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

Chapter 744: Digging deep into the belly of the beast

Lila arrived twenty minutes after Lucas called her.

No ship. She had been running a contract three sectors over when the comms came through and had covered the distance on foot through the outer district rooftops, which explained the dust on her jacket and the complete absence of any expression that suggested she found this unusual.

She looked at the coordination hall through the blue door’s narrow window and said nothing for a moment.

"Twenty four hostages," Lucas said. "Harlan Voss leading. Released eight days ago. Fire sword, category three beast weapon. Twelve to fifteen people with him, mixed abilities, at least one telekinetic confirmed."

"Who else knows he asked for Noah," Lila said.

"Everyone in this room," Lucas said. "Kelvin on comms. That’s it."

"Keep it that way," she said. "Last thing we need is that getting out publicly while Noah is wherever Noah is."

Marcus looked at the wall briefly.

Lila looked at him. "What."

"Kelvin found him," Marcus said.

Lila waited.

"He’s with the EDF," Marcus said not knowing Lila already knew this. "Vanguard station."

Lila was quiet for a moment. Then she looked back at the coordination hall. "We’re not calling him for this."

"Agreed," Lucas said.

"He doesn’t need to know about the demand either. Not yet." She crossed her arms. "We handle it. We find out what Voss actually wants because credits and Noah Eclipse is not a complete picture. Nobody plans a multi-settlement coordinator ambush eight days out of prison for a hundred thousand credits and a person they have no logical access to."

"He has to know Noah won’t just show up," Reyna said.

"He knows," Lila said. "Which means either the demand is a distraction or there’s something else underneath it he hasn’t said yet." She looked at Lucas. "Have you talked to him again since the initial terms?"

"No," Lucas said. "I wanted you here first."

She nodded. Looked at the room. At the window. At the coordination hall two hundred meters away with twenty four people inside it and a man who had been out of prison for eight days running what appeared to be a very organized operation for someone who had supposedly just walked free.

"Kelvin," she said, opening the faction comms.

"Here," Kelvin said.

"Voss’s prison record. Not the public file. The internal EDF classification. Who did he associate with inside, what were his movements in the last thirty days before release, and who posted his early release review."

"That’s going to take longer than fourteen seconds," Kelvin said.

"Take twenty," Lila said.

A pause. Then: "Running. Also flagging something you should know. Voss’s original conviction, the EDF checkpoint attack four years ago. The charges that stuck were assault and illegal weapons. The charges that got dropped were conspiracy to coordinate civil disruption and affiliation with an unlicensed awakened collective."

"Dropped by who," Lucas said.

"The file says prosecutorial discretion," Kelvin said. "Which is the legal way of saying someone above the prosecutor’s pay grade made a phone call."

Lucas and Lila looked at each other.

"He’s not freelancing," Lila said. "He never was."

---

Lucas opened the channel at the forty minute mark.

"Voss."

The voice came back in under five seconds. Prepared. Waiting. "Grey. You talk to Eclipse?"

"I’m working on it," Lucas said. "These things take time. In the meantime I need something from you."

"You’re not in a position to need things."

"I need to know the people in that building are alive and unharmed," Lucas said. "That’s not a negotiating position. That’s a baseline. You want me to work on getting you what you asked for, I need proof of life. Video. All twenty four. Now."

A pause. "You’ll get your proof of life when Eclipse is in front of me."

"That’s not how this works," Lucas said. His voice stayed level. Not hard. Just flat and certain the way someone was flat and certain when they were stating a fact rather than making an argument. "You know that. I take that you’ve done this before. Proof of life is the first thing. Without it I can’t move anything forward on my end because I can’t tell the people I need to tell that there’s anyone worth getting Eclipse here for."

Another pause. Longer.

"One minute of video," Voss said. "That’s what you get."

"That works," Lucas said. "Send it to the comms unit."

The video came through forty seconds later. One minute, fixed angle, someone holding a device and panning it slowly across the coordination hall’s main room. Twenty four people seated on the floor along the far wall. Most of them looked frightened and uncomfortable but physically intact.

Then the camera found the one who wasn’t.

A man in his forties, one of the settlement coordinators from the insignia on his jacket, slumped against the wall with his left arm held at an angle that arms were not supposed to hold. Someone had tied a strip of fabric around it above the elbow but the fabric was dark and the darkness was spreading.

Lucas showed the screen to Lila. She looked at it without changing her expression and then looked away.

"Kelvin," Lucas said quietly. "The man with the arm. Third from the left on the wall."

"I see him," Kelvin said. "That’s a deep laceration, possibly arterial based on the blood volume. The improvised tourniquet is slowing it but not stopping it. Without a healer he has maybe three to four hours before he’s in serious systemic trouble."

Lucas opened the channel. "Voss."

"You got your video."

"One of the coordinators is injured. Arm wound, serious. I need a healer in there."

"No."

"He dies, this conversation ends," Lucas said. "I can’t deliver what you’re asking for if there’s a body count. That changes the entire situation legally, politically, and practically. You know that."

Silence.

"One healer," Lucas said. "Unarmed. They go in, they treat the wound, they come back out. That’s it."

"They go in and they don’t come back out," Voss said. "Not until this is done."

"Fine," Lucas said. "They stay in. Treat the wound, stay with your people. One person."

"And food," Voss said, and the way he said it told Lucas the man had been waiting for an opening to say it. "My people haven’t eaten."

’His people,’ Lucas thought. ’Not the hostages. His people. The ones he brought in.’

"Your people have been in there for two and a half hours," Lucas said. "You’re telling me they didn’t bring supplies for a twelve man operation that was clearly planned in advance."

A beat.

"We want food," Voss said, more carefully. "Everyone in here."

"I’ll send food in with the healer," Lucas said. "Enough for everyone. Your people and the hostages."

"How do I know there’s nothing in it."

"You don’t," Lucas said. "Same way I don’t know the coordinator in there is still breathing. We’re both operating on trust right now. I’m extending some. I need you to extend some back."

A long silence.

"One person," Voss said. "Healer and food. They don’t come back out."

"Understood," Lucas said, and closed the channel.

He looked at Lila.

She was already looking at him.

"I’ll go," she said.

"You’re not a healer," Marcus said.

"I know a healer who’ll go with me," she said. "Dara." She nodded toward the young staff member sitting in the corner who had been listening to all of this with the contained alertness of someone who had decided being useful was better than being afraid. "She said she had medical training before the administrative role. Basic healer certification."

Dara looked at Lila. "Level two certification. I can handle a laceration."

"That’s enough," Lila said. She looked at Lucas. "Two people going in. One certified healer, one support. That’s reasonable. He’ll accept it."

Lucas looked at her. At what she wasn’t saying, which was that she was going in knowing she wasn’t coming back out until this was done, that she was volunteering to be inside that building with twelve armed men and an unstable situation and twenty four civilians who needed someone between them and whatever Voss decided to do next.

’She knows what she’s walking into,’ he thought. ’She’s not doing this because she thinks it’s safe. She’s doing it because someone needs to be in there and she’s the best option we have.’

"Kelvin," Lucas said.

"Already building the intelligence package on Voss’s known associates," Kelvin said. "I need another hour for the prison records. But I can tell you right now that two of the twelve people who went into that building match descriptions from a civil disruption incident in the northern Cardinal eighteen months ago. Which means Voss has been organizing since before he went to prison. This group didn’t form eight days ago."

"Someone was holding them together while he was inside," Reyna said.

"Someone with resources," Seraleth said quietly. She had been standing at the window for the last twenty minutes watching the coordination hall with the patience of someone who moved between rooftops for fun. "The vehicles they arrived in. I looked at them when I placed the device. The modifications on the undercarriage, the shielding on the chassis. That’s not standard civilian equipment. Someone spent money on those vehicles."

"Lila," Lucas said.

She looked at him.

"When you’re in there," he said. "You’re not just there to keep the coordinator alive. I need to know who Voss is talking to outside this room. Who gave him those vehicles. Who held his people together while he was inside. And why he actually wants Noah." He looked at her directly. "Don’t push it. Don’t make it obvious. Just listen."

"I know how to listen," she said.

"I know you do," he said.

She turned to Dara. "You’re sure about going in."

Dara looked at the coordination hall through the window. At the sealed doors. At the two vehicles parked at their wrong angles. She took a breath that was slightly deeper than normal and let it out.

"I have a level two certification," she said. "And there’s a man in there bleeding." She looked at Lila. "Yes. I’m sure."

Healers sat in their own classification system that ran parallel to the standard awakened ranking but operated on different logic. Where combat awakened were measured by output and destructive capacity, healers were measured by what they could repair and how fast they could repair it.

The ranking ran from one to ten.

Level one healers were the baseline. Field certified, able to close surface wounds, manage blood loss, stabilize fractures. The kind of training that got added to basic military certification packages so that soldiers on extended deployments had someone who could handle the things that didn’t require a hospital. Most level ones came out of the standard awakened program having developed a healing adjacent ability and run it through the EDF’s medical certification track. They were useful. They weren’t remarkable.

Level two was where the void energy started doing actual work. A level two healer could close deep lacerations, address internal bleeding if the wound was accessible, manage severe trauma well enough to buy time until proper medical facilities were available. Dara’s level two certification meant she could look at the coordinator’s arm, understand what was happening beneath the surface, and address it with enough precision that he wasn’t going to die from it in the next few hours. That was the ceiling of what level two offered. Buy time. Stabilize. Keep people alive long enough for something better to reach them.

Level three through five were the working medical professionals. The ones attached to EDF battalions, the ones running the faction medical wings, the ones who handled the volume of damage that came through after significant engagements. A level four healer could address spinal trauma, regenerate significant tissue loss, manage the kind of internal damage that combat at high awakened levels produced. They were expensive to train and the EDF competed aggressively with independent factions for them.

Level six and seven were specialists. Healers who had developed enough void energy concentration that their ability operated at a cellular level, addressing things like void sickness, awakened ability burnout, the specific kinds of damage that came from extended exposure to Harbinger biology. Kelvin had relied on a level six healer during Diana’s recovery. The void stone had done the structural work but the healer had managed everything the void stone couldn’t reach.

Level eight and nine were rare enough that most people in the Eastern Cardinal had never met one. Their healing operated at a scale that began to blur the line between medicine and something else entirely. A level nine healer had been documented regrowing a lost limb over a period of three weeks. The EDF kept the location of every level eight and nine healer in the quadrant classified.

Level ten was theoretical. The classification existed in the EDF database as a category but no confirmed level ten healer had been documented in the Eastern Cardinal’s recorded history. The older records, the ones from before the Harbinger wars when the classification system was being built, mentioned accounts from the original family lines of healers operating at levels that the current framework couldn’t fully contain. Whether those accounts were accurate or embellished by time nobody could say with certainty.

What the ranking didn’t capture was the variation within each level. A level three healer who had spent fifteen years working trauma in a faction medical wing operated differently from a level three who had just passed their certification. The number told you the capacity. It didn’t tell you what someone had learned to do with it.

Dara’s level two meant she could handle the coordinator’s arm. It didn’t mean it would be comfortable for either of them. Level two healing at a wound that had been bleeding for two and a half hours with an improvised tourniquet was going to take concentration and cost her something physically. Level two healers didn’t regenerate their void energy quickly. One significant use and she would need rest before she had full capacity again.

She knew that when she agreed to go.

She was going anyway.

Lila nodded once.

She started pulling her gear off. Jacket first, the faction insignia going with it. Then the equipment vest, setting it carefully on the chair beside her. She checked her wrists, her ankles, her collar. Everything that could be read as weapon or tracker came off and went on the chair. What was left was a plain dark shirt and dark pants and boots that were just boots.

She looked ordinary. That was the thing about Lila when she decided to look ordinary. She could do it completely, the contained energy she normally carried just switching off, the flat eyes going somewhere warmer and more approachable, the posture settling into something that looked like someone going somewhere rather than someone assessing whether to level it.

Marcus was watching her and looked slightly unsettled by it.

"The food," Lila said.

Reyna had already found a supply contact in the settlement, a resident three streets over who had agreed to pull together whatever they had on short notice. Twenty minutes later there were two bags, actual food, nothing that looked prepared or tampered with, the kind of thing you handed to someone and they could see immediately was just food.

Lila picked up both bags.

She looked at Lucas one more time.

He held the channel open to Voss. "We’re sending two people in. A healer and support. They’re coming from the eastern approach. Unarmed. They have food."

"I see them on the approach I let them through," Voss said. "Anyone else moves toward this building it changes."

"Understood," Lucas said.

He looked at Lila.

She looked back at him with the expression she wore when she had made a decision and was done making it, which was no expression at all, just presence, just the flat certainty of someone who was about to walk into something and had already finished being afraid of it somewhere private before anyone could see.

"Don’t do anything interesting while I’m in there," she said.

Then she picked up the bags and nodded to Dara and they walked out the blue door and into the street and toward the coordination hall and Lucas watched them through the window the whole way.

The coordination hall’s side entrance opened when they reached it.

And closed behind them.

Lucas held the comms unit and looked at the sealed door and thought about what Kelvin had said. Voss had been organizing since before he went to prison. Someone with resources had been holding the group together. The vehicles had modifications that cost money.

And eight days out of prison, the first thing Harlan Voss did was take twenty four settlement coordinators hostage and ask for Noah Eclipse.

’Why Noah,’ he thought. ’Specifically. By name. Not Eclipse faction. Not Lucas Grey the S ranked soldier who is actually here. Noah Eclipse. The person who left.’

’Someone told him Noah would respond to this,’ he thought. ’Someone who knows how Noah thinks. Someone who knew that asking for him specifically would create a situation that couldn’t be quietly resolved.’

He opened the comms. "Kelvin. The demand. Cross reference anyone who knew Noah’s whereabouts with anyone connected to Voss’s network."

A pause.

"That’s a very specific ask," Kelvin said.

"I know," Lucas said.

"It’ll take time."

"Take it," Lucas said, and looked at the coordination hall where Lila had just walked through a door that wasn’t going to open again until this was done.