SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

It started at his core and propagated outward with horrifying speed—a blackish hue spreading through his flesh like ink dropped into water, his form bulging in ways that the geometry of a human body didn’t accommodate. The angles were wrong. The proportions shifted.

Whatever was happening moved faster than conscious decision, faster than intent, as though the process had been waiting for a trigger condition and had been given it.

Self-destruction.

Leon recognized it in the same instant he was already moving.

FWOOSH!

One single Void Step, pushing the technique to its absolute maximum capacity—his spatial range extended to its furthest possible reach, slightly over four kilometers of instantaneous displacement executed in a single motion.

He was approximately four kilometers out when it detonated.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sound wasn’t combat noise. It was the noise of the landscape being reclassified. A column of dark force and obliterating energy erupted from the thin man’s position and propagated outward in a sphere of destruction that consumed everything within its radius without distinguishing between undead, terrain, or atmosphere. The shockwave that preceded it moved at a speed that made warning irrelevant.

It hit everything simultaneously.

The Red Dragon had been flying toward the battle with ancient revenge burning behind its eyes, wings driving it forward with the single-minded fury of something that had been waiting for this specific moment.

The leading edge of the shockwave struck it broadside, and physics ceased to be negotiable. The dragon—colossal, ancient, powerful beyond most things alive—was flung backward through the sky like something weightless, wings folding uselessly against a force that didn’t acknowledge their span, tumbling through hundreds of meters of air before its own power could claw back enough control to arrest the spin.

CRAAASH! RRRUMMMBLE! WHOOOOSH!

Archon Vyra, further from the epicenter and positioned with the battlefield awareness of someone who had been surviving impossible odds for the past hour, was struck by the attenuated edge of the wave.

Not sent flying—she wasn’t close enough for that—but staggered, her footing lost completely, her defensive aura igniting on pure instinct as the pressure rolled across her position like a physical wall.

The remaining undead—already thinned across every sector of the battlefield by Leon and the clone’s combined work, their coordination degraded by the loss of the thin man’s guiding consciousness—were scattered like debris. Some simply stopped functioning. Others were flung in random directions, puppets whose strings had been cut and then struck by a hurricane simultaneously.

The sound alone, even at a distance, arrived as a physical impact. Eardrums across the entire battlefield registered it as something that bypassed hearing and became sensation.

Seraphine felt the shockwave through her feet before the sound arrived.

She absorbed it through her combat stance with the automatic response of trained muscle memory, but her heart had already moved independently of technique—lurching, then hammering with a sudden panicked rhythm that had nothing to do with the physical force and everything to do with the direction it had originated from.

Leon.

Her eyes went immediately to the clone.

From approximately a hundred meters away, displaced by the sprawling chaos of the battlefield’s final stages, Ira’s eyes went to the clone at the same moment.

Their gazes crossed in transit—launched toward the same destination from different directions, arriving simultaneously, passing through each other in the half-second before both sets of eyes found the clone and then, with the inevitability of geometry, found each other.

The moment held for exactly as long as recognition required.

Seraphine’s mind assembled it in under a second. The white skin. The resemblance was subtle enough to miss at a glance and obvious once the context was available. Leon’s words, delivered with characteristic directness, about there being one other woman.

This is her.

Her expression didn’t change dramatically. What changed was smaller—a setting of the jaw, precise and controlled. Her foot came down against the scorched earth in a single light stamp that was quieter than it felt from the inside, the external manifestation of something considerably less quiet happening in her chest.

She had just stomped her foot in frustration.

Her eyes moved deliberately away from Ira and back to the clone, which stood with the settled, unconcerned expression of something that had no reason to be worried.

He’s fine. If something had gone wrong, the clone would show it. He’s fine.

She held that and made herself stay with it, which wasn’t difficult because it was true, which made the continued elevated heartbeat faintly annoying.

Across the hundred meters, Ira had taken longer with the same conclusion—working through the resemblance more carefully, cross-referencing it against what Leon had told her, assembling the pieces with the methodical patience that characterized how she processed most things.

Leon had told her there was one other woman. She’d received that information and placed it somewhere that didn’t disturb anything essential. What she needed from Leon was specific and clear to her, and the existence of someone else didn’t threaten any part of it. She wasn’t constructed to feel threatened by that particular thing.

But right now, with the explosion’s residual energy still rolling across the landscape and the source of it being the direction where Leon had been, both of them were oriented toward the clone with the same expression, regardless of the differences in their relationships or their personalities or how they’d each arrived at this moment.

Relief. Uncomplicated, immediate, complete.

The clone stood upright, unworried, exactly as it should be.

Both of them exhaled.

Four kilometers from the explosion’s center, Leon materialized on a stretch of scorched ground that the battle’s main body hadn’t touched yet.

His light armor showed surface distortion—minor damage from the shockwave’s outermost edge, the material having absorbed what it was designed to absorb. He ran a quick internal check. No injuries. Whatever marginal abrasions might have been there had already closed, his natural regeneration handling the work before he fully registered the sensation of it.

He straightened and looked back toward the epicenter.

The column of dark energy was dissipating—unraveling at its edges as the force that had generated it spent itself against the atmosphere and the landscape. Where the thin man had been, there was a crater and the absence of anything that had previously been the thin man.

Incarnation destroyed.

The implications were straightforward. The main body existed somewhere beyond this world, and it now knew—through whatever connection bound an incarnation to its origin—that the fragment it had sent here was gone. Destroyed by something on a planet it had apparently considered manageable.

That conversation will happen eventually. Not today.

From a distance—several kilometers away, the Red Dragon fighting its way back to stable flight with laborious wingbeats—a sound came.

It began as a roar and became something else in the same breath.

Something that didn’t move through the air the way combat sound moved, that arrived in the chest differently and stayed there rather than passing through. There was grief in it—old grief, the kind that had been

accumulating for longer than most living things existed, finally finding the specific moment that let it out. Beneath the grief, rage that was the specific flavor of loss rather than battle. Beneath both of those, quieter than either, a hollowness that made the roar feel like a question already certain of its answer.

The brother who had sacrificed himself. The enemy that had been responsible. The revenge that had driven the dragon through an entire battle’s worth of accumulated wounds without slowing.

And now the enemy was gone—destroyed, obliterated, reduced to a dispersing column of dark energy—but not by the dragon’s own hand. Not by the action that would have completed the specific shape the grief required.

The roar carried all of that.

ROOOAARRRRR!

It rolled across the devastated landscape, across the craters and the scattered undead and the smoldering remnants of the Pyran settlement, and faded gradually into the smoke that still hung over everything like a low ceiling of consequence.

Leon stood still on his patch of untouched ground and listened to it until the last of it was gone.

He didn’t move immediately afterward.

Revenge that someone else finishes for you still leaves the wound open.

He understood that without needing to examine it further. Then he turned and began moving back toward the battlefield to assess what remained.