SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 593: Born Beneath Higher Laws

The System caught up a half breath later.

[Star-Iron Devouring Centipede — Level 94]

[Rank: Ethereal Initiate]

[Affinity: Metal, Earth]

[Warning: Existence is not wholly contained within observed body]

Leon read the last line and had no time to think about it, because the head came down.

”Scatter!” he shouted, and the ground where they had been standing ceased to be ground.

Mandibles tore into the basin and threw it upward. Leon folded Loriel forty paces east before the debris arrived, then bent the largest fragments away from Ira, who was already searching the creature’s underside for a seam. Whatever the trial had cost them, none of the four retreated.

Seraphine went first, taking the air in three strides with stormlight running down her sword. A blow that would have opened a fortress gate in Velaria entered an overlapping joint by only a third of its length before stopping.

Something moved under the armor. Beneath the plates, threaded through the meat of the thing, power ran in channels, and where her blade bit, the flow bent toward it and thickened, and the wound closed on the steel like a fist.

Seraphine tore her sword free and dropped away before the segment could roll and crush her.

”It’s pushing back from inside!” she called.

”I saw it.” Leon was already moving.

Ira found a seam near the ninth segment. Instead of pouring out power, she compressed Calamity flame into a needle and drove it into the same opening three times.

Black smoke came out. The creature made a sound like a mountain grinding its teeth, and its whole body rippled — and the ripple carried power toward the wound, from four segments away, and the smoke stopped.

”That’s not healing,” Loriel said, some distance behind them. Her voice was steady, which impressed him more than anything else. ”Leon, it isn’t healing; it’s moving. It’s bringing life from somewhere else in its body and spending it there.”

”How much does it have?”

”I can’t— it’s like asking how much water is in a river.”

Vyra hit it next.

She targeted the metal-touched shimmer gathering along the plates whenever the creature prepared to move quickly. Though the world’s energy ignored her, flame still obeyed. White-hearted Pyran fire flooded its flank until the shimmer scattered.

The centipede’s next lunge came in slower and crooked, and Seraphine used the half second that bought her to cut a plate free entirely.

For about ninety seconds, they were doing well.

Leon folded distances for Seraphine, moved Loriel away from debris, and kept hardened space between Ira and the nearest segments. A lattice of frozen earth-and-metal spikes sank through the basin floor to stop the creature from diving beneath them.

And while he did all of it, he watched the circulation.

The channels ran the length of its body in bundles and crossed at the joints, which brightened whenever it was injured. A lifetime of consuming star-metal and this world’s energy had created a system that made his companions’ strongest attacks seem small.

It was not merely tougher than a Velarian beast of the same level. Every part of its greater strength belonged to one cultivated whole.

Then it stopped being interested in playing.

The creature reared, two-thirds of its length coming off the ground, and every plate along its body stood up like the scales of a pinecone opening.

The metallic storm came out sideways.

Vyra took most of it. Her flames rose to meet it and were shredded and blown backward, and she went with them, skidding thirty paces on her heels with both forearms crossed in front of her face. Seraphine’s guard came up in time and broke anyway — the stormlight barrier held a full second, longer than it had any right to, then burst, and she was thrown into a stone shelf hard enough that Leon heard it.

Ira had committed to a thrust. It went in deep enough to matter, and then the segment rolled, and the tail came around, and she was airborne before she could withdraw.

Leon caught her out of the air with a fold of space, put her down, and got a shield of layered force between Loriel and the shrapnel front, and in the process he let a plate-edge open a long line across his own back that closed before the blood finished leaving it.

Loriel was on her knees, both palms out, holding all three of them together with green light and nothing else, and she was burning through herself to do it. Level thirty-one. She had been Sage two weeks ago.

That was the moment Leon understood the problem, and it was not the problem he had expected.

He could kill this thing. He was already fairly sure he could kill it. The issue was that killing it required his whole attention, and his whole attention was currently divided four ways, and every second he spent shielding was a second he was not spending learning where its power came from.

Out in the basin, the centipede curled itself into a spiral. The plates along its entire length began to glow — dull red at first, then white — and the metal veins in the stone beneath it lit up in sympathy, spreading outward in a web that reached almost to where Loriel was kneeling.

It was not preparing an attack. It was preparing to erase the ground.

”Everyone in,” Leon said.

Seraphine had already pushed herself off the stone shelf. ”No.”

”Seraphine.”

”We crossed for this.” She was breathing badly. There was blood at her hairline, and she had not noticed. ”We crossed so you wouldn’t be standing somewhere like this on your own. If we go inside now, then what was any of it—”

She stopped.

Her gaze moved across the shell around Ira, the barrier over Loriel, and Leon standing between them while the centipede gathered enough power to erase the basin.

Her jaw set. ”How long do you need?”

”Not long.”

”Then don’t be long.” She got an arm under Ira, who was swearing at nobody in particular and trying to stand on a leg that would not take her weight. ”Vyra. Loriel. Now.”

Vyra did not argue. That cost her something — Leon saw it — but she took Loriel by the shoulders and moved her, and whatever pride the fall from her peak had wounded, she kept it out of the way of the decision.

Leon opened the way, the portal leading back to the dimensional world.

It was a controlled aperture, small, edged in silver, and it should have been beneath the notice of a creature made mostly of appetite and armor.

The centipede’s head came around instantly.

It stopped gathering. It stopped everything. Every antenna along its front third turned toward the opening with an attention that was almost sickening in its clarity, and Leon felt the thing look — not at the light, but through it, at the sky beyond, at the fields and the roofs and the thousands of small burning lives inside.

An entire world. Right there. Unarmored.

It lunged.

Seraphine went through with Ira. Vyra went through, pushing Loriel ahead of her, and the great armored head came down the basin faster than anything of that mass should be able to move, mandibles wide, star-metal shrieking against star-metal.

Leon stepped into the gap.

He set one hand against the inside of the left mandible and put everything he had into a single lateral push — space compressed to a wedge, hardened, and driven sideways at the exact angle the creature’s own momentum could not correct. The impact went through his arm, his shoulder, his ribs. His feet cut two furrows twenty paces long through solid black stone.

The head slewed aside and hammered into the basin wall.

Behind him, the aperture closed to a seam, to a thread, to nothing.

Leon lowered his hand. Somewhere under the ringing in his ears he could feel four presences on the other side of that connection, safe, furious, alive.

He rolled his shoulder once, and turned around.

Between him and everything he had carried out of Velaria, there was now only a centipede.