Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

After the river, Almond stopped holding back his hand.

The full roster came out of the Spirit Kodoku pocket at the border of the second region, and for the first time since he had walked through the door, the world in front of him looked like the outnumbered one.

Alfred stepped out first, as he always did, rapier resting easy at his side, eyes already reading the terrain. Sylvia followed with her vines curling out across the grass, tasting the soil of a world that had never grown anything for anyone.

Benedict arrived with the ground complaining under his fortress plates, bastion sigils turning slow above his shoulders. Galvaren dropped out of the sky laughing, storm wings trailing thunder, and Meliora appeared beside him without a sound, her transmutation cube already rotating between her fingers.

Velkris shimmered into place in three overlapping outlines that took a moment to agree on one. Nyssara descended last, frost and flame wings folded, her frozen suns drifting into orbit around her like patient moons.

Ashkar and Chimera Crystalist, who had bled through the river with him, simply took their places in the line.

”One hundred regions,” Almond said. ”One monster in each, immune to everything except one hidden thing. We found the first key by reading the ground. So from now on, we read everything.”

Alfred inclined his head. ”Then we divide the work, my lord.”

They divided the work, and the work became a machine.

Crystalist mapped each region before they entered it, quartz eye turning, four satellites sweeping the land into cold clean charts. Sylvia walked the maps in the flesh, and the plants of every region talked to her vines whether they wanted to or not, and plants always knew what their world was afraid of.

Galvaren owned every sky, and from up there he found the things that only looked wrong from above. Velkris bent light around the group so that monsters that had never been snuck up on were snuck up on. Nyssara froze what needed freezing and burned what needed burning, sometimes in the same stroke.

Benedict’s job was the simplest and the hardest. When a monster caught them before the key was found, Benedict stood in front of it, and the family lived to keep looking.

And Meliora changed everything.

The essences had been Almond’s problem alone until her. Every key was a substance, a sap or a salt or a seed, and every one of them fought being carried. Meliora took each essence into her vial and her cube and studied it the way she studied all matter, and one by one she taught Almond how to stabilize what could not be stabilized.

”You have been carrying them raw,” she observed in the eleventh region, distilling a lightning-eating moss into three drops of grey oil. ”That is why they keep hurting you. Everything has a form it prefers. We simply ask each one what it wants to be.”

”That’s the whole trial,” Almond said slowly. ”In one sentence.””

”Then the trial is not complicated,” Meliora said. ”Only long.”

The counter climbed. Fifteen. Thirty. Fifty.

The kills stopped taking ten days and started taking three, then one, because the answers stacked. A blade of Meliora’s refined frost-oil, thrown through one of Velkris’s folds in the light, landing exactly where Crystalist’s map said the fifty-second monster kept its one soft truth.

Ashkar broke what could be broken and held what could not. Alfred’s rapier learned to carry a different essence on its point every day, and the point never missed. Sylvia’s gardens spread behind them from region to region, small green outposts in a world that had never been kind, and the group slept in them safely.

There were bad days. The sixty-sixth monster lived inside its own echo and nearly took Nyssara before Benedict got his bastion around her. The seventy-first poisoned the map itself, and they walked in circles for six days until Crystalist tore its own chart apart and started over from nothing.

Almond was thrown, burned, buried, and once eaten to the waist before Ashkar tore him free. He set his own bones so many times that Sylvia stopped scolding him and simply kept her healing dew ready, which from her was scolding of a different kind.

But the counter climbed, and none of them fell, and somewhere past eighty the group stopped feeling like intruders in this world and started feeling like its landlords going door to door, collecting.

Then, on a grey morning in a region of singing grass, the ninety-ninth monster came apart under a spear of braided lightning-reed, and the sky wrote its smallest letters one more time.

[99/100]

Almond stood in the grass and turned in a slow circle, and there was only one direction left that he had never walked.

The mountains.

They had stood at the center of the world since his first hour in it, blue rank behind blue rank, and every region he had cleared had curved around them like water around a stone. He had saved them for last without ever deciding to. Now he understood that the world had saved them for last, and he had only agreed.

The hundredth region began where the foothills did, and it was silent. No wind. No birds. Nothing came out to meet them, and after ninety-nine regions, that silence said more than any roar could have.

”It is not hiding,” Alfred said quietly, hand resting on his rapier. ”It has never needed to.”

On the third day of climbing, Crystalist’s thought arrived in every mind at once, cold and certain. *The mountain is breathing.*

It was slow. One breath in perhaps an hour, a swelling of the whole vast slope so gradual that only a quartz eye could catch it. The hundredth monster was not on the mountain. The hundredth monster was the mountain, root to peak, older than everything else in this world, and it had never once needed to move.

They searched anyway, because the method demanded it. Twelve days they combed the region for its essence, the one hidden thing, the key dressed as scenery. Sylvia’s vines found only stone. Crystalist mapped only stone. There was no strange flower, no wrong salt, because the mountain feared nothing, and its region held nothing at all.

On the twelfth night, Almond sat by a small fire with ninety-nine of Meliora’s refined essences arranged around him, and he was quiet for a long time.

”Every region had a key,” he finally said. ”The world doesn’t break its own rules on the last door. So the key exists. It’s just not in this region.”

”Then where, boss?” Benedict asked.

”Everywhere else.” Almond picked up the first vessel, the one holding the river’s unmaking sap, and turned it in the firelight. ”He told me the answer before he dropped me in. I’ve been carrying his instruction sheet for a year and calling it poetry.”

Ashkar’s furnace eyes narrowed. ”Conquer the river.”

”Move the mountain.” Almond stood, and something in his face had gone very simple and very calm. ”What moves a mountain, Ashkar? In any world. What is the only thing that has ever moved a mountain?”

”Water,” Meliora said, before Ashkar could. ”Given time.”

”I don’t have geological time. So we build a river that doesn’t need it.” Almond looked around the fire at all of them. ”Ninety-nine essences, braided into one current, driven into the mountain’s roots. Every answer this world taught us, arriving at once.”

Meliora’s cube stopped rotating, which was her version of an objection. ”The braid is the problem. I can stabilize each essence alone. Together, they unmake each other. And they unmake every vessel. I have run it forty ways. No dead material can hold that current.”

”No dead material,” Almond agreed. ”I know.”

The fire cracked. One by one, the Spirit Lords looked at him, and then, following the direction he was not quite looking, at Ashkar and Crystalist.

”A living vessel,” Almond said. ”A body that can hold ninety-nine warring essences and drive them forward. It needs two things that don’t exist in one being. A lattice that can sort and carry anything.” His eyes went to the four crystals turning in the dark. ”And a heart that cannot be burned out.” His eyes went to the furnace.

Ashkar was silent for a moment. Steam rolled off his shoulders and thinned into the night.

”You are asking us to be woven together,” he said. It was not an objection. It was a craftsman confirming a measurement.

”I’m asking if you’ll agree to it,” Almond said. ”The weaving is permanent. You’d both still be in there, but you’d be one thing. A new Spirit Lord. I won’t do it without your yes.”

Crystalist’s quartz eye rotated once toward Ashkar, and whatever passed between them was not shared with the fire. Then the cold thought arrived, and there was something in it that was almost warm. *We have fought at the same shoulder for a long time. This only makes it official.*

Ashkar’s laugh sounded like a rockslide deciding to be friendly. ”My lord. Build us well.”

Almond opened the Spiritual Weaving Room right there on the mountainside, because he was not the same maker who had entered this cave. A year of essences had rebuilt his craft from the floor up, and the loom he raised under that enormous ordinary sky was the finest he had ever strung.

Ashkar walked into it without slowing. Crystalist drifted in after him, satellites folding inward like a hand closing.

It was time to weave together both of them into a brand new, and more powerful Spirit Lord!