Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner-Chapter 632: Second phase Gorrauth

Usually when Noah defeated something, the system acknowledged it. He should have known something was wrong when the system kept mute and the quest remained active.

The invisible screen only he could see was still charging him with the same quest and this warden was very much active. The rubble that had been Gorrauth moments ago had finished pulling itself back together, the dark stone pieces grinding against each other with the patience of something that had done this before and expected to do it again. The red eyes burned in the hood. The reformed sword hung at its side, pulsing with that deep crimson mist that curled toward the floor and dissolved.

"Noah, please be careful," Nami said from behind the barrier. He could hear the fear in her voice clearly. They all understood now that this thing wasn’t going to stay down easily. Not even after Noah had literally one shotted it the first time.

"Don’t worry. I will~"

He had barely gotten the word out when Gorrauth exploded from the spot it stood.

BOOM!

The speed of something that size moving that fast was wrong in a way that bypassed rational thought and went straight to instinct. Noah’s body was already moving before his brain finished processing the threat, years of combat experience making the decision before conscious thought could slow it down. Gorrauth’s body spun in a full three sixty rotation, the sheer mass of it generating momentum that made the air around it scream, and the sword came around in a horizontal arc that released a wave of red energy so dense it carved a trench into the floor wherever it touched, splitting stone like paper, driving toward Noah with a low grinding howl.

Noah dropped under it. Felt the heat of it pass over the back of his neck close enough to prickle skin.

He came up already looking for the follow-up.

Two more arcs. Already moving. Released in the span of a single breath, one angled low and one coming in straight, their trajectories crossing to cover the exact space a person would naturally move into after dodging the first.

’He’s funneling me,’ Noah thought, his legs already committing to a direction that had nowhere clean to go.

He went forward instead of sideways. Straight through the gap between the two converging arcs, the edges of both passing close enough that the red energy scorched the sides of his training gear as he drove through the middle of them, closing distance with Gorrauth before the next release could charge.

His fist drove into the center of the hooded chest, concentrated, the Vital Point Technique compressing the force down to a needle point that punched through the outer layer of that dark stone body and found something underneath that wasn’t stone.

Gorrauth’s head turned toward him.

"You are seen."

The backhand that followed was casual. One arm swinging outward like Noah was a minor inconvenience to be redirected. The problem was that casual from something Gorrauth’s size translated into Noah leaving the ground entirely, his body tumbling sideways through the steam-filled air before crashing into the far wall with enough force to crater the stone.

[-187 HP]

He hit the floor, rolled, was upright before the dust settled.

Behind the barrier Pip made a sound. "Did he just shake that off?"

Noah was already moving again, circling wide, giving himself room to read the space. His back where he’d hit the wall was already knitting, the damage pulling itself back together with that quiet biological stubbornness that had nothing to do with magic as far as anyone watching was concerned. From behind the barrier it looked like enhancement magic, the only framework available to people who hadn’t seen what Noah actually was.

Gorrauth tracked his movement with those red eyes, unhurried.

Then it raised the sword and the blade began to glow, the crimson deepening, the mist coming off it thickening into something almost solid.

"You seek to ascend?"

The glow intensified.

"Then bleed for it."

Three arcs launched simultaneously. Not in a line. In a spread, angled to cover the full width of the chamber, each one slightly offset in timing so that dodging the first put you directly in the path of the second.

Noah read the geometry in the fraction of a second he had and made a decision that was either very smart or very stupid depending on the next two seconds. He ran directly at the center arc instead of away from it, dropped into a slide at the last possible moment, the red energy passing overhead, and used the momentum of the slide to launch himself upward from the floor with both legs driving hard toward Gorrauth’s midsection.

Both feet connected. The impact drove Gorrauth back two full steps, the hooves cracking the floor with each forced movement, the first time anything Noah had done had actually moved it.

Noah landed, pivoted, drove his elbow into the same spot before Gorrauth could reset.

The stone surface cracked where the elbow hit. An actual crack, running outward from the impact point.

Then Gorrauth’s hand closed around his arm.

The grip was absolute. Like being caught in a door that had decided to close and had no opinion on whether your arm was in the way. Noah felt the pressure immediately, felt the structural integrity of the limb being tested in ways that his enhanced durability was working hard to answer.

He twisted into the grip instead of against it, dropping his weight suddenly, using Gorrauth’s own hold to swing himself underneath the arm and drive a concentrated strike up into the elbow joint from below.

The arm bent. Not the way arms bend. The wrong way.

Gorrauth released him.

Noah was already moving, three fast strikes to the same area of the chest where the stone had cracked, the Vital Point Technique driving each one into the exact same point, compounding the damage, each impact finding the fracture the last one had started and pushing it further.

[-44 HP]

The counter came from the sword arm, not the damaged one. Noah saw it late, got his forearm up in time to deflect the blade rather than take the full edge, but deflecting a sword that size still meant the force traveled up through his guard and snapped something in his forearm with a crack that was audible.

He rolled back from it, putting distance between them, shaking the arm out. The fracture was already pulling itself together, bone finding bone with that quiet rapid efficiency that Pip was currently staring at from behind the barrier with an expression of profound confusion.

"Nami," Pip said quietly. "He’s healing."

"I know."

"That’s not just strength enhancement. Strength enhancement doesn’t fix broken bones in thirty seconds."

"I know," Nami said again, her eyes not moving from Noah.

In the chamber Gorrauth was advancing, each step deliberate, the sword trailing beside it with that constant seeping mist. It wasn’t rushing. It had all the patience of something that had stood in this room for centuries and understood that patience was its own kind of weapon.

"You are weighed."

Noah watched it come and felt the shape of the problem settling over him with uncomfortable clarity. The arcs controlled range. The physical strength controlled close quarters. Every time he found an angle it closed. Every time he pushed it back it absorbed the distance and came forward again.

’It’s not trying to kill me quickly,’ Noah thought, circling to keep the steam vents between them, using the columns of rising heat to break sightlines for the arc releases. ’It’s managing me. Keeping me working, keeping me spending energy, waiting for the moment I slow down.’

He stopped circling.

And charged instead.

Not toward Gorrauth. At a forty five degree angle, closing on the sword arm specifically, inside the arc release range, too close for the energy waves to build properly. His first strike hit the wrist joint where the sword connected to the hand, the Vital Point Technique finding the junction and driving through it, and the sword arm jerked. Not dropped. Jerked.

His second strike went to the elbow of the same arm. Third to the shoulder.

Gorrauth’s sword swung anyway, the arm working despite the damage, but the trajectory was wrong, the motion compromised, and the blade passed behind Noah rather than through him.

He drove his knee upward into the chest crack he’d been building on.

The crack spread visibly. A genuine fracture line running from the impact point upward toward the collar of the robe.

BOOM!

Gorrauth’s free hand came down on top of Noah like something falling from a height, both hands driving him straight into the floor with force that sent the stone around him erupting upward.

[-234 HP]

The crater Noah left was several inches deep. He lay in it for one full second, the world reduced to ringing and pressure and the specific sensation of a body taking stock of its own damage, and then he pushed out of it because staying down was not a decision he was willing to make.

He stood up.

Behind the barrier someone made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

Gorrauth looked at him from above with those red eyes and something in the tilt of the hooded head suggested that the response was unexpected. Not impressive. Just unexpected.

"You are found wanting."

It raised the sword. The glow that built on the blade this time was different from the previous charges, deeper, the mist coming off it running red and black in alternating pulses, the trench it carved in the floor just from existing burning at the edges rather than just splitting.

"This is the cost."

The release that came off the blade wasn’t a single arc. It was a cascade, three waves launching in sequence so rapid they overlapped, each one slightly wider than the last, the outermost one spanning the full width of the chamber with nowhere left to go that wasn’t inside its reach.

Noah went up.

He hit the wall at a run, used the momentum to push off horizontally, his body parallel to the floor for one suspended moment as the outermost arc passed underneath him, and dropped back down behind the trailing edge of the last wave.

The landing put him directly beside Gorrauth’s sword arm.

Everything he had went into the next three seconds. Both fists driving into the fracture line in rapid succession, the Vital Point Technique abandoned in favor of raw concentrated output, each strike finding the same point and hitting it harder than the last. The crack in Gorrauth’s chest spread further with each impact, branching, the stone surface around it beginning to corrugate and buckle.

Gorrauth’s elbow came back and caught him across the jaw.

[-156 HP]

Noah’s vision went sideways. He tasted blood, felt something in his neck complain loudly about the angle it had just been forced through, and was already throwing the next punch before his vision fully cleared because stopping was not something the current situation had room for.

His knuckle connected with the deepest part of the fracture.

The stone surface around it buckled inward.

Then Gorrauth grabbed him by the collar, lifted him to eye level, and for one moment Noah was looking directly into those red eyes from a foot away with nothing between them.

"Ambition has a price."

It threw him.

Not a strike. A throw, full rotation, the chamber spinning past Noah’s vision as his body became a projectile that crossed the full width of the space before connecting with the far wall hard enough to leave an impression in the stone.

[-198 HP]

He peeled off the wall and hit the floor and lay there.

The system damage counter was climbing in ways that were becoming difficult to ignore. His body was working, healing, pulling itself back from each exchange, but the gap between damage received and damage being repaired was wider than it had been at the start. Gorrauth was landing heavier with each exchange. Learning the distances. Adjusting.

Noah’s hands pressed flat against the stone floor.

Everything he knew how to do, he had tried. The Vital Point Technique had found purchase but not enough. The speed had created openings but not decisive ones. The battle IQ had kept him alive through exchanges that should have ended him but hadn’t produced anything that looked like a path to finishing this.

He pushed himself upright.

His hands were shaking. Not from fear. From the accumulated cost of the fight sitting in every tendon and muscle fiber that had been asked to do more than it had done before.

Gorrauth advanced toward him across the cracked and trenched floor, the sword trailing, the red eyes fixed, with the patience of something that had been doing this for centuries and had not yet encountered a reason to hurry.

Noah looked at his hands.

Something moved in the back of his awareness. Not a thought, exactly. More like a door he hadn’t known was there becoming visible because every other door in the corridor had already been opened and found insufficient.

He had chi. Internal energy, white and clean, drawn from his core, the thing that had let him crack dragon scales and shatter Gorrauth’s first form in a single strike. He knew that energy intimately, knew its weight and its cost and its limits.

But there was something else. Something external. He’d felt it before in flashes, dark energy that existed in the space around him rather than inside him, the kind of force that left red traces on his knuckles when he’d pushed past certain thresholds in training without fully understanding why. He’d never tried to draw both simultaneously. Had never had a reason to try. The instinct had always been to use one or the other, the internal and the external as separate tools for separate purposes.

He looked at Gorrauth, twelve feet away and closing.

’There is no other way,’ he thought. Not as a dramatic conclusion. Just as a plain fact, the way you acknowledge a fact when you’ve run out of reasons to dispute it.

He pulled both.

The sensation was immediate and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with something that had never been done before announcing itself. White energy rose from his core, familiar, controlled. Dark energy pulled inward from outside him, the red traces that had always been peripheral suddenly becoming central, drawn in and pressed against the white and held there. The two energies didn’t merge. They coexisted at his skin level with the specific tension of two things that understood they were not supposed to occupy the same space and were doing it anyway.

His hands felt like they were coming apart at the seams.

Not breaking. Splitting. Like the energy coating them was looking for more surface area than his hands could provide and was suggesting, not gently, that the bones underneath might want to renegotiate their arrangement.

He exhaled and moved anyway.

The first strike hit Gorrauth before the warden had finished processing that Noah had closed the distance. Not because Noah was faster than before, but because the energy coating his fist made contact before the fist itself did, the field of combined chi extending his reach by inches that mattered enormously at this speed.

The impact sound was different from everything that had come before. Not the crack of concentrated force finding a weak point. A detonation. A small contained explosion at the point of contact that sent stone fragments from Gorrauth’s chest surface launching outward in every direction.

Noah’s second strike came before the debris from the first had finished moving. Same fist, same point, the detonation compounding on the damage already done.

Third strike, opposite fist, the dark energy flaring red at the knuckles on impact, a visible flash that lit the steam around them crimson for a fraction of a second.

Gorrauth’s sword arm came around. Noah dropped under it, both fists driving upward in simultaneous strikes to the underside of the same arm, the detonation happening twice in the same instant from two contact points, and the arm buckled at the elbow in a way it hadn’t buckled in the entire fight.

The sword hit the floor.

Noah was already moving up the inside of Gorrauth’s guard, too close for the size advantage to matter, both fists working in a sequence that had no gaps between strikes, each one finding the fracture lines that had been building across that chest surface and hitting them with the combined energy that turned every point of contact into its own small catastrophe.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The fracture lines stopped branching and started joining. The surface of Gorrauth’s chest wasn’t cracking anymore. It was failing. The stone structure that made up the warden’s body losing coherence from the accumulated detonations, the area around the original fracture collapsing inward strike by strike.

Gorrauth’s remaining functional arm came down toward Noah’s back with everything it had.

Noah took it. Felt the impact travel through him like a bell being struck, felt his knees want to buckle from the force of it, and kept his fists moving because stopping meant the momentum died and the momentum was the only thing keeping this exchange from reverting to what it had been for the past several minutes.

[-167 HP]

His left fist found the center of the collapsed chest surface and pushed through it. Not a strike. His hand going through the compromised stone the way a foot goes through ice that has been weakened past the point of holding, the combined energy around his knuckles finishing what the sequence of detonations had started.

Gorrauth went still.

The red eyes dimmed. Didn’t go out. Dimmed, the burning quality leaving them and taking with it the weight of presence that had been filling the chamber since the warden had first risen from the floor. The massive body began to descend, not collapsing the way it had the first time, not breaking apart into debris, but lowering, the hooves finding the floor and bending until the warden was down, one knee against the stone, the hood falling forward.

The chamber was completely silent except for Noah’s breathing and the soft persistent hiss of steam from the vents.

Noah stood over Gorrauth with his hands still raised, the combined energy dissipating slowly from his knuckles, the red traces fading back to nothing, the white energy retreating to his core. His hands ached in a way that was deeper than muscle, something at the structural level that would need time he didn’t currently have to fully address.

He looked at the system screen.

The quest was still active.

He already knew what that meant.

Gorrauth’s head rose slowly. The hood fell back.

The warden looked up at the ceiling of the chamber, those dimmed red eyes finding the dark stone overhead, and when it spoke the voice was different from everything that had come before. Not the contemptuous patience of a thing that expected to win. Something else. Something that sounded, impossibly, like recognition.

"The Warden stirs once more."

A pause that filled the entire chamber.

"Now..."

The red eyes began to burn again. Brighter than before. Brighter than they had been at any point in the fight. And from the stone floor around Gorrauth’s kneeling form, something was rising. Not the sword. Not debris. Something new, pulling itself up from beneath the floor with the same inevitability as the warden’s first emergence, taking shape in the red light that was now pouring from those eyes like it had somewhere to go.

"Behold your ruin."