Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner

I’m so sorry... do not unlock!!

The fight that followed made everything that had come before look like a training exercise.

The third gen moved faster than anything Kaine had ever seen, crossing the distance between itself and Steele in the time it took to blink. But the colonel was already swinging, his gauntlets trailing streams of blue energy that left afterimages in the air like electric ghosts.

The vampire twisted aside from the punch with fluid grace, grabbed Steele’s wrist, and used the colonel’s own momentum to throw him across the factory floor. Steele hit a concrete support pillar hard enough to crack it from floor to ceiling, chunks of debris raining down around him, but he rolled with the impact and came up swinging. The man had taken hits from freight trains and kept fighting.

This time his punch connected.

The energy discharge lit up the factory like a miniature sun, throwing stark shadows across the industrial maze of machinery and casting everything in brilliant blue-white. The vampire’s chest caved in under the impact, ribs snapping like dry wood, the sound echoing through the cavernous space like gunshots. But it didn’t go down. Instead, it laughed—a sound like breaking glass mixed with distant thunder, the kind of laugh that belonged in nightmares.

”Gooood...very good,” it said, looking down at its ruined chest with the detached interest of someone examining a torn shirt. The hole in its torso was large enough to put a fist through, edges of bone and flesh already knitting back together with speed..

Already, the wounds were beginning to close, new tissue growing to replace what had been destroyed. Steam rose from the healing flesh, carrying the metallic scent of fresh blood.

Meanwhile, the other two third gens had reached Gwen’s team, and they moved like death itself had learned to dance.

These vampires were older, more experienced, and they’d learned not to underestimate human ingenuity the hard way. Centuries of warfare had taught them patience and cunning.

They didn’t charge blindly into weapons fire or try to overwhelm their opponents with brute force like their younger cousins. Instead, they used the factory’s environment against the humans, turning every piece of machinery into a potential weapon, every shadow into an ambush point.

One of them ripped loose a section of conveyor belt with casual strength that bent steel like putty, and swung it like a massive whip. The metal links crackling through the air with enough force to decapitate anyone unlucky enough to be caught in its path, the sound like thunder rolling through the building.

Gwen threw herself flat as the improvised weapon sailed over her head, taking out a section of wall behind her and showering her with brick dust and mortar.

The second vampire was more subtle, and somehow that made it infinitely more dangerous. It moved through the shadows between machines like liquid darkness, using its supernatural stealth to remain hidden while it maneuvered for the perfect strike. Its footsteps made no sound on the concrete floor, its breathing didn’t disturb the dust motes dancing in the air.

Only the intensity of Nightfall’s glow revealed its presence, the blade’s blessed core responding to supernatural auras like a supernatural Geiger counter, pulsing brighter as the creature drew near.

”Left flank!” Gwen shouted, voice cutting through the chaos, but she was too late. Training could only prepare you for so much.

The vampire emerged from behind a massive industrial loom like a shark breaching water, moving with inhuman speed toward one of the surviving agents. Its claws were already extended, gleaming like surgical steel in the blue light, aimed at the man’s spine with surgical precision.

That was when Jemima’s rifle spoke again and the blessed-charged round caught the creature center mass.

But third gens were built to absorb punishment that would vaporize lesser vampires. The shot spun it around and opened a crater in its chest, black ichor spraying across the factory equipment, but it kept moving. If anything, the wound seemed to make it angry, red eyes blazing brighter with each passing second.

It reached the agent before he could bring his weapon to bear—Morrison, Kaine realized with a sinking heart, recognizing the man’s profile—and opened his throat with a casual swipe that painted the factory equipment red. The man dropped to his knees, clutching his neck with both hands, blood leaking between his fingers in pulsing streams that matched his fading heartbeat. His eyes found Jemima’s across the factory floor, and in them was an apology she didn’t deserve to receive.

”No!” Jemima’s voice cracked with rage and grief that cut through the supernatural dread filling the air. The fallen agent was Morrison—someone she’d trained with, worked with, probably shared drinks with after successful missions. Someone who’d shown her pictures of his kids just last week.

She emptied her rifle’s magazine into the vampire, each blessed-charged round punching holes through supernatural flesh that would have stopped a truck dead in its tracks. The creature’s body jerked and spasmed under the assault, black blood spraying in arcs across the concrete floor. But third generation vampires were beyond such concerns. The creature absorbed the punishment without slowing down, its wounds already beginning to heal even as new ones opened, flesh knitting itself back together with wet, obscene sounds.

When Jemima’s weapon clicked empty, the vampire smiled, showing teeth that belonged in a predator’s mouth.

”My turn,” it said, echoing its weaker cousin from earlier. The same words, but spoken by something that had perfected the art of murder over centuries.

But this time, there was real malice behind the words, cold and calculating and patient. This creature had centuries of experience in killing humans, had probably forgotten more ways to cause suffering than most people could imagine. It intended to make the young hunter’s death educational for everyone present, a lesson in why mortals should fear the dark.

It advanced on Jemima with deliberate slowness, savoring her fear like fine wine. Claws extended like surgical instruments, fangs gleaming in the blue light cast by Nightfall’s blade. Each step was calculated to maximize psychological impact, to break her spirit before it broke her body. Some debris cracked under its feet, and with each footfall, shadows seemed to gather around it like a living cloak.

Boom!!!!

That’s when the factory floor exploded upward in a geyser of concrete and twisted rebar.

The Original had finally decided to join the party, and its entrance redefined the concept of dramatic timing.

It rose from the factory’s basement like something out of a fever dream, debris falling away from its perfect form like water. Its presence hitting the humans like a physical blow, pressing against their minds in irresistible waves. The air itself seemed to thicken around it, growing heavy and oppressive. Even through the building’s walls and his enhanced supernatural senses, Kaine felt the weight of its aura pressing against his consciousness like a thumb on his windpipe.

This wasn’t just a first generation vampire. This was something that had existed since the first nights after the Break, something that remembered what the world had been like before humanity learned to fear the dark. Something that had watched civilizations rise and fall while it remained unchanging, eternal, hungry.

Its eyes burned like red stars, and when it looked at the humans scattered across the factory floor, they blazed with hunger that had been building for centuries. Ancient hunger, refined by time into something pure and terrible.

”Enough!!” it said, and its voice carried harmonics that made the building’s steel framework resonate like a tuning fork. Windows cracked in their frames. Metal groaned. The very air seemed to vibrate with power. ”I grow tired of waiting.”

The Original raised one perfect hand, pale and unmarked by time, and blood began seeping from every surface in the factory—the walls, the floor, even the air itself. Not random bleeding, but controlled, purposeful, the kind of supernatural manipulation that required absolute mastery over the life force that flowed through all living things. This was blood magic in its purest form, wielded by something that had had centuries to perfect the art.

The blood coalesced into floating orbs that hardened into crystalline spikes, each one gleaming with supernatural sharpness and glowing with dark red energy that hurt to look at directly. They hung in the air like a constellation of death, dozens of them, each one capable of punching through steel plating, waiting for its command with patient malevolence.

Blood magic. The kind that could level city blocks and turn armies into memories.

Kaine watched from his perch on the water tower as every weapon the Shadow Guard carried began to glow in response to the supernatural power filling the factory. Nightfall’s blue radiance intensified until it looked like a piece of captured lightning, almost too bright to look at directly. Steele’s gauntlets hummed with stored energy, electricity crackling between the fingers. Even the conventional firearms began to spark and crackle as their blessed components overloaded, pushed beyond their design limits by the sheer supernatural pressure filling the air.

The Original smiled, showing fangs that looked like they’d been carved from ivory by a master craftsman, perfect and terrible and utterly without mercy.

”Now,” it said, voice carrying the weight of centuries, ”let us begin.”