Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 721: Before The Last Stretch

The mountain did not want to be climbed.

That much became clear within the first hour of the fifth day, when the kingdom set foot on the lower slopes and the peak, which had spent four days pretending to be unreachable, finally stopped pretending and simply became difficult instead.

The slopes rose steep and broken under a violet sky, and the higher they went, the more the mountain fought them. The air grew thin and strange, heavy in the lungs one moment and too light the next. The stone underfoot shifted between solid rock and something that crumbled like ash, so that a firm step could vanish into a slide without warning.

It was slower going than any part of the crossing had been. A hundred thousand people could pour across a plain in hours. A mountain like this had to be taken one careful stretch at a time, roped together in places, hauling the exotic army up in others, and the clock in the back of everyone’s mind kept ticking through all of it.

The Spirit Lords helped where they could, their drifting domains lifting whole sections of the army over the worst of the broken ground. Kexell carried more, and Clovelle’s fleet ferried the rest along the sheerest faces. But even with every advantage, the mountain took its toll in hours, and the hours were the one thing the trial had made precious.

"Five days used," Aryan said that first evening on the slope, camped on a shelf of stone barely wide enough to hold them. "Five days left, and we are only at the foot of the thing. This is where kingdoms lose the trial. Not to monsters. To the mountain, and to running out of time on it while they still have the summit above them."

"Then we do not run out of time," Almond said, but even he could hear how much easier that was to say than to do, and he did not pretend otherwise.

The mountain, for its part, had defenders.

They came on the second day of the climb, when the kingdom had pushed high enough that the slopes below were lost in violet haze. Things that lived in the thin air, born of the mountain itself, descended on the climbing army in shrieking waves, and the sound of them coming was a sound like a gale trying to speak.

They were storm-things, made of wind and pale lightning, and they did not fight like flesh. They struck and scattered and struck again, tearing at the edges of the column, trying to pluck people off the narrow paths and fling them into the long fall below. There was nothing solid to hit, no body to break, only wind that hammered and vanished and hammered again.

"Hold the edges!" Marcus roared, driving his shield outward to catch a soldier the storm had nearly torn off the path. "Nobody near the drop fights alone! Pair up, hold the line, and watch each other’s backs. This mountain does not get to take a single one of us!"

The family fought the storm the way it fought everything, together and without panic. Silvester and Hiroshi carved the wind-things out of the air where they massed thickest, two old blades finding the shape of an enemy that had no shape. Jian moved along the most exposed stretches, cold and precise, holding the deadliest edges by himself so that no one else would have to stand where a single gust meant the fall.

But it was Lily who broke the storm’s back. She watched the wind-things long enough to understand them, the way she understood everything given time, and then the Wheel of Achromatic Shade turned and she stole the very thing that made them a storm.

She stole their scattering. Their speed. The formless quickness that let them strike and vanish before anyone could answer. And all at once the storm-things became slow, solid, catchable targets, hanging in the thin air with nowhere to flee, and the family cut them out of the sky before they could take a single soul.

The mountain lost its defenders, and the kingdom climbed on, higher into the thinning air, one hard-won stretch of broken stone at a time.

The sixth day of the trial ended on a high, cold ledge, and there, for the first time, they saw the summit clearly.

It was still far above them, but it was no longer lost in the sky. The churning violet clouds parted around it, and through the gap they could see the top of the peak, a broad flat crown of pale stone with something at its center that pulsed with soft, waiting light. The finish. The right to ascend, sitting up there in plain sight at last.

The whole kingdom stopped to look at it, and for a moment no one spoke, because seeing the end after six days of chasing it did something to a person’s chest that words did not quite fit. Six days of glass and maze and desert and storm, six days of carrying a hundred thousand people through a world built to break them, and there at last was the thing they had bled for, close enough to believe in.

"There it is," Roken said finally, leaning on his great hammer, staring up at the crown of the mountain with open wonder. "That is it. That is the whole thing. Right there. After everything, it is just sitting up there waiting for us."

"Right there," Marcus agreed, quiet for once, and even Jian’s cold face had gone still at the sight of it.

Tejas stood beside his grandfather, young enough that the wonder had not yet been worn smooth in him, and Silvester put a hand on the boy’s shoulder without a word, the two of them looking up at the summit together, three generations of a family that had climbed a very long way to stand on this cold ledge.

Almond looked at the summit, at the soft pulsing light that meant the upper layer, that meant everything they had climbed three layers and a whole middle plane to reach, and he felt the weight of how close it had become. Close enough to touch, almost. Close enough to lose, too, if they let themselves grow careless now.

"Four days left, and it is finally in sight," he said. "We can reach it. We are going to reach it. But not because the mountain will let us. Because we will not let it stop us."

But the trial was not finished with them yet, and it saved its cruelest test for the moment they let themselves believe the end was near.

Because as the kingdom made camp on that cold high ledge, banners of other kingdoms appeared on the slopes around them, closer than they had been in days. The handful of forces still in the race had all pushed for the summit at once, drawn by the same clear sight of the finish, and now the mountain was crowded near its crown with the strongest kingdoms left in the trial.

"They all see it too," Aryan said grimly, watching the distant banners climb. "Every kingdom left. And there is only one summit, and the right to ascend goes to whoever reaches it. This last stretch is going to be a fight, not a climb."

Lily came to stand beside Almond, looking out at the rival banners scattered across the mountain, each one aimed at the same pulsing light above.

"They have been avoiding us for days," she said. "Ever since the valley. No one wanted to be the kingdom that fought Ananta Regalon." She smiled faintly. "But up there, at the top, avoiding us stops being an option. The summit is the only prize, and we are all standing on the same mountain now."

"Then we take it the way we take everything," Almond said, and there was no doubt in it, only the settled certainty of a man who had never once turned back. "Together, and first."

He looked around at his family, tired and worn and unbroken after six days of an impossible world, at the ten Generals and the whole clan and the hundred thousand who had crossed a hostile dimension without losing their number.

"Four days," he said. "One summit. And every kingdom left in this trial standing between us and it." A slow, sharp focus settled over his golden eyes. "Rest tonight. Because tomorrow, we climb the last of it, and we do not stop until Ananta Regalon stands on that crown."

Above them, the summit pulsed its soft and waiting light through the parted violet clouds, and around them, the last of the rival kingdoms climbed toward the same prize, and the final race for the upper layer narrowed toward the single point where all of it would be decided.