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

**BOOM!!**

Suddenly a loud sound snapped Noah out of his daze.

Water splashed up everywhere and when it settled, one of the neighbouring boats near them about twenty feet away was smashed to bits. The occupants had jumped off last minute, all four of them hitting the water in different directions, the shrapnel from the hull spreading outward across the surface in a flat ring.

Noah was already moving before the debris settled.

He hit the water feet first, the cold slamming into him like a wall, and pulled his arms back into a stroke that covered the distance between his boat and the nearest recruit in under four seconds. The boy was disoriented, taking on water, his arms working without coordination. Noah got an arm under his chest from behind and turned immediately, kicking hard, pulling them both back toward the boat.

He deposited the recruit over the side and went back in.

Three more. One had grabbed a floating piece of hull and was managing. Noah collected the other two in two separate dives, each one faster than the last, the cold water irrelevant against the void-enhanced output his body was running. He got them over the gunwale with the efficiency of someone moving cargo rather than people, arms hooked, lifted, deposited, moving again before the previous one had finished coughing.

The last recruit he pulled from the water landed in the boat and immediately said ”thank you” to the floor of the hull, which was about the most anyone could manage given the circumstances.

Pip looked at Noah, dripping, standing in the boat. Then at the four extra people now sitting in a vessel designed for four.

”We have a problem,” Pip said.

Noah looked down.

One of the wood splinter had come in low, driven by the blast displacement, punching through the hull just above the waterline on the port side. Already a thin ribbon of water was threading through it, catching the last light. With four extra people the waterline had dropped two inches closer to the breach, and the ribbon was becoming something less polite.

”Row,” Noah said. ”Everyone row. Now.”

They rowed. Eight people in a boat built for four, the hull groaning under redistribution of weight, the breach beginning to admit water in earnest as they picked up speed because speed required leaning and leaning put pressure on the damaged side. One of the recruits found a bailing cup in the bow locker and started working without being asked, which was the most useful instinct anyone had shown in the last two minutes.

They hit the dock at a pace that was less arrival and more controlled collision, the hull grinding against the pier posts, people tumbling onto the planking with the uncoordinated relief of the recently nearly drowned.

The boat settled immediately once the weight left it, the breach dropping below the waterline as it rode higher, and within thirty seconds it was sitting three inches lower than it should have been and still descending.

Noah stepped onto the dock and looked at the village.

Two buildings on the eastern edge were burning. The smoke columns from the earlier impacts had thickened and spread, the fires feeding on timber construction with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for an excuse. People were running in the streets, the kind of movement that came from not having a destination yet, just away from the sound.

The other boats arrived in clusters over the next five minutes, pulling up to whatever dock space was available, people climbing out with expressions that were still catching up to the situation.

Nami reached him first, her hair loose from the boat’s movement, her eyes taking in the fires and the smoke and the sky to the northwest where the shapes were still coming.

”What do we do?” she said.

Noah looked at the fires. At the watchtowers along the perimeter, at least one of which had people in it still, visible as shapes against the darkening sky. At the street layout of Harrowfield, the way it compressed toward the harbor, the narrow approaches from the inland side, the chokepoints built by decades of organic construction that had no strategic intent but produced strategic geometry by accident.

’Mrs. Brooks,’ he thought, and the voice in his head was as clear as if she were standing behind him. ’Civilians don’t win wars. They survive them. Your job is to make sure they still exist when it’s over.’

”Spread out,” Noah said, his voice carrying differently than it usually did, the register dropping, the pace becoming something deliberate. ”Pip, Cael, get to the watchtowers and confirm what they are seeing and how many. I need numbers. Werner, take three reds and cover the road that comes in from the north side, nothing moves through that without you knowing about it.” He looked at the nearest green recruit standing on the dock still staring at the fires. ”Sera. Every green you have, I need them standing by. You are not fighting tonight. You are keeping everyone else alive long enough to fight.”

Sera blinked once and started moving without asking why.

”Nami—”

”I heard you,” Nami said, already turning. ”I’ll get the yellows.”

He had been talking for forty seconds when Valen arrived.

The instructor came down the harbor road at a pace that suggested he had been moving since the first impact, his face carrying the particular controlled expression of a man who had arrived at a situation and was deciding in real time how much of what he found he had already accounted for. He stopped when he saw Noah standing at the dock’s edge with his arms at his sides issuing assignments to recruits who were moving to execute them.

Valen said nothing for a moment.

Noah turned to face him. ”You’ve sent word to the nearest outpost already.”

”Twenty minutes ago,” Valen said. ”When the first fireballs hit.”

”How long until substantial support reaches us?”

Valen’s jaw tightened. ”A day. At best.”

Noah breathed out through his nose.

’A day. Against dozens of aerial units and at least two sea-based creatures of unknown classification.’ He looked at the northwestern sky. ’Arthur did not move impulsively. These formations are organized. Riders in formation means command structure, communication, coordinated objectives. This is not a raid. This is the leading edge of an invasion and Harrowfield is the point of entry because of the water.’

He looked at the harbor. At the bay opening out to the northwest where the approach was clean and wide and completely undefended.

’Obvious in retrospect,’ he thought. ’The kingdom left the water unaccounted for. Every defensive investment went inland, to roads, to castle walls, to choke points that assumed an enemy coming over land. Nobody planned for a king who weaponized dragons capable of crossing open water in formation.’

He turned back to Valen. ”Then we have tonight.”

”Recruit—”

”There are three problems,” Noah said. ”First, the civilians. Panicked civilians become casualties and then they become leverage. Arthur’s men will take prisoners if they can because a captured villager is worth more to him than a dead one in the short term.” He was already scanning the street layout. ”Every child and every woman who cannot fight needs to move now. Stone structures, cellars, anything that is not timber. Ten recruits escort and hold that position. They do not engage.”

’Remove variables,’ he thought. ’Panic kills faster than weapons.’

Valen was looking at him with an expression that had moved past surprise into something more careful.

”Second,” Noah continued. ”We do not hide. Hiding means containment and containment means capture and captured dragon knight recruits become the reason the nearest relief force does exactly what Arthur wants rather than what the kingdom needs.”

’Deny the enemy their objective. If you cannot destroy the target, make the target worthless.’

”Third,” Noah said, ”the dragons are the most dangerous thing in the air and the least dangerous thing on the ground. We do not fight them in the sky. We bring them down.”

”How,” Valen said.

”We make the air expensive.” Noah looked at Nami, who had returned with six yellows behind her, all of them with their blessed ranged weapons in hand or at their backs. ”Concentrated fire, not accurate fire. Density. Make every approach vector into the village a space where something is coming at you before you can deliver. Wing membranes, joint connections, anything that affects stability. You do not need to kill them. You need to make them choose between landing and taking damage they cannot sustain.”

’You don’t have to shoot down the bomber,’ he thought. ’You just have to make it miss.’

”And when they land,” Werner said from somewhere behind him, his voice flat and carrying, ”they land in our streets. Where the riders cannot maneuver and the dragons cannot turn.”

”Yes,” Noah said.

Werner looked at him for a beat. Said nothing.

”All greens stay back,” Noah continued, raising his voice for the recruits assembling around him. ”You are the reason people stay alive after the fighting. Yellows take every elevated position available, rooftops, the watchtowers, anywhere with a clear sightline to the approach vectors. Your job is to deny clean approach and bring down anything that tries to deliver a payload from altitude.”

He looked at the reds. At Brom, who had said nothing but whose expression carried the forward-leaning attention of someone who wanted a direction. At Werner. At Cael and the others who had survived the gate and the passage and Gorrauth and everything this training had asked of them.

”Reds,” Noah said. ”Anything that lands is yours.”

Brom smiled. It was not a warm expression.

”What about the things in the water,” Cael said.

’Sea-based assault units,’ Noah thought. ’Arthur has assets he hasn’t deployed yet. The creatures in the water are holding at the perimeter, which means they are not the opening move. They are the closing one. The aerial assault comes first to generate chaos, create gaps, draw defensive attention upward. Then the water units come through the harbor into a defense that is already stretched and looking the wrong direction.’

”The harbor entrance,” Noah said. ”Two reds hold it. Nothing comes through without contact.”

’Control the beachhead. Fight them at landing, not inland. Defeat them in detail before they assemble.’

Valen had been quiet for the last two minutes. Noah became aware of this and looked at him.

The instructor’s face carried something he had not seen there before. Not disagreement. Something between assessment and a thing that had not finished forming yet.

’I was a former knight,’ Valen thought, his eyes on the boy standing at the harbor’s edge giving operational assignments to trained recruits who were executing them without question. ’I know warfare. I understand tactics. But this is something else. This is structured doctrine. Where does a tavern boy learn structured doctrine?’

He said none of this aloud. He repeated Noah’s assignments in his own voice to the recruits still looking between the two of them for authority, his tone carrying the weight of an instructor’s command, and watched the group move.

People began to flow through the village in purposeful streams. Villagers guided by recruits toward the stone granary and the castle cellar, children carried by parents who had stopped panicking because someone had told them where to go and given them something to move toward. Gladys appeared from somewhere and took charge of the civilian evacuation with the grim efficiency of someone who had trained for exactly this and never wanted to need it.

Men with no combat training stood in doorways with tools in their hands, looking uncertain.

”Your choice,” Noah said, passing one of them. ”Nobody is making you. But if you pick it up, you pick it up and you stay on your feet.”

The man looked at the hammer in his hand. Looked at the smoke rising from the eastern edge of his village. Stepped into the street.

Others followed him.

Noah moved to the village’s outer edge, the road that ran from the harbor toward the open ground to the northwest. The buildings on either side were stone at the base, two stories, narrow alleys between them. Bad terrain for anything with a wingspan. Good terrain for people who knew the streets.

Nami appeared at his shoulder. ”Yellows are in position.”

”Good.”

”Noah.” She lowered her voice. ”We have twenty-eight recruits. There are dozens of those things in the sky.”

”I know.”

”So what are we actually doing here.”

He looked at her. ”We’re making tonight expensive enough that Arthur has to stop and reorganize before the next move. We don’t need to win. We need to cost him enough time that the relief force arrives into a village that still exists.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Then nodded and moved back to her position.

Brom materialized at Noah’s left shoulder. ”The boy’s scared,” he said quietly, jerking his chin toward a recruit who was standing very still near the wall, his hands gripping his armband.

Noah looked at him. Young, maybe sixteen, one of the reds who had come through the gate passage on nothing but instinct and survived things that had killed older recruits.

”Hey,” Noah said.

The recruit looked up.

”Can I trust you tonight?”

The boy straightened. ”I—yes. Yes.”

”The only person you can absolutely trust is yourself,” Noah said. ”But right now the difference between staying alive and not is having each other’s backs. So stay alert. Watch the alleys. If something comes at me from a direction I’m not watching, you call it out.”

The boy nodded, something settling in his face that had not been there before.

Werner stepped up on Noah’s right, his gauntleted hand loose at his side, his eyes on the northwestern sky where the shapes were resolving into things with bodies and wings and riders.

”They’re close,” Werner said.

”I know.”

”The forbidden technique,” Werner said, his voice dropping until only Noah could hear it. ”The men we will engage tonight. Our scouts reported it in a briefing three months ago before we joined the order. My father told me they were soldiers with red and white energy coating their hands. King Arthur’s technique. His gift to his army.” He paused. ”The same energy you used in the gate. Against Gorrauth.”

Noah said nothing.

”I’m not asking,” Werner said. ”Not tonight.”

”Good,” Noah said.

Silence settled over the street. The fires on the eastern edge had begun to die down, the initial impacts burning out without spreading to neighboring structures because the stone construction had caught what the timber couldn’t contain. The smoke was still there, columns rising in the dark, but the immediate catastrophe had not materialized into the total conflagration Noah suspected had been the intent.

’First strikes were terror,’ he thought. ’Shock and awe. Panic the civilian population, disrupt organization, destroy the will to resist before the main assault deploys. Arthur’s men are patient. They’re waiting for the confusion to compound before they commit.’

The shapes on the horizon were close enough now to be individual. He could see wing joints, rider positions, the organized spacing of a formation that had drilled this approach.

Then, from below the waterline, something moved.

The harbor water broke at the mouth, and something large opened in the darkness, something that was mostly teeth and surface area, and from inside it men began to climb.

Their hands were wrong. Even at this distance the energy was visible, red and white light curling up their forearms and across their knuckles, the dark chi sitting on their skin like something borrowed from a philosophy that this kingdom had decided was forbidden.

Brom’s hands hit the ground as he crouched, his body beginning to expand outward with the slow pressure of his enhancement magic pushing his frame past its ordinary limits. Werner’s gauntleted arm rose slightly, the metal shifting, the single fist becoming something more substantial than it had been.

Noah felt the white chi rise in his legs and his hands, the clean brilliant energy running up through him from somewhere internal that had nothing to do with this timeline’s rules and everything to do with what he actually was underneath the name Burt.

He looked at the street behind him. At the recruits in position. At Pip somewhere on a rooftop with his chakram. At Nami with her knives and her blessed weapons and her absolute refusal to be anywhere she was not needed. At Sera with her green armband and her bottle and the steady competence of someone who had counted flames in a gate room to keep herself from losing her mind and had come out the other side of it still standing.

At all of them.

He unfolded his hands from behind his back and let the white chi run visible down his arms.

”They are here,” he said.

The sky broke open.

Dragons dropping through cloud cover, roars that hit the chest before they hit the ears, the sound arriving as physical pressure a half second before the noise component registered. Fire came first, a column of it that hit the road thirty meters ahead of Noah’s position and turned stone red. Then from another angle something blue-white and crackling, an electrical discharge that carved a trench across a rooftop and sent chimney fragments raining into the street. Then something slow and heavy and orange, thick as poured metal, eating through the cobblestones where it landed with a patience that was more disturbing than the fast attacks.

Three different dragons. Three different outputs. None of them the same.

’Arthur’s been collecting,’ Noah thought, the observation arriving clean and cold beneath the adrenaline. ’Not breeding a single type. Collecting variety. Different elemental affinities, different attack patterns, different threat profiles. He’s built a force that cannot be countered by a single defense.’

From somewhere above and to his left, a sound he recognized.

A chakram. The specific singing note of Pip’s blessed weapon leaving his hand, high and sharp, cutting through the noise of everything else.

Then impact.

The dragon that had been descending toward the street’s center caught the chakram across its left wing joint, and the explosion that accompanied it was not the kind that fire made. It was compressed, concussive, a detonation that radiated outward from the point of contact and rocked the dragon sideways in the air with the force of something that had decided physics was more of a suggestion than a rule. The wing crumpled inward at the joint, the membrane losing its geometry, and the dragon’s descent went from controlled to committed in the space of one wingbeat.

It came down hard. The impact shook the street and the buildings on either side and the riders on its back went over in different directions, their black armor catching the firelight as they tumbled.

One got up immediately.

The dark chi on his hands was running hot, red and white coiling up past the wrists, the energy of something that had been built rather than born.

Noah moved.

The white chi in his legs converted the first step into something that left dust behind him, the displacement visible to Werner on his right who said nothing and started moving himself. The second step covered ten feet. The third was contact.

The knight threw a dark chi punch that came fast and had real weight behind it, the energy amplifying the strike in the way Noah recognized from his own use of the technique.

He was not there for it.

He went low, his right foot sweeping the knight’s ankle at the precise angle that removed the foundation from under them without requiring the force to simply overpower the stance. The knight’s face went forward. Before gravity finished the job Noah’s right hand came up behind the knight’s head, the vital point technique compressing the force down from a strike into a needle of concentrated pressure at the junction between skull and spine.

The knight went face-first into the cobblestones and did not move.

From above, came a roar that hit the sternum.

Noah looked up to see a second dragon descending toward their position, its chest expanding with that geometric dilation that meant something was building inside it.

From a rooftop to his left, a brilliant gold bloom erupted. Not a recruit. Valen, moving with a momentum that had nothing to do with the careful instructor energy he carried in training, his body catching the air from the rooftop edge, a spear in his hand that was trailing lightning from tip to shaft, the energy crackling along the weapon’s length with a brightness that made the street below it daylight for a full second.

The spear left his hand.

It hit the dragon between the eyes.

The roar that had been building died. The chest contraction that had been loading released as nothing. The dragon’s descent converted from attack to fall, the enormous body dropping from the air and hitting the street at the northern edge of the village with an impact that traveled through the ground and up through every pair of boots for a hundred meters.

The rider came off on impact, rolling, coming up with dark chi already running on both hands.

A yellow projectile caught him before he finished standing. From somewhere across the rooftops, angle and source invisible, a shaft of concentrated energy that hit him in the shoulder and sat him back down.

Noah was already looking at the street.

More knights coming from the water. Moving through the harbor mouth and into the village roads with the organized spacing of a force that had practiced this. The dark chi running on their hands was uniform, consistent, the product of training rather than individual variation.

Werner was to his right, his gauntleted arm driving into the nearest knight with a force that the stone wall behind the man registered in the form of new cracks. Brom was to his left and larger than he had been at the street’s edge, his frame pushing past its ordinary dimensions, his strikes carrying a weight that sent armored men into walls and kept them there.

Noah looked at the street ahead. At the knights still coming. At the dragons still dropping from cloud cover in coordinated passes, forced lower with each pass by the yellows on the rooftops, the approach vectors narrowing, the air above Harrowfield becoming exactly what he had needed it to become.

Expensive.

”Advance!” Noah called, his voice carrying the full length of the street.

The reds moved.