Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

The town of Emberhold was burning at its eastern wall when the call for help went out.

It sat on Caldross, a top-tier world of black volcanic plains and rivers of slow molten light, and the thing that made it worth dying for was buried in those plains. Pyrethine. A Tier-65 resource, dense with raw fire-essence, rare enough that three kingdoms had already come sniffing and one had decided not to ask politely.

That one was the Vharn Combine, and they had brought an army.

Roken stood on the eastern wall with a hammer the size of a man, and he was the reason the wall still stood at all.

He was a Runic Blacksmith before he was anything, and he had built this wall himself, rune by rune, every stone of it laid with his own hands over the past three months. Now the Vharn were trying to take it down, and Roken was very personally offended by that.

”You build something for three months,” he grunted, swinging the great hammer into a Vharn siege-beast that had gotten its claws over the parapet, ”and some jerk shows up on a Tuesday and tries to knock it over.”

The hammer connected. The runes along its head flared white. The siege-beast came apart and fell back off the wall in pieces.

”Roken, less talking, more hammering!” someone shouted from down the line.

”I can do both!” Roken shouted back, and did.

The Vharn Combine fought like a machine, and that was the problem.

They were not raiders. They were a disciplined force, armored in dark layered plate, moving in tight interlocking blocks behind their own war-constructs, and they had brought numbers that the small Emberhold garrison could not match. Wave after wave came across the black plain, pressing the walls on three sides, grinding the defenders down with patient, professional pressure.

And at the head of them rode their commander, a hulking figure in spiked black armor on a beast of molten iron, who had announced himself once and not bothered again.

Warlord Khael of the Vharn Combine. He had come for the Pyrethine, and he meant to have it.

On the southern wall, Jian Ranford held the line alone, and he made it look like an insult.

He was a cold, slight figure with short white-blue hair, and he did not waste a word or a motion. Where the Vharn pressed hardest, Jian was simply there, and then the Vharn who had been pressing were not. His cards came and went so fast and so clean that the enemy never saw the deck behind them, only the results, a southern wall that did not break no matter how many bodies the Combine threw at it.

But even Jian could only be in one place.

”They’re flanking the quarry road!” Tejas called from the watchtower. He was young, sharp-eyed, the grandson of an old monster, and he had been tracking the Vharn movements all morning. ”Two full blocks, peeling off east. They’re going around the wall, straight for the Pyrethine vein.”

”Then the wall does not matter,” Jian said flatly, not turning. ”If they take the vein, we have already lost. Roken.”

”On it!” Roken was already moving, vaulting off the parapet, hammer over his shoulder. ”Tejas, with me! We hold the quarry road!”

They held it for an hour. They could not hold it for two.

The two Vharn blocks that hit the quarry road were the Combine’s best, heavy shock troops behind a wall of war-constructs, and Roken and Tejas and the handful of garrison fighters with them were simply outweighed. Roken’s runes held the line longer than anyone had a right to. His hammer broke construct after construct, his wall-runes channeled into a barricade across the road, and Tejas fought like his grandfather had taught him, fast and precise, dropping Vharn officers wherever he could reach them.

But the Combine kept coming, and the barricade cracked, and a war-construct the size of a house punched through it and sent Roken skidding back across the molten-veined stone.

He got up. He spat blood. He looked at the unbroken ranks still pouring down the quarry road and did the math, and the math was bad.

”Tejas,” he said. ”Send it up the network. All of it. Tell them Caldross is real, tell them the Vharn brought a whole army and a Warlord, and tell them we cannot hold the vein alone.” He hefted his hammer again, planting himself in the breach. ”And tell them to hurry.”

Tejas hit the relay. ”Sending! Roken, fall back, you’re hurt!”

”I built this road too,” Roken growled, runes flaring back to life along his arms. ”Nobody walks it without paying me first.”

The call reached the heart of the kingdom in an instant, and from the heart it reached four people who had just finished taking a planet of their own.

Almond was still standing on the Zerrafax hills when Caldross lit up red on the network. He read it in one breath, Lily reading it over his shoulder, and there was no discussion to have.

”Roken’s town,” Lily said. ”A Warlord and a full army. He does not ask for help unless the math is already lost.”

”Then the math is lost.” Almond was already turning to John. ”We need Pymon’s road. Now.”

John grinned and lifted a hand, and on the hills a pillar of light tore open, Pymon’s distance folding the whole gap between Zerrafax and Caldross into a single step.

”Rudra. Ainen.” Almond did not raise his voice. He did not need to. ”We have one more fight today.”

Rudra cracked his knuckles. Ainen, who had been a little disappointed his afternoon was already over, brightened considerably.

The four of them stepped into the light.

They came out of the sky over the Caldross quarry road, and the battle stopped to look up.

It was a thing the Vharn would remember, the ones who lived. The light tore open above the breach, and out of it came four figures who did not fall so much as descend, slow and certain, as if the planet had agreed to wait for them. Black volcanic wind whipped around them. Below, Roken stood bloodied in a cracked barricade against a Warlord’s army, and above him, four X-rankers arrived all at once.

”Took you long enough!” Roken bellowed up, grinning through the blood, relief cracking his battered face wide open.

”You held a Warlord’s army with a hammer,” Rudra said, landing beside him with a crunch of stone. ”Take the rest of the day off.”

Then Rudra walked forward into the war-constructs that had broken Roken’s barricade, and he did not slow down.

A card was already in play.

[Edict of Unmaking.]

The Dominion of the Absolute Breaker rolled out across the quarry road, and the lead war-construct, a house of dark iron and Vharn engineering, simply stopped being a war-construct. Its structure was revoked mid-stride. It came apart into falling, meaningless pieces, and the constructs behind it ran into the wreckage of the one in front.

Rudra walked into the pileup and broke the rest with his hands.

Ainen took the eastern flank, where the Vharn had been climbing the walls Roken built, and he cleared it the way only he could.

[Origin Flame: Devour.]

His flame ate the Vharn war-fire as it came, and learned it, and a dozen exotic flames bloomed across the eastern wall in answer, each one wrong, each one final. Where the Vharn blocks had been climbing, there was suddenly a wall of cold and corrosion and denial flame, and the Combine soldiers who hit it did not climb anything ever again.

”Roken!” Ainen called over the roar, almost cheerful. ”Your wall is very nice, by the way. Good runework!”

”THANK you!” Roken yelled back, vindicated. ”Somebody finally appreciates the wall!”

Lily moved into the heart of the Vharn army, and she did not so much fight it as take it apart.

[Dreadgate Spawn.]

Gates opened across the black plain, and her Dreadlings poured out in an endless black tide, climbing over the disciplined Vharn blocks and pulling them out of formation knot by knot. And as the Vharn officers tried to rally their lines, the Wheel of Achromatic Shade turned beside her, and she stole the very thing that made the Combine a machine.

She stole their coordination. Their discipline. The thing that made them dangerous.

[Wheel of Achromatic Shade: Ban.]

And all at once the Vharn army stopped being an army and became ten thousand frightened individuals on a burning plain, their interlocking blocks dissolving into chaos, their patient professional pressure gone.

That left the Warlord.

Khael of the Vharn Combine saw his army come apart in the space of two minutes, and he did the only thing a Warlord could do. He charged the source of it, his molten-iron beast thundering across the plain straight at Almond, his spiked black gauntlet wreathed in Vharn war-fire, roaring a challenge that shook the volcanic ground.

Almond watched him come, golden eyes calm.

”You brought an army to take a child’s town,” Almond said. ”And you brought it patiently, professionally, like it was just business.” He raised one hand, and the air behind him filled with steel. ”I am going to make it personal.”

He played a card from the Throne of Grimlord’s Blade.

[Grim Convergence Slash.]

His Grimblades stacked into a single descending tower of layered edges, and they came down on the charging Warlord like a falling building. Khael threw up his gauntlet, his war-fire, his molten beast, everything he had.

It did not matter.

The convergence sheared through the war-fire, through the beast, through the gauntlet, and Grim Severam denied the Warlord every chance to hold any of it together. Khael of the Vharn Combine was thrown from his dissolving mount and slammed into the black plain hard enough to crater it, his army scattering, his charge ended in a single strike.

He was alive. Almond had measured it. But he was beaten, flat on his back in the ruins of his own ambition, staring up at four people who had crossed a world in a single step to ruin his afternoon.

”Caldross belongs to Ananta Regalon,” Almond said, standing over him. ”The Pyrethine is ours. Your army is broken. You can gather what is left of it and leave, alive, which is more mercy than you planned to show this town.” His voice cooled. ”Or you can get up. I would not advise getting up.”

Khael did not get up.

The Vharn Combine withdrew across the black plains in broken ragged groups, leaving their Warlord to crawl after them, and Emberhold held.

On the cracked quarry road, Roken sat down heavily in the wreckage of his barricade, hammer across his knees, and let out a long breath that turned into a laugh.

”Three months I spent on that wall,” he said, to no one in particular, as Tejas dropped down beside him grinning with exhaustion. ”Three months. And it took the four of them about four minutes to clean up what almost knocked it over.” He shook his head, more proud than bitter. ”I need stronger decks.”

”You need a nap,” Jian said, walking up from the southern wall, as cold and unbothered as if he had been standing in line for coffee.

”That too,” Roken admitted.

Almond walked back to them through the settling ash, the matter already finished in his mind, and clapped a hand on Roken’s shoulder.

”You held a Warlord’s army with a hammer and three months of runework,” he said. ”Do not ever say you need stronger decks again. You held the line until we got here. That is the whole job.”

Roken looked up at him, and the grin came back, tired and real.

”Yeah,” he said. ”Yeah, alright. But I’m still building that wall back taller.”