bodies, no sign of what happened to whatever had come down in them. Either they’d moved on somewhere else on the planet, or something had taken them out clean enough to leave nothing behind, or, and this was the possibility that kept him circling back to the ridge every morning to check, they were still out there somewhere, regrouping, waiting.

Leaving now meant walking away from a potential Harbinger staging ground without knowing what it actually was. If this planet turned into a real foothold, six dropships worth of Harbingers eventually finding their way toward Earth or any inhabited system nearby wasn’t a risk he was willing to just shrug off in favor of continuing his search uninterrupted. So he’d made the call to sit tight, watch the ridge, see if anything came back to those ships.

Five days so far. Nothing yet.

He finished the last skewer and tossed the stick into the fire, watching it catch.

’A week,’ he thought. ’If I’m counting the day cycle right, I should’ve left this system almost a week ago by my own schedule.’ He looked toward the ridge, barely visible through the treeline from here. ’One more day. If nothing shows, I move on.’

Storm had curled up near the fire, head resting on his front legs, watching Noah with half-lidded eyes.

"Don’t look at me like that," Noah said. "I know we’re behind schedule. I know. But we’re not leaving a live wire lying around if we don’t have to."

Storm huffed, a small puff of steam curling from his nostrils, and closed his eyes fully.

Noah sat there a while longer, letting the fire burn down, the forest settling into its evening rhythm around him, some distant chittering call echoing from somewhere in the canopy, answered a moment later by another, further off.

He stood eventually, brushing dirt off his pants, and whistled once, short.

Storm’s head came up immediately from where he’d been curled by the fire, and he was on his feet a moment later, shaking out his wings, a low rumble of anticipation already building in his chest.

"Training ground," Noah said, climbing onto his back. "Same spot as yesterday."

Storm launched hard, clearing the treeline in seconds, and the forest canopy fell away beneath them in a rush of green, gold light scattering through the gaps as they cut low across the treeline. Noah leaned forward into the wind, one hand braced against a ridge of scales, and let himself just feel it for a moment, the cold rush of air, Storm’s wingbeats steady and sure beneath him, no urgency to it, no fight waiting, just the two of them moving through open sky the way they’d done across more worlds than Noah had bothered counting anymore.

"You know," Noah said, raising his voice over the wind, "I don’t think I’ve actually thanked you properly. For all of this. Every planet, every crash landing, every ridiculous distance you’ve covered without a single complaint."

Storm’s ear flicked back toward him.

"I mean it. I’d be stuck floating in open space by now if it weren’t for you." Noah patted his neck. "Best partner a guy could ask for. Even if you do crash every single landing."

Storm let out a pleased huff, and banked hard into a wide, unnecessary loop that had nothing to do with getting to the training ground faster and everything to do with showing off, and Noah laughed despite himself, gripping tighter as the world spun once around them.

"Show off."

They came down a few minutes later, Storm dropping through the canopy at the clearing’s edge and gliding low over open ground before touching down clean, no crash this time, just a smooth, controlled landing that Noah made a point of noting out loud.

"See, you can do that when you actually try."

Storm shook out his wings, entirely too pleased with himself.

Noah slid off and looked around properly at the clearing stretching out ahead of him, and it took him a moment, same as it had the first morning he’d found this place, to fully register the scale of it. The ground here ran torn and cratered for what had to be close to two miles in either direction, deep gouges carved into the ground, scorched black in long streaks where something had clearly burned hot enough to fuse dirt into glass.

Snapped trees lay scattered at the clearing’s far edges like matchsticks, some of them still standing but leaning at wrong angles, trunks split clean through. A wide crater sat near the center, easily thirty feet across, its edges smooth and glassy where raw force had melted stone.

All of it his. Five mornings of training here already, and the land still hadn’t recovered.

He walked toward the center of it, boots crunching over loose glass-like debris, and pulled up his status proper, the full window unfolding in front of him.

[Name: Noah Eclipse]

[Level: 171]

[Class: Draconic Halfling — Stage 2]

[Health Points: 198,400/198,400]

[Void Energy: 421,000/421,000]

[Experience: 0/420,000]

[Talents:]

[Void Manipulation — SSS+ Rank]

[Perfect Echo — Sealed]

[Enhanced Regeneration — S+ Rank]

[Attributes:]

[Strength: 2,610]

[Agility: 2,715]

[Vitality: 2,670]

[Intelligence: 2,395]

[Wisdom: 2,310]

Noah stared at the numbers a moment, something almost disbelieving in the way his eyes moved down the list.

’Strength 2,610,’ he thought. ’Pre-Kruel, before that quest, I was sitting at around 1,847 and thought that was significant. Thought I’d finally arrived somewhere real.’ He shook his head slowly. ’Not even close. That was still the warm-up.’

He closed the profile and looked out at the cratered ground stretching for miles around him, all of it evidence of exactly how far that gap had actually closed since.

"Reaper’s Harvest. Target: Widow."

[Reaper’s Harvest activated]

[Summoning: Widow]

Violet light bloomed a few feet away, folding into her familiar slender shape, three horns, with the stillness of something that had no thoughts of its own, only the shape of what it had once been.

"Kruel too," Noah said. "Target: Kruel."

[Reaper’s Harvest activated]

[Summoning: Kruel]

The second construct grew taller beside the first, four horns crowning a skull built for exactly the violence its name had once meant, both of them standing motionless, waiting.

Noah rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck once to each side.

"No gear," he said, mostly to himself, glancing down at his own bare chest, hands empty. "No Excaliburn. No erasure. Just us."

He settled into a low stance.

"Alright. Let’s go."

The Widow moved first, faster than the eye could comfortably track, and Noah pivoted just in time to catch her strike on his forearm, the impact rattling clean up into his shoulder. Kruel came in from the opposite side a half second later, a punch aimed for his ribs, and Noah dropped low, felt the wind of it pass over his head close enough to stir his hair, and drove an uppercut into Kruel’s jaw on the way back up.

The construct staggered.

’Right,’ Noah thought, already moving, already reading the Widow’s next angle. ’Last time this wrecked me.’

He blocked her follow-up, took the hit anyway, felt his feet skid back through the dirt, and used the momentum to spin into a kick aimed at Kruel’s exposed knee. It connected, and this time the construct actually buckled slightly before catching itself.

The Widow was on him again immediately, three strikes in fast succession, and he caught the first, slipped the second, and took the third clean across the ribs hard enough to knock the air from his lungs.

He hit the ground rolling, came back up in a crouch, breathing hard already.

Kruel’s fist came down where he’d been standing a half second earlier, cratering the dirt.

’Faster than last time,’ Noah thought, circling now, watching both constructs reposition. ’Or I’m just better at seeing it.’

He surged forward, closing the distance to the Widow before Kruel could reset, driving a knee into her midsection, following with an elbow that snapped her head back. She recovered fast, too fast, catching his wrist and using his own momentum to throw him bodily across the clearing.

He hit the ground hard, tumbled through underbrush, and was back on his feet before the dust settled.

Kruel closed on him next, and this exchange went differently, Noah ducking under the first swing, catching the second on his forearm and feeling the impact all the way to his teeth, but he stayed upright this time, planted, and answered with a combination that actually forced Kruel to give ground, three strikes landing clean before the construct’s counter caught him across the jaw and spun him half around.

He staggered, tasted blood, and grinned through it.

The fight kept going like that, brutal and constant, Noah’s body absorbing hits that would have ended most fighters in the first exchange, both constructs pressing without pause, without fatigue, without anything resembling mercy because they had none to give. He took a hit to the ribs that cracked something. He took a strike across the back that drove him face first into the dirt.

Each time, he got back up.

He blocked, he dodged, he landed strikes of his own, Kruel’s jaw, the Widow’s exposed side, a knee that folded one of Kruel’s legs briefly before it reset. The exchanges blurred together, minutes bleeding into each other, sweat and blood mixing on his skin, his breathing ragged but steady, never quite breaking.

Somewhere in the middle of it, he realized he was holding ground.

Not winning outright. Not yet. But holding, actually holding, matching pace with both of them at once without a single piece of gear, without erasure, without anything but his own body and everything it had become over the past weeks and months. The gap that had rattled him after that first quest notification, the one that had sent him into meditation on a ship two levels above two of his girlfriends sparring, had narrowed. Not closed. Narrowed.

He took the Widow’s next strike on purpose, absorbing it to close distance, and drove his fist into her chest hard enough to send her stumbling back a full three steps.

Kruel roared, wordless, mindless, and came at him with everything, and Noah met it head on, catching the fist in both hands, feet digging trenches into the dirt as he held the line, arms shaking with the effort, and for one long moment neither of them moved, pure force locked against pure force.

Then Noah’s grip held, and Kruel’s didn’t.

The construct staggered back, off balance for just a second, and Noah used it, driving forward with a strike that connected clean, sending Kruel down onto one knee.

He stood there, chest heaving, blood dripping from a split lip, staring at both constructs as they reset, readying for another exchange.

He was smiling.

’Good,’ he thought. ’Good. That’s progress. That’s real progress.’

"Dismiss."

Both constructs dissolved into violet mist and faded, and the clearing went quiet except for his own ragged breathing and the distant chittering of the forest settling back into its evening rhythm.

He stood there a moment longer, catching his breath, flexing his aching hand, before he called toward the treeline.

"Storm! Let’s go, buddy."

The wyvern crashed through the brush a moment later, alert immediately at the tone of his voice, and Noah climbed onto his back, wincing slightly at the fresh bruising along his ribs.

"We’re heading out," Noah said, settling in. "One more sweep of the ridge, and if those dropships are still sitting empty, we move on." He looked out over the darkening treeline, the first stars starting to show through gaps in the canopy far above. "I’ve got a search to get back to. And back home, everyone’s working on Lucas. I need to be doing something too, not just camping out here waiting on ghosts."

Storm rumbled low in agreement, wings shifting beneath him.

"Alright." Noah exhaled, some of the day’s exhaustion settling into his shoulders now that the fight was done. "Let’s go home, boy. Wherever home turns out to be next."