SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Loriel turned at the sound of his voice.

For a single unguarded moment, her whole body moved toward him — the instinct to close the distance immediate and honest, arms already lifting — before she caught herself mid-motion and pulled back, the embarrassment arriving fast enough to make the whole thing awkward rather than smooth.

Leon reached over and patted her head.

”Good to see you again, Loriel.”

The pat landed, and her composure took a direct hit. Color rushed across her face before she could manage it, the blush moving fast and settling deep. She looked slightly to the left of his face.

”How are you here so quickly?” Her voice came out softer than she’d intended. ”I didn’t think — I mean, I wasn’t expecting—”

She stopped, which was probably the right call.

”I was worried about your safety,” Leon said simply. ”So I came.”

Straightforward. No strategy behind it, no softening for delivery. Just the plain truth of it, said the way he said most things.

Loriel’s face went a shade deeper. She gave up on eye contact entirely.

A throat cleared behind them.

Leon had already cataloged her presence — had known she was there since before the fire trap died — but he let the sound draw his attention naturally, giving Loriel’s guest the acknowledgment the moment deserved.

The room itself was not what the temple’s grand exterior suggested. No luxury, no ornate decoration, nothing that announced importance. A bed, a table, a few necessities arranged with the practical minimalism of a space being used for survival rather than living. A hiding place. That was the accurate word for it.

On the bed — a woman.

Green hair, long and slightly disordered against the pillow. Features that placed her somewhere around thirty to the eye, though her skin had the flawless, ageless quality that occasionally appeared in people who had spent a lifetime channeling healing energy. She had been, unmistakably, a top-tier beauty at some point — probably still was, in the way that certain people carried their looks through time without losing the essential quality of them. Mature now. The charm that came with it was its own thing entirely.

But her face was pale. Not tired-pale. Deeply, drainingly pale.

Bandages wrapped her chest and extended to other areas he could map without looking directly. Leon’s awareness moved through her the way it moved through everything — quietly, automatically — and what it found was not good. The wound beneath the bandages on her chest was severe beyond what the clean linen surface suggested. No fresh bleeding, but that wasn’t the issue. The damage had gone deeper than blood. Something had disrupted the body’s ability to repair itself at a foundational level, and without intervention, it would keep not repairing.

Her breathing told him the rest. Shallow, slightly uneven, carrying the particular rhythm of a body rationing its own effort.

A couple of days at most, at the current trajectory. Possibly less, after the energy she’d spent attacking him.

Her voice came out measured despite everything — the deliberate calm of someone who had made a decision about how they were going to face this.

”Can you two love birds stop? This old lady is dying here.”

Loriel’s reaction was immediate and sharp. ”Don’t say that, Mother Saintess. You’re going to be fine.”

The woman on the bed — Luna — didn’t answer with words. She just looked at Loriel. A long, steady look that said everything the silence was supposed to say.

You know exactly what I know. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Loriel’s composure cracked along a very specific seam. Her eyes went to Leon fast, the moisture already forming before the question was fully out.

”Leon.” She couldn’t finish the sentence. The words stalled somewhere before she could make them real. Her pupils were bright and unsteady. ”Mother Saintess is going to be alright, right?”

She was holding herself together through sheer determination, and she was losing the fight with it, and she knew she was losing, and she was asking him anyway because she needed something to hold onto that wasn’t her own assessment.

Leon looked at her directly.

”She’s going to be fine.” Calm. Certain. No hedging is built into it. ”Don’t start crying now. I’m here, aren’t I?”

The effect was immediate — like a hand pressed flat against a crumbling wall. All of it stopped. The moisture in her eyes held where it was and didn’t fall. The shaking in her breath settled. The smile that replaced everything else was bright enough that it looked slightly absurd given the circumstances, which made it exactly right.

She stepped forward with her arms already moving, reaching for him.

Then she stopped. Remembered herself. Started to pull back.

Leon was already closing the distance.

He wrapped his arms around her before the retreat could complete itself, her small frame fitting against his chest with the naturalness of something that had been waiting to happen and had simply been delayed by her own reflexes. She went still against him — completely still, the way people go still when something unexpected turns out to be exactly what they needed.

Her face pressed into his chest. She could feel his heartbeat, steady and unhurried. Could smell the particular quality of him that she’d cataloged without meaning to across every interaction they’d had. It was almost too much to process in one go, and her mind went genuinely blank trying.

She wanted to pull back. The embarrassment was real — knowing he and Seraphine were together, knowing what that meant, feeling the wrongness of it sit alongside how much she didn’t want to move.

His hand settled against her back.

”You wanted to hug me from the moment you saw me,” he said quietly, close enough that it was for her rather than the room. ”You were too embarrassed to follow through. You don’t have to be. We’re not so far apart from each other, are we, Loriel?”

She made a small sound that wasn’t quite a word but was definitely an answer, and her arms moved — carefully, like she was giving herself permission one increment at a time — until they’d wrapped around his back.

She’d been holding herself rigid for days. Watching Luna deteriorate, maintaining the appearance of confidence for someone who deserved to die, surrounded by certainty rather than her apprentice’s visible fear. Keeping the front up, keeping herself functional, keeping everything contained behind the face that healers learned to wear when the alternative would make them useless.

The hug undid all of it gently and without ceremony.

Leon felt the shift happen. He kept his hand moving in slow, steady arcs across her back and said nothing more, because nothing more was needed.

Loriel had forgotten everything she was supposed to be managing. His words had already dissolved the worry — she believed them completely, without qualification, in the way she sometimes believed things when the person saying them wasn’t performing certainty but simply had it. The hug was doing the rest. Warmth bled into her by degrees, the tension she hadn’t realized she was still carrying releasing muscle by muscle.

She let herself be held and stopped thinking about whether she was allowed to be.

On the bed, Luna watched all of this.

She was dying — slowly, by degrees, each breath costing slightly more than the last. That was simply the current fact of her existence, and she had made a quiet peace with the shape of it.

And here, in the middle of that, was her Loriel. The girl she’d trained and loved and watched grow into someone genuinely remarkable. Being held by a young man whose name Luna had heard spoken no fewer than a thousand times across the past several days, in every conceivable emotional register — worried, admiring, embarrassed, longing, proud.

She’d heard Loriel’s assessment of his strength. Had taken it with the reserved skepticism she applied to most things Loriel said about him, because love had a way of expanding people in the telling. Even so, the trap she’d prepared for intruders had been thorough. It had caught nothing. He’d stood inside a pillar of fire she’d constructed specifically to end a Sage rank instantly and come out the other side with his clothes intact.

She revised her skepticism downward.

The words he’d said — she’s going to be fine — she hadn’t taken them seriously on hearing them. Confidence without substance was the most common thing healers encountered from people who didn’t understand the wound they were looking at.

But he’d said them with a quality that was different from confidence without substance. A flatness to it. The tone of someone stating a fact rather than offering comfort.

She watched him hold Loriel and wondered.

She didn’t interrupt them. Some small, tired part of her — the part that had been alone in this room for days, counting the measurements of what remained — was glad not to. At least Loriel had this. At least this hopeless, brilliant, overly emotional daughter of hers had someone steady to press her face against when things got too heavy.

A small smile found its way onto Luna’s pale face.

She approved, quietly and without announcement.