All Chapters of Vengeance of The Reborn Heir: Chapter 131
- Chapter 140
172 chapters
Vanguard Alone
The second day of UMFA operational duty at Obsidian Ridge Base began under an unforgiving sky. The Ridge, a sprawling mountain range of anima-dense obsidian rock and fault-threaded ironstone, had earned its name through centuries of unbroken defense against external calamity.Ronan walked toward the Meridian Operations staging point with a posture calm enough to unsettle those who expected anxiety. His expression was quiet, disciplined, unreadable. Yet the officers assigned beside him, the remote support anchors of Squad 7-A, watched him with a mixture of calculation and disbelief. His squadmates were junior UMFA personnel who had been in the field for several years.Lieutenant Kaelis Thornwick, Rank 7, was assigned to essence fluctuation mapping, ensuring that Ronan’s signature could be traced cleanly from the corridor entry point without overlapping suppression interference.Sergeant Voss Kallivan, also Rank 7, handled spatial hazard tracking and emergency channel stabilization. Ens
He’s Crazy!
Ronan staggered briefly, boots sliding on fractured obsidian rock. “The ground is too fragile,” he muttered under his breath. “If I fight inside this corridor, the markers implode.” He forced his circulation into procedural calm, enough to deploy the fifth marker before his console crystals shattered entirely.The corridor cracked violently like splitting thunder. The Ridge Markers flickered as anima pressure attempted to corrupt them.“Mayday! Sergeant Kallivan, can you hear me? Can you see the beast?” he asked through his communicator. No response.“Corporal Rourke! Can you hear me? Anyone!”No response.“Damn it!” Ronan cursed when he knew that the communication is down.*** His squad, four remote support anchors stationed in the command alcove beyond the corridor, initially succeeded in establishing essence synchronization. The tracing crystals glowed stable, projecting Ronan’s location and vital essence flow in steady sigils.But then they saw the beast.“There’s a rank 8 beast!
The 45-Second Doctrine
The East Ridge was dying in disciplined sequences.Stone ruptures crawled across the terrain like chained explosions, one devouring breach after another. Ronan Crowne ran ahead of it—silent, swift, doctrinal.Above him, the Rank 8 dominion beast hunted in absolute silence—until it did not.Its first strike ripped downward, claws coated in imperial anima, fast enough to cleave fortification metal.Ronan veered left, a violent pivot, boots skimming collapsing stone. The claws pulverized the ground where his ribs had been a breath earlier.Second strike.The beast dived, jaws wide, flame essence surging through its throat like volcanic artery burst.Ronan launched himself forward, rolling across fractured ridge plating, debris hissing behind him like a falling crown. The bite closed on empty air.Third strike. Fourth. Fifth.A flurry of attacks, precise, enraged, territorial. Each miss carved closer to him than the last—slicing fabric, scorching the air, never the man.Ronan did not reta
Debrief Without Glory
The evac ship’s engines cooled, but the silence left behind was louder than combustion.Automatic launch inertia had thrown Ronan across the interior bulkhead like a spear released without aim. His armor, a standard-issue cadet plate reinforced for intake trials, had fractured along the pauldron seam. The metal had not failed from dominion pressure alone—it had failed because it had never been engineered for collision at self-launch velocity.Ronan lay motionless for a moment.Not gloriously unconscious, not theatrically broken—just still, a cadet body caught between physics and anima residue. His energy circulation staggered like a disrupted current, flickering out of coherence, then snapping back into containment by instinct rather than technique.Static lights hummed overhead. The ship did not celebrate arrivals. It only registered signatures.[Cadet Crowne: boarded. Status: no fatal breach detected.]The internal system pinged once, indifferent.Ronan opened his eyes at the 12-sec
The Return They Didn’t Witness
The barracks lounge was noisy with post-assignment exhaustion when the monitor feed finally died—cut by interference, not conclusion. The screen had frozen one second before Ronan boarded the self-launch ship, but the mockers didn’t know that. They only saw his silhouette swallowed by smoke, the ramp glowing, then static devouring the image entirely.Mira stretched her arms with a dramatic groan of mock disappointment.“Ha! We missed the ending. Arken must have shut the feed early just to spare him embarrassment.”Don chuckled, leaning back, brushing dust off his cadet sleeve.“He probably didn’t make it. If the ship launched, then the intake board will log a withdrawal or casualty by morning.”Caldus let out a long, amused sigh, tone smug and competitive.“I wanted to see if he would crawl or cry before boarding. Now we will never know.”Mira laughed again, sharp.“He must have been frightened enough to soil his armor before the beast even landed a strike. Too bad we didn’t get to wi
Orders, Threats, and Old Scars
The military intake of Day 1 and Day 2 had forced every cadet into real duty. The schedule was merciless, the air of the outpost metallic and tense, filled with the smell of engine oil, static anima interference, and the nervous energy of initiates who were beginning to understand that military intake was not a place for dramatic speeches—only results and endurance. Every cadet had been deployed into task loops that tested cognition, stamina, reporting accuracy, and adaptability under pressure. Sleep was rationed. Recognition was not.Lucien Cross, assigned to the Outer Defense Command — Tactical Cognition Support, had executed his provisional role as a Combat Analyst Cadet with analytical precision. His mind moved like a calibrated instrument, parsing terrain feeds, cognitive threat assessments, risk probabilities, and tactical forecasting permutations without hesitation. Each report he generated was structured, cold, efficient, useful. He did not perform for observers. He performed
Beacon Doctrine Under Watch
Aveline Westmere arrived at the Vanguard Response Unit wing just after dawn. The transport corridor released a final pneumatic sigh as the doors sealed behind her, ministry clearance insignia fading from active glow into standby notation. The Vanguard division was already assembled in tight rows, cadets clad in provisional armor plates, faces pale with intake exhaustion, spines straight with forced professionalism.Ronan Crowne stood among them, boots aligned, gaze forward, combat maps folded under his arm. When Aveline entered, Ronan turned his head slightly. Their eyes met—a collision of resentment and restrained neutrality. Aveline’s stare was a promise of complication. Ronan’s stare was awareness without reaction. They held the moment in silence, then both looked away. No greeting. No acknowledgment aloud. Only two cadets who knew the day would not be kind.Captain Hale entered the briefing chamber moments later. The air pressure shifted, heavy with intake authority. A single data-
A Sweep of Silence and Pressure
The Day-3 rotation siren shrieked across the outer perimeter at 0600 local time. The sound carried far beyond the barracks, a harsh metallic call that pulled cadets into the field in synchronized discipline. The ridge they deployed to was still scarred from Day-1 and Day-2 anima flares, a broken frontier breathing with residual instability. The air shimmered faintly with dominion residue, enough to unsettle lesser minds, but not enough to interrupt the chain of command.Five cadets were dispatched in a staggered line across the Vanguard deployment gate.Selwyn Harrow, the sharpest cognitive relay cadet of the unit, was first to move. His fingers danced across a manual relay panel, syncing cognition rods into lattice alignment. His tone was clipped but steady as he muttered into the comm-bead for logging clarity:“Perimeter cognition stack aligned. Relay coherence holding… for now.”Elara Deyn knelt near the relay anchor, manually notating flare dispersion loops. She brushed a strand o
The Archive of a Threatened Name
The sealed assessment archive room was colder than its steel walls. The furnace-like chaos of the intake week outside never entered this chamber. Here, order existed in stacks of reports, timestamps, and tolerance graphs.Vice Principal Aveline Westmere stood alone before the intake terminal, the faint glow of processed anima data washing over her face.The Day-3 reports had arrived minutes earlier. The analysts had already reviewed them, leaving only summary marks on her slate.Aveline opened the file again, scrolling through footage that was fractured by light saturation, audio spikes, and environmental overlap. She was hunting for embarrassment, for a misstep, for a moment to weaponize—but the feed betrayed none of the humiliation she expected.Ronan had survived Day Two in the dominion corridor, and on Day Three he had swept the rods without startled panic. To Aveline, that was infuriating.The task parameters she had quietly proposed to Captain Hale were supposed to bury Ronan in
Ink That Should Have Died
Aveline carried the pen into her quarters like someone transporting a live secret, not an old memory. The moment the door sealed behind her, she twisted the internal lock twice more out of habit, then once more out of fear. Her coat slid off her shoulders, but the tension did not. She placed the fountain pen on her desk, directly under the dim yellow lamp, and for the first time in days she allowed herself to look at something without calculating its usefulness.The pen looked different under light. The obsidian body was still elegant, but the engraving was no longer merely faded—it was familiar. The crest swirling around the clip was not a dominion mark, not a ministry emblem, not a military intake sigil. It was older, simpler, personal. A symbol of a past alliance she had buried so deep that even seeing it now felt like trespassing.Her fingers trembled as she turned the pen slowly. The metal felt cold, but her pulse felt hotter than the furnace ridge had ever burned. She whispered