Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 741: Ultimate Cards (2/3)

Lily’s Exceed Cave Expedition.

The choir did not have a body. That was the problem Lily had been chewing on since region eighty, and on the morning of the hundredth region, she finally understood why.

Every monster before this one had been a single voice wearing a single note. The hundredth region held all of them at once. The whole dead canyon rose up around her, every singing wall she had ever passed, and it sang together for the first time, one enormous chord made of ninety-nine dead throats and something older underneath them.

"So that’s the trick," she said quietly. "You were never separate. You were all one thing, taking turns."

The sound hit her before she finished the sentence. It was not a scream this time. It was a wave, low and total, and it did not aim for her ribs. It aimed for the air in her lungs, the blood in her ears, the small electric hum that kept her heart ticking. Everything in her body ran on rhythm, and the choir had just reached in and started rewriting the beat.

Lily dropped to one knee on the black stone and did not let herself fall further. She had spent ninety-nine days learning that fear was just another sound, and sounds could be starved.

She had brought ninety-nine grey flowers with her, one from every region, each one grown a little different, each one carrying the trick of a different silence. Alone, none of them could touch something this large. She had known that for weeks. So she had not planned to use them alone.

Her tenth Dreadling came free of her hand in gear form, the whip crackling faint and pale, and she fed every flower into it at once. The Dreadgate she had built into its core screamed as it tried to hold ninety-nine kinds of nothing in one small body, and for a moment she thought it would tear apart in her grip instead.

"Hold," she told it, the way she had told it a hundred smaller things before. "You’ve held worse."

It held. The whip stopped being a whip. It grew, silence pouring off it in a shape she had never seen a Dreadling take, long and coiled and utterly without sound, and when she swung it into the choir’s wall of noise, the world did not go quiet.

It went blank.

The chord that had filled the whole canyon simply stopped existing in the space her weapon passed through, not muted, not lowered, erased at the root, and the choir screamed with every voice it had left and found that half of those voices were already gone.

Lily walked into that erasure the way she had walked into every scream since the first day, patient and total, and she did not stop cutting until the last note in the last wall went the same way as the first. The canyon that had never once been silent in the whole hundred regions finally, completely, was.

She stood in that silence for exactly three heartbeats, which was the longest she had ever let herself feel anything in this world. Then the sky, which had no light source and yet let her see, wrote its answer without a sound.

[100/100]

The black glass opened beneath her like it had at the start, gentle this time instead of hungry, and she rose up through it into the bronze light of the world above.

The spirit was there, wearing her own reflection the way it had on the first day. "You were heard," it said. "Every day of it. And you survived being heard. Most who enter my world never learn that being seen is not the same as being destroyed."

"Noted," Lily said, and there was something almost warm buried under the flatness of it.

The light gathered above her, folded, and became a card, and it was heavier in her hand than a whip should ever feel.

[First Entry Guarantee fulfilled.]

[Ultimate Card: The Unheard Absolute]

[Rank: Legendary. Grade: Supreme.]

[This card holds the complete system of Sound and its Unmaking. Every action, every ability, every heartbeat carries a note at its core. The bearer may hear that note, and silence it before it finishes. The bearer may also move through all things utterly unheard, forever.]

Lily read it once, filed it, and allowed herself a small, private smile that nobody in this world would ever get to see. Then the bronze sky closed, and she stepped out into the cold empty air of the upper layer.

Six days. That was what the corner of her vision told her had passed outside. She felt for the Geneline at once, and found the whole family there, tired but whole, and let a slow breath out through her nose.

Then she saw him. Almond hung in the high dark a short distance away, arms crossed, facing three doors that still burned. When her own door faded behind her, he turned, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"You’re late," he said.

"You’re one door lighter than you were an hour ago," Lily said, drifting over to stand beside him. "Which means you’ve been talking to yourself out here."

"Mostly to the doors." Almond glanced sideways at her, something quiet and enormous moving behind his calm. "Good trial?"

"I learned I can erase sound from existence." Lily looked at the two doors still burning ahead of them. "You?"

"I learned I can move a mountain." He said it the way another man might mention the weather, and then, after a pause that lasted a beat too long to be nothing, added, "Glad you’re out."

Lily kissed him and locked her arms with him. "So, darling. How was your adventure?"

Almond grinned. "It was intense enough that now I won’t leave your side for a couple days once we get back home."

"That was my plan, not yours." Lily’s hand slid naughtily towards a certain place.

"Oi, the other two can pop anytime." Almond quickly grabbed her hand.

Lily chuckled. "True."

It would be awkward if Admiral Rudra saw that.

And they didn’t have to wait long.