SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 496: Outside World

Leon and the others stepped out of the portal onto familiar ground — the same spot he’d exited from before, just outside the old dried-up well.

Ira and Archon Vyra both paused the moment they crossed through, taking in their surroundings with the specific attention of people encountering something genuinely new for the first time. The air here was different from the dimensional world — heavier somehow, carrying the texture of a world that had existed and accumulated history rather than one still finding its shape. The sky above them was real sky, the kind that had weather patterns and actual sunlight rather than ambient sourceless glow.

Ira turned slowly, eyes moving across everything with open fascination.

Vyra did the same, though more quietly — absorbing rather than reacting, centuries of composed leadership making her internal experience invisible from outside even when it was clearly significant.

The first thing Leon noticed was the absence.

Liora wasn’t with them. He’d registered it without comment, but it needed acknowledging, and the explanation had already arrived through his shared awareness with the clone.

It had happened during the time Leon and Seraphine were occupied on the mountain — his clone had been overseeing operations when Liora approached with visible anxiety sitting across her entire face. She’d asked directly and without preamble: she wanted to go outside. Back to her world, her people, whatever was waiting for her there.

Under the previous circumstances, trapped inside the Pyran realm with no exit available to anyone, the request would have been impossible to fulfill from the start. But those circumstances had changed completely.

The clone had told her to wait — that Leon would accompany her when he was available which won’t be long, that going alone was unnecessary. She’d refused. The anxious feeling in her chest hadn’t lifted in days, she’d said, and she couldn’t sit with it any longer. She would go alone if that was what it took.

The clone had let her go.

She wasn’t a prisoner. She had never been. She could leave whenever she chose, and he trusted her enough — genuinely — to keep quiet about the things that needed to stay quiet. She understood what was at stake. She’d proven that much.

Leon reached into his inventory and pulled out a small device that looked, at first glance, like a compass — circular, plain edges with nothing written on them, a single needle at its center that vibrated faintly as it oriented itself toward a specific direction.

He watched the needle settle.

A quiet breath of relief left him.

It was working. Pointing clearly, the direction is steady rather than confused or spinning. He’d given Liora an identical one before she left — paired devices, each tracking the other, meaning she could find him just as easily as he could find her. When the time came and their paths needed to cross again, the compasses would handle it regardless of the distance between them.

The devices had come from Isabella’s treasure collection — the seventh supreme leader of the Middle Domain, who had gifted him a considerable trove of items during their encounter. Several pieces from that collection had turned out to be genuinely useful in ways he hadn’t anticipated at the time. He felt something close to gratitude thinking about it now.

he thought,

She’d been in a difficult position when they’d met, her life genuinely on the line. He hadn’t forgotten that, well, one holding her life on the line was him, but that was due to the circumstances that made it be. If she ever needed something from him and he was capable of providing it, he intended to.

He tucked the compass away and turned to more immediate business.

Sylphia had already announced, the moment they’d stepped outside, that she and Bunbun would be going their separate way from here.

Bunbun had grumbled at this — a low, dissatisfied sound that communicated her feelings clearly without committing to actual words. She remembered what her god had said before they left. He hadn’t told her she couldn’t come back. He’d told her to visit her family. Those were two very different instructions, and she’d spent the short journey here quietly building a plan around that distinction.

Visit her family? Yes. She would do that. But visiting didn’t mean leaving forever. And if her father, mother, siblings, and perhaps the entire clan happened to want to follow her back when she returned — well, nobody had said anything about that either.

She followed Sylphia without protest, the plan already fully formed and sitting comfortably in her mind.

Leon watched them go and didn’t stop them.

He’d already helped them considerably — more than the situation had strictly required. And Bunbun, whatever her current state of fervent devotion, was generating holy energy at a rate that rivaled James, possibly more in certain circumstances, given the specific intensity of her belief. If fate brought her back, he’d accept that without hesitation. If his path toward the higher domains meant she never found him again — that was also a valid outcome.

He set those thoughts aside and checked the compass direction once more before starting to move.

Seraphine fell into step beside him naturally. Ira and Vyra followed, the four of them moving through the outskirts together.

Ira had lasted approximately thirty seconds before asking her question. She’d been looking around at the landscape — rubble of what appeared to be an ancient city, reclaimed by time and forest, nothing active or inhabited — and the gap between this and what Leon had described to her earlier was clearly bothering her; other than the mighty sun in the sky, nothing excited her until now.

"This is what’s so interesting?" she asked, looking at crumbled stone half-swallowed by trees.

"Outskirts," Leon said simply. "Not the main area. This is the edge — old ruins, forest. The actual civilization is further in."

She accepted that and went quiet again, though not for long.

As for the matter of Ira and Vyra’s appearance, their skin was a deep red, distinctive enough that it would draw immediate attention in any human-populated area. Their other features were entirely human in proportion and structure, which helped, and the golden markings that traced their skin had faded to near-invisibility at rest under their new armor. But the red skin remained.

Leon had illusion affinity. His mastery of it wasn’t exceptional — he hadn’t prioritized it — but for the strength levels of people they’d be encountering in the Middle Domain, it was more than sufficient to handle a simple appearance overlay. He applied it to both of them without making an event of it, adjusting their apparent skin tone to something that wouldn’t cause every person they passed to stop and stare.

His actual destination had never been the higher domain itself as a final goal. The higher domain was a means to an end — the most likely place to find information or pathways leading to a higher-ranked world entirely. That was the real objective. The route just happened to pass through here first.

They reached a city by mid-travel.

None of them had identification — the standard documents that city gates technically required. It didn’t matter in any practical sense. Every single person in their group operated at a level where the people staffing those checkpoints were simply not a relevant obstacle. Getting in was not a problem that required solving.

But the city itself — that was something else.

Ira saw it from a distance and immediately started talking.

The towering structures are visible even from outside. The movement of people — humans and demi-humans mixed throughout, the specific energy of a place with commerce and noise, and a hundred things happening simultaneously. Shops, stalls, voices layered over each other, the smell of food and activity, and populated life.

She’d never seen anything like it. The Pyran realm had been scorched by rock and survival. Leon’s dimensional world was growing, but still quiet and new. This was a real, living, functioning city, and she wanted to go inside immediately, and she was saying so at length and with considerable enthusiasm.

Leon watched Archon Vyra’s face while Ira talked.

Every time Ira mentioned going in — which was frequently — Vyra’s head made a small, almost imperceptible movement. A slight nod. Unconscious, clearly, because the moment Ira paused, Vyra’s expression returned to its composed default as if nothing had happened.

She wanted to go in just as much as Ira did. She simply wasn’t saying it because centuries of being the one who carried everything and stayed serious had apparently convinced her that wanting things like this wasn’t something she was supposed to voice anymore.

Leon found it genuinely endearing in a way he didn’t comment on.

"We’re going in," he said.

Ira made a sound that was essentially pure joy compressed into a single syllable.

Vyra said nothing, but something in her posture shifted — barely, almost invisibly — into something that looked, for just a moment, like anticipation, and Leon, noticing everything, couldn’t help but find her so adorable.