Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 764: Drowned General

The banquet hall Almond and Lily walked into was already crowded, and crowded, in this event, meant dangerous.

A dozen strangers moved between the long tables, quiet and quick, hands hovering over plates and goblets and silverware like the whole room was a held breath waiting to be broken.

Two of them broke it within the first minute.

A woman near the far wall closed her fist around a wine goblet and vanished into gold light before anyone could react. A man three tables over touched a folded napkin and dropped through the floor entirely, gone into a different dimension a heartbeat later.

Almond and Lily looked at each other, the same thought passing wordless between them. Two dimensions, two coins, and a room full of rivals who now knew exactly how fast this game moved.

”We need our own door,” Lily said. ”Now.”

Footsteps crossed the hall behind them, fast and familiar, and Rudra and Ainen fell in beside them a moment later, both of them already scanning the tables with the same hard focus.

”Small world,” Ainen said. ”Or small resort, anyway.”

Almond’s eyes had already caught something the others hadn’t. A single spoon, resting alone on an otherwise empty plate, humming faint and wrong the way every trigger in this event hummed once you knew how to look.

”Quick,” he said, and let a thread of light settle over it, marking it clear for anyone close enough to see. ”Touch that spoon.”

Rudra and Ainen were closer.

They crossed the distance in three long strides and closed their hands over the spoon together without a moment’s hesitation, and gold light took them both before Almond or Lily had covered half the same ground.

A beat later, the light found Almond and Lily too, a second door opening beneath their own feet, and the crowded banquet hall vanished from around all four of them at once.

Rudra and Ainen landed on wet black planking, and the smell hit before the sight did, salt and rot and something colder underneath both.

Wrecked ships rose out of still, dark water in every direction, hulls tilted and broken, masts snapped and hung with torn sailcloth that moved though no wind stirred it. Fog sat low across the water, thick enough to swallow anything more than fifty paces off.

”Familiar,” Rudra said quietly. ”Too familiar.”

”The Bonefields had better manners,” Ainen said, already reading the fog with wary eyes. ”This place feels like it’s still keeping score.”

The water answered him first. Shapes rose out of it along every wrecked hull, sailors long drowned and long past caring, cutlasses and boarding axes clutched in hands that had never let go.

”Company,” Rudra said, and drew his blade.

They came in ragged waves, and Rudra met the first with the same calm he’d once used to still an entire ocean, planting himself on the deck of the nearest wreck and letting the Unmoved Current spread out from his boots in a slow, silent ring.

The drowned sailors within that ring simply stopped, weapons frozen mid-swing, and Ainen’s blade finished what the stillness started, edge carrying the last patient bite of the Grand Table through rotted armor and older grief alike.

”Fortify here,” Rudra said, already reading the fog for the shape of whatever had sent this many dead men after two living ones. ”This isn’t the whole welcome.”

He was right. A voice rolled out across the water a moment later, cold and amused and entirely unbothered by the two Regalons standing in the wreckage of what had clearly once been his command.

”An Admiral,” the voice said. ”I can smell it on you. Command doesn’t wash off, even here.”

A figure stepped out of the fog and onto the nearest intact deck, armor barnacled and cutlass burning faint blue with old, cursed light, every drowned sailor in the graveyard turning toward him like iron filings finding true north.

”The Drowned General,” Ainen murmured. ”I don’t love that title.”

”I earned it the same way you’ll earn your grave,” the General said, and raised his cutlass, and every wreck in sight groaned as its dead crew rose to answer him at once.

A second figure dropped from a snapped mast a heartbeat later, twin pistols already leveled, grin sharp under a tricorn hat gone green with age.

”And I’m the fun part,” the Corsair said, and fired.

The first shots came in fast, concussive rounds that cracked the planking where Rudra had been standing a half second before he wasn’t, rolling clear and coming up with his blade already reading the Corsair’s next angle.

”She’s fast,” he called to Ainen. ”Faster than the last archer. Watch the reload.”

Ainen had no intention of watching anything from a distance. He crossed the gap between wrecks in three running steps, blade trailing the corroding shimmer of the Grand Table, and met the General’s first cutlass strike with a parry that turned rotted metal to rust on contact.

”That trick again,” the General said, unbothered, cutlass already reforming from the cursed light that made it. ”You’ll have to do better than rust, cook.”

”I usually do,” Ainen said, and reached for something new.

He called his second deck the way he’d built it back in the pocket world during the twenty quiet days after the ocean, a set of cards none of the family had seen him use in a real fight yet. Light gathered around his free hand, and where it settled, the fog itself began to thicken and take shape.

A construct rose out of it, vast and slow, built from compressed spice and hardened dough and something that smelled, absurdly, like a Sunday roast given muscle and purpose.

”Say hello to the Feast Golem,” Ainen said, grinning through the strain of holding it whole. ”I’ve been saving him for someone worth the trouble.”

The Golem’s fist came down on the nearest cluster of drowned sailors like a landslide, and what didn’t scatter simply stopped existing, ground down into the same rich, dark paste that had built the thing in the first place.

The General’s confidence cracked for the first time. ”That’s not cooking.”

”It’s the same thing, if you’re patient enough,” Ainen said.

Rudra had no intention of being outdone by his own dinner guest.

The Corsair pressed him hard, pistols cracking in a rhythm meant to keep him retreating and off balance, and for three exchanges it worked exactly as she wanted it to.

Then Rudra stopped retreating, planted both boots on a groaning deck, and called a deck of his own that had sat unused since the day he’d built it in quiet hours nobody had thought to ask about.

The fog around him answered first, gathering and darkening, and out of it came ships. Not real ones. Spectral hulls no bigger than a man’s forearm, cannons already glowing along every rail, an entire phantom armada assembling itself around its Admiral in the space of two breaths.

”Ghost Fleet,” Rudra said, and the small hulls answered with a volley that lit the fog gold from a dozen directions at once.

The Corsair’s next shot never landed. A spectral cannonball took her legs out from under her mid-dodge, and she hit the deck hard, pistols scattering, momentum stolen by an admiral who had simply brought his own war to a place that thought it already owned every ship in sight.

”You brought a fleet,” she said, staring up at him, ”to a duel.”

”I bring a fleet everywhere,” Rudra said. ”It’s rarely a fair fight after that.”

The General broke away from the Feast Golem’s reach and turned the whole graveyard’s remaining dead toward Ainen at once, cursed cutlass raised high, voice cracking out over the water like a war-horn.

”Rise,” he commanded. ”All of you, rise, and finish this.”

Every wreck answered. Fog thickened into a wall of drowned bodies converging from every direction, and for a moment even Ainen’s Golem looked small against the sheer number closing in.

Rudra didn’t wait to be asked. His Ghost Fleet turned as one, spectral cannons swinging from the fallen Corsair toward the General’s rising tide, and the resulting volley tore through drowned ranks in overlapping arcs of pale fire.

”Now, Ainen!” he called.

Ainen’s Golem surged forward through the gap the volley had opened, and Ainen himself rode its shoulder the last few strides, leaping clear at exactly the right moment to bring his blade down on the General’s own cursed cutlass in a single, decisive strike.

The corroding edge of the Grand Table met centuries of stored grief and old command, and for a moment neither one gave an inch.

Then the cutlass rusted through entirely, snapping at the hilt, and the General staggered back with nothing left in his hand but a memory of the weapon that had made him what he was.

Every drowned sailor in the graveyard went still at once, command severed the same way Ainen’s blade had severed the blade that gave it.

”Yield,” Ainen said, blade resting at the General’s throat, ”or find out if a rusted grave feels any better than a wet one.”

The General looked out at his silenced fleet, at the Corsair still pinned under Rudra’s watchful blade a short distance off, and understood exactly how thoroughly this particular battle had already ended.

”We withdraw,” he said, flat and final. ”Both of us.”

Gold light took the Corsair first, then the General a breath later, and the fog itself seemed to exhale once they were gone, drowned ships settling back into ordinary, harmless wreckage.

The coin sat waiting on the deck where the General had made his stand, and Ainen picked it up, still catching his breath, the Feast Golem dissolving peacefully back into fog and spice behind him.

”New decks,” Rudra said, watching his own Ghost Fleet fold back into nothing. ”Turns out we had more to bring to this than either of us let on.”

”We’ll have to thank whoever built this event,” Ainen said. ”Terrible way to spend a vacation. Excellent way to find out what you’re actually made of.”

Across the resort, in a dimension neither of them had seen and both of them would hear about soon enough, Almond and Lily stood together in quiet, hard-won stillness, a third coin resting warm between them.

”That’s ours,” Almond said.

”That’s ours,” Lily agreed, and neither of them needed to say more than that.

The event’s interface settled over all four of them at once, quiet gold script marking the day’s cost against the day’s progress.

[Rumble Coins remaining: 39]