SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 503: Outside World—7

Leon, Seraphine, Ira, and Vyra departed.

Ira turned to her father before they moved, her voice carrying the particular directness she brought to everything.

"Take care of yourself. And if you’re getting beaten, just run — don’t try to be a hero about it."

Her father’s face twitched. The sentiment was clear enough, and he understood exactly what she meant by it — she was telling him his life mattered more than any battle outcome, which was genuinely touching. The wording, however, was something a daughter probably shouldn’t say to a peak Sage rank former leader of an entire race in front of fifty people he was about to command.

He pulled her into a hug instead of responding to the wording directly.

"I’ll take care of myself and everyone here," he said, with the composed authority of someone who had been leading people through impossible situations for longer than most of the soldiers present had been alive. He looked at Leon over her shoulder and gave a single nod.

Leon returned it.

He wasn’t worried. Through the clone, he’d already briefed the team thoroughly — the time difference inside his dimensional world meant that the thirty seconds of outside time he’d used to organize and summon them had been more than sufficient for complete preparation. They knew the situation, the terrain, the likely threat vectors, and the specific capabilities they were defending against.

He’d also given them a short list of names to watch for and protect if encountered.

Loriel was on it. She’d left his world ahead of them, compass in hand, somewhere in the general direction they were now heading. Her mother was with her, which reduced the concern considerably, but he’d included her name regardless. He’d met her in his first dungeon — she was something close to a friend, one of the earlier genuine ones, and he didn’t want her caught in what the Middle Domain was clearly still dealing with.

Isabella was on the list, too. They hadn’t met under favorable circumstances by any conventional measure — he’d walked out of her treasury considerably wealthier than he’d entered it, and she’d had opinions about that which she’d expressed through being visibly traumatized by his presence ever since. But he considered her a real acquaintance now, and she was genuinely cute in a way that made the idea of her dying somewhere unacceptable to him.

He was aware this was biased. He was fine with it.

The best-case scenario was that nothing unexpected happened at all. Ira’s father, at peak Sage rank, with several others at the same level integrated into the team, put the group’s defensive ceiling well above what any realistic second wave should be able to threaten. And Leon would be heading into the higher domain — he wasn’t going to allow anything significant to escape through that forest corridor while he was on the other side of it.

They moved.

Their pace was fast enough that the soldiers watching their departure saw blurs rather than people. The dense forest swallowed them quickly, the treeline closing behind the group as they pushed into the interior.

Monsters came. Seraphine and Ira handled them with the automatic efficiency of people who had been doing this for hours already and had developed a rhythm. Neither of them was expending significant effort — the forest’s inhabitants were capable enough to threaten ordinary people, but not remotely relevant at the sage level.

Leon thought about the domains as they moved through the forest.

Something about how they were structured had been sitting at the edge of his attention since they’d entered the Middle Domain. The density differential in mana between domains was noticeable — he could feel it clearly, the ambient energy thickening as they moved toward the boundary. But there was no visible mechanism. No physical barrier, no obvious enchantment, nothing he could point to and identify as the cause.

he thought.

The question of who and why was interesting and currently unanswerable. He filed it.

His world ignored those rules entirely, which he found quietly satisfying.

The forest took roughly an hour to cross at their pace. On the other side, the air changed.

The vegetation thinned but didn’t disappear — the outskirts of the higher domain had growth, just differently distributed. The mana density here was noticeably greater than what they’d been moving through. Not dramatically, not the way his dimensional world felt after Xyra’s work, but measurable and real.

They followed the compass needle without standing on ceremony.

The first large hoard appeared within the first stretch of travel — hundreds of corrupted beasts moving in a coordinated mass toward the forest boundary, heading directly for the Middle Domain.

Leon didn’t let them reach it.

Leximancy, deployed without ceremony.

One word — and hundreds died simultaneously, collapsing where they stood as if the instruction to continue existing had simply been revoked.

Two more words — the remainder, the ones on the edges who’d been outside the first command’s radius, gone.

Silence.

Ira, Seraphine, and Vyra stood in the aftermath and said nothing for a moment.

Ira thought, looking at the field of collapsed beasts,

The awe on all three of their faces was genuine — the specific expression of people who had been fighting hard for hours and had just watched the same category of problem get resolved with three words and no apparent effort.

It wasn’t the first time Leon had used Leximancy in front of them, but the scale and the ease of it at this level consistently produced the same reaction.

He didn’t comment on it and kept moving.

The encounters didn’t thin as they traveled deeper. If anything, they increased — corrupted beasts attacking cities and settlements throughout the higher domain, the abyssal energy permeating them at a noticeably higher concentration than what they’d seen in the Middle Domain. These creatures were harder to kill for the people they were attacking. Not because the beasts themselves were stronger in absolute terms, but because the corruption density made conventional killing methods insufficient — wounds closed before they could finish the job, and in several cases Leon saw something worse.

Human casualties are being absorbed. The corruption spreads outward from the killed beasts into the nearest fallen human bodies, the abyssal energy threads through dead tissue and incorporates what it finds into the larger collective rather than leaving corpses behind.

he noted, watching the process with focused attention.

He and the others moved through settlement after settlement, clearing what they found. Leon led with his twin blades — one of holy energy, one of combined elemental Auras — the holy element interacting with the abyssal corruption in a way that didn’t just kill but purified, leaving nothing behind that the corruption could reclaim. Tens of beasts fell with each swing, and the attacks were scaled carefully to avoid leveling the settlements they were defending.

Seraphine’s lightning and light affinities were, in practical terms, exactly the wrong combination for these beasts to face. Lightning as a second counter, light as a primary one — she was cutting through corrupted creatures with the efficiency of someone whose toolkit had been accidentally optimized for this specific enemy. She was visibly aware of it and was using the advantage without sentiment.

Ira and Vyra — fire — were effective but differently. Fire could overwhelm the regeneration through sheer intensity rather than elemental opposition, which meant it worked but required more direct output to achieve the same result. Ira compensated with aggression. Vyra compensated with precision.

Ira suggested another bet, approximately four encounters in.

Seraphine won it cleanly. Twenty more kills than Ira, the elemental advantage playing out in exactly the way Vyra had predicted while watching from the sideline with the expression of someone who had done the math in advance and was watching the calculation confirmed in real time.

Ira stared at the gap. Twenty. She’d won the previous competition by nine and lost this one by twenty, which meant the element issue was real and measurable and not something she could outwork through sheer aggression alone.

She didn’t get depressed. She got focused.

she decided, watching Seraphine accept the win with characteristic composure.

Vyra watched her niece reach this conclusion and revised her earlier assessment. She’d been thinking Ira was simply too straightforward to adapt. That wasn’t accurate. She was direct — which looked the same from outside but was different — and her response to a problem once she understood it was to go through it harder rather than around it. That was a valid approach if the fire could actually get hot enough.

Vyra thought.

The gap closed. Not by the next fight — in the next fight after that, Ira lost by fifteen. Then twelve. Then, in the fight after that, two.

Seraphine noticed. She kept her expression exactly where it normally was, but she noticed.

Their names were spreading ahead of them through the higher domain — the group that had been moving through the chaos, clearing beasts from settlements that had stopped expecting anyone to clear them. People were alive who wouldn’t have been. Cities that had been hours away from falling were standing.

Loriel was still somewhere ahead, the compass pointing steadily in her direction.

They kept moving.

[A/N: Thank you so much for all the support until now.]