Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 794: First Twelve Hours

A hundred towers rose across the battlefield at once, each one built by hands that had earned the right to stand there. Every single kingdom fielding a team in this event had brought only its strongest, because the notice had made the requirement plain from the start.

[Participants must possess confirmed X-rank Potential.]

No ordinary soldier stood anywhere on this field. Every tower held someone who had already survived the kind of trial most fighters never walked away from, and every kingdom on the field understood exactly how dangerous that made the ninety-nine towers that weren’t their own.

Ananta Regalon’s tower rose dark stone and quiet iron, Rudra’s design down to the last brace, with Ghost Fleet’s cannons already mounted along its upper ring and Boarding Party’s marines waiting unseen inside its walls.

"First wave incoming," Marcus called from the top, markers already spinning wide to read the field.

---

The first monsters that broke from the tree line were not gentle test creatures. Wolves of fused bone and muscle came first, fast and coordinated, and behind them lumbered things built from stone that had learned, somewhere, how to be angry.

"Spread out," Rudra said. "Kayla, hold the center for support. Everyone else, find your lane."

Jian met the stone-things head on, Graniteguard answering weight with weight, and where his fists landed, cracks spread through granite the way lightning spread through storm clouds. Kira’s Frostbind Snare locked three of the bone-wolves mid-stride, and Noah’s Endless Blade finished what the ice started before they could ever shake free.

Julian’s Wildfire Eternal caught a whole cluster of the creatures at once, flame that refused to gutter no matter how the wind tried to smother it, and Emma’s Starfall rained down behind him, small burning points finishing off anything that staggered clear of the fire.

"That’s the easy part," Maya said, Farsight Loom already stretched wide across the field. "There’s something bigger circling. Three towers over. It’s already fed once."

Almond read the far shape she pointed toward, and something in his flat expression sharpened. "Not our problem yet," he said. "Ours is closer."

A second wave hit within the hour, flying horrors with wings of torn membrane, screeching in a register that made even Kayla wince from the support line. Lily answered first, Veilfang Reach draining three out of the sky before they came anywhere near the tower’s walls. Ainen’s Feast Golem caught a fourth against its broad chest, absorbing the impact whole, and Natalia’s Warsong sang a note sharp enough to stagger the rest into an easy kill.

A third wave came slower and worse, burrowing things that surfaced directly beneath the tower’s own foundation, and it was Marcus’s Vanguard’s Requiem that caught the danger in time, markers flaring red the instant the ground beneath them hollowed. Kira’s Glassveil rained crystal down through the collapsing earth, and the burrowers came apart before they finished whatever they’d meant to do to the tower’s roots.

By the fourth hour, four other towers had already gone dark on the shared event board. Nobody on Ananta Regalon’s tower celebrated the survival. They simply kept working, resetting formation, tending small wounds, watching the tree line for whatever came next.

---

The attack came at the sixth hour, and it did not come from monsters at all.

"Incoming force," Marcus called, voice suddenly sharp. "Kingdom banner. Skarn. Full squad, heading straight for us."

Six figures crossed the open ground fast, and Almond understood within a single glance exactly why this event only accepted X-rankers at all. Not one of them carried the same kind of power as any other.

The first fighter’s arm had gone half translucent, veins pulsing with something that wasn’t blood, flesh reshaping itself mid-stride into blades that grew and receded like something alive and hungry.

"Parasite-forged," Almond said. "His whole body’s the weapon."

The second carried no visible weapon at all, only a slate of shifting geometric light hovering at her shoulder, angles recalculating themselves with every step she took toward the tower.

The third didn’t run. He simply pulsed once, and every loose stone within thirty paces lifted and hung suspended, gravity itself bending around him like water around a stone.

The fourth screamed before he was even close enough to matter, a note that cracked the outer wall’s stonework on contact, sound turned into something with real, physical weight.

The fifth moved like a smear of ink across daylight, never quite solid, and the sixth simply walked, calm and unhurried, a faint golden aura pulsing steady around him that made the very air taste faintly of copper.

"Positions," Rudra said, already moving. "Ranged first. Don’t let the sound-caster get comfortable."

Natalia’s Huntress’s Brand marked the screamer instantly, and Emma’s Dawnbreaker answered a half breath later, a beam of light driving straight through a throat that had never expected to be a named target instead of a weapon.

The gravity-user turned every suspended stone toward the tower’s base at once, and Jian met the barrage with Skyfather’s Judgment, lightning and stone meeting mid-air in a concussion that shattered half the incoming rocks before they landed. The rest still struck, and the tower’s outer wall cracked wide along one whole face.

The geometric fighter pressed toward Maya directly, her floating angles slicing the air itself into something sharp enough to cut without touching anything, and Maya’s Truthweave read the pattern whole, finding the single flawed calculation hidden inside a system built to look flawless.

"Your math’s wrong," Maya said, and Threadbind’s ethereal cords wrapped the whole floating construct still before it could correct itself.

The ink-smeared fighter used the chaos to slip past the front line entirely, reappearing behind Kayla with a blade made of the same unstable dark, and it was only Kayla’s own Thornveil, thrown up on pure reflex, that turned a killing strike into a shallow, painful graze along her shoulder instead.

"Kayla!" Julian’s voice cracked across the tower.

"I’m fine," she said, teeth gritted, Ashbloom already closing the wound as she fought. "Watch the golden one. He hasn’t done anything yet, and I don’t like that."

The parasite-forged fighter reached the wall itself, blade-limbs raking deep gouges into stone that had held against monsters twice its size, and Ainen met him at the breach with Flashforged Cleaver, matching speed for speed in a way the man clearly hadn’t expected from someone he’d dismissed as a cook.

"You reshape your own flesh," Ainen said, blocking a strike that would have opened his throat. "I reshape everything else. Guess whose trick actually needs less warning."

Almond finished the parasite-fighter with Grimreaver Sovereign, reading past the shifting blades to the one true joint holding the transformation together, and the man went down mid-shift, caught between two shapes and unable to hold either.

The golden-aura fighter finally moved, and the copper taste in the air sharpened into something that made every summoned construct on the tower flicker, decks straining under a pressure none of them had felt before.

"He’s targeting the decks themselves," Lily said, reading the strange pull. "Not us. What we’re carrying."

Rudra didn’t wait to learn more about it. Tollbound Reckoning answered the pressure with debt of its own, marking the golden fighter for every ounce of strain he’d already spent trying to unravel their power, and when Rudra finally called it in, the collected weight of it dropped the man in a single decisive strike he never saw building.

Skarn’s squad broke and retreated within minutes of the fight actually turning, dragging their fallen with them rather than risk losing anyone outright, and the tower held, cracked along one whole face but entirely standing.

"Casualties?" Rudra asked.

"None serious," Kayla said, already tending her own shoulder along with Ainen’s forearm. "Close, though. That ink-fighter could have opened me up worse if Thornveil hadn’t already been half-raised."

"Add it to the list of things we watch for now," Almond said.

---

By the twelfth hour, the event board told its own story without anyone needing to say it aloud. Thirty-one towers remained standing out of the hundred that had risen that morning, and Ananta Regalon’s held near the top of the survival rankings, battered, tested, and entirely intact.

"Halfway," Marcus said, reading the notice as it updated. "If the pattern holds."

It did not hold.

The ground beyond the tree line shuddered, and every remaining tower’s watchers felt it at once, a weight in the air that had nothing to do with the waves that came before it.

[Second Phase Beginning: Wave Intensity Increased.]

[Monster Classification: Epic-Tier threats detected across all remaining towers.]

Almond felt the shift settle over the whole battlefield like a held breath about to break, and looked out at a tree line that had gone suddenly, completely silent.

"That’s not a wave," he said quietly. "That’s a warning."

Around him, the rest of the tower fell into position without needing to be told, thirteen people who had already spent twelve hours proving they belonged on this field, and not one of them looked away from the tree line as they did it.

"Whatever’s coming," Rudra said, hands settling onto the tower’s own defenses like a captain returning to a wheel he’d never truly let go of, "it’s already decided we’re worth its full attention. I’d rather earn that than be ignored."

"Small comfort," Ainen said, flexing a hand still faintly scarred from the last fight.

"It’s the only kind this event’s been offering," Lily said.

The silence broke a moment later, and whatever answered it was not anything any of them had already learned how to fight.