SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 740: What He Refused to Yield

Leon crossed the distance before Mardoc could examine the unfamiliar energy.

A layered stone shield rose between them. Leon struck first with the sword in his right hand, concentrating lightning along the seam opened by his earlier attacks. The edge bit, stopped, and shuddered in his grip.

He put his left palm against the damaged section and released the holy energy into that narrow opening.

The shield resisted. Stone crushed his fingers as Mardoc tried to seal the gap. Leon forced more power through the breach until the supporting layers broke apart. The remaining force struck the old man’s chest, throwing him backward.

Mardoc made a sound Leon had not heard from him before. He staggered back three steps. Where Leon’s palm had been, the stone on his robe had gone white and was flaking away, and under it the cloth was burned through, and under that, the skin was black and smoking.

He coughed. Blood came out, dark and thick.

Leon tried to follow before Mardoc recovered. A ridge of stone struck between them and forced him to turn his next cut downward. By the time he broke it, the old man had another layer over his damaged chest.

The holy strike had hurt him badly. It had also taught him not to let that hand near him again.

The old man looked down at his chest. Then he looked at Leon, and the last of the patience went out of his face.

He set both feet on the floor of the hollow and pulled.

The whole floor groaned. Leon felt it in his teeth. All through the hollow, every terrace shuddered, and the column of light in the center bent hard away from the old man. Mardoc’s skin went gray from head to foot, and the gray thickened, and his body seemed to grow as stone layered itself over him.

”You should have handed it over,” Mardoc said. His voice scraped through blood. The stone thickened around his shoulders as the floor began to rise.

The first thing the old man did was split the floor between Leon and the arcade.

The crack ran straight across the hollow in a line, wide as a man was tall, and it kept widening. Leon understood at once. The crack wasn’t aimed at him at all. The old man meant to make him choose. If the crack reached the arcade’s foundations, the walls the witnesses were sheltering behind would come down.

He threw a fold of space across the crack’s path just short of the arcade mouth. The crack hit it and stopped.

Holding that fold meant holding still for a breath.

Mardoc was on him in that breath.

The stone-covered fist came down where Leon’s head had been, and Leon rolled under it, and the floor cratered beside him. He came up already moving, swung his sword with fire behind it, and the old man took the cut on a forearm and grew more stone over it.

Holy energy remained in Leon’s left hand. Keeping it ready while driving the separate circulation at full output demanded a precision that pain was making harder.

The old man had worked that out too.

Mardoc pressed without giving him room to settle. Stone struck from above and below; another boulder threatened the arcade. Leon deflected it, then barely cleared the fist following behind. Each defense pulled at the attention he needed to keep the two energies apart.

Leon was losing the exchange, and he knew it. The ribs ground on every breath. His right thigh was bleeding steadily. His retained strength remained available, but driving it alongside the narrowed native circulation and separate holy flow was becoming harder with every injury.

Watch his feet. He has to draw from somewhere.

He found it on the third big attack.

Every large attack began with both feet planted. Afterward, the earth energy took a moment to settle before Mardoc moved again. Smaller attacks concealed that pause, but Leon had seen it three times now.

He needed to be behind the old man during that pause.

There was no safe way to wait for it. Another crack was creeping toward the folded boundary near the arcade, and Leon could feel the strain of holding it. He drew Mardoc’s next strike away from that side, letting the boulder pass close enough to tear his sleeve.

The old man followed him. Good. He wanted Leon hurt and cornered more than he wanted to bring down the distant walls. Leon could use that, provided he survived the next few steps.

Make him commit.

He let himself be slower. It wasn’t hard. He was slower. He let the old man drive him back across the floor toward the ice pool, step by step, taking a glancing blow on the shoulder that he could have avoided. He let his breathing go loud. He let the sword dip.

Mardoc saw it. Of course he did.

The old man set his feet.

On either side of Leon, the floor rose in two vast jaws, each as tall as a house, and slammed together.

Leon folded space.

It was a small fold. It was all he could make at that speed with what he had left: one pace wide, from the place he stood to a place eight paces behind the old man. It would hold for two breaths. While it held, it would take most of what he had.

He stepped through.

As Leon moved, he left an image at the point where the jaws were closing. Mardoc had already committed his force and attention there. Leon needed the false outline to survive only that instant, not withstand a searching examination.

The jaws met with a crash that shook the whole hollow.

For one heartbeat, the old man’s attention stayed on the place where Leon should have been, crushed.

His feet were still planted.

Leon came out of the fold behind him with the holy light in his left hand.

He struck beneath the back of the stone armor with his sword, driving into the same damaged side he had wounded from the front. His left palm followed. Holy energy forced through the broken protection and into the body beneath, and Mardoc’s circulating power broke apart.

Mardoc twisted. His stone-covered arm caught Leon across the shoulder, but the blow no longer carried the hill behind it. Leon held on through the pain and kept forcing power into the opening. If he let go now, the old man might find his footing again.

He stayed until the strength went out of the arm pressing against him.

He left the sword in Mardoc’s failing body and closed his right hand.

Mardoc’s soul began pulling free as his body failed. Leon contracted the short spatial passage around it, holding the escape inside a tight pocket. The old man no longer had his planted feet or the hill feeding his blows. Even injured and cut off, he nearly tore through the enclosure.

The first impact split the skin of Leon’s right palm. He reinforced the boundary and drove the remaining holy energy into the trapped soul with his other hand. The attacks stayed distinct: space containing it, holy force striking within.

Gray force battered the boundary, weakening under the concentrated attacks. Leon kept it closed until the last resistance broke and the soul dispersed. He searched the confined space for another movement before releasing it.

Mardoc’s body fell onto the broken floor. Stone armor peeled from the dead man’s shoulders and shattered beside him. Leon tried to take a step, but his right leg folded beneath him.