Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 866: Endless … A dying god

While the battle ensued between Purge and the Eclipse task force, somewhere off in the galaxy, a different battle was about to unfold.

Still in orbit above a distant red planet, Grey forces circled, ships holding position, engines idling low while sensors swept the surface below for defensive positioning.

"Confirm insertion points," Lucy said, standing at the command deck’s viewport, watching the world turn slow beneath them, its atmosphere hazed a dull, bruised red even from this distance.

"Three viable drop zones," her tactical officer answered. "Courtyard access, western gate, and a secondary entrance near what looks like a detainment structure."

"All three," Lucy said. "At once."

A storm began to gather below them as the fleet descended, clouds pulling in from every horizon, thick and black, moving against wind patterns that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the sheer volume of lightning-charged soldiers about to drop through them. Blue forks split the sky, striking down across the courtyard, the outer walls, the distant treeline, again and again, faster than any natural storm could manage.

A Grey army descending was a bad day for everyone standing beneath it, and the sky made certain nobody down there mistook it for anything else.

Ships broke formation and dove, hulls dark against the churning clouds, soldiers dropping from open bays in blue-plated armor, lightning crackling along every joint, riding the current down like something that belonged to the storm rather than merely falling through it.

Lucy went with them.

She launched from the command ship’s open bay a beat after the first wave, and rather than dropping, she let the storm carry her, hanging suspended in its current, lightning crawling bright across both shoulders, Valor held high overhead, the axe’s blue-green edge catching every flash of sky-fire around her.

"Show them fear!" she screamed, voice carrying impossibly far, amplified by the storm itself.

Below her, wave after wave of soldiers dropped through their own falling lightning, turning the entire world beneath them into a single, continuous thunderstorm.

The first wave hit the courtyard hard.

A Grey soldier planted his boots, drew back, and hurled a spear of condensed lightning across the open ground, the bolt catching a two-horn Harbinger square in the chest and punching clean through, the creature dead before the sound of the throw finished echoing off the walls.

More Harbingers surged from the stronghold’s lower gates, and beside them, indistinguishable in posture if not in flesh, Purge soldiers poured out in matching numbers, dark chi crackling red-white around clenched fists, shadow pooling thick at the feet of others, coiling up their arms.

A Purge fighter lunged at the nearest Grey soldier, chi-hardened fist aimed for his skull, and the soldier caught the blow on a lightning-wreathed forearm, current arcing through the attacker’s body and dropping him where he stood.

A shadow-user melted into the ground beside another soldier, reappearing behind him in the same breath, blade already swinging, and the soldier spun a half second too late, the strike opening his shoulder before a second Grey fighter drove a lightning-charged gauntlet through the shadow user’s chest from behind.

The Grey forces gave no ground and asked for none.

A two-horn broke from the pack and drove its claws toward an exposed soldier’s back. She spun into it instead of away, catching the strike on a lightning-forged blade, and the current traveled backward up the creature’s own claw and dropped it twitching before it hit the ground.

A Purge fighter caught a Grey soldier’s arm mid-swing and hardened his grip around it, bone creaking under the pressure, and the soldier answered by discharging every volt he had directly into his own captured limb, the current running straight into his attacker’s chest and throwing him back ten feet, smoking.

Another shadow soldier rose out of the stone itself behind a fighter who’d already turned to face a different threat. She never saw it coming. A second Grey soldier did, closing the distance in a single stride, and drove a lightning-wreathed fist through the construct’s back before it finished materializing, the shadow unraveling into smoke with a sound like a held breath finally released.

A Harbinger took three Grey soldiers down at once with one sweep of its tail, and the fourth soldier standing nearby didn’t hesitate, planting his feet and calling down a bolt from the storm itself, the strike splitting the creature’s skull clean before it could raise its claws for a second pass.

The line held. It bent, here and there, soldiers falling, soldiers rising again through sheer stubborn refusal, but it held.

One soldier broke from his position at the western gate, peeling away from the fighting rather than into it, and ran.

He didn’t take the direct route. The direct route was already choked with Harbingers, and he cut instead through a narrower side passage, boots skidding on stone slick with something he didn’t stop to identify, lightning flashing bright through a high window somewhere above him with every step, thunder rolling low behind each flash close enough that he felt it in his chest more than heard it.

He hit a set of double doors without slowing and shouldered through them.

The room beyond hummed low and steady, machines lining the far wall, tubes and monitoring cable trailing across rumpled sheets, beast core lanterns burning amber along the stone, the light catching dust still drifting slow through the air from whatever had disturbed it last.

A bed sat at the room’s center, blankets thrown back, still holding the shape of a body that wasn’t there anymore.

"Sire!"

Nothing answered him. Just the hum of the machines, the amber light, and an empty bed where the most important man on this world was supposed to be lying, dying slow and safe, exactly where he’d been left.

He stood there a moment too long, breath still ragged, before turning and running back the way he’d come, deeper into the stronghold this time instead of toward the fighting.

High above the courtyard, still riding the storm’s current, Lucy’s eyes swept the battlefield, searching for one specific presence among all the chaos.

"Where are you, old man."

Deeper in the stronghold, past a stretch of corridor the fighting hadn’t reached yet, a door stood open behind a man walking away from it.

Inside, past the threshold, cages lined the walls in uneven rows, bars catching the same amber lantern light that filled the medical chamber above, and behind those bars, figures sat slumped against stone, chained at wrist and ankle both, some awake and watching the door with hollow, resigned eyes, others not moving at all.

The man didn’t look back at any of them.

His skin had gone the color of old paper, stretched tight across a skull where the cheekbones pressed visible ridges beneath it, eye sockets sunken deep enough that shadow pooled there even under direct light. What hair remained clung thin and colorless to a scalp mapped with visible veins. His hands hung loose at his sides, knuckles too large for the wasted muscle around them, nails gone yellow and thick. He still stood fully upright, shoulders squared, and that was the part that didn’t match the rest of him, a frame this ruined should not have been able to hold that posture without shaking, and it wasn’t shaking at all.

He kept walking, unhurried, until a shadow soldier rounded the corridor’s far bend at a dead run, black armor scuffed and scorched along one shoulder, helmet visor cracked. The man didn’t slow when he saw Arthur. If anything he moved faster, driven by something closer to desperation than discipline.

"Sire!" His voice cracked through the visor, ragged. "The upper courtyard has fallen. Our forces are distributed off world. We’re losing the eastern line, we need—"

"You need me." Arthur said it slow, almost amused, letting the words hang in the air. "I can tell that much."

The soldier’s hands were shaking, badly, breath coming in short ragged pulls, and something about the way he stood, hunched slightly, eyes darting toward the corridor behind him as though the battle might follow him even here, reminded Arthur of nothing so much as a cornered animal.

Arthur looked at him the way a man might look at something pathetic.

"Look at you," he said, voice flat, almost bored. "Where has your pride gone. You wear the mark of the Infinite on your chest, a title men used to kill each other for the honor of carrying, and here you stand, shaking like something that’s already decided it’s prey." He shook his head slowly. "I am a god, walking among insects who occasionally remember to call themselves soldiers, and this is what stands before me when the fighting finally turns difficult. Not a warrior. A dog with its tail between its legs, hoping someone bigger will make the noise stop for it."

"Sire, please, we’re dying out there—"

"Everything dies," Arthur said, cutting through him without raising his voice at all. "That has never once been the tragedy. The tragedy is watching something call itself Infinite and fold the instant the numbers stop favoring it. I did not build an army to produce men who whimper."

The soldier said nothing, jaw tight, shame and terror both fighting for space on what little of his expression showed past the cracked visor.

Arthur’s hand closed around his throat without warning.

He lifted the man clean off the ground, unbothered by the weight, unbothered by the hands now scrabbling uselessly at his wrist.

"You have just confirmed, out of your own mouth, that you are entirely useless to me in this state," Arthur said. "So." His voice dropped lower. "Hush."

A thin thread of light began pulling loose from the soldier’s chest, drawn into Arthur’s open palm, and as it fed into him, something in his posture shifted, straightening further, the hollows in his face filling in by fractions, borrowed vitality bleeding color back into grey skin.

The soldier’s struggling slowed, then stopped.

Arthur dropped the emptied body without ceremony, letting it crumple to the stone floor, and stepped over it without looking back down.

"Everything dies," he said again, quieter now, mostly to himself, continuing down the corridor. "That has never once been the tragedy."

Even as the words left him, something in his chest curled tight around the lie of them.

He had been saying that same sentence for longer than any kingdom currently standing had existed. He had buried wives, buried kingdoms, buried entire wars he’d started and finished and started again under different skies, different names, different centuries. Everything around him had died precisely on schedule.

He alone never had.

He had built One specifically because he refused to accept that his own ending would be the final word on anything, had poured decades into shaping a successor who might carry what he’d built forward past the one boundary he’d never quite managed to cross himself. And even now, hollowed out and feeding on borrowed light just to keep walking a single corridor, some old and stubborn part of him still didn’t believe the sentence he’d just spoken.

Everything died.

He simply never had.

If you’re enjoying the ride so far,

— RetardedCulture