Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

The weaving took a full day and a full night. Furnace heat poured into crystal and the crystal did not crack. It learned. Lattice grew through molten stone in bright branching veins, sorting the fire into channels, and the fire fed the lattice until every facet glowed from within.

Almond worked the threads with both hands and all ninety-nine lessons, and near dawn he set the last binding, and the loom went quiet, and something new stood up out of the light.

It was tall as a siege tower, built of dark molten glass veined with rivers of white heat, and across its whole body ran a living lattice of crystal that turned slowly, endlessly, sorting the fire inside it into patterns. Four great facets orbited its head where the satellites had been. Its hooves were crucibles. When it exhaled, the air rang like struck quartz.

It knelt, and when it spoke, two voices arrived at once, gravel and glass, layered into one.

”My lord.”

[Ashkryon, Sovereign of the Molten Lattice]

Almond looked at his newest and oldest companion, and let out a slow breath, and the analytical part of him ran down the work seam by seam and found nothing to fix. The other part of him, the part that had known these two a long time, took a moment longer.

”Welcome back,” he said. ”Both of you.”

”We are ready to be filled,” Ashkryon said, and the lattice across its chest opened into ninety-nine waiting channels.

The loading took three days. Meliora fed the essences in one by one, and Ashkryon’s lattice caught each one and gave it a channel of its own, and the furnace heart kept the whole warring cargo moving so fast that no essence had time to unmake its neighbor. On the third evening the last channel sealed, and the new Sovereign stood on the mountainside holding a river’s worth of murder in perfect order.

Sylvia and Benedict had spent those days cutting the channel, a raw ditch running from the first river’s freed bend to the roots of the breathing mountain, Sylvia’s roots holding the banks, Benedict’s gravity packing the bed. Galvaren pulled a storm across the range and filled it with rain.

On the fourth morning, Ashkryon stepped into the channel, sank its crucible hooves into the bed, and let the water take it. And as the current poured over the molten lattice, the ninety-nine essences bled out of their channels in measured threads, and the river that flowed on toward the mountain was no longer water.

The mountain noticed.

It was the first time in the whole trial that anything had noticed them before they struck, and the noticing came as a sound below sound, a groan out of the world’s foundations. The breathing quickened. Stone that had not moved since before Almond’s species existed began, slowly and horribly, to flex.

The slopes shrugged, and the shrug became avalanches, and the avalanches stood up. Giants of loose rock, dozens of them, shaking themselves into shapes with limbs, pouring down toward the channel to bury the river before it could bite.

”Hold the water,” Almond said, and his family went to war.

Alfred met the first giant alone and unmade it in four thrusts, each one landing on a joint Crystalist’s old maps had taught him to find. Benedict planted himself midstream and became a fortress the avalanches broke against. Galvaren tore the sky open and brought his ruinous lightning down in aimed columns, cutting the giants apart before they could reach the banks.

Nyssara’s frozen suns swept the far slope, freezing rockfalls solid and then shattering them with flame in the same breath. Velkris folded the light across the valley so that half the giants attacked places where the river had never been. Sylvia’s vines held the levees, and Meliora walked the waterline, adjusting the essence threads like a woman tuning an instrument mid-song.

And the river bit.

Where the seasoned current touched the mountain’s roots, the stone did not erode. It surrendered. A thousand years of cutting happened in a breath, the unmaking sap opening the way and ninety-eight sharpened answers pouring in behind it, and Ashkryon drove up the channel at the head of the current, a furnace wearing a river, carrying the blade of it home.

The mountain screamed. The sound broke every rib Almond had ever broken before, all at once, an old pain returned with interest, and he stayed on his feet on the levee and directed the current with both bleeding hands, because he was the river’s maker and it answered him.

”Deeper,” he said through his teeth. ”You’ve stood still your whole life. Feel what that costs.”

The peak leaned. Slowly, the way everything this old did anything, the tallest thing in the world tilted off its ruined roots, and the whole blue range shook as its ancient center failed.

Then the mountain moved.

Not fell. Moved. The vast body tore itself free of the world’s floor and rose, root-stone raining down, trying in its last moments to become the thing it had never needed to be, a creature that fights. Almond looked up at a sky full of hostile stone and felt no fear at all.

”Ashkryon,” he said. ”Finish it.”

The Sovereign of the Molten Lattice gathered the entire river into itself, every essence, every thread, a year of victories drawn into one glowing body, and leapt. It struck the rising mountain at the root-wound and poured everything through, furnace heart driving, lattice singing, and the current went up through the ancient stone like fire through a map of itself.

The mountain came apart in the air. Quietly, at the end, the stone going soft and grey and running down the sky like ash down a window, and what remained drifted to the broken ground as sand, and the breathing stopped, and the world was still.

Almond sat down on the levee, because his legs had decided the matter for him. Ashkryon walked back out of the drained channel, steaming, its lattice dim and satisfied, and knelt beside him without being asked.

The sky did not write small letters this time. It opened.

[100/100]

[Trial Complete: Conquer the River. Move the Mountain.]

The wilderness folded up around them like a tent being struck, gently, and Almond was standing on pale water under a bronze sky, alone with his Spirit Lords returned to the pocket and the faceless spirit in front of him, exactly where he had left it a year and a lifetime ago.

”You were taught,” it said. No praise in it. A fact being filed.

”I was nearly eaten,” Almond said. ”Several times.”

”That is what teaching is.” The spirit raised its hand, and the bronze sky began to gather itself into a point of light above them. ”You came into my world with the power to make things. You leave it knowing what things are made of. One truth sits at the core of everything that exists. You have dug it out one hundred times with your own bleeding hands. And once, at the end, you made something new to carry all of it. That was not required. That was you.”

The light descended, and became a card, and the card was heavier than the mountain had been.

[First Entry Guarantee fulfilled.]

[You have obtained an Ultimate Card of the highest quality this cave can grant.]

[Ultimate Card: Essence of All Things]

[Rank: Legendary. Grade: Supreme.]

[This card holds the complete system of Essence. Everything that exists carries one truth at its core. The bearer may perceive that truth, extract it, and forge with it. What was learned one hundred times through blood is now known in full, forever.]

Almond read it three times, and the craftsman in him ran through what this meant for the Grimblade Essence Factory, for the weaving, for every card and spirit and blade he would ever build again. The conclusion arrived cleanly.

Everything changed. His whole arsenal had just gone from copying the shapes of things to speaking their native language. And Ashkryon, woven by the hands that now held this card, was only the first of what those hands could do.

”Huh,” he said quietly, which for Almond was a standing ovation.

”The door is open,” the spirit said. ”You will not find this cave again. No one will. It has given what it had.”

Almond turned toward the light opening behind him, then paused, and looked back once. ”The river monster. The first one. It moved a river over a thousand years because it was afraid of a tree. Was that always the lesson? Or just the lock on the first door?”

The spirit was silent for a moment, and when it answered, there was something in the flat voice that had not been there before.

”Everything that refuses to be hurt,” it said, ”is only telling you where it has already been hurt. That is the lesson. You will find it is true of more than monsters.”

Then the bronze world closed like an eye, and Almond stepped out of the sky.

The cold of the upper layer hit him like a homecoming. He hung in the empty high air where nothing lived, and the door behind him faded from a burning Legendary weight to a grey scar to nothing at all, and the corner of his vision told him what the cave’s mercy of time had cost.

Six days. He had been gone six days.

Below, far below, the world was quiet in the way of a battlefield after the horns. He could feel the Geneline network again, the whole family alive on it, tired and whole, every thread accounted for, and he let out a breath he had been holding for a year without knowing it.

Then he looked across the empty sky, and his chest went tight in a different way.

Three doors still burned in the dark. Lily’s. Rudra’s. Ainen’s. Three worlds still working on three people he loved, each of them alone against whatever waited inside, exactly as chosen.

Almond found a piece of nothing to stand on, folded his arms, and settled in facing the doors.

”Take your time,” he said to the empty sky, in the casual tone the four of them saved for things that mattered most. ”I’ll hold the ground.”

The new card sat warm against his soul like a banked fire, and the first Regalon to walk out of a Legendary Exceed Cave waited for his family in the high cold, watching three lights that had not gone out.