SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Getting away from Xyra was not as simple as stepping back.

Leon moved to create distance and her hand moved with him, a casual and completely unapologetic contact that made him go very still for exactly one second before continuing his retreat at a slightly faster pace.

”You owe me,” she said, her silver eyes carrying the specific satisfaction of someone who had just collected a down payment on a larger debt. ”Next time the repayment is going to be considerably more substantial.”

Leon processed this information.

”Noted,” he said, with the tone of someone who had decided that engaging further was not strategically sound.

She looked at him for one more moment — the unhurried assessment of someone who had all the time in the world and was content to use it — and then disappeared. Clean teleportation, no announcement, simply present and then not.

Leon stood alone in the crater.

Considerably more substantial, he thought, looking at the empty space where she’d been. What does that even mean for her specifically.

He decided not to follow that thought to its conclusion and turned his attention to something considerably safer.

The golden patterns on his skin caught the dimensional world’s ambient light in a way that shifted depending on how he moved — not quite glowing, not quite not glowing, the markings sitting at the threshold between those two states. He’d been aware of them since the integration finished but hadn’t properly examined them yet. The dragon emblem on his chest was the largest and most detailed. The scale-like patterns along his forearms had a precision that suggested intention rather than decoration.

He felt no heat from any of it. No discomfort. No weight. The patterns existed on him the way his own skin existed — completely, neutrally present.

Control, he thought, reaching for the heat experimentally.

It responded.

Not like channeling an element through mana — more direct than that, more immediate, the heat existing in the patterns already and simply needing direction rather than generation. He pushed it outward in a controlled test, directing it toward a rare-ranked spear he’d pulled from his inventory.

The spear melted.

Not slowly — the metal softened and lost its shape within seconds, the rare-ranked material unable to manage what the armor was producing even at a fraction of what Leon suspected was available. He pulled the heat back and the remaining metal solidified into a misshapen lump on the crater floor.

Interesting, he thought.

He pushed further, directing the heat at an epic-ranked piece he’d kept in inventory — one of the spare weapons from the pre-dungeon distribution, solid and well-made, the best the cosmic shop had offered at that tier.

Nothing.

He increased the intensity.

Still nothing. The epic-ranked weapon absorbed the heat without visible response, the material quality simply sufficient to handle what he was producing.

There’s a ceiling, he realized. Rare rank is the limit of what the heat alone can do. Epic is beyond it.

He filed that honestly. The heat function was an addition, not the core of what he was working with. He set it aside and focused on what the armor actually was.

He willed it.

The golden patterns responded — the markings lifting slightly from his skin and spreading, the liquid-metal quality returning but differently from the integration process. Controlled this time, directed by his intent, the armor forming over his body in a smooth continuous motion rather than the overwhelming crash of the initial merging.

It looked nothing like the armor in the casing.

That armor had been regal. Crimson scales and molten gold edging, the dragon emblem blazing, the entire set radiating the authority of something ancient and significant. What covered him now was gold but different gold — bronze mixed through it, the color muted, the surface texture simpler. Thin where the original had been substantial. The design was surprisingly modern despite the mythical origin, closer to a fitted suit than traditional armor, covering everything without bulk or restriction.

He looked down at himself and felt the faint dissatisfaction of someone who had seen the premium version and was currently working with something two to three tiers below it.

It’s not the full armor, he thought. This is what I can access right now.

What he didn’t know — couldn’t know, since the armor’s consciousness was present but not yet communicating with him directly — was that the design wasn’t random. The consciousness had reached into his memory during the integration and selected the aesthetic based on what it found there, the modern fitted quality reflecting something from his previous life that had lodged in the armor’s understanding of what he was. It had chosen a form suited to him specifically rather than defaulting to its own preferences.

He didn’t know any of this. He just looked at the bronze-gold suit and thought it was actually quite good despite being below the full version, and started testing.

He tested for hours.

The 1000x time field was still active — Xyra had left it running, either intentionally or because canceling it hadn’t occurred to her before she teleported away — and he used every minute of it. Systematic testing, moving through every category of attack he could produce and measuring the armor’s response to each.

Epic-ranked sword strike at full strength with single elemental enhancement.

Light scratch.

The blade made contact, the enhancement added force that should have been meaningful against almost anything at his current tier, and the result was a mark on the armor’s surface that faded within seconds and left a scratch on his skin underneath that was shallow enough to be almost insulting in how minor it was.

That’s impressive, he thought, running his fingers across the fading mark. Genuinely impressive.

He hit it again. Different angle, different enhancement, same result. Then a combination strike — sword plus spatial compression, the two forces working together the way he’d developed during the dimensional world training.

Light scratch. Fading.

He pulled out a rare-ranked weapon and struck with the same configuration.

Nothing. Not even a mark on the armor’s surface, let alone anything reaching his skin underneath.

He stood back and looked at what he’d established.

Rare rank and below: couldn’t penetrate the armor at all, regardless of technique or enhancement combination. The defense was absolute at that tier.

Epic rank: could penetrate, but the result was a light scratch that faded quickly and left minimal damage to the body underneath. The armor wasn’t invulnerable to epic-ranked attacks — it was just dramatically better at handling them than anything he’d previously worn.

And that’s the incomplete version, he thought. Two tiers below what it actually is.

He thought about what full access would look like. If the bronze-gold incomplete form was handling epic-ranked strikes from his own abnormal strength with light scratches that faded in seconds, the full crimson-and-gold version was operating in a category he didn’t currently have reference points for.

I need to get stronger, he thought, not with frustration but with the clear-eyed recognition of someone who had just been shown where the ceiling was and understood what reaching it would require.

He also felt, underneath the analytical assessment, something simpler.

He liked the armor. Genuinely liked it — the way it moved with him, the complete absence of weight or restriction, the fact that it functioned as clothing equally well as protection and meant he’d never need to worry about a fight destroying what he was wearing again.

The consciousness that had designed it based on his own memory had made a good choice.

He didn’t know that yet.

But he appreciated the result anyway.