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

Noah pulled back higher into the cloud cover, Storm banking with him, and they hung there in the thin, cold air while the massive ship continued its slow, deliberate descent toward the clearing below.

It came down in the wide flat stretch beyond the six abandoned dropships, engines venting heat in visible waves that distorted the air around the hull, and the moment it settled, its underside split open along multiple seams, ramps extending down into the scorched earth like something exhaling after holding its breath a long time.

They poured out in organized ranks.

One horns first, dozens of them, moving with a discipline Noah hadn’t expected, not the chaotic scrambling of the pods he’d fought a hundred times over but something closer to actual formation. Two horns followed behind, fewer in number but clearly positioned as something like squad leads, directing smaller clusters of one horns toward the abandoned dropships with sharp, economical gestures.

And above all of it, standing on a raised section of the ship’s lowered ramp, a three horn watched the entire operation unfold.

It didn’t talk much. Didn’t move much at all, actually, just stood there with its arms crossed, occasionally raising one clawed hand to point, and every time it pointed, bodies moved. A cluster of one horns redirected toward the third dropship in line. Two horns split off to flank the perimeter. The whole operation rearranged itself around single gestures from a creature that hadn’t lifted a finger to actually do any of the physical work itself.

’Command structure,’ Noah thought, watching closely. ’That’s not just intelligence. That’s actual hierarchy. Rank. Someone giving orders and expecting them followed without question.’

He’d known Harbingers were smart, individually. He’d fought enough of them, talked to enough of them in the moments before ending them, Rino’s voice still sitting somewhere in his memory dripping with contempt and conviction both. But watching this, watching dozens of bodies reorganize themselves around a single raised claw, was different. This wasn’t smart monsters working together. This was an army.

’They’re doing repairs,’ Noah realized, watching a cluster of one horns begin stripping components off the nearest dropship’s damaged hull and ferrying them up the ramp into the larger ship’s cargo bay. ’Salvage and repair. That’s what this whole operation is.’ He frowned. ’But why. They’ve never been shy about confrontation. They don’t exactly hide what they’re doing, they show up, they fight, they win or they don’t, and they’ve never bothered concealing much of anything because as far as they’re concerned, they’re the apex. So why quietly extract six busted ships instead of just leaving them, or better yet, showing up in force to finish whatever they started here.’

He didn’t have an answer yet. He kept watching.

An hour into the extraction, a cluster of one horns broke off from the main operation and began moving through the treeline in a loose scouting pattern, heading in the general direction of Noah’s camp.

His stomach tightened.

He watched them move, tracking their path through the canopy from above, and they passed within a hundred yards of the hut, close enough that Noah’s jaw clenched involuntarily, close enough that he found himself gripping Storm’s scales a little tighter than necessary.

They stopped.

One of them said something to the others, gesturing toward the trees, and a moment later a small drone detached from somewhere along its harness, hovering upward, spinning slowly as it began a methodical sweep of the surrounding area.

’Well,’ Noah thought, watching the drone’s scanning light pass over the treetops. ’If their tech’s anywhere close to as advanced as everything else about them, they’re going to find something.’

He stayed perfectly still, Storm matching his stillness without needing to be told, both of them holding position high in the cloud cover while the drone continued its sweep below, passing directly over the hut’s rough silhouette, over the training ground’s cratered, glass-scarred earth just beyond it.

Thirty minutes passed. The drone kept circling, methodical, patient.

Then, without any apparent conclusion reached, it powered down, folded back into its housing, and the one horns turned and rejoined the extraction effort without further comment.

Noah exhaled slowly, watching them go.

’Nothing,’ he thought, though something in his chest didn’t fully believe it. ’They found nothing.’ He glanced down at the hut one more time, small and rough and completely still. ’Or they found something and didn’t care. Either way, they’re moving on.’

The extraction wrapped up another two hours later, the last of the salvaged components loaded, the ramps retracting, the massive ship’s engines building slowly back toward full power.

Noah watched it lift off the ground, hovering a moment before angling upward, engines flaring bright against the darkening sky.

He sat there a long moment, watching it climb.

”Storm,” he said quietly. ”What do you say. Wanna tail these bastards? See where they’re actually headed?”

Storm’s head turned slightly, ears pricked.

”Because think about it.” Noah’s voice hardened, something old and tired bleeding into it. ”This whole war, every single fight we’ve had, every planet that’s burned, every person we’ve buried, and we’ve never once known where they actually come from. We fight whatever shows up on our doorstep and call it a victory when we survive it, and the second it’s over we’re right back to waiting for the next wave, because nobody’s ever known where the waves start.” He looked at the retreating shape of the ship, small now against the clouds. ”That’s the whole problem. That’s why this war feels endless. You don’t win a war by surviving every battle somebody else picks. You win it by finding where they actually live and ending it there.”

Storm rumbled, low and steady, something like agreement.

”If that ship’s heading back to a stronghold,” Noah said, ”a real one, encampment, base, whatever they’re calling home right now, that’s worth more to me than six broken dropships ever will be.” His jaw tightened. ”Why take out a ship when I could take out the place that keeps building more of them.”

He leaned forward, and Storm’s wings caught the air, angling up toward the retreating shape of the ship, following at a careful distance through the thinning clouds.

****

It was particularly bright morning in the eastern Cardinal. And the Eclipse HQ embodied every bit of it.

Sunlight poured in through the wide windows of the upper prep room, catching motes of dust drifting lazy through the air, and Kelvin stood in front of a mirror wearing half a suit, his auxiliary arms folded uselessly behind him while his real hands fumbled with a bow tie that had defeated him three times already.

”I built a technopathic prosthetic system capable of hacking military-grade portal infrastructure,” he said, mostly to himself, ”and I cannot tie a bow tie.”

”Let me,” Marcus said, already crossing the room.

”I’ve got it.”

”You clearly don’t have it.”

”I’m choosing a different knot on purpose.”

Sam leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, grinning. ”You’ve been choosing a different knot on purpose for ten minutes.”

”It’s a process.”

Marcus batted Kelvin’s hands away without further discussion and set to work, quick and practiced, and Kelvin stood there letting it happen, staring at his own reflection like it belonged to somebody else.

”You good?” Marcus asked, not looking up from the knot.

”I’m great.”

”You don’t look great. You look like you’re about to throw up.”

”I might throw up. That’s different from not being great.” Kelvin exhaled hard. ”I’m marrying Diana today. Diana. The woman who once told me my four arms made me look like a confused octopus and then two weeks later saved my life with a shield made out of literal ocean physics.”

”Romantic,” Sam said.

”It was romantic, actually, you weren’t there.”

Marcus finished the knot and stepped back, examining his work with the critical eye of someone who took small jobs seriously. ”There. You look like a groom now instead of a man who lost a fight with fabric.”

Kelvin turned side to side in front of the mirror, adjusting his cuffs, running a hand through his hair and immediately messing up whatever he’d just fixed.

”How many people are actually coming,” he asked, mostly to distract himself from his own reflection.

”Full faction,” Sam said. ”All thousand plus. Venue’s set up to handle it, chairs going out to the overflow lawn for anyone who doesn’t fit inside, and the stream’s already got a pre-show running. Last I checked the concurrent viewer count before I came up here, it was climbing fast.”

”Great. Cool. No pressure. Just my entire personal and professional life broadcasting live to strangers.”

”You’ve had a camera on you since you were nineteen, Kelvin.”

”Doesn’t make it less weird today specifically.”

Marcus clapped him on the shoulder. ”You’re overthinking it.”

”I’m allowed to overthink it, it’s my wedding.”

The room went quiet a moment, just the ambient hum of the building and the distant, muffled sound of setup crews working somewhere below, chairs scraping, someone testing a sound system with a burst of static that cut off fast.

Kelvin’s expression shifted, something heavier settling behind his eyes.

”Noah’s not here,” he said, quieter now.

Marcus and Sam exchanged a look.

”Yeah,” Sam said carefully. ”I know.”

”He doesn’t even know it’s today. I don’t think. I sent word out through the usual channels weeks ago, but who knows if it actually reached him out there or if he still has his comms wherever out there even is at this point.” Kelvin sat down heavily on the edge of a bench, suit jacket bunching at the shoulders. ”And Lucas. God, Lucas would be standing right where you are standing right now. He would be the one fixing my tie and making fun of me for sweating through my shirt before the ceremony’s even started.”

”He’d have absolutely made fun of you,” Marcus agreed gently.

”Relentlessly.” Kelvin’s mouth twisted, somewhere between a smile and something sadder. ”He’s the reason I even crossed paths with Diana in the first place, you know that? Led the retaliation raid against School 8 after they hit us, and I wasn’t even on that op, but that whole mess is what put her on my radar to begin with. Rivalry turned into something else entirely once we both ended up drafted to Vanguard. And now I’m marrying her, and he’s lying in a cryo chamber on Raiju not even aware any of this is happening.”

Nobody had a good answer for that. Sam just crossed the room and sat beside him.

”They’d both want this for you,” Sam said. ”You know that.”

”I know.” Kelvin rubbed his face with both real hands, careful not to smudge whatever Diana’s people had done to his hair earlier. ”It’s the happiest day of my life and I keep feeling guilty about being happy on it. Which is a stupid, backwards way to feel, but here we are.”

”They’d tell you to knock that off too,” Marcus said.

Kelvin let out a short laugh, wet at the edges. ”Yeah. Probably.”

He stood back up, straightened his jacket, and looked at himself in the mirror one more time, really looked this time, past the nerves and the ache of two empty spots that should have been filled.

”Okay,” he said. ”Okay. I’m getting married today. Let’s do this.”

---

Across the compound, in the wide green space set aside for the actual ceremony, staff moved with the particular controlled chaos of a wedding that had outgrown every original estimate of its own size. Rows of white chairs stretched out further than any single photo would capture properly, flower arrangements the size of small trees flanking either side of the aisle, and stream drones hovered discreetly at the corners, already broadcasting the buildup to whatever portion of the galaxy happened to be tuned in this morning.

A convoy of sleek, expensive transport vehicles pulled up along the compound’s main drive just past mid-morning, and the low murmur of faction members already gathering nearby shifted instantly into something closer to excited whispering.

Webb Pithon stepped out first.

He looked exactly like a man who owned several industries and had personally decided that subtlety wasn’t worth his time, a tailored suit that cost more than most people’s yearly salary, sunglasses he didn’t need pushed up into greying hair, and a grin already in place before his feet fully hit the ground.

Behind him came the rest of his little procession. A tall, silver-haired woman everyone recognized as Ilena Voss, owner of the largest beast core refinery operation in the Eastern Cardinal, her presence alone enough to make several nearby faction members straighten up unconsciously. Beside her, a heavyset man with an easy laugh already carrying across the lawn, Dorian Achebe, whose transport manufacturing empire put half the vehicles currently parked in that very convoy into production in the first place. A handful of others trailed behind them, faces recognizable from business headlines more than battlefield reports, all of it adding up to more concentrated wealth arriving at once than Eclipse HQ had probably ever hosted.

”Is that Webb Pithon,” someone near the entrance whispered.

”That’s definitely Webb Pithon.”

”He’s so much louder in person.”

Webb, entirely unbothered by being openly stared at by a small crowd of superhuman soldiers, waved broadly at nobody in particular and made his way toward the main building like he owned it, which, given how much of Eclipse’s tech ran on Pithon Industries hardware, wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

Kelvin met him just inside the entrance, and Webb stopped mid-stride, looking his son up and down with an expression that shifted from performative grandeur into something much more real.

”Look at you,” Webb said, voice softer than the booming entrance had suggested he was capable of. ”Look at you, son.”

”Dad.”

Webb crossed the last few feet and pulled him into a hug, solid and unhurried, and for a moment the loud, larger-than-life businessman was gone entirely, replaced by just a father looking at his kid on the biggest day of his life.

”I couldn’t be more proud of the man you’ve grown into,” Webb said, pulling back, hands still on Kelvin’s shoulders. ”I mean that. All of it. The tech, the faction, the woman waiting for you down that aisle who by every account terrifies grown soldiers twice her size. All of it.”

Kelvin’s throat tightened. ”Thanks, Dad.”

Webb’s grin came back, sharper now, edged with something mischievous. ”I have something for you.”

”Dad, you didn’t need to—”

”I got you something,” Webb said, already reaching into his jacket, ”that I think is going to change absolutely everything.”

He pulled out a small, sealed data drive and held it out.

Kelvin took it slowly, turning it over in his hands, reading the label stamped across its casing.

His face went pale.

”Oh,” Kelvin said. ”No.”