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

Noah climbed with both hands on the rock, Ivy moving slower beside him than she had in hours, her claws finding purchase on the mountain’s outer face one careful hold at a time.

”I know you could just fly us up there,” he said, breathing harder than he wanted to admit. ”But we’ve been at this for hours and I don’t want to burn you out right before we actually find him. And if we fly past too fast we might miss something. Another door, another marking, who knows.”

Ivy made a low sound, the kind that meant agreement more than complaint, and kept climbing.

They were maybe two hundred meters up the exterior face when a screech hit.

It came from above, loud enough that Noah felt it in his teeth before his ears fully processed it, and he tipped his head back to find the source, scanning the dark sky overhead where the mountain’s peak vanished into cloud cover thick enough to hide whatever was making that sound.

A black shape dropped through the clouds.

Fast. Falling, almost, the kind of dive that looked uncontrolled right up until the wings flared at the last second and turned the fall into a controlled descent, and Noah’s chest loosened with relief he hadn’t realized he’d been holding back.

”There you are, buddy,” he called up, grinning despite the height and the cold and the hours of frustration that had led to this exact moment. ”Over here.”

Storm shifted course mid-descent and came directly at him.

No lightning. That was the first thing Noah noticed, the absence of it strange after watching Storm announce his presence with electricity in every other reunion they’d ever had. Just speed, pure and uncoated, like he wanted to be seen clearly rather than dramatically.

Then Noah saw the rest of it.

Wings tucked tight against his body, tighter than Storm ever held them in flight. Ears folded flat. Scales laid backward along his neck and spine instead of resting in their natural pattern.

And his eyes.

Not the wide amber Noah had looked into a thousand times since the academy. Slits. Narrow, strange, the pupil contracted down to something that didn’t belong on a face Noah knew this well.

Storm opened his mouth.

Lightning began building in his throat, the blue-white charge crackling at the back of his jaw, and Noah, hanging off the side of a mountain with both hands locked onto rock, had exactly enough time to understand what was happening before it happened.

”No—no—no!”

Storm didn’t fire.

At the last possible second he pivoted, banking hard past Noah’s position, close enough that the wind off his passage hit Noah’s whole body like a wall, snow and loose ice peeling off the rock face and pelting him in a stinging wave. Noah’s hands slipped half an inch on the holds before he locked his grip back down, his heart hammering, and then Storm was gone, swallowed back into the cloud cover above.

Silence.

”Where did he go,” Noah said, more to himself than to Ivy. ”Why was he in attack mode.”

Ivy didn’t answer. Her head was already moving, jerking side to side in sharp, agitated motions, scanning the same emptiness Noah was scanning, and a low growl built in her throat that he’d never heard from her before, not even in the worst fights they’d been through together.

She pushed off the rock face and rose into a hover, wings beating hard, her whole body tense in a way that read as more than just searching.

A streak of blue light cut across the sky.

Noah barely tracked it before Storm crashed into Ivy bodily, no warning, no buildup, the full weight of him slamming into her flank and sending both of them tumbling thirty feet through open air before they hit the slope below in a tangle of wings and limbs.

”STOP!”

Noah’s voice tore out of him, raw, useless against the distance and the wind, and he watched them hit the snow-covered ground hard enough to throw up a wave of white in every direction.

They both got up.

Storm stood first, his entire body running with lightning now, scales raised along his back the way fur raised on a dog’s spine, his whole frame hunched low and tight with aggression. His eyes, still slitted, locked onto Ivy without a flicker of recognition in them.

Ivy mirrored him, lower to the ground, wings half-spread, a growl building steadily in her chest, her own eyes fixed on Storm with an intensity Noah had never seen directed at anyone but an enemy.

From above, Noah saw Storm’s tail begin to spark.

”STOP!”

He blinked.

The void energy folded space and dropped him directly between them, boots hitting snow, and for one suspended half-second both dragons held perfectly still, looking at the human who had just inserted himself into the exact center of whatever this had become.

Then Storm moved.

He came in low, fast, four legs driving him forward across the snow, and Noah braced for impact that never landed. Storm leapt clean over him, an arc that cleared Noah’s head by less than a meter, his target never having been Noah at all.

Ivy mirrored the motion, surging forward to meet him mid-air, and the two of them collided again above Noah’s head in a flash of black scale and violet thorn, the impact sending a shockwave of displaced snow rippling outward in every direction.

Noah spun, trying to track them, and immediately lost the thread.

Storm was simply too fast. He hit and vanished, reappearing somewhere else entirely before Noah’s eyes finished processing where he’d been, a blur of black and electric blue darting across the open slope in patterns that had no predictable shape to them, every strike a hit-and-run that left Ivy turning to find empty air where her target had just been.

Ivy refused to fall back regardless.

She planted her feet and let her bark plating harden across her exposed flanks, taking the hits she couldn’t avoid and trusting her armor to absorb what speed alone couldn’t let her dodge. When Storm came in close enough, her vine whips lashed out, catching a wing once, a leg another time, and each time Storm tore free before the grip could fully close, his speed simply too much for any hold to hold.

”Storm, STOP!”

Noah ran toward them, blinking forward in short bursts, trying to close distance that kept opening again the moment he thought he’d found an angle. Every time he got close enough to reach for Storm, the dragon was already gone, a streak of blue-white lightning marking where he’d been a half second before.

Ivy took a hit across the shoulder that staggered her, snow exploding outward from the impact, and she came back up snarling, her Thorn Barrage firing blind into the space Storm had occupied, the spines finding nothing but empty air.

’He’s not even trying to hurt her seriously,’ Noah thought, watching another exchange happen too fast to fully track. ’Every hit is fast, hard, but not finishing. He’s testing. Probing. Like he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing, like something underneath his own instincts is running the show and even he doesn’t fully understand the orders.’

Storm came around for another pass, and this time Ivy was ready. She caught his trailing wing with a vine whip at the exact moment he committed to the strike, the grip locking before his speed could pull free, and for one full second the two of them were actually anchored to each other, Storm thrashing against the hold while Ivy’s other limbs braced to absorb the violence of it.

Noah saw the opening.

He blinked directly onto Storm’s back, both hands finding purchase on the ridged scales along his spine, and Storm bucked hard enough to nearly throw him before Noah’s grip held.

”Hey,” Noah said, low, steady, the voice he used when Storm was being difficult in the domain rather than dangerous out here. ”Hey, look at me.”

Storm’s head twisted around, jaws snapping.

He caught Noah’s forearm.

Not hard. Not the full force Noah knew Storm was capable of, the bite stopping just short of breaking skin, teeth pressing into the fabric of his jacket and the flesh beneath it without the follow-through that would have torn through both. For one suspended moment Storm’s eyes, still slitted, still wrong, flickered.

Round. Just for a fraction of a second, the pupil widening back toward something recognizable, something that looked at Noah and registered him properly for the first time since he’d come spiraling out of the clouds.

Then they narrowed again.

But the hesitation had been real. Noah felt it in the bite that didn’t finish, in the half-second pause before Storm’s jaw tightened back into something more dangerous.

”I know,” Noah said quietly, still holding on. ”I know, buddy. Something’s wrong with you right now. I’m not mad. I’m not mad at you.”

He reached for the domain link.

Storm’s body went rigid beneath him, fighting it for one long moment, the lightning across his scales surging brighter, and then, all at once, something in him simply gave.

The purple portal opened beneath them both, wide and patient, and Storm’s resistance bled out of him as the void energy folded around his frame, the lightning dimming, the slitted eyes finally closing.

”I’m sorry,” Noah said, sliding off his back as the portal pulled him in. ”But you’re too affected by whatever’s down here. I’m not surprised, honestly. You’re still young. Reckless. This place is getting into your head in a way I can’t fix from out here.”

The portal swallowed him whole, Storm’s black scales disappearing into the dark purple light, and then the snow settled and the slope was quiet again, just Noah and Ivy standing in the aftermath, breathing hard, the only sound the wind moving across the mountain face.

Ivy looked at him.

”You okay,” he said.

She made a low sound, tired but steady, and lowered her head slightly, letting him put a hand against her jaw the way he always did.

’She’s older,’ Noah thought, looking at her. ’Steadier. Whatever’s pulling at instinct down here, it’s pulling at her too. I saw it in how fast she went on guard, how hard she fought without hesitation. But her loyalty held the line where Storm’s didn’t. Maybe that’s just what age does. Maybe it’s something else about her specifically. Either way, she held.’

He looked up at the mountain rising above them, the cloud cover still thick at its peak, the place where Storm had come spiraling down out of and clearly wanted nothing more to do with.

’If Storm reacted that badly just from being close to wherever the alpha actually is,’ Noah thought, ’and Ivy’s holding on by something stronger than instinct alone, then whatever’s up there isn’t just dangerous in the way a fight is dangerous. It’s getting inside something deeper than that. Affecting bonded creatures at a level I haven’t seen before, not in two years of this.’

He thought about the shrine. The army of bonded lizards. The woman with the eclipse pendant carved into stone over and over, arms raised, creatures circling her like they’d come because they trusted her completely.

’If the system flags the alpha as bonded when I finally get close enough to read it,’ he thought, ’that changes everything I assumed back in that gallery. I figured she was part of whoever bound it. Chained it down, kept it contained the way Yrsala’s ancestors did. But why would you chain something you’re bonded to. That doesn’t track. Bonds aren’t cages. I don’t cage Nyx. I don’t cage Storm, not really, not even when he’s being an idiot.’

’Unless the binding wasn’t hers at all. Unless it happened to both of them. Unless she was gone, missing, dead, whatever the truth actually is, and what’s left up there has been alone long enough that alone is the only thing it knows how to be anymore.’

He looked at Ivy.

”Come on, girl,” he said. ”I know where our alpha is hiding.”

Ivy lowered her wing toward him, an invitation, and he climbed on, and together they turned toward the mountain’s peak, toward the cloud cover Storm had come tearing out of with something in his eyes that wasn’t quite Storm at all.

***

A/N

I said I was going to start doing two Chapters daily.

So here’s the second.

I’m sorry I couldn’t finish it yesterday