Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 722: Peak

The last climb began before dawn on the seventh day, and the whole mountain knew it.

Ananta Regalon moved out from the cold ledge in the grey half-light, the summit’s soft glow burning steady above them through the parted clouds, and all across the broken slopes the other kingdoms moved with them. There was no hiding it anymore. Every banner still left in the trial had turned toward the crown at once, and the mountain had become a single crowded race with only one prize waiting at the top.

The first rival reached them within the hour. A kingdom in silver and green came down across a ridge to cut the Regalon column off from the fastest path, and their intent was plain in the way they moved. They did not want to pass. They wanted to hold Ananta Regalon in place long enough for someone else to reach the summit first, and take the whole trial from them by simple delay.

Almond read the play before their commander had finished forming his line, and he did not slow the march by even a step.

"Rudra, Ainen, clear them," he said. "The rest of us keep climbing. We do not stop for anyone who wants us to stop. That is the whole of their strategy, and we do not give it to them."

Rudra and Ainen peeled off from the column without a word, two Generals against a whole rival kingdom, and it was not close. Rudra walked into their line and unmade the ground it stood on, his cards revoking the ridge itself, and Ainen’s flames poured across their flank and turned their advance to a rout. The silver and green banner broke and scattered, and the Regalon column never once stopped climbing, and the two Generals caught back up before the dust had even settled.

Higher up, the mountain narrowed toward its crown, and the paths grew fewer, and the fewer paths meant the kingdoms could no longer avoid one another at all. By the middle of the seventh day, three forces were climbing the same final face, close enough to see the strain on each other’s faces, all of them racing for the same broad crown above.

That was when the trial revealed its last cruelty. The mountain, sensing the finish so near, threw everything it had left at all of them at once. The stone itself came alive, great grinding golems of rock heaving up out of the slope to bar the way, and the thin air filled again with storm, and the ground bucked and slid beneath the whole climbing host.

"It does not want any of us to finish," Aryan shouted over the rising chaos, catching himself against a lurching slab of stone. "It would rather no one reached the top than let it be us. This is the mountain’s last stand."

"Then we give it a last stand to remember," Almond called back, and he turned to his family, and the tiredness of six days fell away from him all at once, because the end was here and there was no more room left for anything but the climb.

The kingdom answered the mountain’s fury with everything it had built across three layers. Kexell took to the air in his true form and tore the flying storms apart, a mountain of scale against a sky of wind, Gopu shrieking defiance from his horn. Marcus and the Sentinels held the shuddering ground where it tried to throw people from the paths. Silvester, Hiroshi, Maya, and Jian carved through the stone golems wherever they rose, and the exotic army poured up the final face in a tide that the mountain could not turn back.

And at the front of all of it climbed the four who had killed a Doom Monarch, cutting a road up the last stretch of the peak that the whole kingdom could follow. Almond’s Grimblades cleared the way. Lily’s Dreadlings swarmed the golems and dragged them down. Rudra broke whatever the mountain raised, and Ainen burned a path straight toward the crown, and behind them the Regalons and their exotic army surged up the slope in their wake.

The other two kingdoms climbed too, hard and desperate, and for a while the three forces rose side by side up the final face, close enough to touch, each one throwing everything into the last stretch. It was the truest race of the whole trial, no monsters between them and the top now, only the mountain and each other and the pulsing light above.

But Ananta Regalon had something the others did not, and it was not power, though it had that too. It was the simple fact that it climbed as one. The other kingdoms fought the mountain as scattered fighters each looking to their own footing. Ananta Regalon fought it as a single body, every hand steadying another, every General clearing the way for the whole, a family that had crossed an impossible world together and would reach the end of it the same way.

They pulled ahead. Slowly at first, then surely, the Regalon column drawing up the final stretch faster than the scattered forces beside it, until the crown of the mountain was close enough that Almond could see the source of the pulsing light waiting at its center.

The last hundred feet were the steepest, a sheer wall of pale stone standing between the kingdom and the summit, and the mountain threw its final golems against them there, one great heaving mass of living rock meaning to hold the wall until the ten days ran out.

Rudra reached it first, and he did not climb it. He revoked it. The whole final wall was told, by a single card, that it was no longer permitted to be a wall, and it came apart into dust and empty air, and the way to the crown stood open at last.

Almond climbed through the falling dust and set his foot on the broad flat crown of the mountain, and the family came up behind him.

The Regalons crested the wall in a rush, the whole clan that had crossed a hostile world together, and behind them the exotic army poured up onto the summit in its ranks, the units their decks had built filling the crown with disciplined lines of Dread-Reavers and Ember-born and spirit-constructs and Sentinels.

This journey had transformed all the units. They became more alive.

At the center of the crown, the source of the pulsing light waited, a pillar of soft radiance rising into the parted violet sky, patient and ancient, the finish of the trial and the door to the upper layer all at once.

For a moment, the family simply stood on the summit and breathed, worn down to the bone and unbroken. Every Regalon who had entered the dimension seven days ago stood on this crown now, and not one of them had been lost in the crossing, and the army they had built stood whole around them.

The Regalons came up onto the crown and stopped where they stood, each of them taking in the impossible fact of having arrived. Roken sat down heavily on the pale stone, hammer across his knees, and laughed the tired, wondering laugh of a man who had half expected to die on the way. Silvester and Hiroshi stood with their grandchildren between them, four generations of two families that had climbed the whole way up to reach this cold and shining place.

Kexell landed on the edge of the crown with a thunder of wings, and for once the loud old dragon had nothing loud to say. He simply looked out over the family gathered on the summit, this family that had taken in a creature who had hatched alone with no kin at all, and Gopu climbed down from his horn and pressed against his grandfather’s side, and Kexell let him, and said nothing.

Almond looked at the pillar of light, and then he looked back at his family, at Lily beside him and Rudra and Ainen and Kexell and all of them, at the whole clan that had climbed from the bottom of the world to stand on this peak, and something moved in his chest that had nothing to do with the thin cold air.

"We made it," he said quietly, and his voice was not quite steady, and he did not care. "All of us. Every single one of us. We made it."

Lily slipped her hand into his, and there were tears standing in her eyes that she did not bother to hide, and around them the family began to understand what they had done. The noise rose slowly from stunned silence into something that shook the crown of the mountain, the Regalons laughing and weeping and holding one another, a family that had climbed out of slavery and scattering and three whole layers of a merciless world to arrive, together, on this single shining peak.

Then Almond stepped forward, and he laid his hand upon the pillar of light, and the trial recognized the ones who had reached the summit within the ten days, and gave them the thing they had bled and climbed and carried each other across a world to earn.

The right to ascend. The upper layer, waiting above.

The pillar’s light rose up around the whole kingdom, gentle and vast, gathering up the family and the army their own hands had built, and Ananta Regalon began to rise toward the layer above, and toward everything still waiting for them there.