Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

A new notice had reached the X-rankers six months, and these towns they built upon various planets were all the results of that.

[Hell-Mode Quest: Become a Dominant Force on 10 different Top-Tier resource planets in the Middle-Plane.]

[Reward: All members of the Ananta Regalon Kingdom reach Tier-50 lifeform.]

Ten planets. Top-tier ones, the richest in the whole middle-plane. Dominate ten of them, and the entire kingdom would leap to Tier-50 in a single stroke.

It was the kind of reward that made a kingdom move.

So far, they had dominated zero top-tier resources, but prepartions, and progression had never stopped.

Person power was most important, so everyone focused on them while taking small steps to build their kingdom.

---

A new notice had reached the X-rankers a week ago, and it changed the shape of everything.

[Hell-Mode Quest: Become a Dominant Force on 10 different Top-Tier resource planets in the Middle-Plane.]

[Reward: All members of the Ananta Regalon Kingdom reach Tier-50 lifeform.]

Ten planets. Top-tier ones, the richest in the whole middle-plane. Dominate ten of them, and the entire kingdom would leap to Tier-50 in a single stroke.

It was the kind of reward that made a kingdom move.

---

That was why Almond and Lily were a thousand feet in the air, riding the back of a monster the size of a city block.

Rexion was one of John Wicked’s Ten Sovereign Monsters, and he looked it. A vast winged beast of dark plated hide and slow burning eyes, his wingspan threw a moving shadow over the wilderness below, and the wind of his flight bent the treetops flat.

John stood at the crest of Rexion’s spine like it was solid ground, hands in his pockets, watching the land roll past beneath them.

”This whole planet is a prize,” he said. ”Top-tier. But the real treasure is in the ground.” He nodded down at a range of dark hills veined with faint blue light. ”Turoak Ore. Tier-60. Some of the best raw material the middle-plane has. Whoever holds these hills holds something every kingdom up here wants.”

Lily looked down at the blue-veined hills with the eyes of a woman already counting. ”And someone holds it already.”

”Someone does.”

John turned from the view and got to the part that mattered.

”You have seen the Mystery Shops by now,” he said. ”They appear everywhere, top-plane and middle-plane both. Strange little places that sell strange things, and they only take one currency.”

”Mystery Coins,” Almond said. ”Earned by selling resources to the shop.”

”Earned only that way. Which is half the reason everyone up here is clawing for resource planets. You sell ore and growth and energy to the shop, you earn Coins, and Coins buy things you cannot get anywhere else.” John’s mouth curved. ”Things like a Challenge Field.”

He let the name sit.

”A Challenge Field locks down an area. Seals it. Once it is up, no one can take what is inside by force. The only way in is to issue a formal challenge under the field’s rules. Win the challenge, and the field is yours, and so is everything it covers.”

”And the people sitting on those Turoak hills,” Lily said, ”have a Challenge Field up.”

”They do.” John grinned. ”So we are going to challenge them for it.”

”The rules are simple,” John went on. ”Five battles. One on one. First side to win three takes the field, and everything under it.”

Almond looked down at the blue veins glowing in the dark hills, and a slow, familiar focus settled over him.

”Five battles,” he said. ”Then we need more than two of us.”

”You need four.” John’s eyes glinted. ”Lucky for you, I brought a road.”

Almond raised his wristdevice and reached down the Regalon Network. ”Rudra. Ainen. We have a field to take. Come through.”

A moment later, on a ridge half a world away, two pillars of light opened.

It was John’s teleport network, the one Pymon had built, another of his Ten Sovereigns, a beast whose whole domain was distance and the folding of it. Where Pymon laid a road, no space could refuse it.

Rudra stepped out of the first pillar, bare-handed and unhurried, the way he stepped into everything. Ainen came through the second, already smelling faintly of cooking, his flames coiled quiet around him.

Four X-rankers, on one ridge, above one field.

That was enough.

They went to the Challenge Field together, and Almond announced them at its edge.

”Ananta Regalon Kingdom,” he called, his voice carrying across the sealed boundary. ”We issue a formal challenge for this field, under its rules. Send out your owners.”

The Field shimmered, a vast dome of faint light over the Turoak hills. For a moment nothing happened.

Then it rippled, and the owners came out to meet them.

They were a striking people. Blue-skinned, their bodies dusted with shimmering scales that caught the light, their hair in colors that had no business growing on a head, deep reds and electric greens and pale shifting golds. They moved with a fluid, unbothered grace, like people who had never once been worried.

And at their head walked their King, laughing before he had even reached the boundary.

”More,” he said, spreading his scaled arms wide. ”More came to waste their time. Wonderful. We do so love the entertainment.” His own scales were the brightest of all, every color at once, a living rainbow shaped by the Geneline that had shaped his whole people. ”Zerrafax Kingdom holds these hills. We have held them against a dozen challengers. By all means, little kingdom, come and be the thirteenth.”

”Five battles,” Almond said evenly. ”First to three. Your rules.”

”Our rules.” The King’s grin widened. ”Then let us not waste the lovely afternoon. Send out your first fool.”

Rudra stepped forward without a word.

The Zerrafax champion who came to meet him was a mountain of a man.

He was bigger than the rest of his people, his blue skin armored in thick interlocking scales that gleamed like wet steel, and the air around him bent and shimmered with pressure, a crushing weight that rolled off him in waves.

”Vakreth,” the King called lazily. ”Be quick. I want my dinner.”

Vakreth cracked his neck and grinned down at the smaller, bare-handed old man across from him.

”No weapon,” he rumbled. ”No armor. You came to a fight with your bare hands, grandfather?”

”I have never needed more,” Rudra said.

The Field’s boundary closed around the two of them.

The battle began.

Vakreth moved first, and for all his size, he was fast.

He crossed the distance in one surge, the pressure around him slamming forward like a wall, and his fist came down with enough force to crater stone.

Rudra raised one forearm and caught it.

The impact threw a ring of dust outward across the whole field. The ground beneath Rudra’s feet cracked into a web. But his arm held, his skin ringing hard as struck iron where the blow had landed, and he did not give an inch.

A card was already in play, laid down before the giant ever closed the distance, a quiet defensive card from one of his decks that made his guard a wall nothing could move.

Vakreth blinked. ”You took that.”

”I did.”

Vakreth came again, harder.

He was a storm of crushing blows, each one carrying that bending pressure, each one strong enough to break a fortress wall, and Rudra met all of them. He slipped some, caught others, turned the worst aside with short brutal economy, his movements carrying a smoothness that made a giant’s fury look clumsy.

Decades of martial mastery, distilled into a body that wasted nothing. He moved faster than a man his size had any right to, reading the rhythm of the giant’s assault and answering it a fraction ahead every time.

He was not winning yet. He was reading.

And then he had read enough.

”Your scales,” Rudra said, stepping back out of Vakreth’s reach. ”They are the whole of it, aren’t they. Born of your Geneline. Unbreakable. You have never lost because nothing has ever cracked them.”

Vakreth laughed, pressure flaring off him. ”Nothing has, and nothing will. Hit me a hundred times, old man. My skin does not break.”

”I know,” Rudra said. ”So I am not going to break it.”

He raised one hand, and a card answered him, drawn from the five decks every fighter built and the only deck that had ever truly been his.

From the Dominion of the Absolute Breaker, he played a single card.

[Edict of Unmaking.]

A domain spread out from the card, quiet and total, the boundary of the Field humming as it filled with something heavier than pressure.

Vakreth charged into it, and the moment he crossed the line, something went wrong.

His pressure aura, the crushing weight that had cowed a dozen challengers, simply stopped. Not pushed back. Gone. Inside the Edict’s domain, the thing that made the pressure a thing was revoked, and the air around Vakreth went still and ordinary.

The giant faltered, suddenly half as heavy as he had been.

He looked down at his own arms in confusion, and then he did what he always did. He swung anyway, trusting the one thing that had never failed him. His unbreakable scales. His perfect, Geneline-born armor.

Rudra met the punch with an open palm and did not break the scales.

He played another card, and revoked them.

[Decree: Cease.]

Absolute Breaker did not crack Vakreth’s armor. It told the armor it was no longer allowed to be armor.

The shimmering scales along Vakreth’s arm dimmed, lost their gleam, and came apart into nothing, the structure that held them simply ceasing to apply. Where the proudest defense in the Zerrafax Kingdom had been, there was only bare, ordinary blue skin.

Vakreth stared at his own naked arm, and for the first time in his life, fear moved across his face.

”That is not possible,” he whispered. ”My scales cannot be removed. They are me.”

”They were,” Rudra said.

---

Then Rudra stepped in, and he stopped reading, and he simply ended it.

He played a second card, this one drawn from one of his two newest decks, and his whole frame rang like struck metal.

From the Codex of the Adamant Sovereign, he laid down the card that mattered.

[Body of the Final Word.]

His body hardened past flesh, past technique, into something that did not bend and did not break and carried the full weight of every year he had spent perfecting it. A martial body made absolute. The man who unmade other people’s structure had spent a lifetime making his own unbreakable, and the card sealed it whole.

He drove his fist into Vakreth’s chest.

There was no pressure aura left to soften it. No scales left to stop it. Just Rudra’s perfected body meeting an ordinary one, with the force of a sovereign behind it.

The blow folded Vakreth in half and threw him the full width of the Field.

He hit the boundary and slid down it, and he did not get up. His chest heaved. He was alive, because Rudra had measured it to leave him alive, but he was finished, and every Zerrafax watching knew it in the same breath.

Rudra lowered his fist and turned his back on the fallen giant, walking toward his own people without a flicker of effort on his face.

The Field was silent.

---

The Zerrafax King was not laughing anymore.

He stared at his unbeaten champion crumpled against the boundary, at the bare blue arm where the kingdom’s proudest armor had simply ceased to exist, and the easy mockery had drained clean out of his rainbow-scaled face.

”One,” Almond said quietly, into that silence. ”First to three.”

Behind him, Lily smiled. Ainen cracked his knuckles. And Rudra rejoined them without a word, already done thinking about a fight that was, to him, finished the moment he understood it.

The Zerrafax King swallowed, looked at the three X-rankers still waiting, and understood that the afternoon had stopped being entertaining.

”Send out your second,” Almond said.