SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Leon wanted to leave immediately. Every instinct was pulling him toward the City of Light, toward the crack, toward answers he could feel sitting just out of reach, fifty kilometers away.

But he knew better than to act on that pull tonight.

His main body had plans that weren’t going anywhere. He’d promised Ira her time — proper time, her own, after the session with Seraphine that had ended up being both of them together, which had been genuinely great and which he was not complaining about in the slightest. His stamina wasn’t a concern. Two was nothing he couldn’t handle, and the thought of tonight made the enforced patience easier to maintain.

That was for his main body.

His clone was a different matter. Same mind, different body — and while the main body rested and kept its promises, the clone could move ahead. Scout the route, assess the battlefield conditions, dig into whatever records existed about the Upper Ones before they arrived at the City of Light properly. No rest required for a clone. No promises to keep.

He asked the question straightforwardly.

”When can we depart for the City of Light and the main battlefield?”

Luna’s face changed when she heard it.

Not dramatically — she wasn’t someone who wore her emotions loudly. But the warmth that moved through her expression was real and visible, a quiet swell of something that looked a lot like relief. The kind that came from having carried a heavy thing alone for too long and suddenly finding someone willing to take hold of the other end.

She thought about her daughter. About the way Loriel had spoken his name for a solid week — constantly, in every context, always on her tongue. She’d mentioned Seraphine a handful of times in passing, but nothing that had registered as significant. The picture Loriel had painted was simply Leon, over and over, from every angle.

My dear daughter, Luna thought, looking at him, you are in for a great deal of future trouble with this one.

She meant it entirely as a compliment.

What she didn’t know — couldn’t know, because Loriel had never thought to mention it — was that there were already two other women in the picture. Seraphine, who was clearly significant in ways Loriel had glossed over whenever the subject came near. And Ira, whom Loriel herself had only met today. The full shape of things was considerably more complex than Luna’s current understanding, and her warm, confident approval was being extended based on incomplete information.

She would have approved anyway. But that was beside the point.

She composed her expression, genuine but apologetic.

”I want to leave immediately, too,” she said. ”But things are a little complicated right now. If it’s not too much to ask — could we depart tomorrow morning?”

The clone smiled easily. ”I was thinking the same thing. Don’t worry about it.”

Then he asked for a map.

Luna produced one with a brightness that she didn’t fully contain — a large, detailed document covering the higher domain’s geography from their current position to the City of Light and the front lines beyond it. She held it out with both hands, pleased in the uncomplicated way of someone doing something small that feels meaningful.

The clone took it, glanced across it once, and committed everything to memory in the span of a few seconds. His memory worked at a level that made detailed study unnecessary — one look was sufficient; every road, landmark, and distance notation was stored cleanly.

Then he was gone.

Not teleportation. He simply moved, and the speed of it meant that to Luna’s eyes he was present one moment and absent the next, no blur, no sound, just the space he’d been standing in suddenly empty. She blinked at it for a moment.

That was fast.

His direction, if she’d been watching carefully enough to track it, wasn’t toward the City of Light. The map sat in his memory but wasn’t his destination tonight. He headed somewhere outside the city entirely, moving in a direction that had nothing to do with the route they’d discussed.

The city fell behind him quickly.

Outside its walls, the damage from the earlier assault was visible in patches — scorched earth, broken terrain, the evidence of where the beast tide had concentrated before being pushed back. He moved through it without slowing, his awareness spreading outward as he went, reading the landscape.

The night air was different out here. Heavier somehow. The mana density that had been noticeably higher throughout the higher domain felt more concentrated in this direction, a slow increase that corresponded with every kilometer he covered away from the city.

The crack’s influence. Even at this distance, the abyssal energy bleeding from it was pressing into the ambient mana and changing its quality — not enough to feel hostile at his level, but enough to be clearly detectable. A constant, low tide of wrongness running underneath everything else.

He followed it.

Not all the way to the source — not tonight, not without the others, not without the preparation that a proper approach to something like that deserved. But close enough to take a real reading of what he was dealing with. Close enough to understand the terrain, the concentration patterns of the corrupted beasts, the shape of the battlefield that Luna’s forces had been holding for months.

He moved through the dark quickly and quietly, the map in his memory and the pull of the crack in his awareness, building the picture he’d need when morning came.

___

Leon led them back through the city toward the temple, Loriel walking ahead of the group with the easy familiarity of someone navigating streets she’d known since childhood.

The evening had settled into something quieter now — the immediate shock of the attack fading, people moving through the aftermath with the careful, subdued energy of a city that had survived something and was still processing the fact of its survival. Shops had closed early. Streets that would normally be busy were thin with people. The atmosphere wasn’t panicked anymore, just heavy.

Loriel walked them through it without much comment, pointing out turns, answering the occasional question from Ira, who was still absorbing everything around her even after a full day of it.

Leon told them on the way back — tomorrow morning, they’d depart for the City of Light and the main battlefield. Luna had confirmed the timing, and everything he needed to move on was in place.

Loriel, hearing this, offered the temple without hesitation.

”Stay here tonight,” she said, turning back to look at the group. ”We have more than enough room. It doesn’t make sense to go anywhere else this late.”

Leon agreed easily. Then he glanced at Ira.

Just a glance. Brief, passing, carrying something in it that wasn’t difficult to read if you were paying attention.

Ira caught it, and a faint blush moved across her face before she looked away.

Then he glanced at Seraphine, who received it with the composed expression of someone who had already been aware of the evening’s general direction for some time and had no objections.

Vyra noticed both exchanges. Said nothing. Her face gave away exactly as much as she decided it should, which was nothing.

Loriel noticed too. She kept her eyes forward and her thoughts behind her expression, which was doing more work than usual.

The temple at night was quieter than it had been during the day — the wide corridors emptier, the ambient sounds of the building reduced to the occasional footstep and the soft presence of the structure itself. Loriel showed them to rooms with the brisk efficiency of someone who knew every door in the building.

When the arrangements were settled, Vyra spoke before anyone else could.

”I’ll stay outside tonight,” she said simply. ”I want to explore a little more before we leave.”

Clean. No elaboration offered.

Loriel had her own reason, different in nature but equally simple — she wanted to spend the night with Luna. They had things to talk about, time to recover together after what had been an extremely long and difficult stretch of days.

She said this without looking at Leon for too long.

So it was settled without much discussion. Vyra disappeared into the temple’s outer corridors. Loriel moved toward the wing where Luna’s rooms were. And Leon opened a portal in the room Loriel had given them — silver-white, quiet, the opening so practiced that it took almost no time at all.

He, Ira, and Seraphine stepped through together.

They came out at the top of the mountain.

The familiar rocky plateau, the house sitting solid and unchanged in the dimensional world’s ambient glow, the open space around it stretching in every direction with the particular quiet of a place that held no one else right now.

Ira looked at Leon the moment they arrived, and the blush that had been sitting on her face since the city deepened considerably. She’d been waiting for this all day — had been promised it, had lost bets and won others and managed the whole complicated business of the tour and the attack and the aftermath with this in the back of her mind the entire time.

Seraphine stood slightly behind her, and the look on her face was the one she wore when she’d already decided something and was simply waiting for events to confirm it.

Leon looked at both of them.

The passion between all three of them was open and unambiguous now — no pretense of anything else, no awkwardness about what the evening was. Ira’s eyes were bright and direct. Seraphine carried that particular warmth underneath her composure, the one that only came out when they were somewhere private, and she didn’t need to manage how it showed.

He took a step toward them.