Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 870: A Queen and a Prideful God

The dust settles several minutes later. There was complete destruction everywhere. The central tower, once a monument to Arthur Kaine’s absolute authority, was gone, replaced by a massive, smoking caldera of pulverized stone and twisted, fused iron. A heavy, grey silence pressed down on the scene, heavier than the gravity of the red planet itself. The storm above had momentarily spent its initial fury, the clouds churning in bruised silence, though blue forks still flickered near the horizon, waiting.

In the center of the ruin, a hand, clad in blue-plated armor, punched through the surface of a fractured marble slab.

Lucy Grey shoved the stone aside, rising slowly, painfully, from the wreckage. Her armor was shredded at the shoulder, the left plate hanging loose by a single cracked rivet, and a deep, jagged cut ran across her cheekbone, soaking the entire left side of her face in a hot mask of her own blood. She spat a mouthful of stone grit, her breathing a ragged, dangerous hiss. She did not look broken. She looked catalyzed.

Her right hand opened, extending toward the deepest part of the crater where a pile of glowing rubble hummed. The blue-green vibration was the first thing to return, a resonant pulse that matched the beat of her own furious heart.

The storm relic axe, buried fifty feet deep in the bed of shattered foundation, answered. The ground shifted and cracked as the axe tore through the debris, flying across the rubble in a low, spinning arc to land in her grip with a solid, stone-shattering thud. The lightning along its edge did not flare immediately; it throbbed, a slow, cyan pulse that settled into a symbiotic rhythm with the raw electrical output she was already generating through her own fingertips.

She rolled her left shoulder, feeling the torn muscle pull, and did not wince. The skill, the precision, the sheer tactical calculation required to survive the overload and instantly recall her weapon were entirely hers, honed by years of unforgiving Raiju training under the harshest conditions in human space.

A low, dry laugh echoed from a corner of the caldera where the shadows pooled thickest.

The shadows writhed, detaching from the debris and coalescing into a skeletal form. Arthur Kaine stepped into the flickering light of the dying beast-core lanterns, completely unscathed. His dark tunic was not even dusty. At the final second of the overload, recognizing the signature of a technique that would have pulverized any ordinary biology, he had simply phased into the shadow realm, letting the catastrophic destruction pass harmlessly through the space he used to occupy.

He was not panicked. He was not fearful. He was, however, monstrously, historically furious.

The indignity of it was a bitter poison coating his throat. He was Arthur Kaine, an Original, a being who had watched civilizations rise and fall before the ancestors of the current noble bloodlines had even finished learning what their own power actually meant. He had been betrayed by his own son, yes, but he had never been forced into a pure defensive retreat by someone he considered a child. The very act of having to use shadow-phasing as his primary survival mechanism was a humiliation that burned brighter than any physical wound.

His face, normally a mask of gaunt, ancient arrogance, was now set in a mask of rigid, murderous intent. His eyes, sunken deep into dark sockets, burned with a cold fire that had nothing to do with the storm and everything to do with centuries of accumulated, offended pride.

"You insolent, reckless, pathetic little brat," Arthur said, his voice flat, dangerously calm, cutting through the low rumble of the settling stone. "Do you think this gesture means anything, truly? My reach extends further than this one burning fortress. Further than this one red world. I have moved pieces across the breadth of the galaxy while your Family sat comfortably within its own borders, calling that comfort strength." He shook his head slowly, the movement tight and deliberate. "You have forced one old man to stand briefly on the defensive. That is not victory, child. That is a single grain of sand believing it has moved the beach."

Lucy did not waste breath on a reply. She planted her boots on the broken marble and lunged, not waiting for him to finish his speech, not giving him time to settle his stance.

She did not lead with a predictable axe swing. She channeled her lightning directly into her calves and thighs, converting raw electrical voltage into pure, explosive velocity, moving faster than the sound of her own footfall. She bypassed the space between them in a microsecond, aiming a horizontal, left-handed punch straight at his hollow cheekbone, her gauntlet wrapped in a blinding, erratic current of her own innate Grey electricity.

Arthur moved with an unnatural, fluid steadiness. He did not phase this time; his pride forbade it. He raised his right hand, siphoning the pooled blood still dripping from Lucy’s own cheek, hardening it mid-flight into a serrated, red barrier of razor-sharp blood crystals that interlocked like dragon scales.

Her gauntlet slammed into the blood shield.

BOOM!

The blood crystals shattered into a shower of red dust, but they did their job, absorbing the kinetic impact and dispersing the lightning harmlessly down into the stone. Lucy, anticipating the physical rebound, used the split-second recoil to rotate her weight on her back heel. She switched Valor to her left hand and brought the axe down in a vicious, vertical, one-handed chop, aiming to split the blood shield and the man behind it cleanly in half.

Arthur’s shadow flickered, not to reposition his entire body, but to generate a decoy. A shadow construct, identical to his own gaunt frame, appeared two feet to his left, drawing the eye and the angle of attack.

Lucy’s own battle instinct, sharp as a monomolecular blade, processed the spatial anomaly immediately. She did not overcommit to the illusion. She adjusted the angle of her swing mid-descent, converting the vertical chop into a sudden, vicious horizontal sweep, catching Arthur’s real body with the flat and edge of Valor’s head just as he was preparing to step out of the dark and strike her exposed side.

It was a solid, bone-jarring hit. Arthur staggered back four steps, the sheer kinetic force of her strike tearing through his dark-chi-hardened metal ribs, a genuine, dry cough of black blood escaping his lips.

His fury reached its absolute zenith. To be outmaneuvered tactically, in close quarters, by this girl’s own instinct, the humiliation was physically agonizing.

He threw his arms wide, not with a quick swipe of energy, but with a slow, deliberate, heavy summoning that drew on every drop of metal, blood, and shadow present in the vast ruin.

"You strike well," Arthur said, his voice rising into a harsh, rasping growl. "I will not pretend otherwise. I have always known the Greys were among the strongest of the Originals, long before your line ever called itself that." He straightened despite the fresh wound, something almost mournful beneath the fury now. "But you are a single spectacle wearing the weight of an entire bloodline, child. If you were not so blinded by the corruption and injustice you inherited from men who taught you to hate my name before you understood it, you might see the truer shape of this story. I was not always the villain in it. There was a time I was simply the one who suffered first."

Dark chi, heavy, volatile, and burning reddish-white, exploded from his frame like an oil spill catching fire. He did not just raise a metal spike or a stone wall. He seized an entire thousand-ton section of the collapsed stronghold’s foundation, fusing twisted structural iron rebar, deep granite bedrock, and the lingering, still-liquid blood of dozens of dead soldiers into a single, monolithic, jagged spear.

It was sky-splitting in scale, a half-mile-long shard of dark, fused death, wide as a warship, rising out of the caldera with a deafening grind of tearing earth.

Lucy looked up at the rising monolith, her face a bloody, lethal mask. She did not retreat. She did not look for cover.

She took the fight vertical.

She leaped, driving off the crumbling marble with an explosive, localized electrical pulse that shot her hundreds of feet straight up into the air. Valor roared, the blue-green light along its edge focusing into a tight, microscopic needle-point of white-hot plasma. She did not try to dodge the monolith as it surged upward to meet her. She focused all her electrical output into a drill-like spiral around her body and the axe blade.

She met the tip of the rising monolith head-on in mid-air.

KABOOM!

The sound was an absolute, physical erasure of auditory reality, replaced by a shockwave that flattened the surrounding dust clouds for half a mile. The half-mile-long spear did not just break; it atomized along its central axis at the point of impact. Lucy did not slow down for a fraction of a second. She drilled straight down through the center of the fused metal, blood, and stone, the extreme heat of her Grey voltage converting the solid structure to liquid slag and vapor as she carved through it.

She burst out of the base of the monolith, ascending straight back up into the open sky above the ruined fortress, the ruined pillar collapsing behind her into a mountain of red-hot slag.

Arthur was already waiting for her in the clouds.

He had phased into his shadow during the structural collapse and repositioned to altitude, using the smoke and falling debris to mask his ascent. He materialized in the air fifteen feet to her left, his emaciated hands already shaping a dark, complex construct, not just metal, not just shadow, but a dense, compressed sphere of dark chi wrapping around a volatile core of pressurized, metallic blood.

"You are fast, Lucy Grey," Arthur said, his voice carrying clearly over the gale-force winds of the upper atmosphere, "but I have outlasted speed since before your bloodline had the language to name its own gifts."

He thrust his hand forward, launching the orb.

Lucy did not try to dodge in the thin air. At this altitude, surrounded by the active storm, her innate aerial lightning control was unmatched. She did not just summon bolts; she manipulated the electromagnetic spectrum of the atmosphere itself. She generated a powerful, localized magnetic field around her own body that repelled the dark chi orb’s trajectory, forcing it to detonate forty feet to her right in a silent, blinding sphere of reddish-black fire that scorched the clouds.

She instantly switched from defense to absolute offense.

She spun Valor in a rapid, double-handed figure-eight, generating a localized, multi-vortex tornado of blue-green electricity that whipped the air around them into a violent, localized storm cell. She launched the vortex straight at Arthur, not as a simple projectile, but as a continuous, wide-area spatial trap designed to lock down his shadow repositioning through constant electrical interference.

Arthur found himself suspended in the open air, the violent electrical currents disrupting the shadows around his body, preventing him from slipping away.

He sneered through the strain, forcing his failing, gaunt body to stack its remaining power to its absolute, dangerous limit. Blood manipulation, fused with dark-chi-hardened metal. He did not have the raw energy reserves to break her vortex with force alone. Instead, he drew upon the blood lingering in his own damaged vessels, forcing it through his skin and hardening it into a full-body shell of black-and-red metallic armor that encased his skeletal frame like a monstrous, spiked suit of plate.

It was a desperate, agonizing defense. The blue-green lightning of her vortex ground against his armor with a sound like iron shears on stone, melting the outer spikes and burning through the dark chi layer, forcing him to expend precious internal reserves just to keep his physical form from being stripped to the bone.

He waited for the vortex’s kinetic pressure to peak, then unleashed his counter. He used the conductive properties of his metal-infused armor to catch her lightning, reversing its magnetic polarity through a massive burst of dark chi. The tornado did not dissipate; it violently reversed its spin, whipping back toward Lucy with double its original velocity.

He followed directly behind the reverse-vortex, thrusting himself forward with dark chi propulsion, his spiked metallic gauntlets aimed straight for her ribcage in a lethal, full-body tackle.

Lucy saw the reversed vortex coming. She did not panic, nor did she attempt to drop out of its path. She used the reversed air currents to accelerate her own momentum, meeting his charge head-on in the open sky.

She angled Valor, not to block his heavy gauntlets, but to deflect the line of force. She allowed his razor-sharp armor spikes to slide violently across the flat of her axe blade, generating a blinding stream of white sparks that lit up the darkened atmosphere. Her tactical mind, processing the geometry of the mid-air collision in a fraction of a second, found the single flaw in his ancient, heavy posture.

He was focused entirely on the kinetic weight of the tackle. He was overcommitted to the forward drive, assuming his dark-chi-reinforced armor could withstand whatever physical strike she offered in return.

He was wrong.

Lucy twisted her torso in mid-air, dropping her center of gravity, allowing his massive metal-clad shoulder to pass bare inches over her collarbone. The friction from his armor spikes ripped through her right bicep, opening a deep, bloody gash that sprayed fresh blood across her armor. She ignored the tearing pain entirely. She leveraged the rotational momentum of his own missed tackle, pivoting on an invisible axis in the sky, and switched Valor back to her dominant right hand.

She did not draw on the storm. She did not call down a massive bolt. She relied on raw, unyielding mechanical strength and the instantaneous telekinetic recall of the blood-bound relic.

The axe, yanked back toward her palm with a violent, spatial jerk, accelerated into her grip at supersonic speed, her own Raiju muscle power doubling the kinetic velocity at the precise moment of impact.

Arthur attempted to rotate his weight, to slip into a shadow or manifest a metal shield, but his weakened, three-ability frame was a fraction of a second too slow. The stack had lagged; his body could no longer keep pace with his ancient mind.

The razor-sharp, blue-green edge of Valor stopped hard and true, pressed deep into the metallic skin of his skeletal throat.

The lightning along the blade died down to a low, lethal, razor-thin hum. The raw atmospheric discharge ceased, replaced by a terrifying, absolute silence in the open sky.

Lucy hung suspended in the air, her left boot resting on a floating chunk of metal debris, holding her position through pure physical will. Her face was a horrific, breathtaking mask of her own dried and fresh blood, her armor cracked and hanging open at the ribs, her right arm dripping blood from the deep tear in her bicep, and her breath coming in heavy, jagged, agonizing rasps. Every muscle in her body burned; her bloodline reserves were dangerously close to empty. This was not a clean victory. It was a brutal, costly, earned triumph won through superior tactical execution and an unbroken will.

Arthur Kaine froze solid in the open sky. The ancient Original, the self-proclaimed god who had walked the world for centuries, was motionless, held in place by a single, bloodied edge at his neck. The humiliation in his yellowed eyes was absolute, a bitter, agonizing realization that he had been outfought, out-thought, and brought to the brink by the young Queen of the Grey family.

Neither of them spoke. The wind howled around them in the vast, open sky, carrying the distant sound of the war still raging miles below, as the two combatants remained locked in the held, silent tension of the blade against his throat.