Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 879: Two gods?

"One."

The man didn’t move.

He stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands hanging easy at his sides and glanced at the violet glow on Noah’s fingertip, about as worried as somebody checking a bug on a windowsill. Then he looked past it, at Noah’s face, and smiled.

"You remembered," he said. "How gratifying. Most people need a moment to reconcile what they’re seeing with what they expected to see."

Noah didn’t answer. He was too busy looking.

The last time he’d seen One, the kid had been small. Twelve, maybe. A narrow little face, thin wrists, a voice that hadn’t dropped yet. The man standing in front of him now was taller than Noah. Broad through the shoulders, jaw gone sharp, dark hair grown long enough to tie back. He was wearing something plain and grey that looked like it had been cut for him on some other world. But the eyes were the same. Flat and calm and a little bored.

’That’s not possible,’ Noah thought. ’It’s been months. Not ten years.’

"You’re staring," One said.

"You got old."

"Time moves differently out here, for those who know how to let it. And I was finished." One tilted his head, considering the word. "He kept me small deliberately, you understand. A child is easy to carry and easier to hide. Nobody fears a child until the fear arrives too late to be useful." He lifted one shoulder. "I no longer required hiding. So I stopped being small."

"Just like that."

"Most things are just like that, once you’ve been given permission to want them."

The void around Noah’s finger thickened. A thin line of violet smoke peeled off it and drifted sideways in the warm air.

One watched it go, then turned his back on him and walked away.

Noah’s arm tracked him the whole time. One went straight past the pile of kindling Noah had stacked, past the fire starter sitting beside it, and stopped under the low branches at the clearing’s edge, where the big violet fruit hung down heavy. He picked one. It came off the branch with a soft snap, and he weighed it in his palm, turned it over, then bit into it like an apple. Juice ran down his wrist. He didn’t seem to care.

"They’re sweeter a day after they fall," he said, chewing. "The ground finishes what the branch began." He held the fruit up and looked at it. "I’ve never had much patience for waiting on things to fall."

"Turn around," Noah said.

"You know I can still hear you this way,"

"Turn around."

One sighed through his nose, tossed the fruit up once, caught it, and turned. He came back toward the clearing’s center, unhurried, and sat down on a fallen log a few feet from Noah’s kindling. He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle.

"Sit," he said. "You were building a fire. Build it. I’d hate to be the reason a man goes cold."

"I’m not going to sit down with you."

"Then you intend to stand there for an hour with your finger raised like a schoolboy waiting to be called on?" One took another bite. "Your arm will tire long before my interest does."

"My arm’s fine." Noah didn’t lower it. "And you should know something, so we don’t waste each other’s time. I don’t need the finger. I don’t need my hands at all. I could stand here with them in my pockets and think you out of existence. Not kill you. Not hurt you. Take you out of the universe so clean there wouldn’t be anything left to bury."

One chewed slowly and swallowed.

"Then why the finger?"

"So you’ve got something to look at while we talk."

For a second One didn’t say anything. Then he laughed, a real one, surprised out of him, and he pointed the half-eaten fruit at Noah.

"That," he said, "was very good. And why haven’t you? Thought me away, as you put it."

"You know why."

"I’d prefer to hear you say it."

"Because whatever you did to Lucas is sitting in your head." Noah’s voice stayed level. "How you did it. What you took. Where it went. The second you stop existing, all of that stops existing with you. So right now, you get to keep breathing."

"So I’m safe."

"You’re useful," Noah said. "That’s different. Useful runs out."

One looked at him over the fruit for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, like a man revising a figure in a ledger.

Behind Noah, the trees creaked. Something big pushed through the undergrowth, and Noah didn’t need to turn to know it was Storm. He could feel him. The air in the clearing dropped about ten degrees in two seconds, and the damp on the grass near Noah’s boots went white and stiff. A long, low sound came out of Storm’s chest, so deep Noah felt it through the soles of his feet more than heard it.

Up in the canopy, the birds that had been calling back and forth stopped.

One looked over Noah’s shoulder at the wyvern and raised his eyebrows.

"He’s grown as well," he said. "Good. Everything out here grows or it ends. There is no third condition."

"Storm," Noah said quietly. "Stay."

Storm stayed. He didn’t stop growling.

"How did you find me?" Noah asked.

"I didn’t." One wiped his wrist on his trousers. "I told you I didn’t expect you, and I don’t say things I don’t mean. I was here first. Nine days now." He glanced around the clearing, at the pale silver trees and the star-shaped flowers, like a man checking his own sitting room for dust. "You came down in my garden, Noah. On my world. If one of us is being hunted this evening, I assure you it isn’t me."

"This is your planet?"

"Whatever I stand on belongs to me. That isn’t a boast. It’s simply how ownership works for those who understand it." He took one last bite of the fruit and dropped the rind into the grass. "You’d know that, if anyone had ever bothered to teach you."

’I can’t go in full blast now and accidentally escalate beyond redemption. As much as I want to punch his face in, Lucas needs me to be as calm as ever,’

"Somebody taught me plenty," Noah said.

"Not that."

"No," Noah agreed. "Not that." Noah said.

One looked at him for a while. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his whole posture changed. He looked interested now. Actually interested, like Noah had just turned into something worth studying.

"Shall I tell you what I thought," he said, "the first time I truly saw you? In that square with my mothers and siblings watching as the old man was bleeding across the floor and the Grey boy holding his own chest together with both hands." He smiled a little. "I thought, there is another one."

"Another what?"

"Another like me."

Noah laughed. It came out short and ugly. "You’re out of your mind."

"Am I?" One spread his hands. "Consider what you are. You don’t break things or burn them. You cause them to stop. You speak to a voice no one else can hear, and it answers you with gifts. You cross between stars on the back of a beast the size of a house, and judging by what’s sitting behind your eyes right now, you’ve spent these months hunting. Hunting me. Alone, out here, for months, and you haven’t died." He tapped two fingers against his own chest. "Everyone else in this galaxy crawls, Noah. They crawl between worlds in metal boxes. They crawl before councils and generals and beg permission to draw breath. You and I have never crawled."

"I crawled plenty."

"Once, perhaps. Before you became what you are."

"No. For years." Noah’s voice had gone flat and hard. "You want to know what I was before any of this? I was the guy they put in the back of the line. Lowest scores in my class. The guy instructors used as the example of what not to do. I got sent into a cave on a nothing mission with a team that would’ve been lucky to have anyone there but me, and I almost died in the dark by myself, and nobody would’ve noticed for a week." He took a step closer, the void on his finger flaring brighter. "Everything I have, something tried to kill me for. Every single thing. So don’t sit on a log in somebody else’s forest and tell me I’m like you."

One listened to all of it without blinking.

"A sad story," he said. "But not a different one. Suffering came first for you, and power after. For me, power came first, and the suffering belonged to everyone else. You believe the order is what separates us. It isn’t. Follow both roads to their end and you’ll find two men standing in the same place, holding the same hands. The only difference is that you’ve chosen to be ashamed of yours."

"The order’s the only thing that matters."

One paused. "Go on."

"I paid first," Noah said. "So I know what things cost. What a friend costs. What a night’s sleep costs. What it costs to walk back into a fight after the last one nearly opened you up." He shrugged. "You never paid for anything. Arthur handed you all of it on a plate. So you don’t know what anything’s worth, and you think that makes you free. It just makes you bad at math."

One’s smile stayed exactly where it was. His fingers, resting on his knee, tapped once and went still.

"You’ve rehearsed that."

"I’ve had a while."

Storm’s growl spiked. Frost spread another foot across the grass, crackling under itself, and a thin skin of ice crept up the bottom of the log One was sitting on. He glanced down at it, then back up.

"Do you know what my father used to say about people like you?" One asked.

"Arthur’s not your father. He’s your manufacturer."

For the first time, One’s smile moved. Just a twitch at one corner of his mouth.

"Clever," he said. "Did that arrive just now, or have you been carrying it?"

"I’ve been saving it."

"He would have admired that. He admired clever things. He collected them, the way some men collect blades." One caught himself, almost smiled at it, and moved on. "He believed the universe was divided cleanly. Those who are owned, and those who own. He believed the second kind carried an obligation to stop pretending to be the first. Humility, he used to tell me, is a costume the strong put on so the weak will open the door."

"Sounds like him."

"He spent thousands of years trying to produce something greater than himself. Do you know how many attempts preceded me?" One didn’t wait for an answer. "I asked him once. Thousands. Some of them didn’t survive a week. Some lasted years, and then simply..." He made a small opening motion with his fingers. "Came undone. I was the one that held."

"Congratulations."

"I watched a god bleed onto a floor because of you." One’s eyes came back down to Noah’s. "Do you understand what that does to a child? For my entire life, there was one fixed point in the universe. One certainty. That he could not be touched. And then you and a boy made of lightning brought him to his knees and made him crawl." He said the word slowly. "Crawl. In front of me."

"So you stabbed him."

"I concluded him. There’s a difference." One spread his hands again. "A god who can be made to crawl was never a god. He was an old man with a gift for speeches. That was his lesson to me, too. He simply never imagined it would one day be applied to him."

Noah looked at him for a second.

’How is he so sure?’ Noah thought. ’He doesn’t know. He thinks Arthur’s dead.’

Noah didn’t know whether it was true, either. Nobody had found a body. Out here, Noah had no way to check on anything. But One talked about it with such tired certainty that something cold crawled up the back of Noah’s neck.

"You hear yourself?" Noah said.

"Always."

"Every single thing you’ve said since you sat down, he said first. Two kinds of people. Humility’s a costume. Gods don’t crawl." Noah tilted his head, copying him on purpose. "You killed the man and kept the script. You’re not his heir, One. You’re his recording."

One’s face went perfectly still. Not calm. Still. His jaw set, and for a second he didn’t seem to be breathing.

"Be careful," he said quietly.

"Why? You going to do something about it?" Noah let the void on his finger swell until it hummed. "Go on. Try."