Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 716: Trial

For the first time in a long while, the kingdom rested.

Not idly, because the Regalons did not know how to be idle, but gently, in the way of people who had finally earned a quiet season. Ten top-tier worlds fed the network. The Asura Executives held the lower planets without ever needing to call for help. And across a whole sector of the sky, the machinery of Ananta Regalon ran smoothly enough that its leaders could, at last, spend a few days on themselves.

They had reached the peak of the middle plane. There was nothing left up here to climb.

Which meant it was time to look up, toward the upper layer, and the truth of that hung over the quiet season like a promise. A kingdom did not simply walk into the upper layer. To carry an entire kingdom across that threshold, a trial had to be completed, and everyone knew it was coming. For now, though, the trial could wait a little longer, and the family took the days it had earned.

The mornings belonged to the tree.

The Virion Iridant Tree had grown vast in the pocket realm, and beneath its canopy the family gathered to train the way they liked best, in the mental space it granted, where a person could work at their own power for hours and feel the exhaustion wash away as fast as it came. Almond spent most mornings there, sitting among the roots with his five decks laid out in his mind, refining them card by card.

He was not the only one. The tree drew the whole family to it, and the space beneath its branches had become the heart of the kingdom in a way the throne room never had.

”You have been staring at that card for an hour,” Lily said one morning, settling down beside him with two cups of something warm. She pressed one into his hands. ”Which one is fighting you?”

”The Ledger,” Almond admitted, taking the cup. ”The Last Word. It works, but it works like a hammer. I want it to work like a scalpel.” He turned the card over in his thoughts, frowning slightly. ”Finality is easy to unleash and hard to aim. I am trying to teach it restraint.”

Lily leaned against his shoulder, warm and unhurried. ”You are trying to teach a card that ends things how to end them politely.”

”When you put it that way it sounds impossible.”

”Most of what we do sounds impossible,” she said, and sipped her drink. ”That has never stopped you before.”

The exotic dimensions were where the real refinement happened, and everyone had their favorite.

Scattered across the worlds they held were secret spots, pockets of strange and exotic space that the kingdom had discovered and kept quiet, each one suited to a different kind of training. Ainen had claimed a dimension of endless cold, a white silent nowhere, and he spent his afternoons there feeding new flames into his origin flame, teaching it the taste of a cold so deep it had never met a fire before.

”Getting anything new?” Rudra asked, finding him there one afternoon, the two of them old friends who did not need many words.

”A patience flame,” Ainen said, watching a small pale fire drift over the endless ice. ”It does not burn hot. It burns slow. It waits. I have wanted one for a while.” He glanced up. ”You?”

”Refining the Tribunal,” Rudra said. ”The sundering law. It is loud. I want it quieter. A verdict should not need to shout.”

Ainen laughed. ”You and Almond, both trying to make your loudest cards whisper. There is a lesson in that somewhere.”

”There usually is,” Rudra said, and settled onto the ice to watch the patience flame burn, comfortable in the quiet the way only very old friends could be.

Lily trained in the dark, as she always had.

Her secret spot was a dimension of layered shadow, endless dusk, the kind of place her old master would have called home. She moved through it refining the Veil of the Crimson Shade, teaching herself to vanish more completely, to move through the gaps in the world more quietly, honoring the craft Aria had carved into her on a dark island a lifetime ago.

Aria found her there one evening, and for a while the old master simply watched her student work without saying a word.

”You have surpassed me,” Aria said finally, and there was no bitterness in it, only a quiet pride that had taken her years to grow comfortable with. ”Years ago. You know that.”

”I had a good teacher,” Lily said, stepping out of the shadow beside her.

”You had a stubborn one.” Aria’s mouth curved. ”The teaching was the easy part. You were always going to be more than I could hold.” She looked out over the shadow-dimension her disciple had made her own. ”It is a strange thing, watching someone you shaped become something you could never have been. A good strange. But strange.”

Lily reached over and squeezed her old master’s hand, and neither of them said anything else, because they did not need to.

The evenings belonged to everyone.

Ainen cooked, because Ainen always cooked, and the long tables beneath the Virion Iridant Tree filled every night with a family that was scattered across a sector by day and gathered here by dusk. Kexell held court at the head of it in his humanoid form, loud and enormous and telling stories that grew taller with every planet they conquered.

Gopu had learned to fly properly in the two months of the campaign, and he spent the dinners doing lazy circles over the tables, occasionally stealing food from unattended plates and blaming it, unconvincingly, on the wind.

”That was you,” Marcus said, watching a whole skewer lift off his plate and drift upward. ”That was very obviously you, Gopu.”

Gopu, mouth full, offered him the most innocent expression a young dragon could manage, which was not very innocent at all, and the whole table laughed.

Dagon and Sabrina came most evenings, and Dagon and Rudra had fallen into an old rhythm, two former military men trading jabs about the days when one of them had commanded and the other had, in Dagon’s words, broken half his bones in training.

”You never once beat me,” Rudra said mildly, over a cup.

”I got close,” Dagon insisted. ”Once. On a Tuesday. There were witnesses.”

”There were no witnesses.”

”There were witnesses and they were sworn to secrecy,” Dagon said with enormous dignity, and Sabrina patted his arm the way a woman does when she has heard a story a hundred times and still loves the man telling it.

It was, all of it, a good season. The best one they had known.

And through all of it, quietly, everyone kept one eye on what came next.

They spoke of it on the last evening of the quiet season, the leadership gathered late beneath the tree after the younger ones had drifted off to sleep. Aryan pulled the details into the shared air between them, and the mood shifted, just slightly, from cozy to considering.

”The trial,” he said. ”If we want to take the whole kingdom up to the upper layer, this is the only door. It opens every ten days.” He laid it out plainly. ”Every middle-plane kingdom that wants to ascend sends its ten strongest. Generals, they call them. Plus a hundred thousand of their own, troops or units or whatever a kingdom can field.”

”And then?” Kexell rumbled.

”And then they drop everyone into an exotic dimension. A different one every time, but the game never changes.” Aryan gestured, and a rough image formed, a vast strange landscape with a single enormous peak rising in the far distance. ”You start scattered. You cross the whole dimension on foot, through whatever it throws at you. Monsters. Mazes. Traps. And every other kingdom in there, all racing the same way you are.”

”Toward the peak,” Almond said, looking at the distant mountain in the projection.

”Toward the peak,” Aryan confirmed. ”Reach the top within ten days, and you earn the right to ascend your kingdom to the upper layer. Fail, and you wait for the next opening, and try again.”

The table was quiet for a moment, the weight of it settling over the cozy evening.

Then Rudra cracked his knuckles, unhurried. ”Ten of our strongest, and a hundred thousand of the army. We have both, and better than most.”

”We have the best,” Lily said simply.

Almond looked around the table, at the family that had climbed three layers and a whole middle plane to sit here in the quiet beneath a tree they had grown themselves, and he felt the familiar pull upward, toward the frontline, toward John, toward everything still waiting above them.

”Then the quiet season is over,” he said, without regret, because they had all felt this coming and none of them truly wanted to stand still. ”The trial opens in a few days. We enter, we cross that dimension, and we take that peak.” He raised his cup, and the others raised theirs. ”And then we go up.”

Above them, the Virion Iridant Tree stirred its iridescent leaves in a wind that did not blow, and the last quiet night of the season settled gently over the kingdom before the climb began again.