SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 675: The Fifth Node

Leon met the first descending strike with his sword angled to carry it past his shoulder.

The weapons touched, and the force drove his boots through the surface of the floor.

He released the parry before it could pin him. A short spatial fold carried him toward the construct’s left side, where he drove a compressed frost lance beneath its raised arm.

The lance struck deeply enough to crack the plate.

Then the construct turned into the attack and brought the lower end of its weapon across his ribs.

His armor hardened before impact. He still felt something break.

Leon landed several paces away, coughing, and moved again before the blade reached him. It cut a groove through the stone where his head had been.

Fine. No trading blows until I know what I’m trading with.

Life gathered beneath his damaged ribs. He could feel the repair taking hold while he evaded the next attack, but he needed an opening to finish it without taking another hit.

He spread Void Dominion across the room to his right.

The construct followed, its next step slowing as its pressure encountered his control. Leon used the delay to draw a full breath and finish mending the ribs. Then he sent Lightning into the cracked plate.

Pale fragments scattered. The construct’s arm dipped, and he advanced behind a burst of fire.

Its blade came through the flames low enough to take his legs.

He jumped, folded sideways, and struck the wall feet first before pushing away.

The creature had barely moved from the place where he had first hurt it.

For the next several exchanges, Leon concentrated on making it turn.

Its battlefield control strengthened near its body. A fold that worked cleanly along the wall became unreliable beside its shoulder. He stopped trying to force passage through the strongest pressure and used the edges instead, crossing from one clear region to another whenever the weapon committed.

His sword opened the thigh plate. The construct answered with a rising cut that caught him across the upper arm.

He sealed the bleeding and kept moving.

Fire drove against its front while water struck the exposed joint from below. He froze the water in place and crossed behind the obstruction with Raijin, bringing the full force of his body into an attack against its back.

The impact staggered it.

Leon followed with holy energy along his sword, maintaining the elemental pressure through the Primordial Void Heart while the separate current entered the blade.

He reached something behind the armor. The construct jerked forward, and for an instant its pressure weakened.

Then the broken plates drew together around his sword.

He wrenched the weapon free before they could trap it and retreated beneath the sweep of the long blade.

By the time he reached the wall, the damage had closed.

Leon stared at the restored back.

”Oh, you’re going to be annoying.”

He confirmed the recovery twice before committing another major attack.

Damage to a hip restored more slowly than damage near the head. The pale channels brightened before the outer plate reformed, and the flow always came from deeper in the body.

He began aiming for those channels.

The construct punished him for looking. A thrust drove through his outer defense and opened his thigh. Leon caught the haft beneath his arm before it could withdraw and turn the cut into something worse. His armor held against the dragging edge as he drove a concentrated elemental strike into its wrist.

The grip loosened.

He escaped through the gap, leaving blood on the stone, and raised an Earth barrier between them. The blade smashed through it almost immediately. Leon released the brace early and sent Lightning through the falling debris while he moved away.

Seraphine’s morning lesson bought him just enough time to get his leg working again.

She’s going to ask whether it helped.

He could already imagine her face when he answered.

By the time an hour had passed, he had located five dense knots inside the construct: one beneath each shoulder, one in the lower back, one behind the left hip, and one at the base of the skull.

Every major repair drew from them.

The knots were protected by thicker plating and the construct’s best defensive angles. There was no convenient exposed point waiting for him to notice it.

Leon took the left shoulder first.

He obscured his approach with Darkness, sent a bright flash across the construct’s opposite side, and entered beneath the blade when it turned to track him through its pressure. The deception only stole a fraction of a second. He spent it on a hardened spatial spear driven through the weakened shoulder plate.

The knot ruptured.

For several breaths, the shoulder hung uselessly.

Then the other four knots brightened, and the damaged one began forming again.

Leon stayed out of reach long enough to watch the whole process. The shoulder recovered in roughly fourteen seconds.

He glanced at the restored arm and swore.

Breaking one node changed the flow through the others. It did not end the recovery.

Over the following half hour, Leon tried interrupting the connections as well as the knots themselves. The construct rerouted the flow around the damage. When he destroyed two close together, the remaining nodes fed them in sequence.

He learned enough to plan a larger attempt, but the information was expensive.

A broken wrist slowed his sword hand until he created space to repair it. A shallow cut along his back remained open because healing it immediately would have distracted him from the weapon trying to split his head.

He had recovered from worse individual wounds. The repeated demand was beginning to weigh on him. Each major repair took concentration he wanted for the fight, and his body was growing less willing to answer instantly.

He could still stop. The token remained within reach beneath his armor.

Leon looked at the construct’s unmarked plates and felt a stubborn desire to leave something on them that stayed broken.

One proper attempt. Then I’ll know whether this is possible.

He forced the opponent toward the side of the chamber where his spatial control was strongest. Elemental Surge strengthened the ice closing around its forward foot. The construct broke the first restraint, stepped over the second, and raised its blade to strike him as he approached.

Leon used Raijin to pass the weapon.

His first attack entered the lower back. The node broke beneath a spatial spear, and he was already turning toward the left hip when the construct swung its elbow at him.

He ducked under it and ruptured the second knot through the joint.

The left shoulder came next. He reached it from below with his sword, holy energy driving through the damaged plating while mana maintained the restraint around the legs.

The construct tore one foot free.

Leon stayed close, took the scraping edge of its haft across his back, and struck the right shoulder before it could complete the turn.

Four nodes went dark.

Its pressure faltered so abruptly that he nearly overstepped. Leon caught himself and raised his sword toward the base of the skull.

The remaining node flared.

Energy rushed through the pale channels. The right shoulder, closest to the surviving knot, began restoring first. The construct recovered enough control of its arm to wrench the blade across its own body.

Leon tried to withdraw.

The haft caught him across the chest and threw him into the wall.

For a moment he could not draw breath.

His armor had held together, but the force beneath it left him on one knee with blood running over his tongue. The construct pulled its trapped foot free while pale light spread through its shoulders and down its back.

The hip node returned last.

Four broken knots, all restored by the fifth before he could stand.

Leon pressed a hand against his chest and began the repair. It took longer this time. He had to keep moving while broken ribs settled, raising a sloping barrier to turn the next strike instead of trying to meet it.

He stumbled behind the falling stone and finished drawing breath.

The head node had restored the nearest shoulder sooner than the full repair cycle. Fourteen seconds was an outside limit, not time he could safely spend.

He would have to break all five before the first useful restoration began.

The construct advanced with its blade level.

Leon straightened slowly. He knew where every node was now, and he knew what happened when he left one alive.

His hands were shaking. He tightened them around his sword and began looking for a way to reach the skull sooner.