Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

The Vharn Combine did not finish retreating.

They got halfway across the black plain, and then the sky over their broken lines tore open, and something far worse than a Warlord came through.

Four pillars of dark light fell from the clouds and struck the volcanic ground, and the whole battlefield felt them land. The molten rivers shuddered. The ash stopped drifting and hung still in the air.

Warlord Khael, crawling, stopped crawling. He looked back at the four pillars, and for the first time all day, something like hope crossed his battered face.

”The Spears,” he rasped. ”They sent the Spears.”

The light faded, and four figures stood on the plain where it had fallen.

They were the Vharn Combine’s pinnacle. Four X-rankers, each one a Tier-50 lifeform, each one carrying five complete decks of their own. They had not come to take a vein. They had come because a vein had cost the Combine a Warlord, and that was an insult that demanded an answer.

The defenders on the walls felt the shift in the air and went quiet. Even Jian, cold as he always was, narrowed his eyes.

”Tier-50,” he said flatly. ”Four of them.”

Roken wiped blood from his mouth and gripped his hammer tighter. ”Tell me ours are stronger.”

”Ours are better,” Almond said, walking forward to meet them, Lily and Rudra and Ainen falling in at his sides. ”There is a difference. Let us go show them what it is.”

The two quartets stopped twenty paces apart on the black plain, and the air between them grew so heavy it hurt to breathe.

The Vharn Spears were a striking sight. They wore no uniform, only the marks of their own power, and each of them radiated the dense, settled weight of a Tier-50 existence.

Their leader stepped forward first. He was tall and lean, wrapped in segmented dark armor, a spear of black light resting easy across his shoulders. His eyes were the color of a dying star.

”I am Drareth,” he said. ”First Spear of the Vharn Combine. You broke a Warlord and a Combine army today, little kingdom. Impressive.” His star-eyes moved across the four of them. ”But you are not Tier-50. Not one of you. We can feel it.”

”No,” Almond agreed easily. ”We are not.”

”Then this ends quickly,” Drareth said.

”It ends,” Almond said. ”Quickly is your assumption.”

The Spears spread out, and so did the four of them, and the single battle became four at once.

Rudra took the giant.

The second Spear was a mountain named Gorrath, half again Vakreth’s size, his body a wall of grey stone-flesh that cracked and re-knit with every step. He did not bother with weapons. He simply walked at Rudra and swung a fist like a falling cliff.

Rudra caught it, and the impact drove him knee-deep into the volcanic rock.

He felt the Tier-50 weight of it through his whole frame. This was not Vakreth. This was a real one.

So Rudra played a card he had not shown the Zerrafax.

[Body of the Final Word.]

The Codex of the Adamant Sovereign sealed his frame absolute, and he shoved the falling-cliff fist aside and drove his own into Gorrath’s chest. The stone-flesh caved. And then re-knit, instantly, the crater filling itself back in.

”I do not break,” Gorrath rumbled. ”I have never broken. I cannot.”

”Everyone says that,” Rudra said.

He hit the giant again, and again, and each time the stone-flesh healed, the wound forgetting it had ever existed. Gorrath laughed and pressed forward, certain, a thing that could not be killed because it could not be hurt for longer than a breath.

Rudra stopped punching and went still in the center of the giant’s assault.

He had been reading. He had read enough.

”Your body does not heal,” he said quietly. ”It refuses the wound. It decides the damage never happened.” He raised one hand, and the plain went cold. ”That is structure. And I revoke structure.”

[Edict of Unmaking.]

The Dominion of the Absolute Breaker rolled out, and inside it, Gorrath’s healing simply stopped being a thing the world allowed.

Rudra struck him once more, clean through the chest, and this time the wound stayed. Gorrath looked down at the hole that would not close, and the certainty drained out of his stone face.

Then Rudra revealed a new deck, one no enemy had ever seen, and the air around his fists turned to something that hummed like a verdict being read.

[Tribunal of the Sundering Law.]

A single card. A single judgment. It named Gorrath’s unkillable body a lie and made the lie true.

Rudra’s final blow did not break the giant. It sentenced him. Gorrath came apart into grey dust that did not re-knit, scattering across the black plain, and the second Spear was gone.

”One,” Rudra said, and turned to find another.

Ainen took the void.

His Spear was a gaunt figure named Vexa, wrapped in a darkness that ate the light around her, and where she walked, the molten rivers dimmed and the air went dead and cold.

”A flame user,” she said, almost pitying. ”You came at me with fire. I am the thing that eats fire. I am the thing that eats everything.”

She opened her hand, and a card answered.

[Null Devourer.]

A sphere of absolute nothing bloomed from her palm and rushed at Ainen, and it ate the heat from the air, the light from the sky, the fire he threw at it. His flames vanished into it and did not come out.

For the first time in a long time, Ainen’s fire failed.

He frowned, took a step back, and grinned.

”You eat fire,” he said. ”Good. I eat what fire eats. Let me have a taste of you.”

[Origin Flame: Devour.]

His origin flame met her nothing, and instead of being eaten, it ate. It learned the void. It learned the hunger itself. And a new flame kindled in his palm, a black flame, a starving flame, a fire that consumed nothing and emptiness the way her void consumed everything else.

Vexa’s eyes went wide. ”That is not possible.”

”People keep telling me that,” Ainen said.

He threw the starving flame, and it ate her void from the inside, her own nothing turned against her, the darkness she wore collapsing as the black flame devoured the very hunger that fed it.

Then he opened a new deck, and the plain lit with a light that should not exist, a fire that burned cold and dark and bright all at once.

[Hearthfire of the Endless Table.]

His newest deck was not war. It was the principle that had fed an entire kingdom turned to its sharpest point. The card poured strength into every flame he held, the starving flame loudest of all, and the black fire bloomed into a sun of pure devouring hunger.

Vexa, the thing that ate everything, was eaten. She fell to the scorched plain with nothing left to consume, her void gone, her decks silent.

”Yield or burn,” Ainen offered.