SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Leon kept his expression calm while asking her his questions.

Underneath that calm, he was still genuinely frightened. Not in the way that produced panic—he’d had enough experience with things that could kill him to know the difference between fear that needed action and fear that needed management. This was the second kind.

She didn’t seem to want to hurt him, but standing this close to something that felt as vast and ancient as she did was not a comfortable experience, regardless of her intentions. And since leaving wasn’t an option, talking was the only path forward.

She grumbled internally for a moment—he could read it in the slight shift of her expression, the quality of her reluctance—before she chose to answer.

”I had been trapped inside this place for a very long time,” she said, her voice carrying that depth that didn’t match the space it came from. ”I was close. I would have broken through eventually on my own.” She said this with the particular confidence of someone stating a fact rather than making an argument. ”Then, not long ago, my soul was pushed out of my body without my control. No warning. No reason I could identify. When I became aware of what had happened, I was this.” She gestured at herself—the drifting silver hair, the form that his spatial awareness read as energy and soul rather than flesh. ”The spirit of this incomplete world. Trapped in a different way than before.”

She paused, and the displeasure in her expression sharpened slightly.

”I felt the tower had something to do with it. So I came here to find the cause.” Her silver eyes held his without wavering. ”And then you arrived. And the connection I feel tells me you are probably responsible for all of this.”

She crossed her arms, the gesture carrying centuries of accumulated irritation compressed into a single movement.

Leon listened to all of it.

And then, as the last of her words settled, something clicked.

Those system messages.

He remembered them with uncomfortable clarity—the repeated confirmations the system had asked for, the warnings about irreversible consequences, the way it had wanted him to acknowledge what he was agreeing to multiple times before proceeding. He’d pushed through them with the particular impatience of someone who was in the middle of something urgent and treated confirmation prompts as obstacles rather than information.

Irreversible consequences.

Yeah, he thought. I think I understand now.

He felt genuinely guilty about it in the specific way you feel guilty about something you caused through carelessness rather than intent, which didn’t make the outcome any better for her, but at least meant he wasn’t the kind of person who would be dismissive about it.

She would have escaped on her own eventually. He had interrupted that process without knowing she existed, without knowing what he was doing, and the result was that her centuries of work toward freedom had been redirected into a different kind of captivity.

I walked in, broke something I didn’t know was there, and kept walking.

He sat with that honesty for a moment.

Then his mind moved forward, because sitting with guilt indefinitely wasn’t useful, and there was something else here worth examining.

She said she’s become the spirit of this incomplete world.

He turned that over carefully. The Dimensional Hourglass—his treasure, formed from the merger of his original treasure and the Ascension Tower—had a spirit now. Which meant she was connected to something he owned in a specific and fundamental way. Which meant the fact that her hand had dispersed on contact wasn’t a coincidence or a limitation of her current form.

She can’t harm me, he thought. That’s what that was.

The relief that produced was genuine and immediate, and he kept it off his face because expressing relief in front of someone who was already frustrated with you was not a tactically sound choice.

But underneath the relief, something else was forming. A recognition of what this situation actually represented beyond the obvious complications.

Leon had been building his strength steadily, following his own path, making progress that was real and meaningful. But for a while now, he’d been aware of the ceiling. After reaching level four Aura in certain elements, the progress had slowed in ways that patience and effort alone didn’t seem to resolve. The bottleneck after the tower’s final monster had given him a direction, but that had been luck—the right encounter at the right moment providing information he would have spent years searching for otherwise.

What about the next one, he thought. And the one after that.

He couldn’t build a strategy around fortunate encounters. The enemies waiting for him weren’t going to be patient about his development timeline. He had people depending on him now—more than before, significantly more after today—and the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was not something he could close by grinding harder at what he already knew.

What he needed was someone who had existed long enough to have seen the things he was approaching from the outside. Someone whose experience contained the answers to questions he didn’t even know how to ask yet.

He looked at her.

Hundreds of thousands of years. Vast and ancient in a way that his spatial awareness kept reminding him of every time he let his attention rest on her too long. Whatever she was, whatever she’d done and seen and survived across that span of time, the knowledge contained in that existence was something that no amount of lucky encounters could replicate.

And she’s here in my world. And she needs something from me.

He felt the shape of it clearly.

He met her silver eyes directly.

”I’ll help you get free of this state,” he said, his voice carrying the sincerity of someone who meant it rather than someone offering it as a negotiating position. ”When I’m capable enough to actually do it properly. But for that to happen, I need to become a lot stronger.” He held her gaze. ”So I want your help too. What do you think?”

Xyvarithiel heard his words and felt something settle inside her with the quiet satisfaction of a plan arriving at its intended destination.

Good.

She had lived long enough to know how these arrangements worked, and long enough to know that the ones built on mutual benefit lasted considerably longer than the ones built on obligation or desperation. She was at a complete disadvantage in her current state—she would not pretend otherwise to herself, even if she had no intention of advertising it to him. She would never beg. That was a line she didn’t cross, regardless of circumstances.

But this wasn’t begging. This was two parties with complementary needs arriving at the obvious arrangement.

She also—and she was aware of this as a separate and distinct consideration—had very specific plans for the moment her physical body became accessible again, which this agreement brought meaningfully closer. Plans that the centuries of observation had given her considerable time to develop in detail.

The smile that crossed her face was the first genuine one since he’d arrived. It came without the frustration underneath it, without the displeasure, without any of the layers that had been sitting on top of everything else since she’d seen him step through the portal.

Just the smile, which was—as Leon discovered in real time—something that operated at a different level than her expression at rest.

His thoughts went briefly sideways.

She’s—

He caught himself.

”Okayyyy!”

The word came out bright and completely at odds with every other quality she’d displayed since his arrival—the ancient depth, the cold displeasure, the centuries of weight. It was the response of someone who had just gotten exactly what they wanted and was not bothering to conceal that fact, and he liked that fact very much; he also needed her help, so it felt like a pretty good deal to him.

Leon looked at her for a moment.

This, he thought, is going to be very interesting.