Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Kayla’s squads hit the ground running behind the two of them, and their work was the ugliest and the most important. The Solmire wounded lay everywhere among the Solmire dead, and telling one from the other took hands and nerve. Her people moved through the smoke in pairs, dragging the breathing back onto Saffa’s ice, marking the dead for the revival array’s keepers, and Kayla herself worked the worst of it, jaw set, hands quick, doing for strangers exactly what she had spent all night doing for family.

”Array is still up,” she reported into the link. ”Their keepers are exhausted, but it is cycling. Every minute we buy them, forty of their people walk back out of it.”

”Then we buy expensively,” Hiroshi said, and turned to face the towers, because the towers had finally noticed that their harvest had stopped.

Both of them came at the east knot together. There was no ravine here, no trap dug in daylight, nothing but frozen ground and a shield wall two kingdoms thick, Regalon vanguard and Solmire survivors locking together because a wall does not ask where its stones were quarried. The first tower’s stride came down on Saffa’s ice and, for the first time that night, a tower slipped. Only slightly. Only for a heartbeat.

A heartbeat was enough. Gopu had been climbing into the dark above the whole time, patient, and he stooped out of it with his jaws already open.

The dragonfire took the tower across its planted knee, compression and inverted heat and that slow terrible erosion that taught armor to forget itself, and Hiroshi hit the softened joint at the head of the combined wall with all the momentum two kingdoms could give him. The leg slid on the ice. Eighty tons went sideways. And the wall swarmed it before it finished falling, Regalons wedging steel into every flexing seam the way they had learned on their own stretch, Solmire fighters copying them within seconds, blades jamming the joints until the great thing’s struggle locked its own body and it crashed down dead across the frozen ground.

The second tower actually hesitated. Whatever moved it, hive or hunger or the will of the wave itself, it looked at its twin lying broken on the ice and at the small furious wall that had done it, and it took one step back.

”No,” Saffa said quietly. ”You came to someone’s home. You do not get to leave.”

Fraisea’s mandala was already spinning above the tower’s head. She had been building it in silence through the whole fight, layer on layer, and now Abyssal Pressure Choir came down on the black plate with the weight of an ocean’s deep places, driving the tower to one knee, and Sovereign Flow Mandala seized every current inside it, whatever passed for its blood and its power, and dragged all of it the wrong way at once. Depth-Sworn Resonance fed the collapse into itself, pulse after pulse, until the tower’s own mass became the hammer.

It did not fall the way the first one fell. It compressed, plate folding into plate, until what hit the ice was half the size of what had stood there, and Fraisea lowered her hand and read her interface and said, in exactly the tone she used for everything, ”Their queue has stopped growing.”

The rest was hours, but the rest was work with a shape. The knots joined into a line, the line reclaimed the wall, and the revival array cycled behind it, forty a minute, the Solmire dead walking back out of the light into a stretch that existed for them to walk back into. Their fighters wept and fought at the same time, which is a thing that can be done, and the Regalons held the worst gaps until dawn was closer than dusk.

The gray-faced officer found Hiroshi in a quiet moment and did not try to make a speech of it. ”Solmire remembers,” was all he said. ”Whatever your kingdom is called, however high it climbs, Solmire remembers who came.”

”Ananta Regalon,” Hiroshi said. ”And you would have done the same.”

”No,” the officer said, honestly. ”A month ago I would not have. Next month I will. That is what you changed.”

It was Fraisea, on the long fold-step journey home, who read out what the night had been worth. The mission closed behind them with its escalated price fully paid, and the board moved the way boards move when a small kingdom does a large thing in front of the whole rim.

[Ananta Regalon. Contribution rank: 87th.]

”Eighty-seventh,” Kayla repeated, too tired to keep the wonder out of it. ”That is medium-tier reward territory. On our first event.”

”It is also attention,” Saffa said. ”Every kingdom watching the board just learned our name. Some of them will be glad of it.” She did not finish the thought, and did not need to.

They came home to their own stretch with the wave still standing black against the sky, and Marcus met them at the rear line, and one look at his face told them the night was not done spending its surprises.

”Good work down there,” he said. ”Now look at the water.”

Out beyond the killing ground, the wave had gone still. Not calm. Still, the way the sea goes still when something beneath it displaces everything smaller, and along miles of the rim in both directions, the runners and the flyers and all the lesser dark were flowing backward into the black like a tide being inhaled.

On the hill to the west, Alfred had stood up.

The small black wolf that had not moved all night was on his feet, hackles flat, crimson eyes fixed on one point deep inside the wave, and across John’s whole territory, one by one, ten Monster Sovereigns turned to face the same point in the dark.

”Fraisea,” Marcus said. ”Tell me what they are looking at.”

Fraisea looked, with everything she had. The color went out of her face by degrees, and when she spoke, her flat calm finally cracked at the edge.

”I cannot find where it ends.”