Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 687: Steady Quiet, Spring

The first twenty days passed in two rhythms that never touched.

In the sealed lab beneath the palace, the development network worked.

Vorth and her team had the Suryax solar-aligned blueprint open first. It was the natural starting point, because the alliance already understood solar resonance through the Suryax Geneline, and because the original Oblivion harnessing system Vorth had cracked gave them a working model for how a Tier-100 design came apart and went back together. The principles carried, even across different alignments. A blueprint was a blueprint. The hard part was never the concept. The hard part was the thousand small things a Tier-100 design assumed you already knew.

Saffa worked beside Vorth through most of it. The two of them had built the dome’s adaptive systems together months ago, and they thought in the same way, and the blueprint development moved faster with both of them on it than it would have with either alone. Fraisea brought the captured-technology archive she had been hoarding since the first naval battle, and more than once a principle from a Tier-50 enemy system turned out to be a smaller, simpler version of something the Tier-100 blueprint assumed, and the smaller version made the larger one legible. Aryan ran the analysis and kept the work organized, tracking which problems were solved and which were still open.

By the tenth day, the Suryax solar design had moved into early production. It was not the full weapon yet. But the alliance now had two Tier-100 systems coming online instead of one, and the development network moved on to the second blueprint without pause.

The leadership rotated through when they were needed. When a development problem required an X-rank deck to test against, Almond or Ainen came down to the lab and provided it. When Vorth needed a specific reading that only Lily’s debuff structures could produce, Lily came. The interchange worked exactly as designed. The best minds stayed on the hardest problem, and the heaviest power came when the problem called for it.

Above ground, the acquisition network fought a different war.

The Mountain’s resources were real, and they were rich, and they were contested. Big D coordinated the whole operation from the lead Mega Dreadship, his intelligence network tracking not just the Doom raids but the other three alliances, who were doing exactly what Suryax-Regalon was doing on the surface. Racing. Harvesting. Watching.

Clovelle ran the air over the Mountain, the Skydread fleet mapping new sites as the broken seal continued to reveal them. The mines went deep, and the deeper veins were richer, and the richest veins were the ones every alliance wanted. More than once, a Suryax-Regalon harvesting team reached a major vein at the same time as a rival team, and the two sides faced off, and neither committed to a fight, because a real fight over a resource site would tell everyone watching far more than the resource was worth. They divided the sites the way the alliances had divided the depth ruins months ago. Tense, professional, unwilling to be the one who started something.

The Asura Executives led the ground teams, and they had grown enough that even the contested sites went smoothly. Vael’s constructs secured the mine approaches. Tharion’s weapons held the airspace over the harvest. Lyxara’s plant constructs pulled ore from veins that would have taken ordinary teams days to clear. The ten of them ran the Mountain operation like a machine, and the 100,000 troops kept the Doom raids off their backs.

The Doom Monarch’s minions came the whole twenty days. Never in waves. Always in raids, small and fast, striking the harvest teams without warning. The raids killed soldiers. The raids were meant to kill soldiers, to bleed the alliance slowly across the month and weaken it before the real war. But the army held, and Almond’s resurrection meant that even the soldiers the raids killed did not stay dead, and the harvest continued.

By the twentieth day, the Suryax-Regalon vault held a quantity of Mountain resources that would feed the alliance’s growth for a long time after the event ended.

And across the ocean, the other three alliances had finished their dives.

---

Big D brought the confirmation to the leadership on the evening of the twentieth day.

”All three of them have their blueprints,” he said. ”Thalmyr-Ronethis dived first and recovered theirs eight days ago. Virexion-Kezryx pulled theirs four days later. Celestara-Dravokh finished two days ago, and it cost them, because their depth was the most dangerous and they are the weakest force. But all three have what they went down for.”

Almond studied the projection. ”Any sign they suspect the blueprints are fake?”

”None. They scanned them, the scans read genuine, and they have all started development. Thalmyr is furthest along. They have committed their best minds to it, the same way we committed ours.” Big D’s tail flicked. ”They have made some progress.”

”How much?”

”Enough to be encouraged. Not enough to find the problem yet. The fakes hold up through the early development. The hollow core does not show until you try to bring the system to full function, and none of them are close to that yet.”

Lily smiled. ”So they are all working hard on weapons that will never fire.”

”All three,” Big D confirmed.

Rudra crossed his arms. ”Then the gap is opening exactly the way we wanted. We have two Tier-100 systems coming online and a third in development. They have three dead ends they do not know are dead ends, and a pile of resources from the Mountain like everyone else.”

”And none of them know which side of that they are on,” Almond said. ”Good. Keep it that way.”

The plan was working. Quietly, steadily, exactly as designed. The alliance looked like one rival among four. The real distance between them was growing in a sealed room that no one outside the alliance had ever seen.

And then, on the twenty-second day, the Mountain changed again.

---

It began as an aura.

It rose somewhere high on the Mountain’s western slope, distinct from the ambient exotic energy that had pressed against everyone since the seal broke. This was different. Concentrated. Clean. It rose like a single clear note over the constant low hum of the Mountain, and every powerhouse on the Mountain felt it at once, and every one of them turned toward it.

A spring had unearthed itself.

The seal, breaking slowly across the month, had finally opened the way to it, and water rose from somewhere deep in the Mountain’s crystalline structure and pooled in a basin of glowing stone on the western slope. The water caught the Mountain’s shifting light and held it, and the power coming off it was unmistakable even from a distance.

The announcement rang a moment later.

[A Spring of Ascension has unearthed itself on the Star Mayhem Mountain.]

[The water of this spring may be carried beyond the boundary of the Warfare Event. Drinking it permanently increases the parameters of an individual. It works on any lifeform below Tier-50.]

[The spring is limited. Claim what you can.]

The notice faded.

In the war room beneath the palace, the leadership had felt the aura and gathered before the announcement finished. Aryan already had the western slope pulled up on the projection.

”Permanent parameter increase,” he said. ”Below Tier-50. That is almost our entire force. The 100,000 troops, the Suryax army, most of the Asura Executives. Every one of them could drink from that and come out permanently stronger.”

”And it can be taken outside,” Maya said. ”Like the Tree Embryo. It does not stay bound to this world.”

Almond leaned back, and there was a slow grin spreading across his face.

”It seems that while the ultimate winner who gets the event reward is only one,” he said, ”this event is handing out prizes to everyone willing to take them. The Tree Embryo for first place. The Mountain resources for whoever harvests them. And now a spring that makes our whole army permanently stronger, that we can carry home.”

”The other three alliances felt it too,” Big D said. ”They are already moving toward the western slope.”

”Then so are we.” Almond stood. ”We have to get the spring. As much of it as we can.”

Lily rose with him. ”It is on an open slope, and three other alliances want it as badly as we do. This will not be like the mines. We cannot quietly divide a spring. Everyone wants all of it, and there is not enough for everyone.”

”Then it gets contested for real,” Rudra said. ”Out in the open. In front of everyone.”

Almond considered that for a moment. The whole month had been about staying quiet, about not revealing the gap, about looking like one rival among four. A real fight over the spring would show more of the alliance’s strength than anything had since the Titans.

But the spring made the entire army permanently stronger. Forever. Carried out of the event and into everything that came after. That was worth more than one more month of looking weak.

He made the call.

”We get the spring,” he said. ”We do not show the blueprints, we do not show the Discord Bloom weapons, but everything else, we use. If we are going to win this, we might as well win big.”

He looked around the room, at the leadership of an alliance that had spent a month opening a gap no one could see, and now had a reason to open it a little in the light.

”Move everyone we can spare to the western slope,” he said. ”The spring is ours.”