Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 809: The Sundered Shelf

The whole layer deployed at once.

That was the first thing that felt wrong about it. Every previous World-Ending Event had scattered kingdoms across a world too large to see from any one position. This time, standing on the edge of the Sundered Shelf at dawn, Almond could see other kingdoms’ banners on the horizon in three directions.

The world they had been given was smaller than the ones before it.

"That’s not a good sign," Marcus said, reading the same horizon. "They’re not spreading us out. They’re concentrating us."

"Because whatever’s coming doesn’t need us spread out to reach us," Rudra said.

The Sundered Shelf itself was a plateau the size of a small country, split down its center by a canyon so deep the bottom of it had never been surveyed. Ananta Regalon held the eastern half. PeakWicked held the western, close enough that John’s banner was visible across the gap.

Four hundred thousand Regalons stood on that shelf. Eleven thousand volunteers stood behind them.

And somewhere far to the north, past the curve of the world, six lights burned where the Six Empires had taken the primary convergence points.

John crossed the canyon on Pymon’s back an hour before dawn ended, landed beside Almond, and did not bother with a greeting.

"Have you looked up?"

Almond had. Everyone had. The sky above the Sundered Shelf was not orange this time. It was clear, ordinary blue, and had been all morning.

"That’s worse, isn’t it," Almond said.

"In thirty-seven years of these, I have never once seen a clean sky on the first day," John said. "The sky goes wrong because the breaches strain the world. No strain means no breaches."

"Then how does anything get here?"

"That," John said, "is the question I have been asking myself since I woke up."

They found out fourteen minutes later.

The world cracked.

Not the sky. The ground. A sound went through the entire layer at once, deep and structural, and every plateau and canyon and plain on that world shifted by a fraction of an inch in the same instant.

The canyon at the center of the Sundered Shelf widened by forty feet.

And out of it, out of every canyon and fissure and crack on the whole world, came the light.

"It’s not breaching in," Lily said, staring down into the widening gap. "It’s already here. It’s been under us the entire time."

[The Ascension Convergence has begun.]

[Hostile origin: internal.]

[All positions are now frontline positions.]

The first thing that came up the canyon wall was a hand, which Almond found darkly funny for about half a second, because it reminded him of the Gutwrack Span thirty-seven years earlier.

Then it kept coming, and it stopped being funny.

The hand belonged to something that climbed out of the canyon fully formed and fully armored, nine feet tall, moving with the fluid competence of a trained soldier rather than a monster. Behind it came another. Then forty. Then a number nobody bothered counting, pouring up over the canyon lip along the entire length of the shelf at once.

They were not animals. Not one of them.

"Formations," Silvester called, disbelieving. "They’re forming up. They’re organizing on the climb."

"Then we hit them before they finish," Rudra said. "Everyone. Now."

Rudra went first, and he went with something nobody outside the family had ever seen.

Deadwater Dominion had been the Ghost Fleet once, a spectral armada of small hulls and patient cannon fire. Thirty-seven years had turned it into something that no longer bothered pretending to be ships.

The canyon below the shelf filled with water that was not water, black and still and rising, and the climbing ranks found themselves suddenly submerged in something that dragged at them with the weight of an entire drowned ocean.

Then it froze in place, the whole volume of it locking solid with several thousand armored soldiers suspended inside.

"That will hold about ninety seconds," Rudra said. "Use them."

Thunderwake Salvo used them. What had been Echo Mayhem now fired in rolling sequence down the entire length of the canyon, each detonation feeding the next, and ninety seconds of trapped enemies became a single continuous collapse that took a mile of canyon wall down with it.

It bought four minutes. Against numbers like that, four minutes was enormous.

They came up the second time in greater numbers, and this time they came up the eastern face where the shelf was shallowest.

Ainen met them there.

Ironpot Colossus had started life as the Feast Golem, a construct of compressed spice and hardened dough that absorbed impacts. It did not absorb anything now. What rose behind Ainen stood sixty feet tall, built from black iron and pressure and heat, and it did not block the first rank so much as cook it where it stood.

"Still a kitchen," Ainen said, one hand raised. "Bigger kitchen."

Palate of Truths came next, and it was the subtler of the two. Spiceweave had always let him read what a thing actually was underneath what it pretended to be. The rebuilt version let him do it to four hundred targets at once, and it fed what he found to everyone on the link.

"Their armor’s grown, not forged," he reported within seconds. "It’s part of them. Cut it and you’re cutting them. Don’t bother going for gaps, there aren’t any."

That single piece of information changed how the entire eastern face fought for the next six hours.

Almond held the center, and he did not use Grimreaver Sovereign at all.

He used Emberthrone Requiem, which had been the Crucible of the Unmaking Flame, and which he had never once needed at full strength in thirty-seven years.

It did not burn things. It burned the space they were standing in, and what was left afterward could not be occupied again. A whole section of the canyon lip went from a climbing route to something the enemy simply could not use, not because it was on fire, but because it had stopped being anywhere at all.

"How long does that last?" Natalia called.

"I don’t know," Almond admitted. "I’ve never held it this long."

"Ballpark."

"Hours. Possibly days. Possibly until I stop paying attention to it."

"Then don’t stop paying attention to it."

Lily took the northern approach, where the canyon narrowed and the climb was fastest, and she took it with two decks she had rebuilt twice each and still did not fully trust.

Nightcrown Legion came first. The Dreadlings had been shadow-wolves once, ten at a time, fast and coordinated. What answered her now was not a pack. It was an army, and it wore her own strategy rather than her own shape, several hundred constructs that did not attack at all but simply occupied ground and refused to be moved off it.

"They’re not fighting," Noah said, watching them.

"They’re holding," Lily said. "That’s the whole point. I got tired of building things that die."

Threshold Unbound was the one she trusted least, because she had rebuilt the Dreadgate three separate times across thirty-seven years and had never been satisfied with any version of it.

She used it anyway.

The canyon’s narrow point stopped being a narrow point. Every climbing rank that reached it arrived somewhere else entirely, fed sideways into the collapsed section Rudra had buried an hour earlier, and the northern approach went from the fastest route up the shelf to a route that no longer went anywhere at all.

"That worked," Lily said, sounding genuinely surprised.

"You didn’t think it would?"

"I thought it had about even odds."

Across the canyon, PeakWicked fought with everything John had spent thirty-seven years building, and the family got their first proper look at what their oldest ally had actually become.

The Ten Sovereigns fought together for the first time any of them had seen. Rexion took the western canyon alone and simply refused to let anything out of it. Terravax planted itself across the widest breach in the shelf and became, functionally, a mountain range with opinions.

Very sang, and a mile of climbing enemies turned into blooming garden.

"He’s been holding back," Lily observed.

"He’s been holding back for thirty-seven years," Almond said. "So have we."

The first day ran nineteen hours.

By the end of it, the Sundered Shelf still belonged to Ananta Regalon and PeakWicked, and the canyon between them had been filled and collapsed and reopened four separate times.

Casualties across the Regalon line: two thousand three hundred wounded. Two hundred and eleven dead.

It was the first time in thirty-seven years the kingdom had lost anyone in an event.

Marcus read the number out on the link because somebody had to, and then nobody said anything for a long moment.

"Two hundred and eleven," Big D said finally. "Names. All of them. Get me the list tonight, not after."

"Yes sir."

"And then everyone eats and everyone sleeps, because tomorrow is going to be worse."

It was Maya who found the thing that actually frightened them, near the end of that first night.

She had pushed her sight down into the canyon, further than she had ever bothered before, looking for whatever was feeding the climb.

She found the bottom.

"It’s not a canyon," she said. "It’s a wound. There’s something down there, and everything that’s been climbing up at us came out of it, and it’s not a breach. It’s a body."

"How big?"

Maya was quiet for long enough that Almond asked again.

"Maya. How big?"

"I followed it for eleven miles," she said. "And I didn’t reach the end of it. And Almond, it’s not just under our shelf."

She looked up, and her face had gone the color of old paper.

"It’s under the whole world."