SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 498: Outside World—2

What stood in front of them was an army.

Thousands of soldiers stretched across the landscape in organized formation, their backs to Leon and his group, facing forward with the rigid alertness of people expecting something they weren’t looking forward to. The atmosphere was tight — the specific tension that settled over soldiers who had done this before and knew what was coming.

No fighting yet. Just waiting.

A few of the soldiers nearest to them had already noticed their arrival. Three broke from the formation and approached, moving with the brisk purpose of people operating on limited time.

The one in front looked them over with a quick, assessing glance and spoke without ceremony.

"Where are you from?" He didn’t wait for the answer. "Save the explanation for later. Just come with us — monsters from the upper world are about to break through. There’s no time."

At the mention of the upper world, the dread on his face was unmistakable — not performed, not exaggerated. The real kind.

Leon and the others exchanged glances. A brief, shared look between all four of them that contained an entire conversation — the nod that followed was unanimous.

They fell in behind the soldiers without argument.

Leon noted internally.

The terminology was interesting. And the monsters coming from there were interesting too, though in different ways for each of them. Leon felt curiosity rather than concern — his current strength made concern feel like an overcalculation. Ira was barely containing her enthusiasm, which was visible in the way she moved and the brightness behind her eyes. Seraphine walked with focused attention, the kind she had when she was reading a situation and filing details. Vyra assessed quietly, her expression neutral but her awareness clearly engaged.

Vyra thought, reading the army’s formation and the quality of the soldiers,

She kept that assessment to herself for now.

As they integrated into the formation, Leon’s enhanced senses swept forward — and then he found the seven figures positioned well ahead of the main army, leading from the front. Tall, clearly powerful by the standards of this domain, separated from the regular soldiers by the simple fact that the space around them felt different.

Seven of them.

Leon’s eyes settled on one in particular — cloaked, masked, the silhouette carrying a specific quality that his memory supplied an identity for before his conscious mind had finished the process.

Seventh supreme leader of the Middle Domain.

He recognized her at first glance despite the mask and the cloak. The others beside her would be the remaining supreme leaders — the six he hadn’t met. He filed that and didn’t announce it.

They didn’t have to wait long after that.

The ground began to tremble. Not violently — a low, sustained tremor that came from something massive moving through dense earth, the kind that built gradually rather than arriving all at once. Then the sounds came rolling out of the forest ahead — guttural, layered, countless throats producing overlapping roars that merged into a wall of noise.

Ira’s spear appeared in her hand. Her eyes lit up in the specific way they did when she was about to do something she genuinely enjoyed, the fire affinity bleeding into her expression until she looked like she was about to enjoy herself considerably more than the situation called for.

The soldiers nearest to her took a quiet step back, then another. Her aura alone — the heat coming off her, the intensity of her combat readiness — was enough to create automatic distance even from people who hadn’t consciously decided to move away from her.

Seraphine’s katana was out, purple lightning crackling along the blade in controlled arcs, her eyes sharp and clear with the focused calm she only had when she was fully prepared.

The ground under both of them cracked and scorched simultaneously.

From ahead, the seven supreme leaders launched forward together — a single booming order to charge rolling back through the formation, and the army responded.

Seraphine became a streak of lightning and light, brilliant and fast, cutting toward the emerging tide of beasts with the precision of someone who had already calculated the first twelve moves.

Ira became a blazing red meteor.

Leon and Vyra rose.

Neither of them made a show of it — they simply lifted into the air below the level where Ira and Seraphine were already engaging, moving forward at a pace that kept them observing the full picture of what was unfolding. No one in the army noticed. The soldiers were too focused on the forward threat, and their perception was too limited to register movement at the level Leon and Vyra operated at. Even the supreme leaders ahead showed no sign of detecting anything unusual.

The beasts emerged from the treeline in a tide.

Hundreds of them, many times human height, the ground shaking under their mass as they came. The collision between the two forces was enormous — sound, force, chaos spreading across the entire front simultaneously.

But Leon had already noticed something before the clash arrived.

A smell. Or not a smell exactly — a quality in the energy coming from within the horde, something underneath the surface reading of them as simply large, powerful beasts. Not from all of them. Many of them. A familiar, disgusting signature that made something in him pull into quiet alertness.

Abyssal energy.

Vyra spoke beside him, low.

"Something is wrong with them." She didn’t have the same inherited recognition he did, the specific sensitivity that let him identify abyssal energy on contact. But the gap in strength between her and the horde was wide enough that her instincts were firing anyway. "My instincts are telling me something is off. They’re mostly Master rank with Ascendant mixed in, but they feel wrong."

Leon nodded without looking away from the battlefield.

Wrong was accurate. The abyssal energy embedded in many of them was the same signature he’d encountered before — the same disgusting quality that had nothing to do with natural beast power and everything to do with something that had gotten into them from outside their nature.

Below them, the battle developed.

The human and demi-human forces had a numerical advantage — roughly two to one against the beast tide, which should have been workable. The supreme leaders were fighting effectively, their power genuinely significant at the level of this domain, and the army’s organization was solid.

But winning wasn’t what was happening.

Struggle was what was happening.

Every beast the army badly wounded should have gone down. Instead, the wounds closed. Not slowly — rapidly, visibly, injuries that should have been fight-ending, sealing shut within seconds. The soldiers who landed what should have been killing blows watched those blows fail to kill, and the dread that produced on their faces was not abstract.

The supreme leaders were grinding through the same problem. They could inflict enormous damage. It didn’t stay inflicted.

The expressions across the battlefield — grit teeth, wide eyes, the particular horror of people who had prepared for this and were still being ground down by it — told Leon this wasn’t the first time this had happened. A week ago, apparently, something similar had occurred. Only the intervention of an outside force had prevented a complete wipeout of what he understood were the most elite forces the Middle Domain could field.

Master ranks were falling with regularity. Below that level, the soldiers were cannon fodder, and everyone present understood it.

The regeneration was the problem. The abyssal energy was the reason.

Leon watched it all from above and began thinking about what he was going to do about it.