Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 751: The Drowned Crown (2/2)

Almond read the throne room the way he had read every region of his own trial, and what he found made him lower his voice without meaning to. "The essence here isn’t angry. It’s loyal. These guardians aren’t hunting us. They’re doing exactly what they were built to do the day they were built to do it. Guard the crown until someone proves they deserve to take it."

"How does one prove that, exactly," Ainen asked, eyeing the nearest stone guardian with open wariness.

The answer came from the guardians themselves, all twelve turning as one toward the six intruders, coral-crusted spears lowering in unison, and Rudra’s shoulders settled into the old easy readiness of a man who had commanded worse odds and walked away from all of them.

"The old way, probably," he said. "Earn it."

---

The fight in the drowned throne room was unlike anything the family had faced on either island, because the guardians did not tire, did not bleed, and did not stop, only slowed when enough of the stone was broken away to matter.

Rudra met the first two head on, spear reading the current between them, halting their spear-thrusts a half second before impact with the Unmoved Current and turning slowed weapons aside with his own. Gopu’s dragonfire bloomed strange and blue underwater, burning through kelp-wrapped stone with a hiss that filled the throne room like a struck bell.

Lily moved between three guardians at once, her whip trailing silence, and where the silence touched coral, the guardians’ old, patient loyalty simply stopped answering, joints going still mid-swing as she erased the command holding them upright.

Almond read each guardian as it came, calling the soft seam in old stone the way he had once called the soft place in a quarry wyrm’s skull, and Ainen’s blade, still carrying the last stubborn edge of the Grand Table, found those seams and made short, decisive work of them.

Marcus held the rear, calm and watchful, counting down a mental clock that only he was truly tracking, because someone had to.

The twelfth guardian fell with its spear half raised, and the throne room went as still as it had been before they arrived, gold light drifting down through drowned towers onto a crown that had waited a very long time for anyone worthy enough to survive reaching it.

Almond lifted it with both hands, and the moment his fingers closed on cold, ancient stone, the whole palace seemed to exhale.

[You have claimed: Fragment of the Drowned Crown]

[This relic carries the memory of a sovereign the ocean has never stopped mourning. Its full nature is not yet understood.]

"Later," Rudra said, reading the strain already showing on Ainen’s face, the Tide-Mark at his collarbone burning fainter than the others. "Understand it later. Up, now."

---

The Rift began closing at the fifth hour, and the family felt it as a slow tightening in the water itself, the gold light dimming toward the dark it had interrupted.

The swim back up was longer than the swim down, because grief, it turned out, closes slower than it opens, and by the time the palace towers fell away beneath them, Ainen’s mark had burned down to almost nothing.

"Ainen," Marcus said sharply, catching the look on his face.

"I’m aware," Ainen said, and there was no dryness left in his voice at all, only the flat calm of a man doing careful math with his own life. "Don’t stop swimming on my account."

Nobody stopped swimming. Rudra caught his arm instead, hauling him along with the same steady strength that had once held a fleet together through worse than this, and Gopu dropped beneath both of them and let his own broad back carry the last stretch, dragon and admiral and cook rising together through darkening gold water while a mark that measured in seconds instead of hours ticked down toward zero.

They broke the surface with less than ten seconds to spare on Ainen’s mark, and the whole crew of the Chainbreaker was already leaning over the rail, and hands reached down and hauled all six of them up onto the deck in a tangle of soaked robes and ragged breathing.

Ainen lay on his back on the planking, coughing seawater and laughing weakly at the same time. "Ten seconds," he said, to no one and everyone. "I want it noted that I remained charming throughout."

"You screamed once," Silvester offered helpfully.

"I did not scream. I expressed urgency."

Behind them, the golden light collapsed in on itself, the whirlpool closing like a held breath finally released, and where a king’s drowned tomb had opened for six hours, the ocean simply became ocean again, violet and endless and unmarked, as if it had never shown them anything at all.

The Hub wrote its final line as the last ripple faded.

[Fourth Objective Complete: Relic claimed.]

[Casualties: 0]

[Kingdoms remaining in event: 150 of 312]

Big D crouched beside Ainen and hauled him up by the collar with rough affection, checking him over with the particular gruffness of a man who had been more frightened than he would ever admit. "You’re an idiot," he said.

"I’m an idiot with a piece of a dead king’s crown," Ainen said, and held up the fragment, gold light still moving faintly beneath its stone surface like a held thought.

Almond took it from him carefully, and turned it in his hands, the Essence of All Things reaching into it the way it reached into everything, and for a moment his easy calm flickered into something more careful.

"There’s a truth at the core of this," he said slowly, "and I can’t read all of it yet. It’s old, and it’s enormous, and it isn’t finished." He closed his hand around the fragment, and looked out at the ordinary violet sea, endless and patient in every direction. "Whatever Thurmugin was, I don’t think we just found the last of him."

Rudra brought the Chainbreaker around toward open water, six souls still dripping on her deck and a piece of a drowned sovereign locked in the family’s keeping, and the ocean that carried his name stretched out ahead of them, giving nothing else away.