SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 506: The Temple—2

The hug ended.

Loriel stepped back with the slightly dazed quality of someone who’d needed something badly and had gotten it, her composure returning in increments. The blush stayed — settled into her cheeks and showed no sign of leaving anytime soon.

Leon moved to the bed without pausing.

Luna watched him approach with the measured attention of someone making a final assessment before an unpleasant conversation. She’d already decided to let him see the wound clearly — let reality do the work of walking back whatever confident thing he’d said to Loriel. She didn’t hold it against him. Young men said things. It was practically a universal feature. His tongue had clearly served him well up to this point, and whatever he said next to soften the situation, she’d give him credit for trying.

He didn’t ask permission. Didn’t request to examine her or explain what he was about to do. His hand simply pressed against her chest over the bandages, and then something flooded into her that she had no prior reference for.

Warmth was the wrong word. It was more than that — more than temperature, more than the familiar movement of life energy she’d spent decades working with. This was something that moved through her like light through water, reaching places that standard healing never reached, finding the dark thing latched onto the wound beneath her bandages and destroying it.

The abyssal energy had been there for days, sunk deep into the tissue, blocking every attempt her body made at repair. It had tendrils she hadn’t known about, threading inward from the original wound site in directions that even her own considerable knowledge hadn’t fully mapped.

Every single one of them came apart.

The sensation was — she made sounds she would not be revisiting in her memory if she could help it. Two of them, involuntary, escaped before she could even register the impulse to suppress them. The healing moved through her in waves, and each wave dissolved something that had been hurting for so long she’d stopped experiencing it as pain and started experiencing it simply as the current state of existing.

Then it was done.

Leon stepped back. "It’s done."

Luna sat up.

Not carefully. Not with the measured, deliberate effort she’d been using for every movement for the past several days, calculating the cost of each shift before committing to it. She just sat up, because her body worked again, and it had apparently forgotten that it was supposed to require effort.

She looked at her own hands.

The things she knew about abyssal energy infection were not small knowledge. She’d spent years in the higher domain working on this crisis, watching the infection spread through beast populations, watching what it did to the few humans unlucky enough to absorb it through serious wounds. Light elemental priests working in coordinated relays, multiple life elemental healers applying sustained effort over days — that was the current treatment for early-stage infection. Barely adequate even then.

Once the infection took deep root, the consensus among every healer she respected was unanimous and grim: there was nothing to be done. It didn’t respond to anything. It degraded the body’s repair functions from the inside, and it kept degrading them until there was nothing left to degrade.

He’d walked in and erased it in under a minute.

Without apparent effort. Without even describing what he was doing.

She processed this with the particular stillness of someone whose framework for what was possible had just been handed a significant revision and needed a moment to rebuild around the new information.

’With him involved,’ she thought slowly, ’we might actually be able to repel this.’

Not survive it with acceptable losses. Repel it.

That thought hadn’t been available to her before this moment.

Loriel had been watching from across the room, holding herself tight, and when Luna stood up freely and without pain written all over her face, the shock hit her like something physical. She understood what she was seeing. As a healer, she understood exactly what deep-rooted abyssal infection meant and what the prognosis was, and how it didn’t move in the direction of recovery.

She grabbed Leon’s arm.

Her face was bright, her eyes shining with a relief so large it had nowhere else to go. She pressed herself against his arm without thinking about it, and Leon registered the soft, round pressure of her against him with a quiet appreciation he kept entirely internal. She was small in most respects but decidedly not in others, and the way she was currently holding his arm left that detail fairly apparent.

’Small,’ he thought, ’but very round. Very soft.’

He said nothing about it and kept his expression neutral.

With the immediate crisis resolved, Leon asked the question he’d been holding — why were they hidden down here, in a concealed room beneath a temple, instead of out there with the people fighting?

Loriel opened her mouth.

Luna answered first.

She introduced herself simply — Luna, no title, no rank. She’d assessed him clearly enough in the past few minutes that leading with her position felt faintly absurd. His strength made hierarchy irrelevant as a conversational tool.

Then she told him.

The ambush had happened during one of the earlier large engagements. She’d been fighting alongside the main force, doing what she’d been doing for weeks — healing casualties, neutralizing infected creatures where possible, trying to slow the spread. Someone in their own group had turned mid-battle. Not gradually. Instantly. One moment, a person she’d fought alongside for months, the next a vector for the abyssal energy, attacking with the specific targeting of something that had been waiting for the right moment rather than something that had snapped under pressure.

The wound she’d taken was the result of that. Deep, immediate, placed with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to hit a healer to make sure the healing couldn’t work.

After that, remaining in the main group was no longer safe. Not because she doubted the people around her specifically, but because the infection’s ability to hide inside a person and detonate without warning meant that any gathering of fighters was a potential ambush waiting for its moment. She and Loriel had withdrawn to this room — known to almost no one, accessible only through a mechanism she’d designed herself — and had been working from here since.

Leon listened to all of it without interrupting.

When she finished, he asked about the invasion specifically. Not the beasts — those he’d seen in volume over the past several hours. He meant the source. She’d called it an invasion, which implied a point of origin, and that was the part he needed to understand.

Luna didn’t hold anything back.

It had started years ago — quietly, the way the worst things often did. A crack had appeared somewhere in the higher domain, small enough that it went unnoticed for longer than it should have. By the time anyone found it, the ominous energy radiating from it had already touched the nearest beast populations. Once touched, those populations began growing. More creatures meant more corruption being generated and absorbed. More corruption meant the crack opened wider. A self-reinforcing cycle, compounding steadily while the higher domain’s forces tried to manage the creature numbers without understanding what was actually driving them.

The crack now measured roughly twenty inches. A gap that looked almost manageable against the scale of the crisis it was producing — except that getting anywhere close to it was lethal. The energy density at the source was beyond what any currently living cultivator could approach without the infection taking hold immediately. The corrupted creatures, by contrast, seemed to absorb it and strengthen from direct exposure rather than being harmed by it.

They couldn’t close it. They couldn’t approach it. And every day it sat open, it grew incrementally larger.

Leon was quiet for a moment after she finished.

He thought about what he’d seen on the journey here — cities in ruins, beast hoards moving in coordinated waves, the scale of human casualties visible in every settlement they’d passed through; out of all of them, this city is probably the best and most intact.