Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner-Chapter 643: Back from the dead

Noah read it twice. He had not known what she was until the system said it. Just the wyvern, just the female, until the word appeared in clean white text in his vision and gave her a designation he had no other way of knowing.

’Empress,’ he thought. The females were Empress. Storm was a Monarch. Same species, different designation depending on what they were.

He thought about twenty-three eggs with no adequate food source waiting for them in this world. About a wyvern that had been running herself lean for months trying to sustain them on harbor fish. About what it meant to leave that situation alone.

He selected yes.

The purple void energy came from his hand the way it always did, flowing outward from his palm in channels that ran along her scales, following the electrical lines in her body like water finding already-cut grooves. She twitched, her whole body registering the foreign energy, the spines flaring briefly.

The mark began forming at her forehead, taking shape in that purple-black void energy.

Then her eyes opened fully.

The blue in them went from pale silver to something far brighter, the charge in her body spiking in a single instant that he saw but could not react to. Every scale lit up from neck to tail in one continuous line, brilliant white at the tips, and she hit him directly in the chest.

Not with her body. With the discharge. A bolt of lightning that came from her mouth and connected with his sternum.

BOOM!

[-1250 HP]

Noah left the ground.

He traveled through the darkness of the cave fast enough that the stone he hit when he stopped felt less like a wall and more like a foam because he passed through it so easily due to the force projecting him.

He slid down it and landed on the cave floor and stayed there.

His chest was on fire. Not frost burn. Electrical fire, starting at the point of contact and running outward through his nervous system in every direction at once.

He could hear her across the cave, the crunching sound of core after core. He reached inward and checked his storage with the reflexive attention of someone taking damage assessment.

[Category 2 Beast Cores: 31]

She had eaten fifteen in the time it had taken him to travel across the cave and stop moving.

Noah tried to move his arms.

They were not cooperating yet.

He lay there, listening to her eat, watching the amber glow of void energy move across the cave ceiling from where she stood, and let his regeneration do what it could with what was left of his void reserves.

At some point his eyes closed.

He was not sure how much time passed.

When he opened them again the cave was different.

The crunching had stopped. The amber glow was gone. The electrical field that had been cycling through the air when she was actively present had dropped to something quieter, a background hum rather than an active presence.

Noah sat up slowly, his chest registering the complaint of tissue that had been electrically traumatized and was still in the process of deciding how it felt about that. The hole in his shirt was clean-edged in the way fabric did not usually tear, the surrounding cloth singed stiff and brown.

He looked across the nesting chamber.

She was in the far corner, near the largest cluster of eggs. The eggs were not exactly what he was looking at.

She was encased. Not in stone, not in anything the cave had produced. The material was hers, generated from her own body, blue-white and solid, ice threaded through with active lightning that ran in slow continuous arcs between the outer surface and whatever was inside. The cocoon was large enough to contain her and the cluster of eggs near her, and it breathed, the outer surface expanding and contracting in a rhythm that matched nothing biological Noah could name.

He looked at it for a long moment.

The system text appeared without being prompted.

[Hollow Blizzard Empress: Reproductive State - Active]

[Biological process initiated. Duration indeterminate.]

[Do not disturb.]

Noah read it twice.

’The cores,’ he thought, watching lightning run slow patterns through the cocoon’s surface. ’She absorbed enough void energy from the cores and it triggered something. Or the taming attempt did. Or both.’

He sat with that for a while. Watched the cocoon breathe. Thought about nothing in particular because thinking in any organized way was still slightly beyond him.

Two hours passed in which nothing changed except that his chest hurt progressively less and the cocoon continued its slow rhythmic expansion and contraction.

Eventually he stood.

His legs held. He checked his storage once more before moving.

[Category 2 Beast Cores: 31]

[Category 3 Beast Cores: 156]

[Category 4 Beast Cores: 284]

[Category 5 Beast Cores: 3]

’I’ll come back,’ he thought, looking at the cocoon one last time. ’With cores. More category twos at minimum. As many as I can move without questions getting asked about where they went.’

He found the passage that led out of the nesting chamber and started walking.

The tunnel system took longer from the inside than it had going in, partly because he had been moving fast in both directions previously and partly because his sense of direction underground was imprecise at the best of times. He passed through three distinct chambers before he found what looked like an original entrance, a crack in the rock face wide enough to fit through sideways, cold air coming through it from outside.

The outside was mountain.

Not hillside, not elevated ground near a village. Actual mountain, the kind where the treeline was well below where he was standing and the nearest visible path was a series of switchbacks cutting down a slope that disappeared into forest several hundred feet below. The village was nowhere visible. The harbor was nowhere visible.

Noah stood on the mountainside in a shirt with a hole burned through the center of it and looked at the view.

He took the shirt off. Looked at the hole, which was about the size of his fist, perfectly circular, the edges showing the glassy quality of fabric that had been superheated rather than torn. He turned it over once in his hands then set it on the rock beside him.

He sat down on a flat outcropping and looked at the forest below and thought.

’Twenty-three eggs,’ he thought. ’And now however many more she lays in that cocoon. All of them in a world that cannot support what they need without help.’

He thought about the cores in his storage. About what they would mean to a clutch of hatchlings with no other viable food source in this era.

’I cannot be here permanently,’ he thought. ’There is a quest. There is a way back. There are people in 2077 who are waiting.’

He stayed with that for a moment. The mountain was quiet around him, just wind and the distant sound of birds below the treeline.

Then he said, quietly, to the morning air:

"Ares. Flame."

He sat back on the rock, his bare feet on the cold stone, and looked at the sky.

Twenty minutes later the mist arrived. Red at the treeline first, low to the ground, rolling upward across the slope with the slow certainty of something following a signal rather than weather. The temperature climbed with it, the mountain air losing its bite as the mist advanced.

Ares came through the treeline and landed with the particular unhurried ease of something that had come because it chose to. The impact of something that size touching down on rock traveled up through the outcropping and into Noah’s feet.

Noah climbed on. The height from the ground when Ares rose to full standing was the same disorienting vertical shift it always was.

They moved down the mountain and out over the forest, the treeline passing below, the landscape opening up as they gained altitude. Noah spotted the harbor first, the light off water visible from a long way out, and then the village arranged along its eastern bank. Smoke from cook fires, the general working noise of a settlement going about its morning. The sun was well up. It was fully day.

He directed Ares wide of the main approach, down into a dense section of tree cover maybe four hundred feet from the village’s outer edge. The landing was a squeeze, branches moving under the pressure of something large that was not particularly concerned about the inconvenience they presented.

Noah dropped to the ground. Ares settled back into the cover of the trees. Noah walked the remaining distance on foot, the grass damp under his boots, his shirt gone, the burn marks on his chest visible in the morning light.

He came in through the outer edge of the village, between buildings, and emerged onto the main road.

He had taken maybe ten steps when he heard it.

"It’s Burt!"

Werner’s voice.

Then motion. Recruits turning, heads coming around, people moving toward him from multiple directions at once with the momentum of relief that had been sitting compressed for hours waiting for somewhere to go.

"Where have you—"

"We thought you were—"

"What happened to your—"

He was surrounded within seconds, faces he had trained beside for weeks appearing on all sides, everyone talking at once, questions overlapping in the way they do when a group of people who have been scared for a long time suddenly have someone to direct all of it at.

Noah raised a hand. "I’m fine. I’m okay."

"You’re not wearing a shirt." Sera, pushing in from the left with her green armband and her watchful face carrying more visible relief than she probably intended to show. "Where is your shirt."

"Gone. It’s a long story."

"What actually happened?" Cael, direct as always, arms crossed, his expression carrying the particular set of someone who had been managing other people’s worry on top of his own for several hours. "You were at the harbor. Then the trap went off and you were gone."

"I..." Noah paused. Let a beat go by, the kind that happened when someone was genuinely trying to organize fragmented memory. "I don’t fully know. The trap deployed. The wyvern came through and everything happened very fast. I went into the water, I think. Or near it." He looked at the ground for a second then back up. "I woke up on a shoreline. Not the harbor. Further out. Sun was already up and I’d been out for hours. I just... started walking."

"You walked back," Finn said. "From wherever you washed up. You just walked."

"There wasn’t a lot of other options," Noah said.

A pause moved through the group.

"Did you see it?" Werner asked.

Noah looked at him. Werner was standing back slightly from the cluster, his arms at his sides, his gauntleted hand catching the morning light. His expression was composed in the way Werner’s expressions were always composed, showing what he chose to show and keeping the rest somewhere inaccessible.

"The wyvern?" Noah said.

"The wyvern."

"I couldn’t tell you much. It was dark and everything happened fast. I didn’t—" Noah shook his head. "I didn’t see where it went. I barely knew where I was."

Werner’s eyes stayed on his face for two seconds longer than they needed to before he looked away.

"If it did Burt this dirty," a voice came from somewhere in the back of the group, not loud, just honest, "what was it going to do to any of us?"

Nobody answered that.

The silence that followed had a particular quality. Twenty-eight people standing in a Harrowfield road doing the private arithmetic of what it meant that the strongest person among them had washed up unconscious on a shoreline and walked back shirtless with burn marks on his chest and no clear account of what had happened.

Then the crowd parted.

Nami came through it in a straight line, covering the distance with the directness of someone who had decided that whatever social geometry existed between her and the rest of the group did not apply to this specific moment. She reached Noah and put her arms around him with a tightness that said several things she was probably not going to say out loud.

Noah stood there for a moment, then put his arms around her back.

"You were gone," she said. Not an accusation. Just a statement carrying weight underneath it.

"I know. I’m sorry."

She pulled back, looked at him, and the expression on her face was the one she usually kept somewhere inaccessible. Not quite visible but not quite hidden either. She looked at the burn marks on his chest, at the circular shape of them, and said nothing about any of it.

"You’re an idiot," she said, which was the Nami version of I was worried about you and meant exactly the same thing.

"Consistently," Noah agreed.

Pip appeared over her shoulder with his chakram on his belt and his face carrying the expression of a man who had spent several hours working very hard to appear less concerned than he actually was.

"Right," Pip said. "So. You went for a swim, lost your shirt, woke up on a beach, walked back. That’s what we’re going with."

"That’s what happened."

"Mm." Pip looked at him with the particular look he got when he was filing something away for later. "Great. I’m just going to note for the record that I was awake when you disappeared."

"You were asleep when the trap went off," Nami said. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

"I was resting my eyes. There’s a difference." Pip fell into step beside Noah as the group began moving, the compressed energy of everyone’s relief dispersing into motion. "I’ve got theories."

"About what."

"Several things." Pip glanced at him sideways. "I’ll tell you when you’ve eaten something. You look terrible."

"You’re very comforting."

"I’m honest. It’s different."

Nami was on his other side, and the three of them moved through the group toward the inn, the recruits around them settling back into their own conversations, the immediate crisis of Burt being missing dissolving into the particular relief of something that had resolved without catastrophe.

Behind them, at the edge of the road, Werner stood still.

He watched them go. Pip talking. Nami close. Noah in the center, responding to questions from recruits who had fallen in beside him, his expression easy and unremarkable and carrying nothing that looked like someone who had spent the night on a mountain.

Werner looked at the burn marks on Noah’s chest. The specific shape of them, perfectly circular, the kind of pattern that came from something precise rather than something chaotic. Not the scattered singeing of someone caught too close to an electrical discharge. Something directed. Something that had hit him square and straight and known exactly where it was aiming.

He looked at Noah’s face again. At the ease of it. At the right words at the right moments, his attention distributed across the group with the familiarity of someone who had been managing other people’s perceptions for a long time.

’I was the only one awake,’ Werner thought. He had not said this to anyone. Had held it through the hours since, carefully, aware of what it could cut if handled wrong. ’Everyone else was asleep. I was watching the harbor. I saw the trap deploy. I heard the discharge.’

He had looked at the inner dock in that moment of brilliant blue-white light.

He had seen Burt running. Not away. Not toward shelter. Toward it. Three running steps down the dock with his hands reaching out toward something moving faster than the eye could track.

’He ran at it,’ Werner thought, watching Noah say something that made Pip laugh, the sound carrying back across the road. ’He deliberately ran at a wyvern in full flight and grabbed on. While every other person in that harbor was asleep or just waking up.’

And now he was standing there telling everyone he did not know what happened. That he had washed up on a shore somewhere and walked back.

Werner’s thumb moved across his gauntlet’s knuckle ridge. Once. Twice.

’I don’t buy it,’ he thought, watching Noah disappear through the inn’s doorway surrounded by people who were glad he was alive. ’Not one word of it.’