SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 446: First Floor of Ascension Tower—16

The two were mixed together in a way Leon had genuinely never encountered before, creating something greater and more versatile than either component could achieve alone.

Not that understanding a direction meant immediately arriving at the destination. He couldn’t will himself into Level 5 aura mastery in the middle of an active battle against an Ethereal-ranked opponent. Comprehension and achievement were entirely different things.

But the seed had been planted. That alone made this trial valuable beyond whatever rewards the system might eventually provide.

More urgently—Leon had been carefully concealing his single remaining trump card throughout the entire extended exchange. Waiting. Measuring. Looking for the precise conditions he needed.

If he revealed it prematurely and the creature recognized the threat, it would adapt its defensive positioning and Leon would forfeit his only realistic path to a killing blow. To defeat something at this fundamental power level, he needed a window of genuine vulnerability—not just a momentary gap, but complete defenselessness, however brief.

Then, without adequate warning, an enormous blow connected with his chest from the front.

The last thing Leon registered clearly was the creature’s crackling, gleeful laughter—kehehehehe—high-pitched and utterly delighted—and the sight of that impossibly wide smile stretched across pale features.

The impact was at least ten percent more powerful than anything it had deployed previously during their entire fight. As if it had been deliberately hoarding that reserve of force for this specific moment.

Leon’s holy armor shattered completely from the full direct connection—a sound like a cathedral window exploding—the first time during the entire fight that his divine protection had been comprehensively stripped away.

His body hit the arena wall with a tremendous impact, stone caving inward around him with a deep, resonant crunch, dust and fragments raining down around his suspended form. He hung there against the deformed wall for a moment, chest visibly caved in, blood flowing freely from the corner of his mouth.

And something else.

A purplish hue spreading slowly across patches of his exposed skin—visible now that the armor was gone, spreading outward from his core like slow ink diffusing through water.

He rapidly reformed the holy armor around himself—he genuinely couldn’t afford even moments of complete exposure—the divine energy condensing around him with a soft, sustained hum.

Since the very beginning of the match, he’d been peripherally aware of a faint, invasive energy attempting to work its way into his body. Previously it had registered as barely noticeable prickling across his skin—annoying but seemingly minor enough that his holy energy and Divinordial constitution had been neutralizing it passively without requiring conscious direction.

But with his defenses momentarily shattered and his active systems momentarily disrupted, the accumulated substance had flooded inward aggressively, reaching concentrations his passive defenses couldn’t immediately process.

He directed the full purging capacity of his holy energy toward systematically eliminating every trace of the invasive substance from his system, feeling it burn away under concentrated divine force with a faint internal sensation like warmth cutting through cold.

His body was still shaking visibly. The trembling wasn’t entirely from injury—the accumulated physical damage from the extended fight combined with the sudden aggressive purge of the poison was placing genuine strain on his recovery systems simultaneously.

The creature was already approaching before Leon had fully straightened from the impact point against the wall, moving with unhurried, absolute confidence now that it believed its invisible weapon had achieved sufficient accumulation to be decisive.

Even through blurred vision and the real physical strain pressing down on him, Leon studied the creature’s approach with everything he had left, searching for any exploitable gap.

But then—a subtle shift in its posture. A fractional relaxation in its defensive configuration as it registered Leon’s visibly struggling form and drew what seemed like an obvious conclusion about his current state.

Leon made a deliberate choice.

He let his body language communicate what the creature wanted to believe—what it had already concluded was true. His knees trembled with slightly more visibility. His sword hand dropped a degree lower than necessary. His breathing became audible, heavier, more labored.

All of it technically real and accurate—just not as catastrophically complete as he was allowing it to appear. The suffering was genuine. The incapacitation was exaggerated.

The creature paused a short distance away, those glowing red eyes practically shimmering with barely restrained anticipation as they studied the apparently crumbling human before them.

it thought, its excitement building to something almost overwhelming.

The honest answer leaned toward no, which was a remarkable acknowledgment—even if the lofty images of demon lords that filled its imagination made definitive judgment difficult.

The heart of a being possessing this regenerative capability and this level of talent would be extraordinarily valuable presented to the right authorities. Proof of what it had encountered and eliminated here would generate rewards surpassing everything it had been patiently accumulating toward for years.

It raised one arm slowly, almost ceremonially—the limb now covered in thick, compressed magma condensed to near-diamond density, pulsating with intense internal heat that made the air around it shimmer and distort. At the fingertips, elongated purple nails of crystallized abyssal energy extended like natural weapons, each one honed to a sharpness that could penetrate virtually any material at sufficient force.

One clean strike. Through the chest. The heart was the singular objective.

The arm moved.

It crossed the distance between them with the speed of a lightning flash—a sound like tearing air, sharp and clean—aimed with precise surgical accuracy directly at Leon’s chest, the magma-armored fist and those terrible purple nails converging on the spot where his heart beat steadily beneath reformed holy armor.

Leon’s head was angled slightly downward, eyes not tracking the approach—

But those eyes were gleaming with pure, concentrated golden light that had nothing whatsoever to do with defeat.

Every fractional measure of his remaining focus had narrowed down to this single moment, this single point in time, this single opportunity he had engineered through patience and calculated endurance.