Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

The western slope of the Star Mayhem Mountain was already crowded by the time Suryax-Regalon arrived.

The spring sat in a wide basin of glowing crystalline stone, partway up the slope, and the water in it caught the Mountain’s shifting light and held it the way still water holds the moon. It was not a large pool. That was the problem. A pool that small, with power like that coming off it, could not satisfy four alliances. There was enough to make a few thousand people permanently stronger, and there were far more than a few thousand people who wanted it.

The four forces converged on the slope from four directions and stopped short of the basin, each one holding at the edge of the open ground around it.

For a long moment, nobody moved.

It was the depth ruins again. It was the resource veins again. Four forces, one prize that could not be cleanly divided, and every leader on the slope doing the same arithmetic at once. The first one to commit to the basin exposed itself to the other three. But the prize was permanent, and exportable, and limited, and that changed the arithmetic in a way the mines never had. With the mines, you could wait, and divide, and take your share later. The spring would be drunk dry by whoever reached it first and held it longest. Waiting meant losing.

Someone was going to move.

Almond looked across the basin at the other three forces, read the same tension in all of them, and made the decision the rest of them were still circling.

“We move first,” he said quietly, to the leadership around him. “Hard and fast. We take the basin and we hold it, and we collect while we hold. Everything except the blueprints and the Discord Bloom weapons. Show them what the rest of us can do.”

“All of it?” Marcus asked.

“All of it. After a month of looking ordinary, we stop looking ordinary right now.”

He stepped forward, past the edge of the open ground, and the alliance moved with him.

—

The slope erupted the instant Suryax-Regalon committed.

The other three forces had been waiting for someone to break the standoff, and the moment Suryax-Regalon broke it, all three reacted at once, because none of them could afford to let a single alliance reach the basin uncontested. Thalmyr-Ronethis came in from the north with their precision arrays already firing. Virexion-Kezryx came from the south in a storm front, Jaskrit at its head. Celestara-Dravokh came from the west, Joaka’s radiant wings spread wide, committing everything they had left because they needed the spring more than anyone, being the weakest force on the slope.

Four alliances hit the open ground around the basin at the same time, and the western slope became a battlefield.

But this time, Suryax-Regalon did not hold back.

Almond reached the basin first, and his Grimblades came out in a torrent, not the focused convergence he had used on the Titans but the full spread, hundreds of blades fanning out into a rotating wall that ringed the entire basin. Grim Severam spread through the wall, and anything that tried to cross it from the other three forces lost its coordination, lost its momentum, lost the structure that held its attacks together. The wall did not kill. It denied. It turned the basin into ground that only Suryax-Regalon could stand on.

Behind the wall, the collection began.

Almond opened the Vault of Infinite Treasures, and the spring water began to flow into his storage in a steady, controlled draw. He did not need to scoop it or carry it. The Vault took it, fast and clean, and every second the basin stayed under his control was a second of water secured forever.

The other three forces threw everything they had at the wall.

Thalmyr-Ronethis tried to find the seam, the way they always did, their precision strikes probing the rotating blades for a pattern they could break. There was no pattern. Almond was not running the wall on a cycle. He was running it on intent, the blades shifting wherever a Thalmyr strike landed, sealing every gap before it opened. Tessovaen Ire’s precision doctrine had no answer for a defense that was not a system.

Virexion-Kezryx tried to overwhelm it. Jaskrit’s storm front slammed into the wall with the full weight of his fleet’s lightning, and for a moment the blades buckled under the load.

Rudra met him there.

The two of them had not fought since the naval battle two months ago, when they had traded blows for nineteen minutes without a decision. They were not the same people now. Rudra had spent two months growing, and when his fist met Jaskrit’s storm-wrapped strike at the edge of the basin, the collision threw a shockwave down the entire western slope, and this time it was Jaskrit who gave ground.

“You have gotten stronger,” Jaskrit said, through the storm.

“So have you,” Rudra said. “Not enough.”

He pressed forward, and the storm front broke against him, and Virexion-Kezryx could not push through to the basin while Rudra held the southern approach.

Celestara-Dravokh came from the west, and they came desperate.

Joaka threw everything into it. Her radiant wings flared to their full span, and she struck the wall with a column of solar light that would have ended a lesser defense. But Ainen met her light with his own fire, and the exotic flames swallowed the solar column and gave nothing back, and Joaka found that the one thing Celestara had built their entire strategy around, light, was being eaten by a man who had spent the entire event hiding what his flames could do.

“You are stronger than the leaderboard showed,” she said, straining against the flames.

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Ainen said. He did not sound unkind about it. “We will stop hiding eventually. Today is a little of that.”

The western approach held.

And around the whole basin, the rest of the alliance fought the war beneath the leaders.

Natalia’s spheres covered the entire slope, intercepting attacks from all three forces at once, her predictive layer tracking a three-way assault and turning it aside before it landed. Kayla’s threads held the alliance together as a single reacting body. Silvester and Hiroshi worked the gaps in Almond’s wall, cutting down anything that slipped through. Maya hunted the slope for the enemy elites who tried to flank, and dropped them with frost before they reached the basin. Marcus anchored the eastern approach with his shield, the one direction Suryax-Regalon held alone, and nothing came through him.

The Asura Executives held sectors across the whole contested ground, no longer pretending to be weaker than they were. Vael’s constructs walled the northern flank against Thalmyr. Tharion’s weapons carved kill zones over the basin. Vokren turned enemy attacks back on the forces that fired them. The ten of them fought at their real strength for the first time in front of an audience, and the audience was three rival alliances who were recalculating Suryax-Regalon with every second.

Saffa, Clovelle, and Fraisea ran the support that made it all hold. Clovelle’s Skydread fleet controlled the air over the slope. Saffa turned the alliance’s defensive systems toward the basin, layering protection over the collection. Fraisea kept the captured-technology weapons firing into the three rival forces, a constant pressure that kept them from massing.

Big D fed Rudra and Almond the whole picture from above, and Gopu held the command platform steady, and the Suryax King and his awakened generals fought alongside the Regalons as equals, their Geneline solar power adding to the wall that ringed the spring.

The basin stayed under Suryax-Regalon control.

And the Vault kept drawing.

—

It became clear within minutes that the other three forces could not break through.

They tried. All three of them tried hard, because the spring was worth trying hard for. But Suryax-Regalon had reached the basin first, and held the high ground around it, and fought at a level that none of the three had expected from the alliance that had spent a month in fourth place. The wall did not break. The approaches did not yield. The Vault kept drawing the water in, and every second that passed was water the others would never get.

Almond watched the basin level drop as the Vault collected, and he did the math.

He could take all of it. The wall would hold long enough. The three forces could not break through in the time it would take the Vault to drain the spring completely. He could walk off this slope with every drop of the Spring of Ascension and leave the other three alliances with nothing.

And that was exactly the thing Lily had warned about.

If he took all of it, the message to the other three forces would be unmistakable. Suryax-Regalon was not a rival anymore. It was a different category of power, and the gap was not going to close. And the moment the other three believed that, they stopped competing and started thinking about sabotage, about lose-lose, about dragging everyone down before the Doom Monarch’s war made the question moot.

He did not want that. Not yet. Not before the war that needed the field strong.

So Almond made a different call.

He let the wall open.

Not collapse. Open. On three of its arcs, the rotating blades thinned, just enough, just for a moment, and the message in it was as clear as the math had been. Suryax-Regalon could have taken everything. Suryax-Regalon was choosing not to.

The three forces surged into the gaps, reaching the basin, and began to collect what was left.

There was less than half of it remaining. Suryax-Regalon had taken the larger share, the lion’s share, more than any other single force would walk away with. But the other three got something. Thalmyr-Ronethis collected a portion. Virexion-Kezryx collected a portion. Celestara-Dravokh, who needed it most, collected a portion, and Almond made sure the opening on their arc was the widest, because a desperate weak force was the most likely to do something reckless, and a weak force that walked away with something was a weak force that would keep playing by the rules.

By the time the spring ran dry, the contest was over.

Suryax-Regalon had the majority. The other three had enough to not be empty-handed. And every alliance on the slope had just watched Suryax-Regalon hold a basin against all three of them at once, take the largest share, and then choose to let the rest go.

It was the choosing that landed hardest.

—

Jaskrit Kezinos stood at the southern edge of the slope, the storm fading around him, and watched Suryax-Regalon withdraw from the basin in good order.

The Kezryx commander came to stand beside him. “They could have taken all of it.”

“Yes,” Jaskrit said.

“Why didn’t they?”

Jaskrit watched Almond walking back down the slope, the Vault sealed, the Grimblades settling into their orbit, the whole alliance moving with the easy coordination of a force that had not been seriously threatened.

“Because they did not need all of it,” he said. “And because letting us have a share costs them nothing and tells us exactly what they want us to understand.” He was quiet for a moment. “They held that basin against three alliances at once and were never in danger. They could have taken everything and they decided the rest of us were not worth the trouble of denying. That is not a rival being generous. That is a stronger power deciding how much weaker powers are allowed to keep.”

The commander said nothing.

“Drink the water,” Jaskrit said. “Distribute it through the force. We take what we got and we get stronger from it, because we are going to need every bit of strength we can find.” He turned away from the basin. “But understand what we just watched. When the Doom Monarch’s war comes, and the dust settles, and the participants leave this world, that alliance is going to be standing at the top of it. The only question left is what they decide to do from up there.”

Jaskrit’s eyes narrowed. “Sometimes, one must be wise to ride along the wind instead of fighting it. We can go further towards our goal that way.”

—

Back on the island, the Spring of Ascension water went to work.

Almond distributed it carefully. The 100,000 troops drank first, and across the army, parameters climbed, permanently, the spring’s power settling into them and staying. The Suryax soldiers drank. The Asura Executives drank, all ten of them already strong and now stronger. Anyone in the alliance below Tier-50, which was nearly everyone, took their share, and the whole force came out of it permanently elevated.

The X-rank holders took the smallest share, because they needed it least and the army needed it most, but they took some, and even a small increase to a power like Almond’s mattered.

In the sealed lab beneath the palace, Vorth’s team kept working on the third blueprint while the spring water spread through the alliance above them, and the two engines of the month ran on, development and acquisition, hidden and visible, the gap widening on both fronts at once.

That evening, the leadership gathered on the central terrace, where Ainen had set up his cooking arrays for the first time in weeks, and the smell of his food drifted across an alliance that had won an event, secured a Tier-70 resource it could take home, harvested a Mountain, claimed the larger share of a spring that made its entire army permanently stronger, and quietly built four genuine Tier-100 weapon systems that no one else even knew existed.

Lily stood at the terrace rail beside Almond, looking out at the ocean, at the distant slopes of the Mountain, at the dark line of the mainland far to the north where the Doom Monarch waited.

“Eight days left,” she said. “Then the war.”

“Eight days,” Almond agreed.

“We are going to be ready.”

He looked out at the same horizon, at the world they had spent months reshaping, and at the enemy still waiting at the end of it.

“We are going to be more than ready,” he said. “We are going to be the reason it ends.”