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

Chapter 741: Brooks’ Final Exit

The training room on level four was empty at this hour, which was exactly why Noah used it.

He sat cross-legged in the center of the rubber floor with his eyes closed and his hands resting flat on his knees. For the first five minutes, he didn’t try to do anything except breathe. He let the station’s ambient noise flatten out into a single, predictable texture—the low, oily thrum of the life-support scrubbers, the distant, metallic click of boots from the night shift moving along the primary corridors, the faint vibration of the structural struts holding this entire tin can together against the vacuum outside. He didn’t fight the noise. He just let it become the background until it wasn’t an interruption anymore.

Then, he went looking for the white chi.

It lived right behind his breastbone, warm and clean and perfectly familiar. This was the energy that belonged to him, the stuff he’d grown himself rather than pulled from the world, and it moved the moment he touched it. He coaxed it out slowly, guiding it up through his chest, over the broad muscle of his shoulders, and down his arms until his fingertips felt heavy. Then he looped it back down through his core and into his legs. He wasn’t forcing the rhythm. He was just following the deep, worn channels his biology had carved out over years of doing this exact sequence.

It came a lot easier now than it used to. Back at the academy, he’d have to sit there for forty minutes just to get the first spark to catch. Now, it happened almost instantaneously.

Once the white loop was running clean and smooth, he reached outward for the dark chi.

This was the part that required a delicate hand. Dark chi didn’t belong to him; it belonged to the space he was occupying. It was the heavy, static residue left behind by the people living on this station—the quiet anxiety of soldiers prepping for a drop they didn’t have the full intel for, the specific, sour weight that military facilities accumulated when thousands of people passed through them on their way to miserable places. It was white chi with a dirty, reddish-pink tint to it. Denser. Realer, in a way.

He drew it in through his skin, letting it seep through his pores at its own pace. If you tried to yank dark chi in by force, it didn’t cooperate; it just gave you a blinding headache, a nosebleed, and a ruined circuit.

The reddish-white energy crept toward his center, meeting the white loop right in his chest. They didn’t merge—they couldn’t—but they ran side-by-side through the same narrow veins, like oil and water spinning through a pipe together if you kept the pressure exactly right. His own warmth running parallel to the collective weight of the station.

He held them both steady, took a slow breath, and pulled the void energy into the mix.

The friction was instantaneous. Two years ago, down at the academy, the first time he’d tried to introduce void to his chi channels, the two energies had rejected each other so violently he thought his ribs were going to crack open from the inside. Void energy was pure entropy; its entire nature was to dissolve, to unmake, to break things down to their absolute baseline. Chi was structure. It was the fundamental framework of living things, and it absolutely hated being pushed around by something that wanted to turn it into nothing.

Now, though, the rejection wasn’t a total system failure anymore. It was just a heavy, grinding friction.

The purple energy slid into the track, running alongside the white and the reddish-pink in a triple circuit that made his skin feel like it was breaking out in static electricity. His muscles twitched, his teeth clicked together, but his body had slowly learned how to act as a container for things that shouldn’t exist in the same zip code.

He thought about Arthur.

Specifically, he thought about the way Arthur had used those shadows in their fights. None of Noah’s usual tricks had worked on them. The null strikes, the Entropy Touch—the things that usually disintegrated everything they touched—had just slid right off those shadows like water off grease. The system had spelled it out for him afterward in that cold, logical text: *Chi as a fundamental energy cannot be erased by void energy.*

Arthur had known that or perhaps had an idea of it somehow.

He’d infused his standard abilities with dark chi, creating a layer beneath the technique that void energy couldn’t touch because void couldn’t dissolve the foundational building blocks of reality.

’There are going to be more of them,’ Noah thought, his jaw tightening as he concentrated on keeping the purple stream from eating the white one. ’Arthur was just the first guy who figured out how to use the rules against me. Anyone operating at that alpha rank threshold, anyone who’s been alive long enough to study how entropy actually functions, they’re going to use chi as a shield. If I can’t break through it with pure void, then I need to be the one putting chi into the weapon myself.’

He shoved a little more void into the circuit, trying to widen the channel.

The dark chi immediately bucked, the reddish-pink energy flaring as it resisted the purple. A sharp, stinging heat spread behind his eyes, the fundamental energy asserting its right to exist, and Noah just sat there and breathed through the burn. He held the triple loop together for one minutes. Ten, then twenty, then almost forty minutes.

On the forty fifth minute, the purple line twitched toward his lung, and he had to drop the whole thing before it bit him.

He let the energy dissipate, slouching slightly as he took a deep, shuddering breath. The air in the room felt incredibly cold against his sweating skin.

’Forty minutes,’ he thought, wiping a hand across his forehead. ’It was barely two when I first started practice. It’s moving. Slowly, but it’s moving.’

He opened his eyes, stared up at the generic grey acoustic tiles of the ceiling, and let his mind drift back to the things he was currently avoiding.

His team.

Diana was going to be absolutely livid. He didn’t need to check his comms or open a channel to know that; he could practically feel her temper vibrating across the solar system. By now, back at the Eclipse headquarters, she’d be pacing the floor, cussing in that low, rhythmic way that made Kelvin look at his boots and caused Lila to quietly leave the room to find something else to do.

He had just walked away. No note, no explanation, no hand-off.

He hadn’t planned it like that. But after the cocoon had split and Kruel was gone, something inside him had just felt... disconnected. The soul form tab had unlocked, the notifications were screaming in his peripheral vision, and the sudden, suffocating reality of what they’d just done had hit him all at once. If he stayed on that planet for one more minute, he was going to have to talk to people. He was going to have to explain what it felt like to have his core rewritten.

So he had just blinked. He’d found Storm, climbed onto the dragon’s back, and let the beast carry him through the empty places between stars, letting the cold vacuum wash over his face until his brain stopped buzzing. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going because, honestly, he hadn’t known until he saw the Vanguard station on the horizon.

’It was a selfish call,’ he told himself, leaning his head back against the wall. ’A genuinely stupid, shortsighted call. I needed a minute to breathe, and instead of just saying that, I let them think their leader had vanished into the ether right after their biggest fight.’

He could see the fallout clearly. Kelvin would be doing damage control with the team, smiling for the cameras while his eyes remained entirely dead. Lucas would be looking at the public relations metrics, calculating exactly how much credit Eclipse was losing by having their primary asset go dark during the post-mission window.

’Bad for the brand,’ he thought, the word *brand* tasting sour in his mouth.

But beneath the corporate nonsense, there was the other thing. The real thing.

When Kruel’s fist had taken his spine apart, Noah had felt the exact moment the bone gave way. It wasn’t like the typical combat injuries—the deep cuts or the standard meat-and-potatoes burns you got from low-level Harbingers. It was a cold, total structural failure. His legs had simply ceased to be part of the conversation. Lying there in the dirt with his ribs pushed out against his skin, watching his void reserves tick down toward the single digits, he hadn’t thought about the mission or the quest or the fate of the universe of Kruel became a five horn.

He’d thought about his parents.

Not with some grand, dramatic wave of affection, either. It was just the hard, dry realization that he was about to die on a rock nobody had a name for, and he’d never actually looked his mother in the eye to ask her why she’d left him behind.

’Mrs. Harper spent twenty years sweeping up the dust from broken beast cores at the academy,’ he thought, his eyes tracking a tiny scratch on the floor. ’She didn’t have a system. She didn’t have void energy to scrub her cells. She just got old and sick while the radiation took her apart piece by piece, and I was stuck in a penalty dimension playing a character named Burt while she died alone. And all that time, my actual parents were sitting up here on the Ark, signing off on logistical manifests.’

He stood up, his joints popping in the quiet room, and walked over to the heavy black striking post bolted to the floorboards.

He didn’t use energy. He just lifted his hands and started working through the standard Vanguard physical training loops. *Snap. Thud. Snap.* He kept the strikes short, focusing entirely on the point of contact, letting his knuckles take the brunt of the impact until the skin went red. Fifty reps on the right, fifty on the left. The repetitive, mindless sting of it helped clear the fog.

He stopped, his forehead resting against the cold vinyl of the post, his breath coming a little quicker now.

He had to go back soon. He knew that. He had to stand in the same room with Diana and Lucas and Kelvin, and they had to look at the fact that Jayden was gone, and they had to figure out how to carry that weight together instead of letting it poison them separately.

’But I have to finish this first,’ he thought. ’The alpha dragon. Whatever is out there at the edge of the system, it’s been waiting for two years, and I’m not leaving until I see what it is.’

He began to walk out of the training room and saw some recruits who waved and he waved back. The novelty of an actual, SSS ranked human walking their station was starting to wear off.

He thought about Rael. The kid’s S-ranked presence was still hanging in the back of his mind—that arrogant, iron-jawed stance in the docking bay, the complete lack of doubt in his eyes when he’d told Noah to get off his station.

’He’s good,’ Noah thought, a small, genuine smile tugging at his lips. ’That’s what makes him so irritating. He’s nineteen, he’s got a clean record, and he actually believes the uniform means something. I used to look exactly like that before the world got heavy.’

He walked into his quarters with storm in and went to bed. All in a day’s work.

___

The knock on his quarters came at exactly twenty-two hundred.

Noah opened the door to find a kid who looked like he’d survived his first year at the academy by the skin of his teeth. The boy was stiff as a board, his uniform pressed so hard the creases looked like they could cut paper.

"Commander Brooks requests your presence, sir. Level two, observation room three."

"Lead the way," Noah said, grabbing his jacket from the hook.

Observation room three wasn’t one of the grand tactical chambers with the holographic maps and the multi-layered display screens. It was a narrow, low-ceilinged space tucked away behind the secondary coolant lines, containing nothing but a small round table, four standard-issue metal chairs, and a long, thick viewport that looked out into the black. This far down the eastern strut, the curve of the Earth was hidden behind the station’s primary solar arrays, leaving nothing to look at but stars that didn’t blink.

Brooks was already sitting there. She’d changed out of her uniform into a simple, charcoal-colored wool sweater that looked a bit too large for her, her hair down around her shoulders instead of pinned back into that tight, severe military bun. She looked smaller like this. Less like an institution, more like a person.

Two mugs of generic station coffee were sitting between them, steam rising in thin, crooked lines toward the vent.

"Sit," she said, nodding toward the chair opposite her.

Noah sat down, his long legs awkward under the small table. He picked up his mug, the ceramic warm against his calloused palms, and waited. He knew her patterns; she always took a second to align her thoughts before she opened her mouth, a habit left over from her days as an instructor.

"Rael told me about the docking bay," she said after a long sip. "He thinks you’re disrespectful."

"He’s nineteen," Noah said. "Everyone’s disrespectful when they’re nineteen and they haven’t lost a friend yet."

"He’s twenty, actually," she corrected softly, her eyes drifting toward the viewport. "But your point stands. He thinks the war has a ceiling, and he’s about to hit it. He doesn’t understand that the ceiling just keeps moving up every time you get close to it."

"He’ll learn," Noah muttered. "Or he’ll die. That’s usually how the EDF handles the curriculum."

Brooks didn’t flinch at the wording. She just stared into her coffee, her fingers tracing the rim of the mug. "The recruitment numbers are up thirty percent this year. The new simulators are better. The gear we’re giving them—the armor, the sidearms, the kinetic dampeners—it’s all three generations ahead of what you had when you were in the barracks."

She paused, her jaw tightening slightly.

"And it still doesn’t feel like we’re winning," she said. "The threat assessments for the outer sectors came in yesterday morning. They’re classifying three more regions as unviable for civilian habitation. They aren’t telling the press, obviously. They’re just... quietly adjusting the maps."

"They’ve been doing that since the first time the Ark was stationed in our orbit," Noah said, taking a sip of the coffee. It tasted like burnt beans and copper, the classic Vanguard blend. "It’s how they keep people from jumping out of the windows."

"No, Noah, it’s different now," she said, her voice dropping into a register he hadn’t heard from her before—quieter, less sure of itself. "Before, it was a logistical problem. We didn’t have enough boots, or we didn’t have enough cores to power the shields. Now... the decisions coming down from the Ark don’t look like logistical failures. They look like choices."

Noah looked at her across the rim of his mug. ’She’s been sitting with this for months,’ he thought, watching the subtle tension in her forehead. ’She didn’t call me down here to complain about the bureaucracy. She’s looking for something else.’

"The Vel’kai operation," she continued, her eyes fixed on his. "We had three scouts confirm Kruel’s coordinate matrix six weeks before you went in. Six weeks, Noah. The local defense forces were asking for an orbital strike or a vanguard insertion. The Ark tabled the motion three times."

"They said they were waiting for the atmospheric interference to clear amongst other excuses like the conclave of whom I never got the pleasure of encountering by the way," Noah said.

"The interference was within normal parameters for forty-eight of those days," she said flatly. "They let that four-horn sit there because they were running a different calculation. I don’t know what it was—maybe they wanted to see if the local factions would break first, maybe they were negotiating with someone behind closed doors—but four hundred million people lived under that shadow for an extra month because the top floor decided to wait. They knew the conclave was a none issue as long as the host planet didn’t call them in. By law, you were in a territory you shouldn’t have been in but the host planet seemed to have let it slide, so they couldn’t intervene,"

The small room felt incredibly quiet. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic *thump-thump* of the station’s main rotation axis two levels up.

"Why are you telling me this, Commander?" Noah asked.

"Because I want out," she said.

The words came out clean, without any of the dramatic weight people usually put on statements like that. She just said it the way she’d tell a class that a tactical maneuver was no longer viable.

Noah didn’t say anything for a long moment. He just watched her.

"Sixteen years," she said, her voice steady but thin. "I came in when our last defence fell. I believed the story. I believed that if we just trained them hard enough, if we got the parameters exactly right, we could build a perimeter that would hold. But you can’t build a perimeter when the people behind you keep moving the fence posts."

She leaned forward, her elbows resting on the table, her face coming into the light. "I’ve been watching Eclipse. Not the streams—the actual tactical feeds. Your people don’t wait for the Ark to sign off on a budget before they move. When the Eastern Cardinal went sideways, Diana, kelvin, Lucas and all those present didn’t file a three-part report; they just took the transport and went."

"They all almost died," Noah said.

"But you guys went," she said. "And you did it because it needed doing, not because it looked good on an administrative review. I’m a good officer, Noah. I know how to organize a supply line, and I know how to make twenty-year-olds understand how to survive a tier-three encounter. But I’m done doing it for an institution that treats its soldiers like currency."

She stopped, her dark eyes wide and completely serious as she waited for him to respond.

Noah looked down at his hands. He thought about the Eclipse facility—the messy, unorganized offices that occurred when certain recruits were in charge of certain departments that got less oversight. There was only so much that could be supervised between Sophie and Sam.

Was it the way Kelvin always left his dirty coffee cups on the main tactical table? The constant, low-grade chaos of a faction that was growing too fast for its own skin. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t clean.

’But it’s real,’ he thought. ’We don’t leave people behind because the math doesn’t work out.’

"We don’t have uniforms," Noah said, looking back up at her. "And Sophie will probably make you do your own paperwork for the first six months."

A tiny, genuine smile broke through her severe expression, softening the lines around her eyes. "I think I can manage that."

"Then you’re in," Noah said. "Whenever you’re ready to hand in the badge, the door’s open. I’ll tell Kelvin to clear out a desk. One without cups on it, if he can manage it."

She nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement, and picked up her mug to finish her coffee. The air in the room didn’t feel quite as cold anymore.

---

Noah walked back to the residential level alone, his jacket unzipped and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. The station was on its late-night cycle now, the overhead lights dimmed to a deep, dark blue that was supposed to mimic a natural night sky but just made the corridors look like the inside of an old submarine.

’Sixteen years,’ he thought, his boots clicking against the metal floor. ’She’s the third senior officer from the academy to talk about leaving this year, I got word from kelvin about two more. The ones who actually know how the machine works are all looking for the exit.’

It didn’t make sense.

He thought about the Supreme General—the old man in the scarred beast armor who had stood by the viewport on the upper deck and looked at the Earth like he was trying to remember what it felt like to live there. The General wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t some corrupt bureaucrat who had bought his way into a high-backed chair; he was a man who had earned every single scar on his face in the mud of the war drops. He was sharp, he was present, and he genuinely cared about whether the species survived the week.

So why was the institution under him rotting from the inside out?

’The intelligence on Kruel sat on a desk for six weeks,’ Noah thought, turning the corner toward his sector. ’That’s not a mistake. You don’t misplace a four-horn evolution report. Someone at the very top of that chain looked at those coordinates, looked at the timeline, and made a conscious choice to let that thing grow.’

What were they waiting for? What could possibly be more important than taking out an alpha-tier threat before it reached maturity?

’Something’s broken,’ he told himself, hitting the door control for his quarters. ’Something at a level that isn’t visible from the barracks or the streams. The EDF isn’t losing the war because the Harbingers are too strong; they’re losing it because they’ve stopped trying to win.’

The door slid open, and the immediate, familiar smell of ozone and wet dog hit him in the face.

Storm was lying across the entire floor area between the bed and the desk, his massive tail curled around the base of the nightstand. He’d somehow managed to turn the automated desk lamp on with his nose, and he was currently staring at the lightbulb with the intense, vacant curiosity of a creature that had four brain quadrant (humans have two hemisphere) but used none of them for high-level logistics.

Noah shut the door behind him, kicked off his boots, and dropped onto the edge of the mattress.

"Move over," he said.

Storm let out a low, rumbling grunt, shifting his haunches about three inches to the left, which did absolutely nothing to increase the available floor space.