Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 662: Clash (2/5)

The shockwaves spread outward in widening rings as the battlefield committed fully. The pretense of probing had ended. From this point forward, every strike carried the weight of full intent, and the ocean responded by losing whatever coherence it had left.

From within the eastern storm, a figure stepped onto the upper deck of the Kezryx Void Imperium’s command vessel.

Jaskrit Kezinos.

Rank one across all participating kingdoms. Tier-42. Three hundred and forty-one million combat power.

He did not raise a weapon. He did not gather energy in any visible form. He simply lifted one hand, palm open, and the storm above the eastern fleet folded inward toward him. Lightning that had been crashing wildly across the sky stopped mid-arc. Every bolt bent in his direction as though attracted to a singular gravity. The clouds themselves descended, compressing into a dense column of contained pressure that hovered above his hand.

Then he closed his fingers.

The column collapsed into a single point of violet-white light no larger than a fist.

He flicked his wrist.

The point traveled.

It did not move quickly in the visible sense. It crossed the distance between the eastern fleet and the Suryax forward line with what looked almost like leisure. But behind it, the ocean split. Water did not part for it. Water ceased to exist in its path, vaporized into nothing, leaving a trench of empty air carved into the sea.

Rudra moved.

He did not call for evasion. He did not raise a defense. He intercepted.

His body crossed the distance in a single explosive surge, meeting the descending point of light in mid-air above the leading Mega Dreadship. His palm met it directly.

The collision did not produce a sound at first.

It produced silence.

A perfect, ringing absence that spread outward in a sphere as the contained pressure of Jaskrit’s attack collided with the contained pressure of Rudra’s strike. For a long fraction of a second, nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

Then the silence ruptured.

The shockwave that followed flattened the surface of the ocean for kilometers in every direction. Mega Dreadships rocked in their formations, their stabilizers screaming under the sudden displacement. Skydread Crafts tumbled briefly before recovering. The dome of Suryax, far behind them, rippled visibly even at that distance.

Rudra remained where he stood, suspended in air, his palm still extended. Smoke rose from his arm in thin curls. His expression did not change.

Across the battlefield, Jaskrit lowered his hand slowly. His eyes narrowed for the first time.

"Acceptable," he said. His voice did not carry on any wind. It simply arrived, threaded through the air by some mechanism of his power. "You will do."

Rudra rolled his shoulder once. "Likewise."

The two of them moved at the same instant.

---

Far to the northwest, the second front roared.

Zypharion Krez did not arrive with restraint.

He emerged from the central construct of the Velkarion command vessel in a column of crimson-black energy that burst upward through the deck and tore the hull apart in the process. He did not seem to notice or care. The remains of his own ship continued collapsing around him as he rose, his body wreathed in unstable energy that pulsed in irregular intervals like a heart that had forgotten its rhythm.

Tier-32. Two hundred and ninety-eight million combat power.

He laughed before he attacked. The sound was not entirely sane.

Then he brought his hands together.

The space between his palms folded.

What emerged was not a beam, not a projectile, not even a clearly defined attack. It was a wave of conceptual rupture, a moving region of reality where the rules holding things together had been temporarily revoked. Wherever it passed, structure failed. Water came apart into its constituent components. Air separated. Sound stopped propagating.

It rolled forward across the ocean toward the Suryax northwestern formation.

Almond stepped to meet it.

Three Exalted Grimblades rotated around him in slow orbit. Abyssbreaker rested in his right hand. His expression was almost calm.

"Lily," he said.

She was already beside him. She had been beside him for the past three seconds, though no one had seen her move. Her blade hovered at her side, and her Dreadlings spread across the air in front of them like a black curtain pulled across the world.

"Layer it," she said.

The Dreadlings collapsed inward, fusing into a dense barrier that absorbed the leading edge of Zypharion’s rupture wave. The barrier did not block it cleanly. It did something more useful. It accepted the rupture into itself and then refused to come apart.

The Dreadling barrier consumed structural failure as if structural failure were just another form of food.

Lily’s smile sharpened. "He’s a generous one."

The wave passed through the Dreadling layer thinned and weakened, its conceptual edge stripped away. What reached Almond on the other side was only kinetic force, and kinetic force was something he could answer.

Abyssbreaker rose.

The Grimblade descended in a single clean arc, and the remaining wave was split cleanly down its center. Both halves dispersed into harmless turbulence as they passed around him.

Across the battlefield, Zypharion’s laughter cut off mid-breath.

Then it returned, louder.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, you are going to be fun."

He came forward personally.

---

The Suryax fleet held the center, but holding was no longer enough.

Marcus stood on the forward platform of the leading Mega Dreadship with his shield expanded into a layered hexagonal wall fifty meters across. Lightning had been striking that wall continuously for the past two minutes, and each impact spread a fresh web of glowing fractures across its surface. Each fracture sealed itself within a breath. The shield was no longer just absorbing.

It was learning.

His sword glowed steadily at his side. He had not used it yet for anything beyond clearing immediate threats. He was waiting.

A massive Virexion assault platform descended through the storm directly above him, its underside rotating open to reveal an enormous coiled construct of compressed lightning. The construct uncoiled.

Marcus released the shield.

The hexagonal wall did not collapse. It launched. Fifty meters of layered defensive plating tore upward through the rain at velocity, slamming directly into the underside of the descending platform before the lightning construct could fully discharge. The platform’s underside crumpled inward. The lightning construct destabilized and detonated within its own delivery system, gutting the entire vessel from below.

Marcus raised his sword in the same motion. A crescent of force erupted from the blade and carved upward through the falling wreckage, splitting the platform into thirds before any piece of it could reach the ocean.

"That’s one," he said.

His shield reformed at his side within a heartbeat, already layered for the next impact.

---

Silvester and Hiroshi had taken to the storm itself.

They moved through the dense cloud cover above the eastern fleet like two cuts in the world that had decided to walk around. Silvester’s blade carried no visible glow, only a faint distortion at its edge that bent the light around it. Hiroshi’s katana flowed with a pale silver flame that did not flicker even in the high winds.

They had stopped attacking individual targets ten minutes ago.

Now they were attacking formations.

Silvester passed through a tight cluster of Virexion interceptors, and the cluster simply unraveled. Not destroyed. Unraveled. Each interceptor came apart along seams that had not existed before he passed, falling out of the sky in neat geometric pieces that no longer functioned as anything.

Hiroshi followed a heartbeat behind, and where his blade traced the air, a horizontal plane of silver fire spread outward across an entire fleet wing. The plane did not move. It simply existed for one full second and then dissipated. Every Virexion craft that had been within that plane was no longer there. They had been removed cleanly from the sky, their lower halves drifting downward through clear air, their upper halves having ceased to be.

A Kezryx commander on a higher platform turned toward them.

The commander was not weak. Her combat power was 263 millions, and his presence carried the unmistakable signature of a fully developed deck. Nezaria Vincoz, Tier-50, deck specialty in compression-class storm matrices.

She pointed once.

The sky compressed around Silvester and Hiroshi simultaneously, an invisible vise of contained storm pressure crushing inward from all directions.

Silvester smiled faintly.

"Compression is just structure," he said.

He cut once.

The compression came apart.

Hiroshi was already past him by then, moving directly at Nezaria. She raised both hands to defend, formed a layered storm barrier seven layers deep, and Hiroshi passed through all seven without slowing. His katana traced a single vertical line through her chest, and her body separated cleanly into two halves that drifted apart in opposite directions before the storm barrier had finished collapsing.

"Two," Hiroshi said.

A heartbeat later, golden-green threads converged on Nezaria’s remains from across the battlefield. She began to reassemble.

Hiroshi turned to look in the direction the threads had come from.

So did Silvester.

So did, very quietly, Almond.