Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 812: The Shelf Holds

Marcus kept talking into the dead link for an hour.

He gave casualty numbers. He gave positions. He told Almond which parts of the line were holding and which parts were not, and not once did anything come back.

Natalia finally sat down beside him in the command tent and picked up the second headset.

”You can stop,” she said gently.

”I know,” Marcus said. He kept talking anyway.

Natalia listened for a while. Then she put the headset on and started talking too, because it was easier than sitting there doing nothing.

Dawn on the third day came up gray and cold over the Sundered Shelf.

Big D gathered the commanders at the edge of the canyon. He did not make a speech. He just looked at each of them in turn, and his voice was the same steady rasp it had always been.

”We don’t know if they’re alive,” he said. ”We don’t know when they’ll reach whatever’s down there. We don’t know if they’ll reach it at all.”

Nobody argued with any of that.

”So we hold,” Big D said. ”Not because we know it’ll work. Because if they come back up and there’s nothing left to come back to, then all of it was for nothing.”

He turned to Natalia.

”You take Almond’s place on the western line.”

Natalia nodded once. She did not say anything, because there was nothing that needed saying.

The Shelf was split into two halves by the canyon, and every half had its own people holding it.

Silvester and Hiroshi held the flats on the west. Kayla ran the hospital in the eastern half, with Fraisea, Saffa, and Clovelle holding the ground Ainen had left behind. John stood across the canyon with all ten of his Monster Sovereigns spread out behind him like a second wall.

For two hours, nothing happened at all.

No soldiers came out of the ground. No giants rose. The body under the world simply went quiet.

”I don’t like this,” Hiroshi said. He stood on the flats with his fists wrapped and his eyes on the dirt. ”It’s never gone quiet before.”

”Maybe it’s tired,” Silvester said.

”Things like this don’t get tired.”

They waited, and the quiet went on, and it was worse than any attack.

Without Maya, they were fighting blind. She had always been the one who could see the patterns coming. Now all they had was the ground under their feet and whatever it decided to do next.

Fraisea felt it first.

She was kneeling near the hospital with one palm flat on the ground, the way she had knelt every hour since the first day. Suddenly her whole body went stiff.

”Pressure,” she said. ”Under us. It’s building.”

”Where?” Kayla asked.

Fraisea’s eyes went wide. ”Right here. Under the hospital.”

The ground opened.

It did not crack or split. It opened like a mouth, forty feet wide, directly under the tents where two thousand wounded people lay. Rows of grown teeth ran around the edge, and the dark inside went down forever.

Kayla moved before anyone else could scream.

”Edenroot!”

Roots burst out of the ground around the mouth by the hundreds. They grabbed every tent and every stretcher and every falling body, and they held on even as the ground under them tried to swallow the whole hospital.

”I can’t hold this long!” Kayla shouted. ”Clovelle!”

Clovelle was already moving. She threw both hands out, and the air around the hospital bent. Distance folded like a sheet of paper, and the entire hospital, roots and tents and two thousand wounded, slid forty feet sideways in a single breath.

The mouth snapped shut on empty ground.

It tried to open again, and Saffa was there. She slammed her palms into the dirt, and ice spread out around the edges of the mouth in a thick white ring. The teeth froze solid and cracked apart, and the mouth could not open wider than it already had.

For a moment, all three of them just stood there breathing hard.

”That was close,” Clovelle said.

”That was the first one,” Fraisea said. Her hand was still on the ground, and her face had gone pale. ”There are more.”

Eleven more mouths opened across the Shelf within the next hour.

Natalia saw it happen from the western line. She raised her bow and let the Huntress’s Brand flare to life across her whole deck, and a red mark burned onto the ground in eleven different places.

”Every mark is a mouth!” she shouted into the headset. ”Half a second warning! Move when you see red!”

Half a second was not much, but it was enough.

Jian was standing on the northern ridge when a mark lit up under his feet. He jumped straight up, and the mouth opened where he had just been standing.

”Skyfather’s Judgment!”

The sky above him split open. A column of white lightning came down straight into the mouth, and it kept coming down until the inside of the mouth was burned black and the teeth had melted into slag.

Julian took the next one. A mouth opened under a squad of Asuras on the southern flats, and he dropped into the gap between them and the teeth before any of them could fall.

”Wildfire Eternal!”

Fire poured out of him in a flood. It filled the mouth to the brim and did not stop burning, even when the mouth tried to close. The fire held it open, and the Asuras scrambled clear over the rim while Julian stood inside the flames and did not even blink.

Emma was farther east. A mark flared on the ground in front of her, and she did not wait for the mouth to open.

”Nova’s Crown!”

A ring of burning light rose around her head. She pointed at the mark, and a small white star dropped out of the ring and hit the ground just as the mouth opened. The star went off inside it like a sun being born. When the light faded, the mouth was a smoking crater with nothing living left in it.

Noah and Kira fought the last two together.

Noah brought Eternal Frost down over the first mouth, and the whole thing froze solid from the teeth down. Kira came right behind him with Endless Blade. Her sword swung once, and the cut kept going long after the swing ended. It carved through the frozen mouth again and again until it broke apart into a thousand pieces of ice.

The second mouth opened right behind them.

”Kira!” Noah shouted.

She was already turning. The Endless Blade swung the other way, and the cut met the rising teeth before they could close. Noah froze what was left.

Marcus’s voice came over every headset at once.

”Vanguard’s Requiem! East flats, three mouths, ten seconds! Clear it now!”

The soldiers on the east flats cleared it. Ten seconds later, three mouths opened on empty ground.

By midday, the body stopped holding back.

The soldiers came back all at once. Thousands of them crawled out of the walls of the canyon, their grown armor gleaming wet and gray. Behind them, the giants rose again, taller than any of the ones from the first two days.

And the mouths kept opening.

”We can’t cover all three,” Marcus said. His voice had gone very flat and very calm, which was how everyone knew things were bad. ”Soldiers, giants, and mouths. The eastern line can’t hold all three.”

He was right.

The eastern line broke at hour thirteen.

It started with one giant. It stepped over the frozen ring Saffa had built and brought its fist down on the line of Asuras holding the gap. The line held for three seconds. Then a mouth opened under half of them, and the soldiers came pouring in through the hole.

Silvester saw it from across the flats.

He ran. He crossed the whole field in the space of a breath, and he hit the first soldier so hard it flew back into the canyon. A young Asura was dangling over the edge of an open mouth, holding on by one hand. Silvester grabbed him by the collar and threw him clear.

The giant’s fist came down on Silvester instead.

He went down hard. He did not get up.

”Silvester!” Hiroshi’s scream carried across the whole Shelf.

Kayla heard it from the hospital. She slammed both hands into the ground.

”Edenroot!”

Roots shot out across the whole distance of the flats. They wrapped around Silvester’s body and pulled him back toward the hospital before the next soldier could reach him. Green light poured into him from every root at once.

Hiroshi reached him first. He dropped to his knees beside the roots and grabbed Silvester by the shoulders.

Silvester’s eyes opened. He coughed up blood and tried to sit up.

”Don’t you dare get up this time,” Hiroshi said. His voice was shaking. ”Don’t you dare.”

Silvester lay back down. He looked up at the gray sky and let out a slow breath.

”That one actually hurt,” he said.

Hiroshi laughed. It came out broken and wet, and he did not let go of Silvester’s shoulder for a long time.

Big D gave up the eastern half at hour fourteen.

”Pull back,” he said into the headset. ”All of it. Everyone west of the canyon. Now.”

Nobody wanted to hear it. Everybody did it anyway.

The retreat was worse than the fighting. Three hundred and eighty wounded had to be carried back across the canyon while soldiers chased them the whole way. Seventy-four people died during the crossing, and every one of them was someone who had been alive that morning.

PeakWicked covered them.

John stood at the edge of the canyon and raised one hand. His Monster Sovereigns moved.

Terravax came first. The great turtle lowered itself across the canyon, and its back became a bridge of living forest and stone. Rivers ran down its sides, and the wounded were carried across on stretchers over a road that had not existed a minute before.

Rexion took the rear guard. The dragon coiled itself across the far end of the bridge, and its body burned gold and crimson and void-black. Every soldier that tried to follow simply turned to ash the moment it touched the fire.

Very rose above the canyon. The Masked Whale sang, and its masks blazed purple. Wherever the song touched the ground, the mouths stopped being mouths. They filled with water and blooming coral and fish, turning into small gardens where there had been teeth a heartbeat before.

Pymon came last. The great eagle spread its wings over the whole eastern half and called down a storm. Golden lightning fell like rain, and it fell only on things that belonged to the body.

The last stretcher crossed the bridge. Terravax rose again, and the bridge was gone.

Night came down over a Shelf that was half its old size.

Big D walked the new line alone. He stopped at every post and said a few words to whoever was standing there. He did not promise anyone anything, and he did not tell anyone it would be alright.

He just made sure they knew he was there.

John found him near the canyon’s edge a little before midnight.

”They’re alive,” John said.

Big D looked at him.

”Almond and the others,” John said. ”They’re alive. I’d know.”

”How?”

John smiled a little. ”I’ve been watching him for a long time. If he died, I’d feel the whole world tilt.”

Big D grunted. It was not quite agreement, but it was close.

Fraisea came running from the hospital a little later.

She was out of breath, and there was something in her face nobody had seen in three days. It looked almost like hope.

”The pulse,” she said. ”Listen.”

She dropped to her knees and put her palm on the ground. Everyone near her went quiet.

The body’s heartbeat came slow and deep through the dirt. Everyone had learned to count it by now. Eleven seconds between beats, over and over, for three days.

This time it was thirteen.

They waited. The next one came at fifteen.

”It’s slowing down,” Fraisea said. ”Something down there is hurting it.”

Marcus started laughing.

He could not help it. He laughed until his eyes were wet and his ribs hurt, and nobody around him told him to stop.

Then he picked up the headset again.

”Almond,” he said. ”If you can hear this, whatever you’re doing down there, it’s working. Keep going. We’re holding.”

Nothing came back.

Marcus kept talking anyway.