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

Arthur sneered, stepping back half a pace. He raised both hands, pulling dark chi from deep within his chest. The reddish-white energy swirled around his gaunt arms like liquid fire, and from the pool of his own blood still dripping from his right palm, he manifested three thick, whip-like tendrils of hardened blood, laced with dark metal, blood and metal fused into hybrid weaponry.

The blood-whips lashed out, cutting through the air with a high-pitched whistle.

Lucy didn’t stop her charge. She channeled her lightning into her own skin, activating her bloodline’s full physical enhancement. Her speed doubled. She ducked under the first whip, the sharp edge cutting a few strands of her hair, slipped inside the arc of the second, and brought Valor down to sever the third.

The axe cleaved through the blood-whip, but the moment the blade made contact, the spilled blood on the axe head didn’t splatter, it adhered.

Arthur’s face twisted into a vicious, mocking sneer.

”Blood is a tether, little girl!” Arthur yelled.

He yanked his arm back. The blood attached to Valor hardened into solid steel-like roots, instantly pulling Lucy off balance, dragging her toward him. As she stumbled forward, Arthur stepped in, his right hand completely encased in a monstrous, spiked gauntlet of dark-chi-infused metal. He drove a straight punch into her chest plate.

BOOM!

The strike landed with the force of a siege engine. Lucy’s chest armor cracked, the blue plating spider-webbing with fractures. The force drove the air completely out of her lungs, sending her skidding backward across the hall for fifty feet, her boots carving deep grooves into the marble before she slammed back-first into a massive structural pillar.

The stone pillar cracked straight up to the ceiling, dust raining down around her.

Lucy fell to one knee, coughing up a spatter of blood onto the dark marble. She clutched her chest, her breathing heavy, ragged, and hot. The dark chi behind Arthur’s strike was heavy, lingering on her armor like a cold, corrosive weight that tried to seep into her veins.

Arthur stood fifty feet away, his chest heaving slightly. For all his unnatural steadiness, his sunken cheeks were flushed with a faint, sickly gray. His skeletal hands were trembling slightly before he forced them into fists, clamping down on the tremor with sheer, stubborn will.

He looked at her, his yellowed eyes burning with ancient, offended arrogance.

”Fix him?” Arthur spat, his voice dripping with venomous disdain. ”You come into my domain, slaughter my men, tear down my roof, and demand that I fix a broken child?” He scoffed, stepping forward, his boots clicking heavily against the marble. ”One did what was necessary to strip a threat. Your brother was weak enough to let his energy be drained, and now he rots in an ice box like a useless piece of meat. Why would I ever undo a masterpiece?”

Lucy raised her head slowly. The blood dripping from her lip caught the blue lightning flickering across her chin. Her eyes weren’t filled with fear or exhaustion; they were filled with a wild, terrifying murder.

”Because if you don’t,” Lucy said, her voice eerily quiet, rising from her knee, ”I will rip this building apart stone by stone, and I will chew the life out of your throat until there is nothing left of you to remember.”

Arthur stared at her for a long second, and then he threw his head back and laughed, a dry, rasping, terrible sound that echoed through the ruined hall like grinding iron.

”You think you threaten me?” Arthur shouted, his voice suddenly spiking with an explosive, ancient fury. ”You stand before Arthur Kaine! A god who walked this world before your ancestors learned to spark a fire with their fingers!”

He raised his hands, and the shadows across the room began to stretch, twisting up the walls like dark, reaching fingers. The reddish-white dark chi wrapped around his frame, forcing his wasted muscles to swell slightly, borrowing vitality from the very air and the blood spilled on the floor.

”If I were at my peak,” Arthur snarled, his eyes flashing with a deep, humiliating bitterness that cracked his pristine mask of arrogance, ”if I had not been betrayed by my own blood, I would be wielding seven bloodlines right now. I would burn you with solar fire, crush you with titan strength, and turn your mind to ash with a glance. You are fighting a fraction of what I am. You are fighting a man reduced to three meagre abilities.”

The confession hung in the air, heavy and raw. It was not a boast; it was a furious, humiliated bite of truth from a king furious that he had to fight with rusted blades.

Lucy didn’t care about his seven bloodlines. She didn’t care about his history. All she heard was that he was refusing.

”Then three is all I need to break,” Lucy growled.

BOOM!

She detonated her lightning outward in a massive, thirty-foot ring of blue-green destruction. The marble floor around her shattered into millions of tiny pebbles, lifted into the air by the raw static field she generated.

Valor roared. The relic axe, drawing on the immense storm raging through the broken ceiling above, began to glow with a blinding, cyan-colored radiance. The air in the grand hall grew thick with the smell of ozone, so heavy it made the skin on Arthur’s forearms prickle.

Lucy raised Valor high above her head with both hands.

”Here’s a Grey culture for you. Lightning Technique: Sky-Borer!” she screamed, calling upon one of Grey’s signature bloodline techniques.

She swung the axe down, not at Arthur, but directly into the ground beneath her feet.

A solid, continuous pillar of blue-green voltage shot out from the head of the axe, traveling along the floor like an underwater torpedo. The marble ripped open, a massive trench expanding at fifty miles an hour straight toward Arthur.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed. He recognized the technique, a Grey had used a variation of it in their past encounter.

”Predictable!” Arthur yelled.

He slammed both palms onto the floor. Metal manipulation instantly responded, pulling the iron rebar and deep structural metal from within the building’s foundation. A massive, ten-foot-thick wall of spiked black iron erupted from the floor in front of him, heavily reinforced with a solid layer of reddish-white dark chi designed to absorb the charge.

The Sky-Borer strike slammed into the metal wall.

KABOOM!

The explosion was deafening. The dark chi wall held against the initial electrical blast, but Lucy wasn’t done.

She didn’t wait for the dust to clear. She rode the wave of her own lightning, moving through the electrical current itself, appearing instantly at the top of the iron wall.

Arthur looked up just in time to see her descending upon him, her face contorted in a scream of absolute, unadulterated rage.

”FIX HIM!” she shrieked.

She brought Valor down with both hands, channeling every ounce of energy the storm engine had gathered.

Arthur raised both arms, creating a massive, crisscrossing shield of dark-chi-infused metal blades directly over his head, while simultaneously pooling his shadow energy beneath his feet to cushion the impact.

The axe hit the metal shield.

BOOOOOOOOM!

The resulting force was beyond anything the grand hall could sustain.

The shockwave radiated outward in a massive, two-hundred-foot sphere of kinetic destruction. Every single stained-glass window in the grand hall shattered simultaneously, sending a rain of colored glass shards exploding outward into the open storm outside. The massive stone pillars supporting the high ceiling cracked down their centers, then crumbled into powder.

The entire floor beneath them gave way completely.

A central collapse triggered, thousands of tons of black stone, iron beams, and ruined furniture plunging four stories down into the deep, subterranean vaults of the stronghold.

They fell together through the falling mountain of ruin.

In the middle of the plummeting debris, surrounded by falling stone blocks the size of houses, they continued to fight.

Lucy swung Valor in a rapid, continuous flurry of horizontal cuts, each strike producing a crescent-shaped blade of blue lightning that cut through falling boulders like butter. Arthur, falling beside her, manipulated the falling iron beams, bending them into lethal spears that he launched at her with dark chi propulsion.

Lucy dodged two spears, used a falling stone block as a launchpad, and drove her shoulder straight into Arthur’s chest mid-air.

They collided hard, locking arms as they tumbled through the dark air of the internal abyss.

Lucy grabbed Arthur by his thin, withered throat with her left hand, her fingers burning into his paper-skin with high-voltage electricity.

”Undo it!” she spat into his face, her blood mixing with his on her cheek. ”You created One! You know how his power works! Undo what he did to my brother, or I will drag your soul out of your ribs!”

Arthur, even with his throat clamped in a vise of electrical death, stared back at her with a terrifying, yellow-eyed sneer. The dark chi in his veins surged, the reddish-white energy burning against her palm, preventing her lightning from frying his spine.

”You soft, foolish, pathetic girl,” Arthur rasped, his voice bubbling with his own dark blood. ”One learned to drain because he understood the grand truth, power belongs only to those who can hold it. Your brother was a vessel with a hole in it. Even if I wanted to, even if I cared to raise a finger for your sniveling family—”

He leaned in, his gaunt face inches from hers, his sunken eyes wider than she had ever seen them, filled with a cruel, absolute satisfaction.

”—it cannot be reversed,” Arthur hissed. ”The energy is gone. Spent. Lucas is not wounded, child, he is empty. There is nothing left to fix.”