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

Chapter 746: A different beast

The channel had been quiet for six minutes when Voss opened it himself.

Lucas noted that. Six minutes of him sitting with something and deciding he couldn’t sit with it anymore.

"Grey."

"I’m here."

"The wounded man. Teo Maren." A pause. "Your healer says he needs a hospital within a few hours."

"She told me the same thing," Lucas said.

"I want that on record. That I flagged it."

"It’s on record," Lucas said. "What do you want to do about it."

"Nothing yet." Another pause. "Eclipse needs to understand that this timeline isn’t open ended. Six hours was the window. Four are gone."

"I understand."

"Then I need to see movement." The flatness in Voss’s voice was working harder now, something underneath it pushing against it. "Because right now what I’m seeing is a negotiator running out the clock. I didn’t come here to be managed."

"You came here to get what you asked for," Lucas said.

"Yes."

"Then help me get it for you," Lucas said. "Noah Eclipse is not a resource I deploy. He’s a person. The only way he walks through that door is if I give him a reason that actually means something to him. So give me the real reason. Not the surface."

Silence.

"Two hours," Voss said. "Show me something in two hours or the conversation changes."

He closed the channel.

Lucas put the comms unit down and looked at the coordination hall through the window.

"He’s scared," Marcus said.

"He flagged Teo Maren without being asked," Lucas said. "He’s doing the math on what happens if that man dies in there and he doesn’t like where it lands." He looked at the window. "Someone sold him this plan as clean. It’s not clean anymore."

The door opened.

Diana came in with Shade behind her. She looked at the coordination hall first, then at Lucas, then at Marcus and Reyna and Seraleth.

"Talk," she said.

Lucas talked. The ambush. Voss and his twelve. Twenty four hostages. Lila and Dara inside. Teo Maren’s arm. The two demands, credits and Noah Eclipse in person.

Diana’s jaw tightened on Noah’s name but she kept listening.

Lucas kept going. Kelvin’s network mapping. The prison visitation records. The psychological assessor license. Academy Twelve.

Then Darius Mercer.

Diana’s eyes moved. "The shapeshifter."

"Yeah," Lucas said.

"The one with the arm," she said.

"Three years ago he fought Storm," Lucas said. "Lost. Never processed it."

Diana looked at the window. Lucas could see her putting it together, the pieces arranging themselves behind her eyes.

"So someone found him," she said. "Someone who knew about his obsession and pointed it at this situation."

"And gave him a story about how this was the path to getting another shot," Lucas said. "Mercer believed it because he wanted to."

"Who," Diana said.

"Callum Albright," Lucas said.

Diana looked at him.

"Vice Commander Albright’s younger brother," Lucas said. "Adrian’s uncle. He was thirty four when they both died. Two years after that he got a psychological assessor license in the northern Cardinal. Used it to get close to Voss inside Sector Nine detention. Visited him regularly for two years. Then consulted on his early release review and wrote the assessment that got him out eight days ago."

Diana was quiet for a moment.

"Where is he now," she said.

"That’s what Kelvin is working on," Lucas said. "Last confirmed position was six weeks ago. He’s been moving since."

Diana nodded slowly. Then she looked at Shade.

"Mercer," she said. "He’s close. He has to be. The whole point of this operation from his end is that Noah shows up and the dragons come with him. He’s not going to be sitting two hours away waiting for a phone call. He’s somewhere he can move from the moment things start happening."

"So we find him before things start happening," Seraleth said.

"We find him now," Diana said. She looked at the window. "Two kilometer radius from this settlement. He’s watching it. Waiting." She looked at Shade. "We go up. Shade masks both of us, we take the air, we cover the radius systematically and we look for someone sitting somewhere they have a clear line of sight to this street."

Shade lowered himself without being asked.

Diana climbed on. Seraleth looked at her.

"You’re not going alone," Seraleth said.

"I wasn’t planning to," Diana said.

Seraleth spread the Faithful Feathers and went to the door.

Lucas watched them go. Diana on Shade’s back, the dragon masking the moment they cleared the doorway, Diana disappearing with him, just gone, the street outside looking empty. Seraleth lifting from the ground silently and angling upward until she too was gone into the afternoon sky.

He looked at Marcus.

"Now we wait on two things," Marcus said.

"Three," Lucas said. "Lila inside. Diana finding Mercer. Kelvin finding Callum." He picked up the comms unit. "Kelvin."

"Still running," Kelvin said. "The ghost registration in the northern Cardinal led me to a cash payment trail. Whoever Callum Albright is using to move around has been pulling currency from physical dispensers, not digital transfers. Smart. Harder to track."

"But not impossible," Lucas said.

"Nothing is impossible," Kelvin said, sounding mildly offended. "It’s just slower. The dispensers have camera records. I’m pulling them now. Give me twenty minutes."

"You have fifteen," Lucas said.

"That’s not how cameras work," Kelvin said.

Lucas opened the channel to Voss.

"Voss."

"Grey." Immediate. Tense.

"Teo Maren," Lucas said. "I want another voice confirmation he’s stable. Put Dara on."

A pause. Movement in the background. Then Dara’s voice, focused, slightly breathless. "He’s holding. The bleeding has stopped but he needs proper medical care. The longer we wait the more complicated this gets."

"Understood," Lucas said. "Dara, is Lila with you."

"Yes," Dara said.

"Good," Lucas said, and closed it.

He stood at the window and looked at the empty street where Diana and Shade had been standing a few minutes ago and thought about Lila inside that building with no comms. And knowing Lila, there had to be something she had noticed that was stopping her from ending this herself and whatever that something was it had made Lila go still about it which meant it was real and it mattered.

’She’s waiting on us,’ he thought. ’She’s too rash to still be quiet. My guess is something is forcing her hands here. Whatever she found in there she’s sitting with it and waiting for us to catch up.’

Marcus was watching the street too. "How long has she been inside."

Lucas checked. "Forty minutes."

"Feels longer," Marcus said.

"Always does," Lucas said.

---

Diana was maybe eight hundred meters out and forty meters up when she found him.

She almost missed him. Shade was moving slow and low, the mask holding, and she was scanning the rooftops and the upper windows the way you scanned for someone who wanted a view, and she had gone past the building twice before something made her look again.

A warehouse on the settlement’s southern edge. Three stories, the top floor windows dark. But the third window from the left on the second floor had a different quality to its darkness. Not empty dark. Occupied dark. The kind that came from someone sitting back from the glass far enough not to be seen but close enough to see out.

She tapped Shade’s neck twice. He stopped moving.

She looked at the window.

A shape. Seated. Not moving. The stillness of someone who had been there for a while and had settled into it.

She pulled out her comms. Spoke low. "Lucas. Southern edge. The warehouse with the blue loading doors. Second floor, third window from the left. Someone’s in there."

"Mercer," Lucas said.

"Has to be," Diana said. "He’s got a direct line of sight to the coordination hall from there. He can see the whole street."

"Can you get to him without him knowing," Lucas said.

Diana looked at the building. At the window. At Shade beneath her, still masked, still silent.

"Already there," she said.

She guided Shade down to the warehouse’s roof, slow, no sound. Dismounted. Looked at the rooftop access hatch.

Unlocked.

She looked at Seraleth hovering ten meters above her, wings barely moving, waiting.

Diana held up one finger. Wait.

She opened the hatch and went down.

The second floor was dark and smelled like old industrial equipment.

She moved along the wall toward the third window.

He was there.

Seated on a crate, elbows on his knees, eyes on the street below. Broad across the back. Left arm resting differently from the right, the shoulder sitting wrong, the sleeve of his jacket pulled down over it but not hiding the shape of it.

He was completely absorbed in whatever he was watching.

He hadn’t heard her.

Diana stood in the dark behind him and looked at the back of his head and thought about what Lucas needed from this moment and what she needed from this moment and whether those two things were the same.

Then Darius Mercer said, to the window, to the street, to nobody, in the voice of someone talking to themselves after a long time of waiting alone:

"He promised me dragons."

And he smiled at his own reflection in the glass.

Diana said, "Darius."

He turned around slowly, like he’d been half expecting it. He looked at her, then at the shield on her arm, then at the space around her. His eyes moved across the dark warehouse the way someone’s eyes moved when they were feeling for something rather than looking for it.

"Eclipse sent you," he said. Then he smiled. "Diana Frost. The null girl."

"Where is Callum Albright," Diana said.

He ignored that completely. He was still feeling around the edges of the room, his head tilting slightly, his breathing changing. "There’s something here with you," he said. "Something I can feel but I can’t see." He took a slow breath. "Something strong."

Diana said nothing.

His eyes went wide. Not fear. The opposite of fear.

"A DRAGON." He said it loud, too loud for the space, his voice bouncing off the warehouse walls and coming back at both of them. "You brought a dragon here." He looked at the dark space around Diana, at the nothing that was Shade, and his whole face changed, the controlled patience of someone who had been waiting dissolving into something rawer and more honest. "WHERE ARE YOU." He was talking to the room now, to the masked space, turning in a slow circle with his arms slightly spread like he was inviting something to come at him. "WHERE ARE YOU, COME OUT, I CAN FEEL YOU, I KNOW YOU’RE HERE."

"Darius," Diana said sharply.

He snapped back to her. Breathing faster now. The left hand flexing at his side, the fingers opening and closing, the knuckle joints moving wrong.

"You have no idea what I’ve been through to get here," he said. "Three years. Three years since that red dragon put me through a wall and I woke up in a hospital with half my face rebuilt and do you know what I thought about while they were putting me back together?" He took a step toward her. "Storm. I thought about Storm. About what it would feel like the second time. About what I’d become."

"The last time you went after Noah’s dragons Nyx buried you," Diana said. "What makes you think today is different."

"Because I’m different," Darius said, and he wasn’t wrong.

BOOM.

He came at her faster than someone his size should have moved, closing the distance in two steps, right hand swinging at her head with everything behind it. Diana got the shield up and the Living Reef expanded on contact and took it and she felt it in her teeth, the force traveling up through the shield and into her arm and into her shoulder and into the wall she was standing in front of.

She wasn’t standing in front of the wall anymore.

CRACK.

Her back hit it and the plaster came apart around her and she was through it, stumbling into the next section of the warehouse in a cloud of dust and debris, and she caught herself on one knee and looked back through the hole she’d made.

Darius was already coming through it.

"WHERE IS THE DRAGON," he screamed into the dark space around him, arms wide, turning again, the unhinged energy of someone who had been running on obsession for three years and was now close enough to smell what he wanted. "COME OUT. COME OUT AND FIGHT ME. I KNOW YOU’RE HERE I CAN FEEL YOU—"

Diana drove the shield into his back.

He went forward, hit the ground, rolled, came back up and grabbed her by the shield arm before she could pull back and yanked and Diana left the ground entirely, one handed, and hit the far wall feet first, her boots punching through the plaster, and she pushed off it and came back at him before gravity had finished making its argument.

The Tidal Rebound released everything his grab had put into the shield directly into his palm and he felt that, pulling his hand back, shaking it out, looking at it with surprise that shifted immediately back into that wide grinning energy.

"GOOD," he said. "GOOD, YES, MORE—"

She sent the orbital fragments. All six, every direction, hitting him across the shoulders and the chest and the sides of his neck and he took all of it and kept moving, the Harbinger biology in his arm running the healing faster than the cuts could fully open, and he grabbed one of the fragments out of the air with his bare hand and looked at it and threw it back at her.

Diana ducked.

It embedded in the wall behind her head.

She straightened up breathing hard, her forearm screaming where his hand had been, the deep bone kind of pain that said something had been very close to giving and had decided not to at the last second.

Darius had stopped moving. He was looking at the space to Diana’s left. Really looking now, not the unfocused feeling from before. Focused. Locked on.

"There," he said quietly.

Shade unmasked.

He came out of nothing two meters from Darius, full size, dark scales and pale amber eyes and the tail sweeping once across the warehouse floor, and Darius looked at him the way a person looked at a thing they had been dreaming about for three years and had started to believe was only a dream.

"Oh," Darius breathed. "Oh there you are."

He took a step toward Shade.

Diana was between them before the step finished.

Shield up, full Coral Fortress, the orbital fragments reforming their circuit, putting herself in the two meters of space between Darius Mercer and her dragon.

Darius looked at her. At the shield. At Shade behind her.

Then he came.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Three hits in sequence, left right left, the left hand doing the damage and the right hand setting it up, and each left hand hit landed on the shield and went into Diana and she took every one of them and held her ground and the Tidal Rebound fired back on the third one and caught him square in the chest and he went back five meters and hit a support column and the column cracked down its length from floor to ceiling.

He came back.

He just wouldn’t back down.

Diana braced and he hit the shield again and this time she felt her boots leaving the floor, both feet, the force of it lifting her, and she came back down and drove forward and hit him with the shield’s edge and the Leviathan Rush activated, the defensive fragments transforming into a surge that crashed into him and drove him backward and he hit the far wall and this time stayed against it for two full seconds.

Diana crossed the distance.

The Shoal Swarm spread six fragments around him from every angle. She drove the shield into his chest and pinned him against the cracked wall and one fragment broke from its orbit and stopped six inches from his left temple, angled in, not moving.

Darius looked at the fragment.

Then at Shade standing ten meters behind Diana, amber eyes watching him.

Then at Diana.

He was breathing hard. Finally. Three years of whatever obsession had been fueling him had him pinned to a wall in a warehouse in Settlement Varda and he was breathing hard.

"Where is Callum Albright," Diana said.

Darius looked at her.

Then he smiled.

His teeth changed. The front ones first, the shape of them shifting, the edges going wrong, the shape of something that wasn’t human finding its way into a human mouth, and the process didn’t stop at the teeth, it kept going, the skin at his jaw pulling differently, the bone structure underneath it beginning to move.

Diana held the fragment exactly where it was.

"Where is Albright," she said again.

Darius kept smiling with his changing mouth and said nothing at all.