Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

The assessment took the Six Empires half a day, and the rim spent that half day learning how to stand still again.

Along thousands of territories, kingdoms buried their dead or queued them for revival, patched their walls, and pretended not to stare at the frozen contribution board hanging over everything.

The Regalons used the time the way Big D ordered, which was food, sleep in shifts, and no speculating out loud. The last rule lasted about an hour.

”Eighty-seventh when the calamity appeared,” Silvester said, sketching numbers in the dirt of the command rise. ”Then a Severe mission fully paid, an emergency hold on the engagement zone, and the flag.”

He tapped the last word home. ”Fraisea’s flag went out on Empire channels. The Hub logged whose admins caught the burrowing before anyone else on the rim.”

”Speculating,” Big D rasped from where he sat with his eyes closed.

”Mathematics,” Silvester said with dignity, and kept sketching.

The declaration came at noon, if the upper layer’s strange sky could be said to have one. The six voices spoke together, and the frozen board came alive, and ten thousand kingdoms stopped breathing at once.

[Assessment complete. Final contribution rankings for the 3,041st World-Ending Event are declared.]

The top ten unfurled first, and there were no surprises in it, because there never were. The Six Empires held six of the ten places, and four great kingdoms of the top hundred filled the rest.

Top-tier rewards fell on them like a second sunrise, and far away, on six thrones, the last coins of six long climbs dropped into place. The board marked it without ceremony.

[The leaders of the Six Empires have advanced to Tier-60.]

”There it is,” Marcus murmured. ”The whole machine, working exactly as built.”

Then the board rolled downward through the medium tier, 11th through 50th, and the family read the names with their hearts climbing into their throats. Forty places, thirty, twenty.

And there, sitting at 43rd among ten thousand kingdoms, on their first night on the rim, was the name.

[43rd: Ananta Regalon.]

The stretch did not erupt the way the feast had erupted. The fighters were too tired and too new to the scale of it.

Instead a sound moved down the line like a long exhale, laughter breaking out in pockets, fists thumping shoulders. Kayla sat down on a rock and put her face in her hands and laughed until it turned into something wetter.

Nobody teased her about it, because half the line was doing the same behind their helmets.

”Forty-third in contribution,” Natalia said, staring at it. ”Ranked 378th on the ladder, and we out-fought three hundred kingdoms above us.”

”The ladder noticed,” Fraisea said quietly, and pointed.

The leaderboard was moving too, the slower board, the one that measured a kingdom’s whole standing. Ananta Regalon’s name climbed it even as they watched, settling at last into its new place. 341st.

Thirty-seven ranks bought in a single night of holding a wall well.

The rewards arrived before anyone finished absorbing that, materializing in ordered rows on the command rise with the polite indifference of a system that had done this three thousand times.

Medium-tier was not a trinket tier. It came as chests of Mystery Boxes stacked in graded colors.

Plain Normal-grade by the dozen. Silver-chased Rare-grade in neat ranks. And a small precious cluster of Epic-grade boxes that seemed to bend the light around their seams.

Beside them lay flat sealed cases, and Marcus opened the first with careful hands and went very still.

[Tier-100 Technology Blueprint acquired: Rare-grade.]

”Blueprints,” he said. ”Actual Tier-100 blueprints.”

There were more beneath it, a spread of Normal and Rare-grade schematics, and two Epic-grade cases sealed twice over.

And separate from all of it, bound in covers that hummed against the fingertips, the arts. Tier-100 Exceed Arts in their four grades, Normal through a single Epic, waiting to be layered onto whichever decks could bear them.

John came up the rise while they were still cataloguing, took one look at the spread, and nodded the way a farmer nods at good rain. ”Medium-tier on your first event. Do you understand yet what you are holding?”

”Beginning to,” Marcus said.

”Then let me finish it for you. The boxes are the gamble. Every Mystery Box holds something of the hundredth Tier, gears, relics, cards, and the grade of the box decides the odds of what falls out.”

”The blueprints are the investment. A blueprint is not a weapon, it is the knowledge to build one, and a kingdom that can build arms itself forever instead of once.”

He tapped the humming covers last. ”And the arts are the crown. An Exceed Art laid over a deck does what you watched my Sovereigns do all night. Multiplies.”

”We cannot build Tier-100 technology,” Silvester said. ”We do not have the workshops. We barely have the vocabulary.”

”You have a dragon,” John said, ”who is already reading.”

He was. Gopu had planted himself over the opened Rare-grade blueprint with his snout an inch from the schematic, tail utterly still.

His eyes tracked the impossible geometry line by line with the ferocious contentment of a creature who had just been handed the best toy in the world.

When Saffa reached to tidy the case he put one claw on it, gently, without looking up, and the matter was considered settled.

”Every kingdom finds its way in,” John said, watching him with open amusement. ”Some buy their builders. Some steal them. You appear to have hatched one.”

Then there was one item left, and it stood apart from all the rest, because the system had set it apart.

A single box, black and gold, of a grade the medium tier did not contain, and above it a citation written in the Empires’ own voice.

[Special commendation: earliest identification of the Calamity-class entity’s subterranean maneuver. Issued to the admins of Ananta Regalon.]

[Reward: one Legendary-grade Mystery Box.]

The whole rise went quiet.

Down the rim, other kingdoms’ boards were carrying the same citation as news, and the family could feel the attention arriving like weather. Thousands of territories were learning in the same moment which 341st-ranked newcomer had seen the calamity’s trick before the Empires did.

”Fraisea caught it,” Marcus said. ”She opens it.”

Fraisea looked at the box for a long moment, and something in her usual flatness wavered. Then she reached out and broke the seal without ceremony, because ceremony was not in her.

The light that came out was slow and heavy. When it settled, a single card hung above the open box, turning gently, its face worked in gold and depths of blue.

[Tier-100 Relic Card acquired: Legendary-grade. Analysis available upon binding.]

”A Legendary Tier-100 relic,” John said, and for once even his voice carried real weight. ”On a first event.”

”Bind it, study it, and tell no one outside the family what it does until you have decided how to use it. Prizes like that are why kingdoms watch each other.”

They opened the rest through the afternoon, and the afternoon became the kind of memory a kingdom keeps.

Normal boxes spilled Tier-100 gears by the armful, gauntlets and lattice-plates and instruments nobody could name yet. The Rare boxes gave relics that made the air taste different.

The Epic boxes each produced a single card that Marcus locked away with his jaw tight against a grin.

Fighters crowded the rise in rotating knots to watch the openings, cheering the good pulls, howling at the duds. For a few hours the rim’s most dangerous stretch of ground sounded like a festival.

The march home began at dusk, and it was nothing like the march out.

They went with their wounded walking or carried and complaining, with wagons of graded boxes and sealed cases rolling in the column’s heart, and with their name sitting at 341st above them and 43rd behind them.

Other kingdoms’ fighters came to the edges of their own territories to watch Ananta Regalon pass. Some watched with respect. Some watched the wagons.

Saffa noted which was which, the whole way home, and said nothing, and forgot nothing.

At the border of John’s territory, a party of tall grey-skinned soldiers in scorched livery stood waiting. Their gray-faced officer stepped forward and bowed to the column, low and long, and all his soldiers bowed with him.

He did not say anything. Solmire had already said it.

The column returned the bow on the march, a thousand heads dipping without breaking stride, and both kingdoms understood that something had been founded there that no board would ever measure.

Home was the pocket world, and the pocket world had kept the fires lit.

The family poured back in under the Virion Iridant Tree to the smell of cooking and the shrieks of children who had been promised the whole story.

The story got told that night the way the family told everything, loudly, in overlapping versions, with Gopu performing his tower kill in increasingly theatrical reenactments until the children collapsed.

Big D sat back from the fires late that night with John beside him, both of them watching the celebration wind itself down. The old man finally said what the whole month had been building toward.

”One event,” he rasped. ”Forty-third in contribution, a Legendary relic in the vault, blueprints in the workshop, and an alliance bowing to us on the road. And our four strongest were not even here.”

He turned his creased old face toward the patron. ”What exactly happens to this ladder when they come home?”

John smiled up at the strange bright canopy, and past it, toward the highest reaches of a sky where four Legendary doors hung shut over four ongoing wars, a hundred days deep and counting.

”That,” he said, ”is what I keep wondering.”