Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 852: Eclipse Vs EDF 1

Above the Eastern Cardinal, a small sized transport was in the air. It had the EDF insignia, two crossed blades over a shield in red and white on it. And a number beside it, 12.

Academy 12, Eastern Cardinal.

Inside, twenty-some students sat crammed into rows of hard bench seating, all of them dressed in matching white gis, belts of varying color knotted at their waists depending on rank, and the low murmur of confused chatter filled the cabin the way it always did whenever a routine class did something that wasn’t routine at all.

"Since when does martial arts class take field trips," one boy muttered to the girl beside him, adjusting his belt for the third time in ten minutes out of pure nervous habit.

"Since never," she said. "This is weird. Master Anng’s never done this before."

Up front, near the cockpit divider, Master Anng sat with his hands folded in his lap, spine straight, eyes forward, the same posture he carried into every class he’d ever taught in several years of doing this.

"Master Anng," a third student called out, louder, brave enough to actually ask. "Where exactly are we going?"

Anng didn’t turn around.

"New syllabus," he said, voice flat, giving nothing away. "That’s all you need to know."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only one you’re getting."

The murmuring dropped several notches after that, uncertainty settling heavier over the cabin, kids exchanging glances that all carried the same unspoken question nobody wanted to be the one to ask twice.

The transport began its descent a while later, engines whining down through the clouds, and touched ground somewhere well outside city limits, a stretch of open, empty terrain with nothing around it but scrub grass and distant hills.

Anng rose first.

"Follow me," he said, already moving toward the ramp. "All of you. Stay together."

The students filed out slowly, gis rustling, sandals crunching against dry dirt, looking around at the empty landscape with the specific unease of people who’d expected a training facility and found nothing but open sky instead.

Up ahead, a certain figure stood waiting, her short blonde hair wisping in the wind.

Lila stood with her hands in her pocket.

She looked, at a glance, almost harmless. Casual clothes, hair loose, hands tucked into her jacket pockets, and if any of the students recognized her at all it was only as a vague face from old news coverage, nothing that registered as an immediate threat.

"Is this all of them," Lila asked, as Anng approached.

"Yes."

"You’re sure they’re ready?" Anng asked.

Something flickered behind Anng’s eyes, fast, gone before it could fully form into anything readable.

"Was that doubt I just sensed?" Lila’s mouth curved, watching him closely.

"Carry on," Anng said, and stepped back, folding his hands behind him, expression settling into something carefully blank.

Lila turned to face the students, all twenty-some of them now bunched together in a loose, uncertain cluster, gis stark white against the dry brown landscape.

"Today," she said, voice carrying easy across the open ground, "your lives are about to change by extraordinary measures."

Nobody said anything. A few exchanged glances.

"Today," she continued, "I’m going to turn you from students into actual soldiers."

"Who are you?" one of the older boys finally asked, stepping half a pace in front of the others, some instinct toward protecting the younger ones kicking in without him fully deciding to do it.

Lila smiled.

"Look closely," she said. "You know who I am."

Red and white energy began to gather slow around both her arms, twin threads of light climbing steady toward her elbows, and somewhere in the crowd, a girl’s breath caught audibly.

---

Back at headquarters, Angel arrived in a rush and bypassed everyone, offering mild greetings.

She didn’t knock. She hit the door to the debrief room hard enough to rattle the frame, still in half her field gear, blood dried dark along one gauntlet from earlier that day, and didn’t wait for anyone to invite her in before she was already talking.

"We need to talk. Now."

Sophie looked up from the table where she, Sera, and Brooks had reconvened not twenty minutes earlier, the same tired postures from that morning’s Hendricks conversation still hanging over all three of them.

"Angel." Sophie straightened. "What happened."

"Category four beast surge. Confirmed, not theoretical. Lost a man out there today." Angel dropped into the nearest chair without being offered it, exhaustion finally cracking through the composure she’d clearly been holding since the fight ended. "It’s worse than the Amazon reports suggested. Every single encounter I’ve logged in the last month has trended upward. We used to see a stray cat two once in a while, something manageable, something you’d send a junior team to handle. Now it’s threes minimum, sometimes fours, and there’s no clear reason why the whole scale’s shifted this hard this fast."

"We were just discussing something adjacent," Brooks said carefully. "Hendricks. What we know so far."

Angel’s eyebrows shot up. "The Lieutenant? What about him?"

Sophie gave her the short version, quick and clipped, and watched Angel’s expression shift through disbelief into something grimmer as the pieces landed.

"So Lucy’s talking about pulling Raiju support," Angel said slowly, once Sophie finished. "During an active beast surge. During a war we’re already stretched thin fighting."

"That’s the shape of it," Sophie said.

"That’s catastrophic timing." Angel dragged a hand down her face. "You understand what happens if Raiju actually walks, right? Grey pulling out sends a message to every other original family watching. If even one of them treats EDF leadership as compromised, the entire coordinated defense structure starts fracturing exactly when we can least afford it."

"We know," Sera said quietly. "We discussed this already."

"Then you also know what it means for me specifically." Angel’s jaw tightened. "My task force operates under EDF authorization. The governor established us after Kruel, working directly with EDF command structure for resources, deployment authority, everything. If this Hendricks situation blows up publicly, if it turns out to be true, I’m standing in the middle of an institution that just got proven rotten from somewhere near the very top."

"You still trust the structure," Brooks said, not quite a question.

"I trust the people I work with day to day," Angel said. "The soldiers under me, the coordination officers who actually answer my calls when things go wrong. I don’t have the luxury of not trusting EDF wholesale, Brooks, my entire operation runs through them. That’s different from you, walking away from your commission to work here full time. I still answer to that chain, every single day."

"So where does that leave you," Sophie asked. "On what we do next."

Angel was quiet a moment, working through it visibly.

"Cautious," she said finally. "Same as Brooks, probably. Not because I don’t believe what you’re telling me, I do, the pattern’s too consistent to ignore. But because I’ve seen what happens when an accusation this size goes out too early, without airtight proof. It doesn’t just fail. It poisons every future attempt to actually expose the truth, because now everyone remembers the first time we cried wolf and got laughed out of the room."

"That’s the tribunal all over again," Sera said.

"Exactly the tribunal all over again," Angel agreed. "And we can’t afford a second one. Not with what’s actually coming."

"The beast surge," Sophie said.

"The beast surge," Angel confirmed, some real weight settling into her voice now. "Listen. I’ve been out there. I’ve seen what’s actually escalating, and it’s not stabilizing on its own. If this keeps climbing at the rate I’ve watched it climb over the last month alone, we’re not talking about isolated incidents anymore. We’re talking about entire regions becoming genuinely unsafe for standard population density within the year, maybe less."

"That’s a different war than the one we’re already fighting," Brooks said slowly.

"It’s the same war," Angel said. "Just a front nobody’s been paying proper attention to because Harbingers get all the headlines and beast activity gets filed under routine contract work. Except it stopped being routine a while ago, and I don’t think anyone above my pay grade has actually clocked how fast that shift’s been happening."

The room sat with that a moment, the weight of two separate, equally serious threats now sitting on the table at once.

"So we’ve got a fracturing alliance system," Sophie said slowly, working through it out loud. "A potentially compromised military command structure we can’t safely expose yet. And an accelerating beast crisis that might overwhelm entire regions within a year."

"That’s the shape of it," Angel said.

"We can’t fight all three at full strength simultaneously," Sera said. "Not with our current numbers. Noah is offworld. Lucas remains in cryo. Diana and Kelvin are unreachable on their honeymoon by design, and I do not think either of us wants to interrupt that unless it becomes truly necessary."

"So we prioritize," Brooks said.

"Prioritize how," Sophie asked. "Which one kills people slower if we ignore it?"

Nobody had an easy answer for that.

"Here’s what worries me most, honestly," Angel said, after a long pause, voice quieter now, more careful. "Forget the Harbingers for a second. Forget the beasts, even, as bad as that surge actually is. If this Hendricks situation is real, and if it ever comes out into the open, comes out that Eclipse was the one who exposed it, dragged a senior EDF Lieutenant’s decades of hidden corruption into public view—"

She stopped, looking around at the three of them.

"What," Sophie said.

"Think about how that actually plays out," Angel said. "We’re not talking about EDF quietly thanking us for uncovering a problem. We’re talking about an institution that’s already humiliated once by Team Seven’s original accusations against Arthur, now facing a second scandal, bigger, uglier, implicating someone deep inside their own command structure. Institutions don’t usually respond to that kind of exposure with gratitude. They respond with denial, and blame, and looking for the fastest way to make the messenger the actual problem instead of the message."

"You think they’d turn on us," Brooks said slowly.

"I think it’s a real possibility we need to actually plan for, not just hope doesn’t happen." Angel’s voice hardened. "Eclipse already burned that bridge partially once, years ago, and it’s only ever been half-rebuilt since. This could be the thing that burns it down completely. Permanently."

Sophie’s stomach tightened. "You’re saying Eclipse versus EDF. Openly."

"I’m saying it’s on the table," Angel said. "And I think we’d be foolish to keep planning like it isn’t." She looked around at all three of them, exhaustion and grim clarity both sitting plain on her face now. "Forget the Harbingers. Forget the beasts, even as bad as they’re getting. If this all comes out, and EDF decides Eclipse is the actual threat here instead of the corruption we uncovered, we may have an entirely different war on our hands. One against the very institution we’ve spent years trying to find a common ground and work alongside instead of against."