Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner-Chapter 637: Ragtag

Pip sat up slowly.

Nami climbed off him and brushed grass from her knees, still smiling, not making any effort to hide it.

The dragon was right there. Twenty feet. Pip’s eyes kept going back to it the way eyes go back to things they haven’t fully accepted yet, running the confirmation loop of yes it’s still there, yes it’s still that size, yes those are scales and not some elaborate trick of moonlight and exhaustion.

"Okay," Pip said.

Nobody responded.

"Okay," he said again, slightly differently.

Noah had stood up and walked toward the dragon with the ease of someone approaching a horse he’d owned for years. The dragon lowered its head as he got close, not aggressively, just movement, and Noah put his hand on the side of its jaw and said something too quiet to carry.

Pip watched this.

"How long," he said.

"Since before the camp," Nami said, sitting back down in the grass with her legs crossed.

"Since before the camp," Pip repeated. He looked at her. "You knew."

"I found out."

"You found out and didn’t tell me."

"You screamed quite loudly just now," she said. "Imagine that at camp."

Pip opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked back at Noah and the dragon. "That’s fair," he admitted, which cost him something. "That’s actually fair." He stood up properly, brushing grass off the back of his shirt, trying to recover some portion of his dignity by at least being vertical. "Can I—is it—"

"His name is Ares," Noah said from where he stood.

Pip took three careful steps forward. The dragon’s eye tracked him, one huge amber eye rotating with the unhurried patience of something that had looked at a lot of things over a lot of time and found most of them only mildly interesting.

"Hello," Pip said.

Ares blinked.

"Right," Pip said. He looked at Noah. "He’s very calm."

"He usually is."

"When I saw him coming through the mist I thought—" He stopped. "You know what I thought. Everyone heard what I thought." He cleared his throat. "He’s very calm though. That’s not what the texts suggest about red deaths."

"The texts are written by people who met them under bad circumstances," Noah said.

Pip considered this. "That’s a reasonable point." He took another step. Ares watched him with the same expression, if it could be called that, patient and somewhat disinterested. "Can I touch him."

"You can try."

Pip reached out slowly and put two fingers against the side of Ares’s neck, just below the jaw where the scales were smaller and closer together. The skin underneath was warm, much warmer than the air, the heat of something large and internally combustible radiating outward at a steady controlled level.

"Huh," Pip said.

He pressed his whole palm flat.

"He’s warm," he said, somewhat unnecessarily.

"Yes," Noah said.

"Like, genuinely warm. Like standing near a fire but from the inside." Pip moved his hand slightly, feeling the scales shift against each other with the subtle movement of the dragon’s breathing. "This is the most insane thing that has ever happened to me. Including the gate. Including all of it. This is the most insane thing."

Nami was watching from the grass, her chin resting in her hand.

"How," Pip said.

Noah sat down on a flat rock nearby, his forearms on his knees. "The dragon the knights saw me with. The one that got me recruited. They thought I’d fought it off." He looked at Ares. "I hadn’t. I don’t fully understand why it worked, why he let me near him and then let me stay near him, but it did." He paused. "When Egor and the others later found me, they saw a red death flying off and next to it was a person who was still alive. That’s the part that impressed them. They assumed I’d done something impressive to make that happen."

"You had," Nami said.

"Not what they thought."

Pip turned this over. "So Ironside, Valen, all of them, they recruited you on the basis of a fight that didn’t happen."

"They recruited me on the basis of a result. The result was real."

"That’s technically true," Pip said slowly. "It’s also extremely funny." He looked at Ares, then at Noah. "Does he go wherever you go? How does that work practically? Where has he been while we’ve been at camp?"

"Around," Noah said. "Far enough that nobody notices. Close enough."

"Close enough," Pip repeated. He looked at the tree line, at the dark beyond it, with new eyes. "Has he been out there this whole time."

"Most of it."

"That’s." Pip stopped. "That’s actually somewhat reassuring and also deeply unsettling and I can’t decide which feeling wins." He looked at Noah directly. "I assume the ask is that I say nothing."

"The ask is that you say nothing," Noah confirmed.

Pip looked at Nami. She raised one eyebrow very slightly, a gesture that communicated yes obviously without requiring words.

He turned back to Ares, who had lowered his head further during this conversation to the point where he was now resting his chin approximately three feet from the ground with the air of something that had decided this patch of clearing was comfortable enough.

"I can keep a secret," Pip said. "I’m excellent at keeping secrets. I’ve kept dozens of secrets." A pause. "Can I ride him."

Nami laughed again, the same helpless quality as before.

"Please," Pip added.

Noah looked at Ares. Something passed between them that wasn’t visible and wasn’t a sound and Pip filed the fact of it away with everything else he was filing.

"Come here," Noah said.

---

Riding Ares was nothing like Pip had imagined, partly because he’d never seriously imagined it and partly because the reality of it had no reference point to land against. The movement was enormous and smooth at the same time, the muscles beneath doing work that translated upward through the scales into something that felt less like riding and more like being carried by a landscape that had decided to relocate. The heat came from everywhere below him, and the wind from the speed of it, and the ground was very far down.

He screamed for the first thirty seconds. Not in fear exactly. In something that fear and joy produced together when they were going too fast to be separated.

Nami went second. She didn’t scream. She went quiet instead, that specific quality of quiet she had when something was happening that she hadn’t made room for yet. Her braid came loose from its tie in the first minute and she didn’t reach for it, just let it go, her face turned into the wind with her eyes open.

Noah went last, which was different from watching the other two because Ares moved differently with him. Less like carrying and more like moving together, a coordination that had no particular drama to it, just two things that had been in proximity long enough to know each other’s weight.

They landed at the edge of the clearing, the grass flattening outward from the air displacement, and sat there for a while in the dark, not talking very much.

Pip lay back in the grass and looked at the sky. Ares had settled nearby, his breathing slow and audible, the heat from him reaching outward across the clearing like a low fire.

"Uncle Pip," Pip said quietly.

"What?" Nami said.

"Nothing. I’m just saying. It has a good sound."

---

The days after that had a different quality to them, not because anything formal had changed but because something between the three of them had settled into a shape that held. They trained the same way they’d always trained, ate at the same table, ran the same drills. But the evenings three times a week they went out past the tree line, and Ares was there, and they worked through whatever Noah was developing in the dark away from the instructors.

Pip’s chakram started finding angles it hadn’t found before. Not because he’d developed new strength, he hadn’t, but because Noah had a way of showing him the geometry of a situation that translated directly into instinct if you ran it enough times. Nami sharpened things she’d already been good at into something closer to automatic, her knife work becoming less about execution and more about the decision that happened before the throw.

Neither of them asked Noah where he’d learned what he knew. The answer would have been complicated and they’d both arrived, independently and at different moments, at the understanding that complicated was fine. He was teaching them and the teaching worked and that was what mattered.

Werner noticed the night absences. He said nothing.

Brom said something to one of the reds one morning about Burt spending a lot of time in the trees, the comment carrying enough edge to suggest it was meant to be heard. Noah heard it and didn’t respond and Brom moved on to other things.

The last evening before deployment they sat outside the barracks on an overturned trough, the three of them, and Pip ate an apple he’d saved from dinner with the attention of someone treating it as an event.

"First real hunt tomorrow," he said.

"Yes," Nami said.

"I’ve been thinking about it."

"When aren’t you thinking about something."

"Fair. But specifically this. We’ve trained for this. We’ve done the gate. We’ve done Gorrauth. We’ve done passages with things in them that should be called nightmares," He took a bite. "And tomorrow we go to a village and deal with a dragon."

"One dragon," Noah said. "Probably."

"Probably," Pip repeated. "That’s a comfortable word."

"It’s an honest word."

Pip finished the apple, considered the core, threw it into the dark. "I’m not scared," he said. "I want to be clear about that."

"Nobody said you were," Nami said.

"I know. I’m just noting it for the record." He looked at Noah. "Are you scared."

Noah thought about it genuinely. "No."

Pip looked at him for a moment, reading him the way he read things. Whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him. "Right," he said. "Okay." He stood up, stretched his back with a sound of genuine discomfort. "Get some sleep. Both of you. Uncle Pip has spoken."

He went inside.

Nami and Noah sat for a moment in the quiet he’d left behind.

"He’s going to be fine out there," Noah said.

"I know," she said.

---

The deployment address happened in the main yard at first light, the sky still carrying the pale grey of a morning that hadn’t fully committed to itself yet. Twenty-nine recruits in a loose formation that would never have satisfied Valen in the first week but that now held a certain coherent shape, people gravitating to positions that made sense for how they moved and what they could do.

Ironside stood at the front. He looked at them for a long moment before speaking, the kind of look that wasn’t assessment exactly, more like acknowledgment.

"A village three days east," he said. "Harrowfield. Population under four hundred. They’ve reported dragon activity for the past month. Livestock kills, structural damage to the outer buildings, two injuries to residents who were in the wrong place." He paused. "Local knights are operating in the area. You’ll meet your contact at the village entrance and coordinate from there. You follow her lead on local knowledge and you contribute your capabilities. Nobody goes solo. Nobody takes independent action without communication. You work as a unit."

He looked along the row of them.

"You’ve done things in the last months that most recruits don’t survive. That’s real and it counts for something." His voice stayed flat but the weight behind it was different from the usual flatness. "Don’t let it make you careless. A dragon in a village is not a gate challenge. There are people there. That changes everything about how you operate."

He stepped back. "Move out."

---

The road east was wider than Noah had expected, a proper trade route with wheel ruts worn deep from years of cart traffic, the kind of road that suggested the villages along it were worth reaching. The morning warmed as they walked and the formation spread naturally into something more like a group moving together than a military column, people finding their pace and their conversation partners with the ease of a month spent doing exactly this.

Cael fell into step beside Noah about an hour in. He was broad through the shoulders with a way of walking that kept his weight low, the habit of someone who’d learned early that being solid on your feet mattered. The red armband sat on his arm like it belonged there, worn at the edge where he’d rolled his sleeve.

"Question," Cael said.

"Sure," Noah said.

"The second floor. Gorrauth." He said it like he’d been deciding whether to say it for a while. "I watched the whole thing through the barrier. Most of it anyway. You hit it and it came apart and then it came back together and you hit it again." He looked at the road ahead. "The thing that keeps staying with me is that you didn’t look surprised. When it came back. Most of us were losing it, I heard people crying, and you just looked at it and went again."

Noah said nothing.

"I’m not asking for an explanation," Cael said. "I’m just saying. That’s the thing I keep thinking about." He glanced over. "How do you do that. Not the technique. The other part."

Noah thought about it. "You pick the next thing," he said. "Whatever just happened is already done. The next thing is what matters."

Cael walked with that for a moment. "That sounds simple."

"It’s not."

"No," Cael agreed. "I don’t imagine it is." He nodded once, the gesture closing something, and dropped back to his usual position in the group.

Sera the green recruit was walking with two others from her section, her bottle in its padded sleeve at her hip, the glass catching light occasionally as she moved. She was slight with a watchful face that showed everything she was thinking whether she intended it to or not, her expressions moving through things openly in a way that made her easy to read and somehow disarming for it. She’d spent most of the gate’s first floor keeping three separate bases alive by moving between them when nobody else would leave their own, a fact that most people didn’t know because she hadn’t mentioned it.

"Three days walking," she said to nobody in particular, her voice carrying mild complaint without real heat behind it. "They couldn’t have found a dragon two days east."

"They probably have dragons one day east," the recruit beside her said, a yellow named Finn who was thin and tall enough that his stride covered ground efficiently without looking fast. He had a way of saying accurate things without emphasis that made them land harder than if he’d tried. "They chose the three day one because it’s appropriately sized for a first hunt."

"Appropriately sized," Sera repeated. "What does that mean."

"Not big enough to kill us all, hopefully not small enough to be embarrassing."

"That’s not actually reassuring."

"I know," Finn said. "I was going for honest."

Werner was walking apart from the main mass of the group, not so far that it looked deliberate but enough that conversations would have to cross a gap to reach him. His gauntlet caught the morning light every so often, the channel patterns running across the knuckles visible from here. He walked steadily, his pace consistent, his face carrying the closed-off quality of someone who had things they were working through and had decided to work through them alone.

Brom walked two rows back from Werner with three reds who’d been in his orbit since the first week of camp. He was large the way some people are large as a fact rather than a feature, his frame built for force rather than speed, and he walked like he knew exactly how much space he occupied. The arm he’d held the green recruit with in the gate. The weight he’d decided to keep. He hadn’t been addressed formally for it, the chaos of survival and return and the general overwhelm of the aftermath had swallowed that conversation before it could happen. It sat there now as a fact that everyone near him was aware of and nobody had resolved.

He caught Noah looking at him once during the first day’s walk. His expression didn’t change. He looked back at the road.

Noah looked back at the road too.

---

They camped the first night in a clearing off the road where previous travelers had left a fire ring of stacked stones. Finn managed to get a fire going with less difficulty than seemed fair for how damp the wood was, his hands moving through the process with the efficiency of someone who’d done it hundreds of times, and the group arranged itself around the warmth in the loose configuration of people who were tired enough to stop performing.

Pip produced food from his pack that was somehow better than the camp rations everyone else had brought, which prompted a detailed interrogation from Sera about where he’d gotten it and whether there was more.

"I’m an excellent planner," Pip said.

"That’s dried fruit," Sera said. "Where did you get dried fruit."

"The kitchen girl with the red hair owed me a favor."

"You have favors owed to you by the kitchen staff."

"I have favors owed to me by several people," Pip said, completely seriously. "Information is a resource and I have never wasted a piece of it."

Nami was already asleep against her pack, or giving a very good impression of it, her braid redone from the undoing Ares had given it two nights before. Her knives were where they always were, both of them, the placement habitual and unconscious.

Noah kept watch for the first half of the night and Cael took the second half without being asked, the handoff happening quietly in the dark with a nod on both sides.

The second day the road narrowed and climbed, the landscape shifting from open farmland into something more wooded, the trees older and closer together. Villages appeared at longer intervals, smaller, the buildings showing the particular weathered quality of places that existed because the land around them required working rather than because anyone had chosen them.

They stopped at midday at a well in a hamlet too small to have a name on the maps. A woman came out to watch them drink from her doorway, arms folded, her face carrying the specific expression of someone who had learned to assess strangers quickly and had found this group mostly harmless. She looked at their armbands, at the weapons they carried, and then at Noah for reasons he didn’t fully understand.

"Dragon knights," she said.

"Recruits," Valen corrected from where he stood at the edge of the group. He’d been there the whole journey, present without being intrusive, letting them operate and watching what they did with the freedom.

The woman looked at Noah once more, then went back inside.

Pip watched this happen and said nothing until they were moving again, at which point he fell into step beside Noah and said very quietly, "You have a face that people make decisions about."

"What does that mean," Noah said.

"That woman looked at you and made a decision. I’ve seen it happen three times now on this trip. Cael when he asked you his question. That innkeeper yesterday when we passed through Millford. Now her." He glanced sideways. "People look at you and arrive at something. I don’t know what it is. It’s interesting."

"You’re overthinking it," Noah said.

"I never overthink anything," Pip said. "I think exactly the right amount about everything. It’s one of my best qualities."

The third day was shorter, the road straightening out as they came down from the wooded hills into a valley that held a river and the village along its eastern bank. Harrowfield announced itself first as smoke, cook fires and hearths sending thin columns into the afternoon sky, and then as sound, the general working noise of a settlement that was going about its business while simultaneously trying not to think too hard about what was living in the hills above it.

They came down the main approach road with the village growing ahead of them, its buildings visible now, stone and timber construction with the practical no-nonsense architecture of people who built things to last rather than to impress. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

A figure was waiting at the road’s end where it met the village’s outer edge, standing beside a post that had probably held a gate at some point and now just held memory. She was watching them come down the hill with her arms crossed and her weight on one foot, the posture of someone comfortable in their own skin who had been standing in open air her whole life.

She was stocky through the shoulders with a fighter’s build that her frame carried without advertising, dark skin that showed the wear of outdoor work, and a scar that ran from her left ear down to her jaw in the curved line of something that had gone through armor before finding her. Her hair was cut close on one side and longer on the other, the longer section tucked behind her ear with a piece of cord. She wore traveling gear that had been repaired in several places, competently but not neatly, the patches holding fast while caring nothing for aesthetics.

She watched the group finish coming down the road and looked along the line of them with the quick assessment of someone who had spent years reading groups of fighters for capability and threat and was doing it again now out of habit.

"Dragon knight recruits," she said. "From the Ironside camp."

"That’s us," Valen said, stepping forward.

She looked at him, looked at the recruits, looked at the general state of twenty-nine people who had spent three days on a road and arrived tired and competent and ready to be useful.

"Gladys," she said. "I’m your contact." She looked them over one more time. "You’re younger than I expected."

From somewhere in the middle of the group, a voice said, just loud enough to carry: "Glad to meet you."

It was Finn. His expression when Gladys’s eyes found him was the expression of a man who had not intended to be heard quite that clearly.

She held his gaze for exactly two seconds. Then the corner of her mouth moved in something that walked up to a smile and decided to stay there.

"Follow me," she said, turning toward the village. "We’ve got a lot to talk about before dark."