SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 499: Outside World—3
The situation hadn’t deteriorated into something unmanageable yet — and the reason for that was two people who hadn’t actually started fighting anything.
They were making rules.
Seraphine and Ira stood slightly apart from the main clash, weapons out, auras fully active, working through the terms of a competition that both of them had apparently decided was more immediately important than the battle unfolding around them. The suggestion had come from both sides simultaneously — which made sense, given that both of them were carrying a loss they wanted to address.
Seraphine had lost the previous sparring match against Ira. Ira had lost something else — not the fight, but the bet attached to it, the one that had resulted in her calling Seraphine big sister in front of Leon, which she was still quietly embarrassed about and intended to rectify as soon as possible.
The terms Seraphine had originally laid out after winning had included that specific demand — Ira would call her big sis Sera going forward. Ira had accepted in the moment, believing it was a one-time concession for that occasion. She’d discovered, afterward, that Seraphine considered it a standing arrangement.
Ira had been speechless. She was not someone who went back on her word, which Seraphine knew, which was precisely why Seraphine had worded the original terms the way she had. Clever, calculated, and executed with the specific satisfaction of someone who had planned several moves ahead.
The current negotiation was Ira’s attempt to buy herself out of it.
She wanted a clause — if she won this competition, she wouldn’t have to use the title for a month. Simple enough in concept. Getting Seraphine to agree to it had taken considerably longer than it would have been simple. Seraphine had negotiated the terms with the patience and precision of someone who held the leverage and knew it, extracting her own conditions in return before finally agreeing to the month-long reprieve — but only if Ira’s kill count exceeded hers by a margin of at least ten.
Ira had no choice but to accept. The terms were unfavorable, and she knew it, but the alternative was worse.
Ira thought, eyes already scanning the battlefield ahead,
She remembers even her Aunt Vyra was giving her looks the whole time, when she had addressed Seraphine by her big sis Sera the whole time, she can’t leave it like this.
The word was given — both of them said it at the same time, because neither was willing to let the other start first.
They unleashed.
If this had been casual — just for the enjoyment of fighting, the pleasure of testing themselves against something — they would have held back enough to make it interesting. But there was a real stake on the line. Seraphine had also named something specific she wanted from Ira in return, which she hadn’t announced loudly but which had made Ira take the whole thing considerably more seriously.
Neither of them held anything back.
BOOM! BOOM! CRACK!
Ira’s spear became sunlight made solid — each strike detonating on contact with a force that didn’t leave anything behind to regenerate. The abyssal corruption that had been making the beasts so difficult to kill had a straightforward answer when the attack itself was thorough enough: if there was nothing left, there was nothing to heal. She wasn’t wounding them. She was erasing them, the fire element burning through the abyssal interference like it found the corruption personally offensive.
Seraphine moved differently — lightning-fast, precise, her katana leaving trails of purple-white light in the air behind each arc. Where Ira was a meteor, Seraphine was a sequence of decisions executed faster than most people could track. Her strikes didn’t leave burning craters. They left clean separations, the cuts going through the brain and heart simultaneously, giving the regenerative capability nothing meaningful to work with.
They cut through the horde like it wasn’t there.
The Ascendant-rank beasts that had been pushing the supreme leaders to their absolute limits — the ones that had been dominating the finest fighters the Middle Domain had available, grinding them down with regeneration that made every hard-won injury irrelevant — met Seraphine and Ira and discovered that their advantages were not universal.
SLASH! CRACK! BOOM! BOOM!
Dismantled. The word wasn’t strong enough, but it was accurate. The Ascendant beasts came apart, their remains destroyed thoroughly enough that the black-pupiled eyes went dark before whatever was controlling them could do anything about it.
Tens of monsters are dying in seconds. Then more.
The soldiers around them had initially mistaken them for the reinforcements they’d been waiting for — the ones the leaders had been desperately stalling to buy time for. Some of the supreme leaders had doubts about that identification, but suppressed them in favor of the immediate relief of watching the tide turn.
Something shifted in the beast horde when the kills started accumulating at scale.
The scattered groups that had been distributed across the battlefield began converging. Not randomly — with focus. They pulled away from other engagements and moved toward Seraphine and Ira specifically, leaving soldiers they’d been fighting to turn in the same direction.
Leon thought from above, watching the convergence pattern.
Vyra was watching it too, her expression carrying the particular alertness of someone whose instincts were firing steadily.
The battle didn’t extend long after that. Two hours of sustained, unrestricted combat between a sage-realm pair who had stopped holding back and a horde that, whatever its abyssal advantages, was operating at a fundamentally lower realm of power.
Ninety percent of the kills belonged to two people.
When the last beast fell, and the battlefield went quiet, the army stood in a silence that had the specific quality of people who had survived something they hadn’t been certain they would survive, processing the gap between the outcome they’d prepared for and the one that had actually occurred.
The supreme leaders stood at a distance from Seraphine and Ira, unable to approach — the auras of both women were still fully active, unrestricted, the competitive energy between them radiating outward in waves that made the air around them feel genuinely dangerous.
Underneath her cloak, the seventh supreme leader of the Middle Domain was not looking at the battlefield.
She was looking at Seraphine.
Her mind was in complete chaos.
she thought, her thoughts running fast behind her mask.
The terror was small but real — the specific fear of encountering something that violated her understanding of how strength development worked.
She swept her gaze around the area quickly, searching with urgent attention for something — someone — she was clearly dreading finding.
Her eyes completed the full sweep.
Nothing.
A breath left her that she’d been holding without realizing it. The relief was visible even through the cloak, in the slight drop of her shoulders and the quality of her stillness afterward.
she thought, the gratitude genuine and immediate.
She felt, for a moment, genuinely blessed.
Across the battlefield, Seraphine and Ira stood facing each other, weapons still out, auras still crackling against each other at the edges.
Ira’s voice came out slightly rougher than normal — combat residue in it, the specific hoarseness that came from two hours of sustained all-out fighting.
"How many?"