Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner-Chapter 628: A dragon’s tomb 2

Noah turned back around and looked at the chamber properly.

Running the length of the space on both sides stood a bunch of statues.

Seven on the left. Seven on the right. Each one looked like a knight carved from the same dark stone as the walls, standing roughly fifteen feet tall, fully armored in plate with visors down, gauntlets wrapped around weapons built to the same scale as the figures holding them. The first on the left held a broadsword, the blade alone as long as a grown man is tall. Beside it a war hammer with a head the size of a millstone. Further down a spear, a curved polearm, an axe with a blade wide enough to use as a door, a flail with chain links as thick as a fist, and at the far end a double-bladed weapon Noah had no name for, two edges angling off a central handle in opposite directions.

The detail was the kind that made you stop moving for a moment. The texture of chainmail was visible at the joints between plates, individual links rendered in stone with a precision that had no practical reason for existing. The plate armor showed wear, not decorative wear but the real accumulated kind, scoring and denting from years of something. Whoever made these had not been making monuments.

Along the right wall, partially swallowed by the shadows between the fifth and sixth statues, a cluster of large spherical stones sat against the base of the wall. Each one roughly the height of a person's waist.

On every free hand left on each statue, there was something. While one held a weapon, another hand was raised.

Every raised arm held a flame.

Not a torch. An open stone palm with a fire sitting in it that burned without fuel, without any visible source, fourteen separate fires casting warm unsteady light that moved across the carved walls in slow patterns. Some burned full and bright. Others were lower. The seventh on the right, near the far end, was barely a handspan above the stone palm, guttering and settling with a randomness that had nothing to do with air movement because there was no air movement in this place.

At the far end of the chamber, past all fourteen statues, words floated in the air above the floor. Glowing softly. Just hanging there.

BEGIN.

"Begin what?" someone said.

The question moved out across the chamber and found nothing on the other side.

Noah looked at the floating words. Then at the statues. Then at the flames, at the ones burning full and the ones burning low, at the seventh barely keeping itself alive. He stood with that for a moment.

Around him the group spread out the way groups do with an empty space and no instructions. Some moved toward the walls to look at the carvings. Some drifted toward the statues. A few stayed near the sealed entrance. The chamber broke into loose clusters within minutes, each doing their own uncertain version of exploring, the sound of any one conversation no longer reaching another.

Noah walked forward slowly, passing the first statue on the left. The flame in its palm burned full and steady. He looked up at the blank space behind the visor.

He kept walking. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Pip was near the right wall with two other recruits, looking at the carvings with the focused attention he brought to anything that resembled a puzzle. Werner was in the center of the chamber with his usual cluster of reds, looking toward the floating words at the far end.

Noah was halfway down the chamber when the sound came.

Low. Slow. Stone moving against stone.

He stopped walking.

The third statue from the entrance on the right had its head turning. The carved stone neck rotating on itself with a sound that crawled into the back teeth and sat there. The helmeted head swinging away from the wall and toward the open floor, slow and deliberate. The arm that had been raised was lowering. The flame in the open palm went out the moment the hand dropped past a certain height, simply gone, and then the statue lifted one foot off its base and placed it on the floor.

The impact went through the stone and up through every pair of boots in the chamber. A single deep percussion, then a second as the other foot came down, and then it was walking, moving into the open center of the space with the unhurried certainty of something that had done this before and knew exactly how it ended.

For two full seconds the entire chamber just stared.

Two recruits near the statue's side of the room broke first, bodies going before minds could catch up, running in opposite directions with no plan beyond away. The statue's head tracked the nearer one with that grinding rotation and adjusted its path without slowing.

Four steps.

The broadsword came across in a single horizontal arc.

The recruit who hadn't gotten far enough stopped being one thing. The sound of it reached the chamber before the full reality of what had just happened did, and then both arrived at the same moment, and the scream that came from somewhere near the left wall was the kind of sound that lives in the memory permanently once heard.

"OH GODS"

"RUN"

"WHAT IS THAT WHAT IS"

The chamber came apart. Not in any organized direction, just away, a hundred and fifty people deciding simultaneously that where they were standing was wrong and none of them agreeing on where right was. Bodies colliding, someone going down hard and getting stepped on, a girl somewhere behind Noah crying in a way that had stopped trying to be quiet, two recruits running directly toward the sealed entrance and hitting it with their palms and their shoulders and getting nothing back from the stone. Werner was shouting about formation that nobody was listening to. Someone near the center of the chamber was standing completely frozen, not having run, not having done anything, just standing there staring at what was left on the floor.

The statue turned its head.

The second recruit who'd run at the start, the one who'd gone the other direction and put more distance between himself and it, was still moving, threading between the other scrambling bodies, making for the left wall. The statue walked toward him through the chaos and the recruits split around it the way water splits around a stone, nobody willing to be the thing that made contact with it, and it closed the distance in six steps and the spear came down.

He didn't make a sound. He just stopped.

Someone nearby who'd seen it from three feet away stumbled backward into two other recruits, and the sound that came out of them was not a word and not a scream but something caught between the two.

The statue stood over what it had done for a moment.

Then it turned and walked back. Back toward its base, the same unhurried steps, climbing back onto the stone platform, settling, raising its arm. The flame returned to the open palm the moment the hand reached the right height, appearing the same way it had disappeared, bright and full, brighter than it had been before it moved.

And on the right side of the chamber, four statues further down, another flame went out.

That statue's head began to turn.

"THERE'S ANOTHER ONE"

"GET BACK"

"MOVE MOVE MOVE"

The second statue came off its base into a chamber already in motion and the result was worse, people moving in directions that made sense for the first statue and not for this one. A red recruit ran directly across its path trying to reach the left wall and the war hammer came down in a single motion that drove him into the stone floor and the sound it made emptied the area around it of everyone who had been nearby, people scrambling away on hands and knees, one recruit being sick against the wall, another sitting down on the floor with his knees pulled up and his hands pressed over his ears making a low sound that wasn't words.

"Stop running!" Werner's voice cut across the noise. "RUNNING DRAWS IT. STOP MOVING."

Some people listened. Maybe forty of them, the ones with enough presence of mind left to hear an instruction and follow it, went still where they were or pressed themselves against the walls. The rest were still moving, still crying, still trying to find a direction that felt safer than the one they were in.

The second statue completed what it had come to do, turned, walked back to its base.

Its flame returned, bright and full.

Further down the right side, a third flame began to lower.

A red recruit Noah recognized from training, a broad-shouldered boy who'd been vocal about his lightning magic since the first week of camp, had stopped running. He was standing in the open center of the chamber with both hands raised, blue-white current crawling between his fingers and up his forearms. His face had the look of someone who had decided that standing still felt like dying and that doing something, anything, was better than nothing.

Noah was already opening his mouth.

He wasn't close enough. The word didn't carry.

The recruit's hands came up and the lightning left him in a sustained release that lit the entire chamber white for a full second, a crack of sound that bounced off every carved wall and came back from all directions at once, the smell of charged air rolling across the whole space. It hit the third statue across the chest and shoulders and the stone where it struck scorched black in a patch the size of a barrel lid.

The statue kept walking.

Not slowed. Not staggered. Its head turned toward the recruit who had just made himself the loudest thing in the room, and it walked directly toward him, and the recruit stood there for one more second with his hands still half-raised, not quite believing what his eyes were telling him, and then he turned to run and the polearm was already coming.

He fell.

Noah had already looked away. He had seen everything he needed to see from the moment the lightning made contact and the statue didn't care. He looked instead at the chamber around him, at the recruits pressed against walls and the ones still moving and the ones sitting on the floor not moving at all.

"Burt." Nami's voice was low and close. She had moved to his side at some point in the chaos, he hadn't tracked when. Her knives were in her hands.

"Put those away," he said quietly.

She looked at him.

"You saw what the lightning did," he said.

A beat of silence. She looked at the scorched patch on the statue's chest, at the statue now returning to its base after finishing what it had started, at the flame reigniting in its palm full and bright. She put the knives away.

Pip appeared at Noah's other side, slightly out of breath, his chakram in his hand. He looked at Noah's face and then at the statue and then back at Noah. "We're not engaging, are we."

"No."

"Right." Pip looked around the chamber. "Okay. Right." He was already doing what Pip always did, already looking at the room rather than the immediate threat, his eyes moving across the statues and the flames and the bases with the restless attention of someone trying to find the shape of a problem before naming it. "Then we need to figure out what we're actually supposed to do in here."

Noah said nothing. He was already looking at the flames.

Most of them were still burning at the same level they'd been when they entered. But three, now four counting the one that had just reignited, were sitting lower than the others. Not dramatically. Noticeably.

He looked at the ones burning lowest. Then at the ones burning brightest. Then at the bases beneath each statue.

There was a pattern here. He didn't have all of it yet.

Around the chamber the noise was settling into something different from the initial panic, the sustained fear of people who understood now that the threat was real and recurring and they had no answer for it. Groups had formed against the walls, against the far end near the floating words, anywhere that had stone behind it. Some recruits were crying quietly. Some were staring at the statues with the fixed attention of people watching for movement. Werner was moving through the reds checking on them, his earlier bravado stripped back to something more functional. Two green recruits were kneeling beside someone on the floor, doing what they could.

Pip had drifted a few feet away while Noah was watching the flames, threading between clusters of recruits with his feet moving and his eyes elsewhere, the way he always moved when his brain was working on something and his body hadn't been told to stop.

He ended up near the base of the seventh statue on the right. The one whose flame was burning lowest of all, barely a handspan above the stone palm, guttering with a fragility that felt like watching something count down. Pip wasn't looking at the flame. He was looking at the base.

He crouched down.

He put one hand flat against the stone and tilted his head slightly. His fingers spread. He pressed down, putting weight into his palm.

The flame above him jumped.

Not dramatically. Half a handspan higher, burning with more intensity, and then when Pip lifted his hand it settled back to where it had been.

Pip stayed crouching. He pressed down again, harder, leaning weight into it.

The flame jumped again. Held while his weight was on it. Dropped when he lifted.

He stood up slowly and looked at his hand. Then up at the flame. Then at his hand again.

He pressed down a third time, just to be sure.

The flame jumped a third time.

He stood up straight and looked across the chamber with an expression that was equal parts terrified and completely focused.

"Guys," he said.

The chamber noise was still high, overlapping conversations and crying and the occasional sharp sound of someone's fear getting the better of them. Nobody turned.

"Guys." Louder.

Still nothing.

"GUYS."

The chamber went quiet the way it goes quiet when one voice cuts through everything else with enough intention behind it. Every face in the room turned toward Pip, standing next to the base of a fifteen foot stone knight whose flame was barely alive, pointing down at the stone beneath his feet.

"I found something," he said. "Everyone come look. And listen to me carefully because this matters." He looked across the room. "The statues that have already moved and gone back to their bases, go near those ones. Those flames are full, they're not going anywhere soon. Stay near them. The ones that haven't moved yet, the ones with lower flames, those are what we need to worry about." He pressed his hand against the base again and let everyone watch the flame above him jump and hold and then settle. "There is a mechanism inside this base. Weight on top of it feeds whatever is keeping that flame alive. I don't know how it works exactly. I just know it does."

The chamber was completely still.

"Try the ones near you," Pip said. "The ones with lower flames, go to their bases and press. See for yourselves."

People moved slowly at first, reluctantly, a few recruits peeling away from walls and crossing to the nearest bases, pressing hands against stone and watching flames respond. Then more quickly as the results came back across the chamber, voices calling out that yes, theirs jumped too, yes all of them, every base had the same mechanism, the weight activated something inside.

"We have to keep the flames alive," Pip said, loudly enough for the whole chamber. "When the flame goes out, the statue moves. When we keep weight on the base, the flame stays alive. We have to keep people on these bases continuously." He looked around. "Everyone go to a base. The ones with the lowest flames first, those are most urgent. As many as can fit, get on it and stay on it."

The response was uneven. Some recruits moved immediately, crossing to bases and stepping up, watching the flames above them respond. Others stayed where they were, looking at the statues looming over the bases, working through what it meant to stand voluntarily beneath something that had just killed four people. A few drifted toward the bases near the sealed entrance, keeping the stone wall behind them.

Enough people had distributed themselves across the bases that the effect was visible, several flames burning noticeably higher than they had been, the chamber a little brighter for it, and for a moment something close to relief moved through the room.

Then the counting started.

Not out loud. Just in people's eyes as they looked around at fourteen bases and a hundred and fifty recruits minus the four on the floor and started doing the arithmetic.

The bases near the entrance had more people because people had gone to what was closest. The bases further back had fewer. And the ones with fewer were showing it, flames sitting low and unsteady, rising slightly with each shift of weight and never climbing to where they needed to be.

"We need to redistribute," Pip said, looking at the fuller bases near the entrance. "The ones at the back need more people."

Nobody moved immediately. The bases near the entrance were the bases closest to the sealed gate, and asking people to leave them and go deeper into the chamber toward the statues that hadn't moved yet was a different request than it sounded.

A green recruit stepped down from a full base near the front without saying anything and walked toward the back. Two others followed her.

Three more people joined the fifth base on the right. The flame climbed. Held.

Then the base they'd just left dropped to four people and its flame dipped in response.

Someone moved back to cover it. Which left the base they'd just come from short again.

The chamber was doing the arithmetic now, every recruit standing on a base or watching from nearby running the same calculation and arriving at the same answer. There were not enough people, not distributed the right way, and every time one flame stabilized another one somewhere else started to slip, and the shuffling back and forth was only moving the problem from one place to another without actually solving it.

"Someone get on four left," Werner called.

"I'm on three left, if I move three left drops."

"Then someone else cover three left."

"There's only two of us on three left already."

The arguments were spreading across the chamber, not angry yet but tight, the specific tension of people who have found something that almost works and are watching it not quite work and have nothing else ready.

One of the flames at the back, the sixth on the right, was barely visible above the stone palm. The three recruits standing on its base were looking up at it and then at each other, and nobody was saying what they were all thinking.

The flame on the sixth right flickered.

Held.

Flickered again.

And the chamber went quiet as everyone watched it, standing on their bases, waiting to see if the number they had would be enough, already knowing somewhere underneath the waiting that it wasn't going to be.