Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Days blurred into a rhythm none of them tracked closely anymore, dimension after dimension, coin after coin, until the counting stopped feeling like counting and started feeling like breathing.

By the time anyone thought to add it all up properly, Almond and Lily had claimed eighteen coins between them. Rudra and Ainen had claimed seventeen more.

Thirty-five, out of a hundred.

”Thirty-five,” Marcus would have said, if Marcus had been there to say it, and instead it was Ainen who said it out loud, turning the number over at a quiet table between fights. ”That’s more than a third. And we still don’t know if it’s enough.”

It wasn’t a guess born of nerves. Coins changed hands in this event in ways beyond simply finding them. Every X-ranker who died rather than withdrew left their coins behind for whoever claimed the ground they fell on, and more than once Regalon’s own total had climbed on the back of someone else’s ending rather than their own search.

The Hub’s broad accounting made the uncertainty worse, not better.

[Estimated leading totals: 35+ coins (unconfirmed holder). Approximately 25 coins (unconfirmed holder).]

[Remaining active participants: 3 groups.]

Nobody knew for certain whose total sat where. Only that three groups remained standing out of a hundred and eighty-three names that had started this event, and only four coins were left uncollected anywhere in the resort.

One of the remaining groups numbered four. Another numbered five. Ananta Regalon, four strong, was the third.

”Whoever holds thirty-five or more right now,” Rudra said, reading the notice with the flat calculation of a man who had commanded fleets on worse odds than this, ”is either us, or someone who’s about to become a very serious problem.”

”Then we make sure it’s us,” Almond said.

---

The riddle arrived without warning, dropped into every remaining mind across the resort at once.

[The Last 4 coins will be together. They are at a place where the sun and moon both shine on it.]

Lily read it twice, turning the words over for a hidden edge. ”That’s not a location. That’s a description waiting for someone to recognize it.”

Ainen frowned. ”Sun and moon, in the same place, at the same time. Some kind of eclipse room?”

Almond had gone very still.

”I’ve seen it,” he said. ”Days ago. I wasn’t looking for anything, I was just walking past a kitchen.”

The memory arrived whole and sudden, the way the cave had once taught his memory to hold things. A cake, forgotten on a back counter, sun and moon shaped candies pressed into its frosting. A single empty bowl set just beside it, catching the kitchen’s strange double lighting in a way he’d noticed and then simply walked past, because nothing about it had mattered yet.

The light from both candies had struck that bowl at once, sun-gold and moon-silver both, reflected together on curved silver in a place that should never have held both at the same time.

”An empty bowl,” he said. ”Sitting under a cake with the sun and moon on it. The light hits it from both sides at once. That’s the place.”

”Where?” Rudra was already moving.

”The kitchen off the second banquet hall. I’ll lead.”

---

They ran, and they were not the only ones running.

Five figures broke from a corridor on the far side of the resort at nearly the same moment, moving with the same sudden purpose, and Almond understood before anyone said a word that at least one of them had seen the same bowl he had.

”Ravengard banner,” Rudra said, catching the colors at a glance. ”The five.”

Both groups reached the kitchen doorway within seconds of each other, and for one taut breath, nobody moved first.

Then the empty bowl on the back counter began to glow, sun-gold and moon-silver light pouring off its curved rim at once, and the whole kitchen folded open beneath every pair of feet standing in it.

---

They landed together in a garden unlike anything the resort had shown them yet.

A line ran straight through the center of it, sharp as a drawn blade, sunlight blazing gold on one side and moonlight pooling silver on the other, neither one crossing into the other’s ground and neither one willing to give way.

Flowers on the sun side burned bright and restless, opening and closing in time with a heartbeat none of them could hear. Flowers on the moon side glowed pale and patient, petals drifting loose like slow falling snow that never quite touched the ground.

At the exact center, where gold and silver light overlapped in a shivering, impossible seam, four coins sat together on a low stone dais, bright enough to be seen from either side of the garden at once.

”There,” Lily said.

Five figures in Ravengard colors spread out across the garden’s far side, and their leader, a broad man with a greatsword strapped across his back and command written into every line of his stance, looked across the dividing seam at the four Regalons with open, unbothered calculation.

”Four coins,” he said. ”Four of you. Five of us. I don’t love your odds.”

”We’ve heard worse math,” Almond said.

”Just give up and save us some time. We need your coins to win this.”

”You must have eaten a delulu mushroom.” Ainen laughed.

The fight broke open the moment the Warlord moved, and it broke open in five directions at once.

He came straight for Almond, greatsword already trailing a heat-shimmer of raw command energy, swinging in a wide arc meant to clear ground rather than land a killing blow first.

Almond met it on crossed Grimblades and read the strike the way he read everything, finding the seam in the Warlord’s confidence the same way he’d once found the seam in a mountain.

”You lead from the front,” Almond said, turning the block into a redirect that sent the greatsword skidding wide. ”That means everyone else is watching you, not the fight.”

”Good,” the Warlord said. ”I like being watched.”

A shield-bearer, broad and braced, planted himself opposite Rudra with a wall of pale energy already blooming from a heavy tower shield, and Rudra read the stance in an instant, the particular patience of a man built to outlast rather than outfight.

”A warden,” Rudra said, settling into his own stance. ”I’ve broken worse walls than you.”

He spent the Unmoved Current not on the shield itself, but on the ground beneath the Warden’s braced feet, and the moment his footing lost its certainty, the wall of pale energy wavered with it.

A caster wreathed in low flame turned her attention on Ainen, twin balls of fire already gathering in open palms, and Ainen met her the way he met every hostile kitchen, curious first and cautious second.

”Fire and food,” he said, already calling the Grand Table’s shimmer around his blade. ”I’ve made worse things useful before.”

And two fast shapes broke from the group entirely, twin daggers flashing in perfect mirrored rhythm, converging on Lily from opposite sides at once.

Lily’s whip met them both without slowing, silence trailing off every strike, and the twins broke apart around her like water around a stone, already circling for a second pass.

”Let’s rolle them up and finish this,” Lily said, reading the matched rhythm of their attacks.