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

The last person came through the portal and Noah sealed it.

Five hundred of them on an alien shore. Ares soldiers, task force, Eclipse mixed together, nobody talking much because there wasn’t much to say yet. The water behind them was doing something slightly wrong with its rhythm, the waves coming in at intervals that weren’t quite Earth intervals, and the sky ahead was darker than it should have been for what the mission clock said was early morning local time.

Noah looked at the city in the distance.

Angel appeared beside him. ”How long do we have before first light.”

”Two hours local,” Noah said. ”Maybe less.”

”Then we need to move.”

”We need eyes first,” Noah said.

That was where Kelvin came in.

He had built the drones over the last three weeks of transit. Ten thousand of them, each one fist sized, matte black casing that absorbed light rather than reflected it. The principle behind them was simple and the application of it was what made the whole operation possible.

Noah could void blink to any location he had visual on. Any location. Anywhere on the planet. If a drone was sitting on a rooftop in a city sixty kilometers away and transmitting a live feed back to Noah’s display, that rooftop was somewhere Noah could be in a fraction of a second. And if Noah could be there, he could take someone with him. And if he could take someone with him he could take a whole team, moving them one blink at a time to positions spread across an entire globe simultaneously.

That was the plan.

Not one team inserting into one location. Sixteen teams in sixteen locations across the planet’s surface appearing at the same moment, holding their positions before anyone understood what had arrived.

The drones went out first.

They released from the packs the Eclipse engineers had carried through the portal, pre-programmed dispersal patterns taking them in every direction simultaneously, riding the upper wind currents down through the cloud layer and across the planet’s surface. From the ground they were invisible. Too small, too dark, too spread.

From orbit, if anyone had been watching, the dispersal looked like something breathing out.

Within four hours Kelvin had feeds from eleven thousand locations.

He had built an eye that covered most of a world.

And Noah had an anchor point anywhere he could see.

This was the part of the plan that had required the most argument.

Not because it was conceptually complicated. The principle was simple. Noah could void blink to any location he had visual on. Give him eyes across the planet and he could move himself anywhere on it instantly, which meant he could move anyone he was physically holding anywhere on it instantly, which meant small teams could appear in locations simultaneously across the entire globe without any of them having traveled there in any conventional sense.

The argument had been about scale.

Lucas had said it first. ”You’re talking about coordinating simultaneous insertions across an entire planet. Every team going in at the same moment, every position held, every action taken concurrently. If one team gets spotted before the others are in position the whole thing collapses.”

”Which is why we don’t move until all positions are confirmed,” Noah had said.

”And if one position can’t be confirmed? If the drone coverage has a gap? If the location we need for a critical team has no visual and we can’t get one?”

”Then we find another way into that position,” Noah had said. ”But we don’t start until every team is ready to move.”

”You’re asking for perfect coordination on an alien planet we’ve never been to with teams who have never operated together at this scale.”

”Yes,” Noah had said.

Lucas had looked at him for a long moment. Then he had nodded and started asking the next set of questions which was how Lucas said yes to things he had reservations about, by moving immediately to the details because the decision was made and reservations were less useful than logistics.

The teams had been built over the following days. Small, never more than four people, chosen for the specific requirements of each position they were being inserted into. Speed, stealth, language capability through Aurelius’s translation devices, the ability to operate without support for extended periods. Eclipse members, task force personnel, Ares soldiers who had volunteered and whose king had not discouraged them.

Each team knew their location. Their objective. Their extraction protocol if things went badly. They did not know what the other teams were doing because compartmentalization was how you kept a sixteen team simultaneous global insertion from becoming sixteen separate failures if any one piece got exposed.

The moment all teams confirmed ready, Noah moved.

From a bird’s eye view, if anyone had been watching from the right altitude at the right moment, the planet’s surface had lit up.

Purple.

Not everywhere. Not continuously. Just dots, dozens of them, appearing simultaneously in locations spread across the globe, each one lasting exactly as long as it took for the people coming through to arrive and for Noah to blink back to the next location, which was fractions of a second. The dots appeared and disappeared faster than most eyes could have tracked them individually.

But from altitude, in the aggregate, it looked like a planet that had just experienced something.

Like something had breathed on it.

---

Diana had been on the surface for eleven hours before the drone network was dense enough to begin the government location phase.

She had spent those eleven hours doing what the plan required, which was establishing the ground picture. Moving through the city’s outskirts on foot with Shade masked beside her, the dragon’s presence detectable only as a faint warmth to her left and the occasional displacement of air when he adjusted his position. She wore clothing sourced from the intelligence files Aurelius’s scouts had built over months of long range observation, nothing that would mark her immediately as wrong, though her face and her height and the structure of her body were all wrong in ways that clothing couldn’t fix.

So she moved at night.

The city’s night was not Earth’s night. The planet had two moons and both of them were up, and their combined light was enough to see by without it being enough to see details clearly. It turned everything silver and faintly uncertain, shapes visible but textures lost, which was actually useful for someone who needed to move without being seen clearly.

She called them the Vel’ai.

Not Le’anna’s people, not the alien species, not the inhabitants. The Vel’ai. The name had come from the intelligence files, the closest phonetic rendering of what Aurelius’s scouts had recorded the planet’s inhabitants calling themselves in the few communications that had been intercepted and translated.

They were tripedal.

That was the first thing that mattered operationally. Three legs arranged in a triangular configuration beneath a torso that sat lower than a human torso, the center of gravity different, the movement pattern a rolling gait that was completely stable and looked strange to eyes that had grown up watching bipedal locomotion. One eye, central, large, the iris taking up most of the visible surface, adapted for the planet’s lower light conditions. Two arms, each one ending in four fingers with an opposable structure that worked differently from a human thumb but achieved similar results.

They were not small. Average height was comparable to a human, maybe slightly taller, and the tripedal stance gave them a width that made them look more substantial than the height suggested.

Diana had watched them for eleven hours from positions that Shade found and she maintained. Watched how they moved through the city. What routes they took. What they avoided. Where the densest foot traffic was and where it thinned. What the lighting situation was at different hours. Whether they had any kind of patrol or security presence and what it looked like.

They had security. Not military. Something closer to civic enforcement, small groups of Vel’ai in markings she had started to identify as authority indicators, moving through the city at regular intervals on routes that were patterned enough to predict after three hours of observation.

’No random element,’ she thought, watching a group of three pass below her position on a low roof. ’Same route, same timing. Whoever trained them didn’t emphasize unpredictability. That’s a doctrine gap.’

She marked the patrol timing in her wrist display and moved.

The drone feeds had been running for four hours now. Kelvin’s voice had come through her earpiece at the two hour mark with a compressed update. Drone coverage at sixty three percent. Working on the gaps. He had sent her a partial map of the city center with concentration points marked, locations where the drone density was highest and therefore where Noah’s void blink access was most reliable if she needed extraction or reinforcement.

The governing body was the objective.

Finding it had taken the full eleven hours.

Not because it was hidden. Because it didn’t look like what she expected. She had been scanning for something that corresponded to human concepts of governance, a large central building, security presence, visible authority markers. The Vel’ai didn’t organize that way. Their governing structure was distributed, she had worked this out gradually from watching which buildings the authority-marked individuals moved between and how the communication patterns between those buildings worked.

Seven buildings. Spread across the city center in what looked random from ground level and was clearly not random from the drone feeds.

A distributed council. Seven nodes, each one with its own function, collectively making up whatever passed for the planet’s decision making structure.

’Distributed governance on a species that’s been under Harbinger pressure for years,’ she thought. ’Smart. One central building gets taken out, six others still function. They built redundancy into their power structure because something was threatening their power structure or perhaps they have no clue he’s here.’

She needed to access all seven simultaneously or she needed to find the one that mattered most right now.

She spent two hours working that out.

The answer was the one in the eastern quarter of the city. Smaller than the others, less foot traffic, the authority-marked individuals who moved between buildings spent disproportionate time there relative to its apparent size. Whatever decisions actually got made happened there.

She told Shade.

He had been beside her the entire time, invisible, patient in the way he was always patient, which was completely and without apparent limit. He communicated back in the way he communicated, which was not words, just weight. A shift in the air beside her that meant acknowledged. A warmth that increased slightly when something was confirmed.

Getting into the eastern building was the problem.

It had two entrances. Both were used continuously, Vel’ai moving in and out at a rate that made simply walking in behind someone a viable approach in theory but the interior was lit better than the streets and her face would be visible to anyone who looked directly at her for more than a second.

She thought about it for forty minutes.

Then she looked at the building’s roof.

Then she looked at where Shade was.

”Can you get me up there,” she said quietly.

The warmth beside her increased.

He came out of the mask just enough to crouch, fully visible for the three seconds it took her to climb onto his back, and then he masked again with her on him and she was invisible along with him, a person sitting on nothing, and he went up the side of the building.

The roof had a ventilation structure. Not identical to human engineering but functionally similar, the need to move air through a building being apparently universal. The gaps in it were not large enough for a human to use comfortably.

Diana used them anyway.

Discomfort was a note she filed and addressed later.

---

The interior of the eastern building was warm. The Vel’ai ran warmer than humans, she had noted this from the drone thermal feeds, and the buildings reflected that, the ambient temperature sitting at something that humans would call humid and unpleasant and that the Vel’ai apparently found comfortable.

She moved through the upper level. Storage, from the look of it, and access corridors that connected the upper sections of the building to the lower ones. She found a position above the main gathering space of the building and looked down through a gap in the ceiling structure.

Twelve Vel’ai below her. Seated in a configuration that was clearly deliberate, the arrangement of bodies having the specific intentionality of a meeting rather than the loose informality of people sharing space. They were communicating in ways that were partially vocal and partially physical, the tripedal bodies shifting in their seating, the single eye directing toward whoever was speaking, something in the movement of the arms that carried meaning she couldn’t read.

She watched for twenty minutes.

Whatever they were discussing, it had weight. The communication patterns were compressed, urgent, the physical components of it more pronounced than the earlier casual movement she had seen in the streets.

’They know something is wrong,’ she thought. ’Not us specifically. But something has changed on this planet in the last two years and they have been governing around it and trying to make decisions about it and they have been failing to solve it.’

She thought about the Harbingers that had been operating in this system. The two years of Kruel’s presence. Whatever the Vel’ai had been doing in that time to survive it.

’They haven’t been passive,’ she thought. ’This is an active governing body making active decisions. They have a plan of their own for whatever Kruel represents. They just don’t have the capability to execute it.’

She needed to be in that room.

She needed Shade.

She spoke into the comm. ”Kelvin. Eastern building. I need the translation device calibrated to the Vel’ai language. Whatever the scouts recorded. Can you push it to my earpiece.”

Kelvin’s voice came back. ”Pushing now. It’s partial. Maybe sixty percent of vocabulary coverage based on what the scouts captured. You’re going to have gaps.”

”Sixty percent is enough to start,” she said.

”Diana,” Kelvin said. ”You’re going in there.”

”Yes,” she said.

A pause. ”Okay,” he said. ”I’ve got drone coverage on four of the seven exits of that building. If you need out I can guide Noah to a visual position in under thirty seconds.”

”Copy,” she said.

She looked at Shade beside her in the ceiling space, invisible, his warmth the only indicator of where he was.

She found the access point to the lower level. Dropped through it. Landed on the floor of a corridor one room away from the gathering space. Straightened her clothing. Checked the shield on her arm. Checked the translator in her ear.

Then she walked into the room.

Twelve Vel’ai looked at her.

The communication stopped. Completely. Every body stilled, every eye directed toward her, the single large iris of each one adjusting in ways that she read as the biological equivalent of someone going very alert very fast.

Nobody moved for three seconds.

Then one of them, the one whose position at the center of the configuration suggested authority, made a sound. The translator in her ear rendered most of it, clearly displaying what sixty percent vocabulary coverage could do. She could hear gaps filled with approximation.

”What,” the translator said. And then a word it couldn’t render. And then ”here.”

Diana kept her hands visible. Away from the shield. Away from anything that could be read as threat preparation. She looked at the one who had spoken and she spoke clearly and hoped the translation device on her wrist was doing its job in the other direction.

”My name is Diana Frost,” she said. ”I’m human. I have urgent information about a being that has been in your world for two years and I’m here to help.”

The translator rendered it. She watched the twelve Vel’ai receive it.

Then the one in the center position made another sound. And another. And a third one joined in and a fourth and they were all making sounds and the translator was trying to keep up and what came back was fragmented and loud and unmistakable in its meaning even through the gaps.

”Human?”

”Another human?”

”No. No human.”

”No human!”

”No human allowed!”

And just like that, weapons came out. Not guns. Something else, handheld, the technology unfamiliar but the posture of people pointing things at you being universal across species. Twelve of them, all directed at Diana, the configuration shifting as they moved to surround her, the tripedal gait carrying them around her in a circle that closed faster than she had expected.

Diana stood in the center of it and did not move and kept her hands where they were.

Then Shade unmasked.

He came out of the air directly behind her, all of him, the full scale of an Umbral Fang Dragon in an enclosed room, the dark scales and the pale amber eyes and the tail that curled around Diana in a slow protective arc, and the sound that came from him was not a roar and was not a growl and had no clean name in any language, it was just the sound of something very large communicating that the small things in the room needed to reconsider their current course of action very carefully.

The Vel’ai did not drop their weapons.

But none of them moved closer either.

Diana looked at the one in the center. At the single large eye directed at her. At the weapon pointed at her chest.

She kept her voice level.

”I know what’s been on your planet,” she said. ”And I know you can’t stop it. Neither have we, yet. But we have a plan.” She held the eye contact. ”And we need your help to make it work.”

The translator rendered it.

The room was very still.