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

The bruised red sky above the stronghold was no longer a sky. It was an active, torn fabric of atmospheric violence, ripped wide by the sheer weight of Grey forces dropping through the clouds. Blue forks of lightning, thick as ancient trees, slammed into the courtyard, the outer battlements, and the black stone towers, turning the dark sky into an endless, blinding strobe. Below, the war was a roaring, messy meat grinder. Harbingers surged from the lower gates alongside Purge fighters with dark chi crackling red-white around their fists, colliding head-on with blue-armored Grey soldiers who met every strike with raw, lethal voltage.

Structures were already collapsing. Debris, stone, and severed armor showered the lower levels as the invasion ground its way inward.

Above it all, hovering on a current of trapped electrical pressure, Lucy Grey drifted through the air. Her blue-plated armor hummed, the blue-green edge of Valor held loosely in her right hand. Her eyes, glowing with a bright, erratic current, swept the chaotic geometry of the stronghold. She ignored the screams in the courtyard. She ignored the dying Harbingers and the shadow soldiers dissolving into ash. She was looking for one face, one frame, one specific presence.

She found him.

High on the widest, highest flat-topped structure of the central fortress, a massive slab of black reinforced stone jutting into the storm like a landing pad, a single figure stepped through a heavy set of double doors and walked toward the edge.

He looked like a corpse that had forgotten to stop moving. Shriveled, paper-thin skin stretched painfully tight over a visible skeleton, his cheeks sunken into deep, shadowed caverns. Thin, colorless hair clung to a scalp mapped with dark blue veins. He wore a simple, dark tunic that hung off his skeletal shoulders like a shroud over a rack of dry bones.

Yet, as he walked out into the gale-force winds of the storm, his posture was impossibly, unnervingly straight. There was no tremor in his hands, no sway in his stride. He stepped onto the rooftop, looked up at the sky, and stopped.

Lucy’s eyes locked onto him. The current around her shoulders flared into a localized burst that sent a thunderclap rattling through the air around her chest.

”Arthur!” her voice boomed, amplified by the storm, carrying over the roar of the invasion below. ”I have come for you, old man!”

Arthur stood at the edge of the stone roof, his sunken eye sockets catching the glare of the blue sky-fire above. He did not flinch at the thunder. He slowly tilted his head back, his ancient, yellowed eyes tracking her in the air.

”Is that how you speak to your father, child?” Arthur’s voice was dry, like grinding stones, yet it carried clearly through the howl of the storm. ”Or have the Grey family lost their culture?”

Lucy’s jaw tightened, the muscle along her neck pulling taut as her fingers clamped around Valor’s leather-bound grip. The blue-green lightning along the blade flared violently, answering the sudden, boiling spike in her blood pressure.

”Shall I demonstrate proper Grey culture then?” she yelled back.

She coiled her upper body, threw her weight backward in mid-air, and hurled Valor straight at his head with everything her Grey bloodline could push through her shoulders.

The throw did not just launch the axe; it warped the space around its flight path. The sheer, instantaneous velocity created a drowned-out, vacuum-like silence in the air, the sound stripped away as a cone of compressed pressure formed around the spinning weapon. For a microsecond, light itself seemed to bend, the axe blurring into a distortion before appearing almost instantly inches from Arthur’s face.

Arthur did not dodge. He did not shift his feet.

He raised his right hand, his emaciated, long-fingered palm opening in a simple, effortless arc.

BOOM!

The collision was catastrophic.

The physical shockwave of the axe hitting his bare palm didn’t push Arthur back an inch, but the displaced force detonated outward and downward in a violent ring. The entire rooftop behind him, thousands of tons of ancient, reinforced black stone, was instantly vaporized into fine, microscopic dust, torn to shreds and blown into the sky like a black plume of ash. The structural beams beneath the roof shattered, sending massive stone blocks tumbling hundreds of feet down into the internal chambers of the stronghold.

Yet, the precise circle of stone where Arthur stood remained completely unaffected, a solitary, pristine pillar left standing in the wake of total ruin.

Arthur stood on the isolated pillar, his fingers wrapped tightly around the haft of Valor. The blue-green lightning from the relic raged against his flesh, arcing wildly across his arm, but as the current touched his skin, it hit a layer of dense, reddish-white dark chi that absorbed and redirected the voltage, dispersing it harmlessly into the air around his shoulder.

He looked down at the axe in his hand, a slow, yellow-toothed smile spreading across his gaunt face.

”Such a handy tool she has,” Arthur murmured, his voice laced with patronizing amusement. ”Where did she craft it? I didn’t know Grey craftsmen could do such a fine job.”

Lucy dropped from the sky like a meteor, her boots slamming onto a protruding stone ledge twenty feet across from his pillar, cracking the stone beneath her heel. Her eyes burned with a raw, unstable electrical fire.

”The weapon in your hands was made by Noah Eclipse,” she said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, jagged growl. ”And the owner, my brother. Lucas Grey.”

Arthur’s smile widened slightly, his sunken eyes glinting with a cold, mocking recollection.

”Ahhh, Lucas,” Arthur said softly, nodding his head as if reminiscing about an old acquaintance over tea. ”The prodigious Grey prince. Tell me, where is he? Our last encounter was flavorful.”

”Don’t talk about my brother that way!” Lucy roared.

She thrust her right hand forward, her palm opening toward the relic.

The axe in Arthur’s grip violently shuddered. The blood-bond burned deep within the steel, answering the Grey blood that surged through Lucas’s blood which she also had surging through her veins.

’This axe, Lucas says is named Valor, was made by Noah,’ Lucy thought, her mind hardening into a diamond-sharp edge of focus as the memory of her brother fueled her voltage. ’I don’t know the details. But the axe is linked by blood. And as such, with it, I can do whatever Lucas can do too.’

BOOM!

The axe tore itself backward out of Arthur’s hand with such raw magnetic and kinetic violence that it ripped open his palm, leaving a line of dark, thick blood before flying back into Lucy’s waiting fingers.

The moment her fingers locked around the hilt, the perpetual storm engine inside Valor resonated with the red tempest above. The weapon roared, a column of blue-green voltage shooting straight up into the clouds, linking her directly to the sky.

Lucy didn’t hesitate. She kicked off the ledge, shattering it entirely, and shot directly across the gap at Arthur like a railgun round, the axe raised over her right shoulder, trailing a solid ribbon of lightning.

Arthur didn’t reach for a weapon. He didn’t even draw back his posture. He simply stood on his solitary stone pillar, his blood-stained palm resting at his side, his smile curling wider.

”Come, child,” he whispered.

Lucy arrived in a fraction of a second, bringing Valor down in a diagonal cleave meant to split him from shoulder to hip.

Arthur moved with an unnatural, terrifying fluidity that defied his skeletal appearance. He didn’t jump or dodge outward; he shifted his upper torso by three inches, allowing the massive blue-green blade to graze the air right in front of his chest.

BOOM!

The air pressure alone from her strike split the stone pillar beneath Arthur’s feet down the middle, but before the stone could fully separate, Arthur reacted. His right hand, the one carrying the fresh line of his own dark blood, shot forward, his fingers coated in a thick, metallic sheen that burned with a reddish-white aura.

Metal manipulation, fused with dark chi.

He caught the side of Valor’s head mid-swing, not with raw muscle, but by instantly generating a heavy, spiked bracket of dense, dark-chi-infused steel directly from his skin that clamped onto the axe blade. The metal was non-magnetic, dense, and heavily charged with dark chi, acting as a grounding point that instantly absorbed and redirected Lucy’s blue-green voltage, dumping the massive electrical current down through his leg and into the crumbling pillar beneath them.

The pillar detonated into fragments under the redirected current, and both of them plummeted into the dark, cavernous upper hall of the stronghold below.

As they fell through the dust and falling stone, Lucy didn’t lose her rhythm. She twisted her hips in mid-air, using her left boot to kick off a falling block of masonry, driving her knee straight toward Arthur’s face.

Arthur’s shadow flickered.

Before her knee could make contact, his body dissolved into a dark, fluid smear, reappearing instantly three feet behind her in the air, shadow manipulation stacked with dark chi to grant instantaneous spatial repositioning. He brought his left arm down in an axe-handle strike, his forearm reinforced with dark-chi-hardened metal, aiming directly for the back of her neck.

Lucy felt the shift in air pressure. The blood-bond with Valor didn’t just give her power; it gave her Lucas’s battle-honed instincts. Without looking, she released Valor with her right hand, let it drop an inch, caught the pommel with her left, and swung the axe behind her back in an inverted arc, a classic, blind defensive sweep her brother had used against a hundred enemies.

CLANG!

The metallic strike rang out like a church bell, sending a visible ring of compressed force through the falling debris. Sparks of dark red chi and blue lightning exploded between them. Arthur’s eyes widened slightly as the force of her backward swing actually repelled his arm, the heavy, raw kinetic output of her Grey bloodline tearing through his dark chi guard and rattling the fragile bones in his forearm.

”Impudent brat,” Arthur hissed, his pride nicked by the sheer physical weight behind her blow.

They hit the floor of the upper grand hall simultaneously. The floor was a massive expanse of polished black marble, lined with high stone pillars and stained-glass windows depicting ancient, forgotten wars.

The moment Lucy’s boots touched the marble, she didn’t reset. She sprinted forward, her boots leaving scorched, sparking footprints on the polished stone. She held Valor in a two-handed low guard, dragging the head of the axe along the floor, cutting a glowing, molten trench through the marble before whipping it upward in a lethal, rising uppercut.

”Give it back!” Lucy screamed, her voice cracking with a fierce, desperate rage that echoed off the high vaulted ceilings. ”Fix what your son did to Lucas!”