Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner

Chapter 737: The Conclave response

It’s been several months since the Kruel incident occurred and the Vel’kai planet had changed in ways that couldn’t be undone.

The markets that had reopened three days after the evacuation ended, the ones where Vel’kai had returned to their stalls with the stubborn determination of people who understood that routine was how you survived catastrophe, those markets were quiet now. Not closed. The stalls were there. The goods were there. The Vel’kai moved through them because they had been told to keep moving through them, because a planet that looked functional from orbit was easier to run than one that looked broken, and One understood that.

The difference was who was watching.

There were enforcers everywhere. And not just ordinary ones, One’s enforcers.

The enforcers stood at every market corner in pairs. Tall, pale, built from a world that had no business producing life at all. Sek’vora was what the Conclave called uninhabitable, toxic atmosphere, surface temperatures that swung between extremes that killed most things, a planet that had rebuffed four centuries of diplomatic contact from every species that tried.

The Sek had survived all of it because the Sek were built for exactly that, bodies that processed what should have been poison, skin that held up under conditions that melted equipment. They had never wanted allies. Never wanted trade. Never wanted anything from anyone.

Then One arrived.

He hadn’t asked them nicely. He hadn’t offered them a deal. He had landed on their world and shown them what he was and given them a choice that wasn’t really a choice and now they wore his insignia on their chest plates and stood at market corners on a planet four hundred million Vel’kai used to call their own.

That was One’s first achievement. Taking the thing nobody wanted and making it useful.

The Vel’kai had learned quickly what the Sek’s presence meant. The tripedal shuffle that had always looked rolling and almost comfortable moved differently now, heads lower, single eyes directed at the ground ahead rather than at the stalls and the other people and the general business of being alive somewhere you belonged. Children pressed close to adults. Adults kept their hands visible. The enforcer formations moved through residential districts on rotation, six to a group, checking doors and counting heads with the thoroughness of people who had done this on another world before this one and had found a rhythm in it.

They moved through Vel’kai homes and the Vel’kai did not stop them.

The northern settlements had it worse than the outer ones but better than the south.

The southern coast was where the battle had happened and the southern coast was where One’s administration had built first. The eleven kilometer trench running northeast through what used to be forest and cliff face was the first thing his people had identified as useful when they arrived. Deep, straight, long enough to hold whatever needed holding. His enforcers had started using it in the second week and had not stopped since.

Teams worked the trench edge every morning. Not Vel’kai. The Sek handled this themselves, moving bodies to the edge with the organized efficiency of people who had found a method and stuck to it. The bodies were Vel’kai mostly. Some were the first messengers the Conclave had sent, representatives from three species who had arrived with formal documents demanding One vacate the planet and return its population to its previous governance structure.

They had not made it back to deliver the Conclave’s response to One’s response.

They were in the trench now, in the first layer, covered by everything that had come after.

The Conclave’s second move had been mercenaries. A small force, fast deployment, the kind of thing you sent when you wanted to communicate seriousness without committing to a full engagement. They had made it to the surface. Four days of fighting and not once had One left his palace to address it. The Sek had handled them and the trench had received them and that layer was covered now too.

The two moons rose when they always rose. The alien sun came up when it always came up. The planet kept being a planet under new management and the trench kept being full and the Sek kept standing at market corners and the Vel’kai kept walking with their eyes down.

Among the new structures One had raised along the southern coast, sitting on the plateau above the coastline where the ruins of the old governance district used to be, there was a building that hadn’t been there before.

It was large. Not ornate in the way that buildings were ornate when someone wanted to show off. Just large, and deliberate, and built to last, the dark stone of it imported from Sek’vora because One had decided that what he built should look like what he came from.

It sat on the plateau with the trench visible from its upper windows and the ocean visible from its lower ones and the settlement spreading out around it in every direction with One’s insignia on every surface that had been built or modified since his arrival.

Inside, the throne room smelled like that imported stone.

He had replaced everything in the Vel’kai council’s eastern building that wasn’t structural. The walls, the floor, sections of the ceiling, all of it the dark Sek’voran material with the veins running through it that caught light differently from anything native to this world. His insignia ran along the upper walls in a continuous band, the single vertical line bisected by a horizontal, repeated until it stopped being something you read and became something that was just there.

He sat in the chair at the far end of the room with his legs apart and one arm on each rest and his eyes on nothing specific. Just present. The way he was always present in a room, aware of everything in it without directing his attention at any of it in particular.

At his feet, across the wide floor, women lay and sat. Two Sek, pale and tall, their faces carrying the careful blankness of people who had learned what expressions cost in this room. Three Vel’kai, their single eyes directed downward, their three legs folded beneath them.

There was footsteps comin from the side corridor. An enforcer entered carrying a tray. Behind him four more, single file, each with a tray, moving toward the eastern wing.

One watched them pass without turning his head.

"They should be hungry by now," he said.

The lead enforcer stopped. "Yes sire. The usual portions as instructed."

"Then go."

They went. Five trays disappearing down the corridor toward the eastern wing, the footsteps fading until the throne room settled back into its quiet.

One looked at the middle distance.

The far door opened.

An enforcer came through it at a pace that said he had been moving faster before entering and had made a decision about that in the last twenty meters. He crossed the floor and stopped at the distance he had learned was appropriate and stood there.

One looked at him.

"Sire," the enforcer said. "Orbital defense reports an approaching force. Interracial composition. The Conclave has sent mercenaries."

"Again?" One said.

The enforcer swallowed. "Yes sire. Though this time the numbers are." A pause. "Significant."

"Handle it," One said.

"Sire." The enforcer’s jaw moved. "It is a full army."

One was quiet for a moment. He looked at the ceiling. Then back at the enforcer.

"The Conclave," he said, "is starting to get on my nerves."

He stood up.

The enforcer stepped aside. One walked through the far door and through the corridor beyond it and out into the courtyard and the alien sky above the palace was doing something new.

Dots. High up, catching the sun as they broke through the cloud layer. Dozens at first and then more behind those, the formations of something that had been planned rather than improvised spreading across the sky in organized patterns. Ships of every configuration, nothing matching anything else, the assembled force of whatever the Conclave had managed to hire across its fourteen species. Hundreds of vessels. The forward elements already angling into attack formation, the lower ones beginning their descent through the atmosphere.

One’s Sek enforcers stood at their posts around the courtyard and looked up.

The Vel’kai workers who had been moving materials along the perimeter had stopped. They stood with their single eyes up, watching the sky fill, and something was in their stillness that was different from the enforced stillness of the throne room. Something that hadn’t been there in months.

Had the Two hand Messiah come to save them a second time?

Could it be?

But sadly, little did they know that wasn’t the case.

One stood in the center of the courtyard and looked up at the army the Conclave had finally decided to send properly.

He reached up and unclasped his robe at the collar. Pulled it off his shoulders and let it fall. An enforcer stepped forward and caught it.

Underneath, just dark pants and boots. His upper body bare. Fifteen years old and built like someone had looked at what fifteen should eventually become and removed the waiting period.

Every muscle group defined past what time alone produced, the kind of physical development that came from something other than growing up. His skin was clean. Unmarked. Nothing had ever left a record on it.

He looked up at the dots.

Then he went up.

BOOM.

The courtyard stone cracked under his launch, a starburst fracture spreading from where his feet had been, and he rose, clearing the palace walls, clearing the settlement’s upper structures, the planet spreading out below him, the trench a dark line running to the horizon, the settlements laid out in their grid with the Sek formations moving through them like dark threads.

Above him the dots had become ships. Targeting systems were finding him, the nearest vessels adjusting their approach angles, weapons coming online.

One looked at them.

A ship fired. Wide bore, surface bombardment class, a column of energy coming down at him that lit the clouds from inside as it passed through.

One stepped sideways in the air.

The blast continued past him and hit the surface three kilometers below and reshaped a section of terrain that had already been reshaped once this month by a different kind of violence.

BOOM.

He was at the ship before the sound of his movement finished traveling. Two mirror images of him hung in the air at the point he had left, the atmosphere holding the shape of him for a half second before filling back in, and he was already at the hull with his hand around the throat of the alien operating the weapon emplacement before those shapes had finished dissolving.

He held them there. Looked at them. Octopus faced, four eyes, the suction lined arms of their species going rigid in his grip, the weapon still warm beneath them from the shot that had missed.

"I have told your pitiful council," One said, in the tone of someone repeating something they were tired of repeating, "that I will not surrender." He looked out at the hundreds of ships filling the sky around him. "And they send." He looked back at the four eyes in front of him. "You lot."

The alien’s mouth moved.

One tightened his grip.

"Disappointing," he said, and threw them into the hull of the adjacent ship hard enough that both the alien and the hull stopped being what they had been.

He turned to the army.

His right hand came up and fire came out of it. Not a beam. A wave, spreading from his palm in an arc that caught the nearest three ships at the same time. The fire ran white at its core and yellow at its edges and it hit those three ships and they came apart in pieces that caught the alien sun as they fell, trailing smoke, the debris spreading across the sky in a fan that the formations behind had to break to avoid.

BOOM.

He was already at the fourth ship, fist into the hull, the metal caving inward, the ship listing and beginning its drop, and he caught the edge on the way down and used the momentum, swinging himself around and launching off it toward a cluster of five vessels coming in from the north.

Lightning out of his left hand. It branched and found all five hulls simultaneously, running through their electrical systems, and the systems expressed their objections through every speaker and panel they had before going dark. Three kept flying on momentum. Two dropped.

He landed on the nearest one still moving and punched through the hull and grabbed what his hand found and pulled the engine housing free and threw it into the ship beside it and both of them were done.

He dropped off the edge and fell and a shadow rose and fell with him and then kept falling past where it should have stopped, stretching down and then sideways, reaching across the sky toward the next formation like something with direction and intention. Where it touched the ships their systems went dark and their crews went still, the kind of still that wasn’t a decision, just the body receiving information and shutting everything else down while it processed it.

The shadow pulled.

The ships it touched folded inward. Not explosively. Just inward, the material of them compressing toward a point, quiet in a way that made it worse than if it had been loud.

One reappeared below the folded ships and caught one of the falling crew members by the collar. Different species from the first. Bipedal, scaled, four arms, built for combat in a way that under normal circumstances probably meant something.

Except there was nothing about One that was normal and the circumstances they were in was dire.

He looked at them. At the sky around them, at the debris field, at the ships still trying to find a formation that made sense given what had happened to the last several formations.

"Your commanders," One said. "When they briefed you on this mission. How long did they tell you it would take?"

The alien said something the translation device rendered as a profanity.

A profound middle finger, if you will.

One put his free hand flat against the alien’s chest and his blood ability ran through his palm. Every vein in the alien’s body went rigid, running at a pressure and a temperature their biology was loudly unhappy about, and One held it there for three seconds while that unhappiness found every available outlet. Then he released it and let the alien hang in his grip, breathing, barely, the body having decided that continuing to exist was the only priority right now.

The remaining ships had pulled back. Their commanders had picked a distance they believed was safe based on observation. They were wrong about the distance but One had decided he was finished with the ships.

He looked at the alien in his grip.

"Go back," he said. "Tell the Conclave that the One Empire is here and it is staying and it is expanding." He looked at the alien’s eyes. "And if the fourteen of them have opinions about that." He paused. "Tell them to get on their knees and pray to God." Another pause. "And hope I don’t hear them,"

He let go.

The alien dropped two seconds before their suit caught them and slowed their fall toward the planet below.

One watched them go.

Then he looked at the sky. At the wreckage spread across the alien atmosphere in every direction, pieces of ships and weapons and crew members drifting in the low gravity, the alien sun finding the metal and the bodies and making no distinction between them. The numbers were past hundreds. Still climbing.

From the courtyard below the Sek enforcers looked up at what hung in the sky above them and said nothing to each other. For a single moment, it looked like they were disappointed about the outcome.

The Vel’kai who had been standing with something in their eyes that looked like hope when the army arrived looked up now.

The hope was gone.

Perhaps they had thought this one would be different. The numbers alone had said it should be different. And perhaps even the Sek, who knew better than anyone what One was because they had been the first to find out, had looked up at those hundreds of ships and felt something stir that they would never admit to. They had been the first world. They knew what came after hope on a world One visited. They were living what came after.

And still.

For thirty minutes, standing in that courtyard watching the sky fill with more ships than the Conclave had ever sent at once, maybe even the Sek had dared to wonder.

The debris field drifting above them answered the question the same way One always answered questions.

Completely.

One descended slowly through the debris field, the alien sun behind him, unhurried.

He landed in the courtyard.

The enforcer stepped forward with the robe. One took it, pulled it on, and walked back inside without looking at any of them.