Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 865: We Have a Harbinger

He moved first, closing the distance to Angel in a single blink-fast stride that left a back-draft of pressurized air in his wake. Crimson-and-white chi flared along his knuckles in jagged, high-frequency bands, turning his leading fist into an unyielding battering ram. Angel barely got a blood wall up in time, throwing her hands forward to manifest a dense, ruby-hard lattice of crystallized blood, but the impact sheer-cleaved the structure straight through. The kinetic shockwave detonated the wall into a rain of sharp red glass, the momentum lifting Angel off her feet and launching her backward into a bank of high-yield monitors. Frame-housing buckled, glass exploded outward, and blue electrical arcs hissed violently as spark showers rained down across her shoulders.

"Sera, cover the corridor!" Angel called out, her voice hard despite the thin line of crimson running down her jaw. She was already rolling upright, utilizing the momentum of her fall to gain her feet, catching the distinctive heavy thud of tactical combat boots accelerating down the metal corridor behind them. "Don’t let anything else through!"

Sera’s Faithful Feathers twitched toward the chamber’s interior fight, then snapped outward toward the noise building down the hall. The mythic wings reacted at thought-speed, the brilliant plumage edge along both wings hardening into razor-honed steel with an audible metallic chime.

"Go," Lila said, her eyes locked dead on her father as telekinetic pressure rippled around her knuckles like warped glass. "We’ve got this room."

Sera peeled off without another word, launching straight down the corridor toward the incoming wave. Winged Dominion took hold. She didn’t merely sprint; she glided inches off the steel decking, her body slanting horizontally as she swept her left wing forward. With a sharp, metallic thwip, a spread of feather-blades detached, crossing the hall in a lethal spread. The recallable projectiles struck the lead operative through his shoulder plates, pinning him to the far bulkhead before his boots could set.

Inside the chamber, Kelvin closed on the striped operative from the flank. KROME’s massive boots cracked the reinforced flooring with every heavy stride. Kelvin extended both primary prosthetic arms to full reach, driving a rapid, three-hit combination designed to shatter guard stances. The mechanical fists slammed into the operative’s ribs, flank, and chest in a blinding succession of heavy impacts.

The operative didn’t retreat. Crimson-and-white chi surged across the fourth point of contact, his skin instantly hardening into a marbled, red-and-white shell that turned Kelvin’s follow-up strike into a deadened metallic clang. The operative’s eyes were wide, bloodshot, and completely manic, a terrifying grin splitting his face as the corrupted chi forced his muscle fibers past human biological thresholds. He didn’t feel the impact; he braced to drive a counter-strike straight through KROME’s chest plate.

"Diana, front!" Kelvin barked.

From his spine, the two mechanical arms of the Auxiliary Assistant deployed over his shoulders with a pneumatic hiss. The upper mechanical arm reached out, grabbing a dislodged steel ceiling strut that hung loose from the earlier explosion, and welded it instantly into a makeshift brace across KROME’s upper back to stabilize his center of mass against the impending collision.

Diana surged in, planting herself directly between Kelvin and the operative’s ruthless retaliation. She raised the Shoal Shield, its living coral face pulsing with a deep, ethereal oceanic glow.

The operative’s chi-infused palm slammed square into the shield’s center. Instead of acting as a static barrier, the Tidal Rebound mechanic engaged. The living coral surface cratered inward like deep ocean water, catching the terrifying kinetic force, compressing it, and then violently rebounding. A localized shockwave erupted from the shield’s face with the roar of a breaking wave, blasting the striped operative backward and cracking the reinforced floor tiles beneath his feet into fine powder. The indestructible relic stood completely unmarked, its coral lattice gleaming flawless under the flashing alarm lights.

"Darling, left!" Mr. Rowe commanded, his voice cold, dark chi wreathing his forearms in jagged, high-frequency bands that hissed against the ambient dust.

Mrs. Rowe moved on Diana’s exposed flank a beat later. She showed no hesitation. The dark chi was visibly eating through her stamina, but she forced the reserves faster, red-white energy weaving frantically between her hands until it burned with blinding intensity. She drove a compressed, short-range energy projection straight at Diana’s open side while the defender was still recovering from the force of the first rebound.

Diana pivoted sharply, activating Ocean Current Guard. She angled the Shoal Shield at a precise forty-five-degree slant, letting the dense stream of corrupted energy slide off the organic contours of the coral face. The redirected blast skittered off the impervious face and struck the floor plating beneath them, instantly liquefying the heavy steel into glowing slag.

"She’s redirection-heavy, overwhelm her!" Mrs. Rowe shrieked, her voice frantic, unhinged by the chi flooding her central nervous system.

Both she and the striped operative hit the shield simultaneously from opposing angles. Red-white chi flared blindingly white across the chamber, pounding against the relic with bone-crushing violence, but the Shoal Shield remained completely impervious, refusing to yield an inch of ground.

Rather than maintaining a static defense, Diana seized command of the relic’s structure and activated Leviathan Rush. With a sharp mental command, she split the shield, sending a controlled swarm of razor-sharp coral fragments surging outward like a localized tempest. The flying shards raked across both attackers, forcing them to cross their arms over their faces as blood sprayed from a dozen deep cuts. On her command, the fragments immediately coalesced back into her hand, reforming the pristine, unbroken shield in an instant.

"Fall back, regroup!" Kelvin shouted, stepping up.

"I’ve got this!" Diana dismissed the construct back to its origin, rolling clear of Mrs. Rowe’s wild follow-up sweep and coming up smoothly into a low, rooted stance. Stripped of construct barriers, she brought up her bare hands, now relying entirely on her innate momentum nullification to lock down the engagement zone.

The striped operative pressed his advantage, leaping toward her position, his body completely ignoring the bleeding rakes left by the Leviathan Rush. Red-white chi cauterized his open wounds with a sickening, high-pressure hiss of steam even as he moved.

Angel intercepted at the last second, driving a blood-hardened blade across his forearm hard enough to bite deep into the hardened muscle, forcing his strike wide.

"You’re welcome," Angel said, her chest heaving as ruby constructs coiled like striking vipers around her wrists.

Across the chamber, Mr. Rowe closed on Lila. Crimson-and-white chi crackled along his knuckles and forearms, dense and terrifyingly disciplined, yet pulling from the exact same unhinged root that drove his wife and operative.

"You could have avoided all this," Mr. Rowe said, his voice terrifyingly steady despite the violent energy surging through his veins. "Come home. Finish what we asked."

"I chose my actual family," Lila said, telekinesis gathering tight around both hands until the air between them warped and thrummed. "Not the one that put something in my head I still don’t understand and calls it discipline."

He struck without warning, a textbook dark-chi step-strike designed to blow straight through conventional guard positions. Lila snapped a chronokinetic field around the motion, freezing his fist inches from her collarbone. The red-white chi flared angrily against the temporal stasis, trying to force its way through linear time by sheer output.

"You always hesitate a half second too long," she said, her voice strained under the temporal load, before driving a heavy telekinetic blast into his exposed ribs that sent him sprawling across the ruined floor.

He rose fast, dark chi flaring brighter, more aggressive, burning through his internal reserves to force his damaged body back into motion. He pressed again. Lila fell into the old rhythm, freeze, strike, release, freeze again, buying just enough time between each exchange to land something real against his hardened frame.

He read the pattern on the fourth exchange. Holding back a half beat, he let her stasis field snap shut on empty air, closing the real distance from an angle she hadn’t guarded.

His chi-reinforced fist caught her shoulder with the force of an anvil drop. Lila cried out, stumbling back as the kinetic shockwave dislocated the joint and ripped through the surrounding tissue.

"You taught me some of those instincts yourself," she gasped, clutching her arm as telekinetic pressure forced the bone back into place with a sickening snap.

"I did," Mr. Rowe said, the red-white energy on his arms flickering slightly, the first visible sign of depletion under sustained strain. "Doesn’t mean I can’t out-think my own lessons."

Down the corridor, Sera met the incoming wave head-on. Five operatives broke formation the moment they locked eyes on her. She didn’t slow for a second. Activating Aerial Supremacy, she burst forward, her wings acting as lethal, thought-speed extensions of her frame in the narrow space.

She used Guardian Plumage to lock down the bottleneck, sweeping one wing forward like a massive steel curved shield to deflect a hail of sidearm fire before sweeping both wings outward in a wide, blinding arc. Two operatives were cut down instantly, their armor shredded by the razor edges. A third caught her across the ribs with a chi-hardened fist. She took the hit, absorbed the crushing force, and drove a recallable feather-blade straight through his sternum before the pain could register.

"Corridor’s mine!" Sera called back over the comm, her breath ragged as feather-blades zipped back into her wings, slick with dark fluid. "Keep pushing the objective!"

Back in the chamber, Kelvin became a walking engine of destruction.

The striped operative lunged at him again, but Kelvin’s Auxiliary Assistant arms acted independently of his intent. The upper mechanical arm snapped out, locking around the operative’s throat with crushing hydraulic force, while the lower spine-mounted arm ripped a heavy, discharged console panel off the wall. Using Foundry Protocol, the assistant arm bent and reshaped the panel on the fly into a curved focus housing over Kelvin’s main right arm.

"Hold still," Kelvin growled.

He fired a point-blank plasma discharge through the improvised housing. The directional blast cooked the operative’s dark-chi skin hardening, burning through the red-white energy layer and slamming him violently into the far bulkhead. KROME’s main chest plate took a glancing retaliatory strike, denting inward with a shriek of stressed metal, but Kelvin didn’t budge an inch. He stepped into the recoil, his primary prosthetic swinging in a brutal arc that caught the operative square across the jaw, snapping his head sideways.

The man spat blood, his dark chi flickering wildly as his body fought to heal the massive plasma burns. The mid-fight regeneration was slowing drastically now, his finite chi reserves running dry under the relentless attrition.

"Diana," Kelvin gasped, his cooling fans roaring at maximum RPM, "need an opening!"

"Working on it!"

Diana stepped directly into the path of the weakened operative’s frantic, unhinged counter. As his chi-hardened fist rocketed toward her face, she didn’t block or brace. She projected a dead zone directly across the point of contact. The instant his fist entered the space, her momentum nullification erased the strike’s kinetic energy entirely, stopping the blow dead in mid-air as if it had struck an invisible, absolute wall. With the operative’s forward motion instantly killed and his balance ruined, Diana seized the arrested energy, redirected the deadened vector, and drove a brutal counter-punch into his exposed ribs.

An audible, sickening crack echoed through the room.

The operative staggered, dark chi pulsing faintly around the shattered ribcage, but the healing failed to knit the bone. The sustained fight had drained him empty. He collapsed forward, gasping, before Kelvin brought a heavy mechanical heel down, knocking him out cold.

Mrs. Rowe pressed her own desperate assault against Angel. Her dark chi was frantic, unspooling in jagged, dangerous bursts as she realized her reserves were almost gone. Her chi-hardened palms met Angel’s blood constructs in a blinding, high-speed exchange that cratered the concrete beneath them.

Angel took a glancing, high-pressure palm strike across the temple that sent her vision swimming with crimson spots. But Angel didn’t retreat. She leaned straight into the pain, drawing from her own spilled blood on the floor to form a wicked, subterranean spike that thrust upward through Mrs. Rowe’s exposed hip.

Mrs. Rowe screamed, her dark chi shattering as she staggered back into the shattered console bank, blood pouring from the deep wound.

"Getting tired?" Angel asked, wiping her face, her breathing heavy and ragged.

"Getting annoyed!" Mrs. Rowe snapped, her eyes wild, pushing her corrupted chi past its breaking point as she lunged one last time.

Angel stepped inside the telegraphed strike, caught Mrs. Rowe’s wrist, and drove a dense, blood-hardened gauntlet across her jaw. The impact dropped Mrs. Rowe hard against the far wall, where she went instantly limp.

Mr. Rowe stood alone now.

The chamber was a total wreck, monitors shattered, floor cratered, thick smoke and ozone hanging heavy in the air. Every combatant was bleeding, their armor scorched, their energy running dangerously low.

Lila stepped toward her father. As Mr. Rowe lunged with his final burst of dark chi, Lila didn’t just freeze him. She snapped a fresh stasis field around his upper torso and held it, refusing to release the kinetic pressure. While he remained locked in place, she gathered every ounce of her remaining telekinesis and drove a crushing wave directly into his exposed flank.

The sound of cracking ribs was sharp in the small room.

When the temporal field dropped, Mr. Rowe staggered hard, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth for the first time all fight. His dark chi sputtered out entirely, the red-white glow vanishing from his skin.

Three down.

Mr. Rowe stood breathing heavily, blood streaked across his weathered face. He looked at his wife slumped against the wall, at the unconscious operative, and finally at his daughter, who stood bleeding but unyielding alongside her team.

Something in his expression shifted. Not fear. Recalculation.

"Enough," he said, slowly straightening his posture despite the broken ribs. "You want to know why none of this actually matters."

"Dad," Lila warned, her telekinesis humming dangerously.

"You think you’ve won something here." He swept a cold look across the wrecked chamber, at all of them, exhausted, battered, but still standing. "You think cornering me is the end of anything."

"It’s the end of your operation," Lila said.

Mr. Rowe laughed, a wet, raspy sound, but terrifyingly genuine.

"Is it," he said softly.

He wiped the blood from his chin with the back of his hand and looked directly at his daughter. For a single fraction of a second, something almost mournful passed behind his eyes, before hardening back into absolute, ruthless conviction with a smile.

"We have a Harbinger," he said.

The ground began to shake.

***

If you’re enjoying the ride so far,

— RetardedCulture