Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 875: Humanity’s state of crisis

The light hit the forward viewport before anyone on the bridge even registered it as light.

"What is that," someone said, voice small.

Nobody answered right away. Everyone just stared, the entire bridge crew frozen mid-motion, half of them still catching their breath from the celebration two minutes earlier.

"Sensors are reading it as a kinetic event," the navigation officer said, fingers already flying across her console. "Moving fast. Too fast, that velocity doesn’t make sense for debris, debris decelerates, this is accelerating—"

"Accelerating toward what," Angel said.

"Us."

Diana stepped closer to the viewport, Kelvin still tucked under one arm, both of them still flushed from the reunion hug that hadn’t even finished properly before the alarms started.

"Is that from the planet," Diana asked. "Leftover from the blast?"

"It shouldn’t be anything," Brooks said, already crossing the bridge toward the main console. "There’s nothing left down there to still be moving like that. We watched it come apart."

Kelvin’s eyes went distant.

Green light bled out along both sides of his face, thin at first, then flooding brighter, and his hands came up on instinct, pulling threads of data from every sensor array the fleet still had pointed at that light.

"Kelvin?" Diana said.

He didn’t answer. His jaw had gone tight, breath coming faster, and the longer he stared into that spreading glow the worse his expression got.

"Kelvin, talk to me."

"That’s not a shockwave," he said finally, voice low. "I keep trying to read it as leftover plasma dispersal and the numbers won’t let me. It’s coherent. It’s holding its own shape instead of scattering the way an explosion’s aftermath should."

"Meaning what," Sophie said.

"Meaning something’s inside it. Something that’s keeping it together on purpose."

The light kept growing, filling more of the viewport by the second, and faint shapes began resolving at its center, something moving, something that didn’t belong in open space at all.

Kelvin’s breath caught.

"I fought Kruel," he said, mostly to himself now, words coming slow and careful like he was trying to talk himself out of what he was seeing. "I watched that thing heal from hits that should’ve ended it before I even landed the next one. Every Harbinger past one horn does that. Fast regeneration. That’s not new, that’s baseline for them."

"Kelvin." Diana’s grip on his arm tightened. "What are you looking at."

"I’m not looking at fast regeneration," he said. "I’m looking at something rebuilding itself from nothing. Cellular structure, tissue, bone, all of it, coming back from total destruction like it’s shrugging off a scrape." His voice cracked slightly. "A planet just ended. The whole thing, gone, atoms scattered, and whatever’s in that light wasn’t just caught in that. It was inside it. And it’s putting itself back together in real time while we’re watching it happen."

"That’s not possible," Angel said.

"I know it’s not possible." Kelvin’s hands were shaking now. "I’m reading the data and it’s telling me it’s happening anyway, so I don’t actually know what to do with the word possible anymore."

Nobody said anything for a second.

The light kept closing.

"Run," Brooks said.

Nobody moved.

"RUN!" She was already moving herself, slamming a hand down on the bridge’s general alarm, voice tearing loud across every channel at once. "Everyone brace, Kelvin, I need you, now—"

He was already moving before she finished.

Green light flooded outward from his eyes, from both hands, reaching past his own suit’s systems into every ship in the formation at once, dozens of separate hulls lighting up green in the same instant, circuits that had never been built to accept a single outside signal suddenly carrying his.

"Hold onto something!" he shouted, voice straining hard against the effort. "This is going to feel bad, give me maybe four seconds—"

"Kelvin, what are you doing—"

"Taking every jump system in the fleet at once." Sweat ran down his face despite the cold sweeping the bridge. "Funny story, this might fry something important in my own skull afterward, we can deal with that later, assuming later actually happens—"

The light filled the entire viewport now, blinding white swallowing every star behind it.

"NOW!"

Every ship in the formation jumped in the same instant, green light collapsing inward and vanishing all at once, the whole fleet torn out of that system in under five seconds, a sequence that should have taken careful individual calibration ship by ship instead happening as one single desperate pulse.

They reappeared in open space a heartbeat later, unfamiliar stars scattered across black none of them recognized, engines groaning under the strain, half the bridge’s consoles still blaring soft alarms nobody had the energy to silence yet.

Nobody spoke.

Diana checked herself over without thinking, hands running down her own arms like she expected to find something wrong, and found nothing but the same exhaustion that had been there before the light appeared.

Kelvin sat down hard on the bridge floor, green fading slow from his eyes, breath coming in ragged pulls.

"We got something," Sera said quietly, still at her station. "Before the jump. One frame."

Brooks crossed to the console fast and pulled it up, and the bridge went quiet again, worse this time, as the image resolved on the main display.

A single still shot. Blinding white bled across most of the frame, and at its center, barely visible through the glare, a shape held itself together against all that light.

Not whole. Not clean. The silhouette showed through disfigured, wrong in ways none of them could fully name out loud, limbs bent at angles that shouldn’t have worked at all, flesh fused with something that wasn’t flesh in patches across its frame, caught mid-reconstruction, still putting itself back together in the exact instant the camera caught it.

And it was already turning toward where they’d been standing.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"Shit," Angel said finally, flat, the only word that actually fit.

Kelvin stared at the frozen image from where he sat on the floor, like it might change shape if he looked at it long enough. It didn’t.

"We need to call this in," Brooks said eventually, voice steady despite everything underneath it. "Ark command. Now."

---

The transmission reached the Ark twenty minutes later, routed through every emergency channel the fleet still had open, and the chamber that received it went quiet in exactly the same way the bridge had gone quiet.

"Confirmed," the technical officer said, reading data scrolling fast across her own display, voice tight. "Five horn classification. Survived a planetary-scale detonation. Currently active in open space. Trajectory inbound."

A senior officer leaned forward, face gone pale under the chamber’s harsh overhead light.

"How far is that system from Earth."

The technical officer checked the numbers twice before she answered, protocol forgotten entirely, voice dropping flat and cold.

"Not far enough, sir."

***

Five hours post transmission, the Ark had never been busier.

Every corridor on the command deck moved at a pace that looked less like urgency and more like controlled panic held together by procedure, officers cutting across each other’s paths without apology, comm stations lit end to end with open channels nobody had closed since the alert first landed. Earth sat under its highest alert status in recorded history, every colony beyond it receiving the same warning broadcast on loop, encrypted, plain-language, repeated in every dialect the Ark’s systems could render fast enough.

In the outer colonies, evacuation drills that had sat theoretical for years suddenly became real. Families who’d never once rehearsed a shelter protocol found themselves doing it for the first time with their hands shaking, following instructions barked over emergency broadcast by voices trying very hard to sound calmer than the situation actually was.

Kruel had been bad. Kruel had taken millions, burned a hemisphere, forced an entire defense doctrine to rebuild itself from scratch. But Kruel had been known. Cataloged. Fought, eventually, and ended.

Nobody had a file on this.

The war room sat at the Ark’s center, and by the time the full command staff filed in, the air already felt heavy with everything that hadn’t been said yet.

Admiral Kross took his seat first, tablet already glowing with half-finished reports he hadn’t had time to properly read. General Thorne arrived a step behind him, arms crossed before he’d even sat down. Fleet Admiral Zhang moved slower, older, the weight of every decision she’d ever regretted visible in how carefully she lowered herself into her chair. Commander Cassandra Beaumont took her usual spot near the back, quiet, watchful. Hendricks arrived last among the senior staff, unhurried as always, settling into his seat with the same composed stillness he brought to every meeting, regardless of what the meeting was actually about.

The Supreme General entered without announcement, and the room’s noise dropped to nothing the instant he crossed the threshold.

He didn’t sit.

"You’ve all seen the footage," he said, voice carrying that distorted weight it always carried, the sound of something too large to be fully contained by the speakers meant to transmit it. "I won’t waste time summarizing what every person in this room already understands."

"With respect," Thorne said, "some context would help. We’ve fought four horns. We know what that scale of threat looks like. A five horn is new territory, and new territory means we plan carefully before we commit resources we can’t afford to lose."

"We don’t have the luxury of acting careful," the General said. "That creature survived a planetary detonation. It is, by every measure this institution has ever used to classify threats, the single most dangerous entity humanity has ever encountered. Not Kruel. Kruel was terrible, and Kruel is dead, and Kruel never forced us to reconsider what the word survivable actually meant." He let that sit a moment. "This does."

"Which is exactly why we need a plan, not a reaction," Zhang said. "Sending forces out blind against something that just no-sold the destruction of an entire world isn’t strategy. It’s a second tragedy waiting to compound the first."

"I’m not proposing we send forces out blind."

"Then what are you proposing," Hendricks asked, voice even, unreadable as ever.

"I’m proposing we go find it," the General said. "Before anyone else does."

A murmur moved through the room.

"The Purge held that creature captive for three years," he continued. "Three years, undetected, unweaponized only because they lacked whatever final piece they needed to actually deploy it. That window closed the moment it broke free, but it will not stay closed. Other factions exist. Other ambitions exist. If word of what that thing can survive reaches the wrong hands before we’ve secured it, we will spend the next decade fighting an enemy who no longer needs Harbinger incursions to threaten us. They’ll simply point a leash at Earth."

"You’re suggesting we capture it," Kross said slowly. "After what we just watched it do."

"I’m suggesting we find it first," the General said. "What happens after that depends entirely on what we’re dealing with once we do."

"And if capture isn’t possible," Cassandra said, speaking for the first time, voice careful. "If this is a creature that regenerates from planetary-scale destruction. What’s the actual plan when containment fails."

The room went quiet, waiting.

"Then it dies," the General said. "Permanently, not contained nor studied. Ended."

"With respect, sir," Thorne said, leaning forward, "we just watched that thing shrug off an attack that erased an entire planet. What makes you confident anyone, including you, could actually finish the job if containment isn’t an option?"

The General was quiet a moment, and something in that silence carried more weight than anything he’d said so far.

"Because the Purge managed to capture it," he said finally, "using resources, intelligence, and infrastructure built entirely in secret, over years, without anyone in this room noticing." He looked around the table slowly, meeting every pair of eyes in turn. "If an organization operating in the shadows, with a fraction of what this institution commands, could accomplish that much against a threat this size, then I refuse to accept that the full weight of the EDF, properly focused, properly committed, cannot finish what they started."

Nobody spoke.

"They captured it," he said, quieter now, and somehow that quiet carried further than the volume had a moment ago. "I can kill it."

He straightened, the full presence of him settling over the room in a way that made even Hendricks’s composed stillness look, for just a moment, genuinely uncertain.

"I want full tracking assets reallocated to this effort, effective immediately," the General said. "Every available scout, every intelligence asset we have operating anywhere near that system’s projected drift path. I want daily briefings, and I want this room to understand that nothing currently on this institution’s priority list outranks finding that creature before someone else does."

"Sir," Zhang started.

"This meeting is concluded."

He turned and walked out before anyone could raise another objection, the door sealing shut behind him with a quiet, final sound that left the entire room sitting in silence for a long moment after he’d already gone.