Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 815: What It Learned

For a long moment, nobody on the thrones moved.

The heart hung below them like a red mountain. The gray seam ran down its center, and it stayed open just a little, waiting.

Kael was the first to speak. "You know this thing."

"We fought it," Rudra said. His eyes never left the seam. "Thirty-seven years ago. At the Year-End Convergence."

"It opened the gates that year," Lily said quietly. "We broke three of its shapes. We never broke the thing wearing them."

"And now it’s back," Ainen said.

"You knew I would be," the voice answered from below. "You said so yourself, Lily Regalon. You stood at the edge of the Gutwrack Span and told your husband I would return with a fourth shape that already knew everything you had done. You were right."

Lily’s face went pale.

"It heard that," she said.

"I hear most things," the voice said.

"How?" Almond asked. His voice was steady, but his hand had closed around Lily’s. "Your third shape died on the Gutwrack Span. We watched the seam go dark."

"The third shape died," the voice agreed. "The fourth had not finished being made. It was small. Very small. It fell through the last open gate before the gate closed, and it kept falling until it reached the floor of this layer."

The heart beat. Fifteen seconds.

"And at the floor of this layer, I found this."

"The gatekeeper," Maya said.

"It has sat here since before the first kingdom climbed out of the bottom world. Every soul that climbs this layer is seen by it. Every fight. Every deck. Every choice." The seam widened a little. "It did not want me here. It fought me for a long time. But I am patient, and it was alone."

Kael’s grip tightened on his sword. "The Ascension Convergence. You’re the one running it."

"The gatekeeper runs it. It always has." The voice sounded almost gentle. "I only changed the question it asks."

"What question?" Rudra asked.

The heart beat again.

"Whether anything that climbs this far is worth letting any further," the voice said. "I have watched this layer for thirty-seven years through the gatekeeper’s eyes. I have my answer already. Now I would like to see yours."

The next heartbeat was not a heartbeat.

It came up out of the heart like a wall of force. It rolled up through the dark hollow and slammed into the underside of the thrones, and it did not hit the ground. It hit the eight Spirit Lords carrying it.

Sylvia cried out. Benedict dropped to one knee. The whole circle of carried ground lurched and tilted, and for a terrible second Maya slid toward the edge.

Ainen caught her by the collar and hauled her back.

"It’s going to do that every fifteen seconds," Maya gasped. "We can’t take many of those."

"We won’t take the next one," Rudra said.

He stepped to the edge of the thrones and held out one hand toward the heart. He waited, counting under his breath. When the next beat came rolling up out of the dark, he closed his fist.

"Unmoved Current."

The wall of force stopped dead in the air, halfway between the heart and the thrones. It hung there, shaking, with nowhere left to go. Then it simply faded away.

"I know that card," the voice said.

The next beat did not come as one wave. It came as three smaller ones, each one from a different side of the heart, each a heartbeat apart from the last.

Rudra stopped the first. He stopped the second.

The third hit the thrones from behind him, and Galvaren grunted as the throne dipped low.

"It’s splitting them," Rudra said through his teeth. "It knows I can only stop one direction at a time."

"It knows everything we can do," Lily said.

Then the heart started growing things.

They rose from its surface like blisters that burst open. Every one of them was gray and thin, and every one of them had a smooth face with a single seam down its center. There were hundreds of them.

They climbed toward the thrones.

"Thunderwake Salvo!"

Rudra’s first blast went off in the middle of the closest cluster. The second one should have gone off inside it and fed on it, but the gray things opened their seams wide and swallowed the blast whole. The chain had nothing left to feed on, and it died after two links.

"They’re eating it," Rudra said.

"Nightcrown Legion!"

Lily’s constructs rose in a ring and locked shields. The gray things did not try to break the shields. They went thin, as thin as paper, and slid through the cracks between them like water through fingers.

A dozen of them spilled onto the thrones.

Kael met the first one with Stormbreaker and cut it in half. The two halves grew back into two whole shapes. He cut them again, and there were four.

"I can’t cut these!" he shouted.

"Ironpot Colossus!"

Sixty feet of black iron rose up beside the thrones, boiling hot. The heart answered at once. Cold dark fluid came pouring out of a hundred veins along its surface and washed over the Colossus. Steam exploded everywhere, and when it cleared, the iron had gone dark and slow.

"It’s been watching the Shelf for three days," Ainen said grimly. "It knew exactly what to bring for that."

"Almond!" Lily shouted. "Keyward Absence!"

Almond raised his hand. The deck that had once denied the first shape its arrival rose around him. He pointed it at the heart and the seam.

"I am already here," the voice said calmly. "I arrived thirty-seven years ago. You cannot deny an arrival that is already finished."

Nothing happened.

The gray shapes kept coming.

Vess and the Skytheum fighters held one side of the thrones. Ainen held another with his cleaver, and every shape he cut split and came back. Kael fought with his one good arm until blood was running down his side again.

"We can’t win this," Kael said. "Everything we do, it’s already seen."

"Not everything," Lily said.

Almond turned to look at her.

She had gone very still in the middle of the fight. Her eyes were closed, and her head was tilted, the way it always was when she was listening to something nobody else could hear.

"It learns us by reading us," she said. "It reads our essence before we move, and it answers before we finish. That’s how it knew about Unmoved Current. That’s how it knew about the Colossus."

"So?" Rudra asked.

Lily opened her eyes.

"So I take its reading away."

"Unheard Absolute."

Nobody saw anything happen. There was no light and no sound. There was only a sudden, heavy silence that fell over the whole hollow like a blanket.

The gray shapes stopped.

Not all at once. They hesitated first, then twitched, then turned their seam-faces from side to side as if they had suddenly forgotten where they were.

"How long?" Almond asked.

"Not long," Lily said. Sweat was already on her face. "Twenty seconds. Maybe thirty. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever silenced."

"Then we use every one of them."

Rudra went first.

"Thunderwake Salvo."

This time the gray things did not open their seams. They did not know the blast was coming. The first explosion went off in the middle of them, and the second fed on the first, and the chain rolled across the surface of the heart without stopping. Hundreds of shapes came apart.

Kael went next.

"Windrunner’s Grace."

He crossed the hollow in a silver streak. No hunters rose to match him, because nothing knew where he was going. He landed on the surface of the heart right beside the gray seam.

Almond was already there with him.

The whole world went quiet around Almond as he looked at the heart. He let Grimreaver’s Absolute Edge settle into his hands, and the card did what it had been built to do. It found the weakest point.

It was not the seam.

The seam was only a door. The weak point was far below it, deep inside the heart. It was a small, hard knot where something gray had fallen in thirty-seven years ago and never left.

"There," Almond said. "It’s inside. The real thing is inside."

"Then we open the door," Kael said.

"Kingsbane."

Almond’s blade came down on the seam with all the weight of the heart’s own strength behind it. The card scaled with how strong its target was, and nothing he had ever struck was as strong as this. The seam split open wide.

"Stormbreaker."

Kael’s cut went into the same wound, and it tore the opening wider still.

"Vintage Eternal," Ainen said, landing beside them. He pressed his hand to the edge of the opening, and three hundred years passed through the flesh in a heartbeat. The edge went gray and brittle and could not grow back fast. "Four left."

"Twelve seconds," Lily called from the thrones. Her voice was shaking. "Eleven."

"Reaver’s Momentum," Almond said.

His next strike was faster than his first. The one after that was faster still. He cut down along the edge of the opening, again and again, and every strike fed the next one, until the opening was wide enough to drive a throne through.

"Seven seconds!"

"Everyone in!" Almond shouted. "Now!"

The thrones moved. The eight Spirit Lords carried the circle of ground straight down toward the opening, even with Sylvia’s shoulder bleeding again and Benedict limping.

Vess stopped at the edge.

"Someone has to hold the door," she said. "If it closes, none of you come back out."

Kael looked at her. For a moment it seemed like he would argue.

"Hullbreaker Vanguard," Rudra said, before Kael could speak.

The spectral marines poured out again. They were fewer now, but they climbed into the edges of the opening and dug in with hooks and ropes and blades, holding it wide with their own bodies.

"They’ll hold it with you," Rudra told Vess. "As long as I’m alive, they hold."

"Then stay alive," Vess said.

"Three seconds!"

The thrones dropped through the opening. Kael came in right behind them.

"One."

The silence broke.

The voice came back all at once. It did not sound angry, and that was worse.

"You silenced me," it said. "No one has done that in a very long time."

Nobody answered it.

They were inside the heart now. It was dark and red and hot, and the walls around them beat slowly, fifteen seconds at a time.

Far below them, deep in the center of the heart, something enormous was moving. It was not gray. It was old and gold and very tired. Long gray threads ran through it from every side, pinning it in place like a fly caught in a web.

"That’s the gatekeeper," Maya whispered.

"It’s still alive," Lily said.

Ainen stepped to the edge of the thrones. "Palate of Truths."

His eyes went wide.

"It’s two things," he said. "Not one. The gatekeeper is still in there, and it’s still fighting." He looked down at the knot of gray at the very center of the web. "And that thing is eating it. Slowly. It’s been eating it for thirty-seven years."

Behind them, far above, the opening was already trying to close against Rudra’s marines.

In front of them, the gray threads began to turn toward the thrones, one by one.

"Every world I have opened," the voice said softly, "someone eventually comes inside. You are the first who came in knowing where to cut."

The heart beat.

"Let us see if you can reach it."