Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 726: Conquer The Rivers. Move The Mountains

The spirit did not make him wait long, but it did make him ask.

Almond stood on the pale water and looked at the featureless bronze face and waited, and when it became clear the thing would not begin without him, he shrugged and got it over with. "You brought me here. So talk."

"You entered of your own will." The voice arrived inside his chest rather than his ears, and it carried no malice at all, which was somehow worse. "The world beyond this one belongs to me. It has no interest in you. It will not test your courage, because courage is cheap and every one of you carries it through my door like it means something."

"Then what does it test?"

"Whether you can be taught by a thing that is trying to kill you." The spirit raised one hand, and the water under Almond’s boots began to shiver. "Conquer the River. Move the Mountain."

Almond turned the words over and found them useless, which told him they were not a riddle. They were a description. He would understand them the moment the world showed him what they meant, and not one heartbeat sooner.

"And how do I know when I’ve passed?"

"You will know," the spirit said, and the pale water broke apart beneath him, and the bronze sky peeled back like skin, and he fell.

He landed on grass.

It took him a moment to accept that. He had come up braced, ready to fight whatever touched him first, and instead there was grass under his palms and wind moving through it and a bird calling somewhere behind him that sounded almost like the birds at home. He got to his feet slowly and looked out at a wilderness that ran to every horizon he had. Rivers threaded silver through dark forest. Mountains stood in ranks behind mountains, blue with distance, their heads lost in a sky that was ordinary and enormous. It smelled of wet earth and pollen.

"Beautiful," Almond said aloud, to nobody. "That’s the part I don’t like."

He reached inward and the Spirit Kodoku pocket opened, and five of them came out into the light of a world that had never seen their kind.

Ashkar came first, the way he always did, hooves sinking into soft ground and steam rolling off his shoulders, the heat of him bending the air. Behind him the Infernal Knight rose in silence, armor drinking the sun. Dark Pope Benedict stepped out and immediately looked up, as though checking whether this sky held anything worth praying to. Chimera Crystalist drifted into being with its four satellite crystals turning around its body, quartz eye rotating slow across the treeline. And Starlight Beast simply arrived, snout already lifted, sparks fizzing off its whiskers as it tasted the wind.

"My lord," Ashkar rumbled, his deep voice grating like stone dragged over stone. "This place is wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"There is nothing here that fears us."

Almond let out a slow breath. He had been thinking something close to that and had not wanted to be right. "Spread out. Nobody engages anything without telling me first. Benedict, that especially means you."

"I am wounded," Dark Pope Benedict said mildly, "that you would single me out."

"You set a forest on fire last time."

"That forest was heretical."

Starlight Beast made a sound that was unmistakably a snicker. Almond rubbed his eyes and started walking.

He walked the whole first day, and the world let him. By nightfall he had a shape for the place. It was divided, not by borders anyone had drawn but by the mood of the land itself, into regions that each held their own weather and their own light and their own particular silence. And in every region, sooner or later, something lived that the region had grown around.

He found the first one in the river.

He was crouched at a shallows drinking when the water twenty paces downstream stood up. That was the only way his mind could hold it. The river did not part around the thing so much as decide, briefly, to be the thing, and then a shape came out of it with length he could not measure and armor like layered slate and no eyes at all, and it turned its blind head toward him across the water and knew exactly where he was.

Almond was moving before it finished rising, and his summons moved with him. Ashkar hit it first, all that furnace weight behind a strike that would have shattered a hillside. The Infernal Knight came in under the arc of it, blade lit, aiming for the seam where armor met throat. Chimera Crystalist’s four crystals locked and fired, and Starlight Beast poured a lance of white light across the water, and Dark Pope Benedict, saying nothing at all, dropped the entire river into darkness.

Almond had killed things that made mountains sit down. He knew, with the cold clarity of a man reading his own instruments, exactly what all of that should have done.

It did nothing.

Not deflected. Not resisted. The power went into the creature and the creature simply declined to accept that it had happened, the way a wall declines to accept an argument, and then it was on him.

The coil took him across the chest. He felt three ribs go, heard them go, and the river came up to meet him. He had one full second underwater to understand that the current itself was hostile, that the water was dragging him down into the dark where the thing lived, and that everything he had spent his life building had just been shown to him as decoration. Ashkar’s hand closed on his arm and hauled, and the two of them came out of the water in a burst of steam, and Almond hit the bank hard enough to bounce.

"Go," he coughed. "Treeline, now, all of you."

It did not follow them past the trees.

He lay on his back forty paces in, breathing carefully around the broken ribs, staring up through the leaves at that ordinary, enormous sky. The Infernal Knight stood over him with its blade still drawn, motionless, watching the water. Chimera Crystalist’s quartz eye had not stopped rotating.

"Every strike landed clean," Benedict said at last. He had knelt beside Almond and his shadow was doing something slow and careful to the ribs. "Not one of them was avoided. It let us hit it."

"It didn’t let us," Almond said. "It didn’t notice."

Something resolved in the corner of his vision, faint, as though the world had waited to see whether he would survive long enough to be worth informing.

[Exceed Monster.]

Nothing else. No stats. No rank. No name. The world had told him what it was and left the rest to him. Almond read it twice and laughed, which hurt considerably, and Ashkar turned to look at him with the flat concern of a creature who suspected his master’s skull had taken damage.

"He said it," Almond told them, wiping his mouth. "The spirit. He said this place wouldn’t test whether I’m brave. It tests whether I can learn from something that’s killing me." He let his head fall back into the leaf litter. "Well. It’s certainly killing me."

The next nine days taught him what he was dealing with.

He watched it, because there was nothing else he could do that did not end with him dead in the water.

He watched from ridges and from treetops and once, badly, from a hollow in the bank, lying in the mud with his hand clamped over his own mouth while armor scraped stone above his head.

He learned that it did not sleep.

He learned it drank the river and the river came back.

He learned it hunted by some sense he never identified and could not fool, and that it had no interest whatsoever in leaving the water, which was the only mercy the place offered.

Twice more he tested it. Once with everything the five of them could pour into a single point, and once with a construct he fabricated from the ground up over two full days, an ugly beautiful thing of folded space that he sank the creature inside of and closed until the riverbed turned to glass. It came out of the glass and broke his arm.

He set the arm himself that night, in the dark, biting down on a strip of leather while Starlight Beast pressed its warm flank against his back to hold him steady. Ashkar held the splint. Nobody spoke for a while.