Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner-Chapter 610: Vital Point Technique

The morning bell dragged Noah from sleep that had been restless. He dressed quickly, Nami already awake and pulling on her boots.

They didn’t speak much on the way to breakfast, just moved with the flow of other recruits toward the dining hall. The meal was porridge again, thick and unsweetened, with dried fruit mixed in that added some flavor. Noah ate slowly, his mind elsewhere.

’Back home, it’s probably been what, four days now?’ he thought, stirring his porridge. ’I told them I was heading into a gate, something system-related. Didn’t give details because I didn’t have any. They’ll assume my domain abilities can pull me back whenever I want. That’s usually how it works.’

The thought should have been comforting, but it wasn’t.

’But what if something happens while I’m stuck here? What if Kruel comes back? What if another four-horn shows up, or worse? The Eastern Cardinal is barely holding together after what happened. Three million dead. Diana’s still in the hospital with her skull held together by pins. The faction as good as it looks is running on fumes and hope, and I’m not there.’

He pushed the porridge around his bowl, appetite gone.

’Sophie’s handling operations, Kelvin’s rebuilding KROME, Lucas is probably back from Raiju Prime by now wondering where the hell I went. Lila and Seraleth are managing what they can. But we’re strongest together. That’s always been true. Eclipse works because we cover each other’s weaknesses, because when one of us falls, the others are there to pick them up. Without me there, if something goes wrong, if the world throws another disaster at them...’

Noah shook his head, forcing the spiral of worry down. Nothing he could do about it from here. The system had locked most of his abilities. He was stuck in this timeline until he figured out what "Extinguish the Flames" meant and completed whatever objective would let him return home.

"You look troubled," Nami observed, breaking into his thoughts.

"Just thinking about home."

"Missing your family already? We’ve been gone one day."

"It’s more complicated than that."

She studied him for a moment, then shrugged and returned to her breakfast. Around them, other recruits talked excitedly about the training to come, speculating about what they’d learn first.

The assembly bell rang while they were still eating. Everyone stood, leaving half-finished meals, and filed toward the main training yard. The space was larger than Noah had initially realized, easily a hundred yards across, with various equipment stations set up around the perimeter. Weapon racks lined one wall, holding training swords, spears, and other implements. Target dummies stood in organized rows. Obstacle courses wound through sections of the yard, complex arrangements of walls and barriers that suggested the training here went far beyond simple sparring.

Constable Ironside stood at the center, but today another instructor stood beside him. This man was shorter, maybe five foot ten, but built like someone who’d spent decades fighting things that wanted to kill him. Scars covered his exposed forearms, thick pale lines that spoke of close calls and near-death experiences. His face carried the weathered look of someone who’d seen too much sun and too much violence, skin leathery and creased around the eyes. His hair was gray, cut short against his skull, and his eyes were sharp when they swept across the assembled recruits. He moved like a fighter, weight balanced, hands relaxed but ready.

"This is Instructor Valen," Ironside announced once everyone had gathered. "He will be leading today’s session on dragon anatomy and combat techniques. Pay attention. What he teaches you will keep you alive."

Ironside stepped back, yielding the floor.

Valen didn’t waste time with pleasantries. "Dragons," he began, his voice rough like gravel in a barrel, "are not beasts. I know some of you have heard otherwise, read stories about dragon hunts like they’re just bigger versions of hunting wolves or bears. That’s horseshit. Dragons are something else entirely."

He gestured to an assistant who brought forward a large board covered with sketches and diagrams. The drawings showed various creatures, some Noah recognized as similar to beasts from his timeline, others completely unfamiliar.

"Beasts," Valen continued, pointing to several of the sketches, "have cores. Most of you probably don’t know this, but when you kill a beast and carve it open properly, you’ll find something inside. A crystallized mass of energy, usually near the heart or in the skull. These cores contain power we don’t fully understand yet."

He moved to a different section of the board where cores of varying sizes had been sketched.

"Some cores are small, weak, barely worth the effort of extraction. Maybe the size of your thumbnail, giving off just a faint glow. Others are massive, the size of a man’s fist or larger, pulsing with energy that can be felt even through dead flesh. We’ve tried studying them, tried understanding what makes them work, but the energy dissipates quickly after death. Within hours, sometimes minutes, a powerful core can become inert, useless."

Noah felt his attention sharpen. ’He’s describing void energy cores. Beast cores. In my timeline, we’ve catalogued them extensively. Category 1 through Category 5 based on the energy concentration and the beast’s power level. Cat-1 cores are barely worth collecting, maybe useful for low-level equipment. Cat-5 cores are strategic resources, single cores that can power city shields or weapon systems for months.’

His mind raced through the implications. ’These people know the cores exist, they’re harvesting them, but they haven’t figured out the classification system. They don’t understand the relationship between core strength and beast power. They’re still in the discovery phase, treating each beast as unique rather than part of a broader pattern.’

"Beasts have been around for as long as anyone can remember," Valen said, moving to stand beside the diagram board. "Old texts mention them, stories passed down through generations talk about villages being destroyed by massive creatures that came from the wild places. Forests, mountains, deep caves. Anywhere humans don’t regularly travel, you might find beasts."

He paused, his expression growing more serious.

"But here’s the thing that the scholars don’t like to talk about much, that most people don’t notice because it happens slowly. Beasts are dwindling. Encounters are less frequent than they were a generation ago. My father, who was a dragon knight before me, told stories about beast attacks happening weekly in some regions. Entire knight orders dedicated to clearing territories of beast infestations. Now? We might see one or two serious beast incidents a year across the entire kingdom."

He let that statement hang in the air.

"The really powerful ones, the kind that could level towns, that took entire armies to bring down? They’re becoming rare. Some scholars think the source of whatever creates beasts is dying out. That there’s some kind of fundamental energy in the world that spawns these creatures, and that energy is depleting. Nobody knows for sure, and frankly, most people are just happy there are fewer monsters trying to eat them."

Noah’s mind immediately went to the mechanics of beast creation in his timeline. ’In my world, beasts appear near void stones. Concentrations of void energy that leak from the planet’s core after the Harbinger seed crashed and changed Earth’s fundamental composition. Normal animals get exposed to void energy over time, their DNA mutates, and eventually they transform into beasts. A few factors contribute to how strong a beast can be. For example, their base state, the length of exposure and more importantly, the stronger the void stone, the more powerful the beasts it produces.’

He thought about the Original Eight. The founding families that had left Earth generations ago. Arthur, who became the leader of the Endless or as kelvin nicknamed them, The Eight. Lucas’s ancestors who built the empire on Raiju Prime. Aurelius’s lineage that founded the Ares dynasty. The Sterling family, the Leviticus family, the Marrick, Durn, and Veyra bloodlines. All of them traced their power back to eight individuals who were exposed to void energy in some ancient event and gained abilities that made them godlike compared to normal humans.

’What if that exposure was localized?’ Noah wondered, his mind working through the timeline. ’What if it wasn’t a global event like the Harbinger seed impact in my timeline? What if it was just a single meteor, a concentrated void stone that landed in one location? Eight people got exposed directly, became the Original Eight. The void energy from that stone started mutating local wildlife into beasts. But unlike my timeline where the void energy is constantly being replenished from Earth’s corrupted core, this timeline’s source is finite. The original meteor or whatever it was is running out. Depleting. And as it depletes, fewer beasts are being created.’

It would explain so much. Why beasts were dwindling. Why only eight families gained power. Why this timeline felt similar to his own but fundamentally different in key ways. The void energy was the same, the mechanisms were the same, but the scale and sustainability were completely different.

’If I’m right,’ Noah thought, ’then beasts might disappear entirely from this timeline within a few more generations. The void energy source will run dry, no more mutations, no more beast cores. That’s probably good for normal people, but it means this timeline will lose access to a major source of supernatural power and technology,’

"Dragons," Valen continued, pulling Noah back to the present, "are different from beasts in a fundamental way. When you kill a dragon and examine its body, you don’t find a single core. You find power distributed throughout the entire creature."

He gestured to the assistant again, who brought forward several items carefully wrapped in cloth. Valen unwrapped them one by one, revealing objects that made several recruits lean forward with interest.

A sword with a blade that gleamed with an inner light, the metal appearing almost translucent in places. A shield with a surface that looked like hammered bronze but seemed to shift and flow, almost breathing. Pieces of armor, a gauntlet and a shoulder guard, that changed color depending on the angle of viewing, purple to black to deep red.

"These are all made from dragon parts," Valen said, holding up the sword with obvious reverence. "This blade was forged from the shin bone of a red death dragon, probably eighty years old when it was killed. The metal is stronger than any steel we can produce, lighter than iron, and it holds magical enchantments better than any other material we’ve discovered. A sword like this can cut through normal armor like parchment."

He set the sword down carefully and picked up the shield.

"This shield is made from scales, hundreds of them layered and bonded together using techniques the master smiths guard jealously. It can withstand dragon fire directly, can turn aside claws that would shred steel plate. A knight carrying this shield has survived things that would kill anyone else."

The armor pieces came next, the gauntlet fitting over Valen’s hand despite being sized for someone larger.

"The kingdom’s best smiths and enchanters have been working for years to create full suits of armor from dragon materials. Complete body coverage, protection that could let a knight wade through dragon fire, take direct hits from claws and teeth, and walk away. We’re getting close. The holy grail would be a full suit that doesn’t restrict movement, doesn’t weigh the wearer down, but provides absolute protection. Some say it’s impossible. Others say we’re maybe five years away from a working prototype."

He removed the gauntlet and set it with the other items.

"But here’s what you need to understand, what makes dragons so dangerous and so valuable. Dragons aren’t just powerful because of what they’re made of. They’re powerful because that energy, that distributed power source, makes them incredibly difficult to kill. You can’t just aim for the heart or the head like you would with a beast. Every part of a dragon is reinforced, every inch of scale is like hitting tempered steel wrapped around stone."

Noah thought about his own experiences with dragon durability. Nyx, his bonded red death, had taken direct hits from Kruel during that first encounter on Sirius Prime. A newly evolved four-horn Harbinger, putting out enough destructive power to level cities, and Nyx’s scales had held. Cracked in places, bleeding from the impacts, but they’d absorbed punishment that would have obliterated Category 3 beasts instantly. Dragon scales weren’t just armor, they were something fundamentally different, designed to withstand forces that defied normal physics.

"That’s why," Valen said, his voice taking on a harder edge, "we developed the Vital Point Technique. It’s a combat method designed to bridge the gap between human capability and dragon durability. Your magic alone isn’t enough. I don’t care if you can throw fire hot enough to melt stone, ice cold enough to shatter steel, lightning that can arc across a battlefield. A dragon will take those attacks and keep coming. You need something more."

He nodded to his assistant, who wheeled forward a strange apparatus. It consisted of a sturdy wooden frame, maybe six feet tall and four feet wide, holding what looked like a board covered in dark scales. The scales overlapped like roof tiles, each one maybe the size of Noah’s palm, creating a protective surface that gleamed dully in the morning light. Behind the scaled board, mounted in the frame, was a transparent container made of some material Noah didn’t recognize. It bulged outward, clearly filled with water, the liquid sloshing slightly as the apparatus settled into place.

"This," Valen said, tapping the scaled board with his knuckles, producing a sound like metal on metal, "is actual dragon skin. Harvested from a dragon that was killed about five years ago up in the northern mountains. Not particularly large as dragons go, probably only sixty years old, but still a formidable creature. Thirty knights died bringing it down. The scales you see here are from its underbelly, supposedly one of the weaker areas on a dragon’s body."

He pointed to the water-filled container behind it.

"Your task is simple. Strike the dragon scale hard enough to pierce through it and burst the water container behind. That’s it. Just get through the defense and hit the target. Should be easy, right? You’re all here training to be dragon knights. You’ve got magic, you’ve got strength, you’ve got determination. Surely breaking through some old dragon scales can’t be that hard."

The way he said it, the slight smile on his scarred face, made it absolutely clear it was anything but easy.

"Each of you will try," Valen continued, gesturing broadly to encompass all the assembled recruits. "Use whatever magic you have, whatever techniques you think will work. Hit it with everything you’ve got. I want to see creativity. I want to see power. Most of all, I want to see who among you can actually damage a dragon."

Silence fell over the training yard. Two hundred recruits stared at the scaled board, the morning’s excitement cooling into something more like apprehension.

"Who’s first?" Valen asked, his scarred face splitting into a grin that suggested he was going to enjoy this. "Come on, don’t be shy. Show me what the next generation of dragon knights can do."