SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 508: The Temple—4

Leon stood looking at her closed eyes and the small fists clenched at her sides and felt something he didn’t immediately have a word for.

The thought arrived and he waved it away almost instantly. Loriel couldn’t pull something like that off. She didn’t have the architecture for deliberate manipulation — everything she felt moved straight to her face without passing through any filter first. The closed eyes, the tiptoes, the expression of someone bracing for something they’d decided to stop fighting against — that was just her. Unguarded in the way she apparently was around him specifically, without quite realizing how unguarded she was.

He looked at her for a moment.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. She was genuinely adorable — the crybaby tendencies, the almost comical sensitivity to pain, the way she got flustered so completely that her face ran out of room for color. Cute. Good-looking in a way that was understated rather than obvious. And beneath all of that, genuinely good, in the way that some people simply were without having to work at it.

But she felt young to him right now. Not in age — in this specific moment, expecting her first kiss with her eyes shut and her feet on tiptoe, she felt like something delicate that needed more time before this particular thing happened between them. He wanted her to arrive at it with more of herself in place, not just be swept along by the momentum of a situation she’d walked into without fully thinking.

he decided.

He flicked her forehead.

Controlled. Minimal force — he’d calibrated it specifically for someone with the approximate pain tolerance of a decorative pillow.

The sound it made was very small.

Loriel’s eyes opened.

"Ouch—"

She blinked. Then she looked at him. Then the tears started forming at the corners of her eyes with a speed that genuinely alarmed him.

he thought, staring at the emerging moisture.

He had miscalculated one variable: her emotional state going into the flick had been approximately seventeen layers deep, all of them running hot, none of them oriented toward withstanding even minor additional input. The tingly anticipation, the surrender-adjacent moment of deciding to just let it happen, the mention of Seraphine that had felt like a confession she hadn’t planned to make — all of it had wound her up to a sensitivity level that made the actual pain irrelevant. The flick had simply been the thing that broke the surface.

"Why did you hit me?" Her voice came out accusatory, genuinely upset.

Her hazel eyes were filling. Her nose had gone slightly pink. The face she was making was the face of someone trying very hard not to cry and losing ground on it steadily.

he thought.

He felt guilty, which was both reasonable and absurd simultaneously, and he was aware of both qualities at once.

"You even called me a clueless idiot," she added, which was fair, and which she delivered with the specific indignation of someone who had been too flustered to register the insult in the moment but had filed it away for later use.

He brought his hand up and rubbed her forehead gently with his thumb — careful, apologetic in motion if not yet in words. Then he shifted toward his life element, letting the mana move toward the small red mark on her otherwise flawless skin. It would have faded on its own in minutes, but—

Loriel felt the mana activate.

Her body shook. The tears that had been threatening tipped over the edge, not falling yet but absolutely present, her eyes redder now, her hands coming up to grab fistfuls of his shirt and pull.

"Stop." Her voice was sharp with a kind of anger he’d never heard from her before — genuine, not performed. "You hit me and now you’re trying to heal me. Why are you so cruel?"

His mana stopped.

was the first thing his mind produced. The second thing was that she still looked devastatingly cute even when angry, which he recognized was not the priority right now but was difficult to fully set aside.

He looked at her. She looked at him. Her eyes were right on the edge of actually spilling over, her grip on his shirt tight, the expression on her face a mixture of upset and something underneath that wasn’t quite upset — something closer to overwhelmed, too many feelings arriving at the same time and finding insufficient space.

He had no clean path forward. Healing was rejected. Rubbing her head hadn’t fully worked. Explaining himself felt like it would make things worse. He’d never been in a situation where he genuinely didn’t know what to do with someone and felt the helplessness of it this clearly.

he decided.

He cupped her face gently with one hand, tilted it up, and pressed his lips to the center of her forehead. Soft. Brief. Then pulled back just enough to look at her.

"I’m sorry, Loriel." Quiet. Sincere. "Does that help?"

The dam held. The tears stopped advancing. But her face told him it wasn’t resolved — still red at the edges, still upset, the equilibrium precarious.

He panicked slightly, which was a novel experience.

Then her voice came. Small. Slightly demanding. Cheeks fully flushed.

"M-more."

The relief that moved through him was immediate and slightly embarrassing in its intensity. At least he knew what she wanted. At least there was a direction.

He obliged without deliberation.

Gentle kisses, center of her forehead, consistent and unhurried. After each small cluster he’d check — — and receive a hmph in response that he correctly interpreted as She didn’t let go of his shirt. Didn’t move away. Just stood there accepting them with her eyes down and her face the color of something that should come with a warning label.

Thirty or so in, across a full minute, she gave a small nod on the latest

He stopped.

A beat of silence settled between them.

Then she squared her shoulders, lifted her chin by a fraction, and said with the specific courage of someone who had decided to reclaim at least this much dignity:

"I am not a clueless idiot."

A single hmph. Precise. Closing the matter unilaterally.

She turned and walked out of her bedroom without looking back.

He caught a glimpse of her face in profile as she turned — completely, thoroughly red, from her cheekbones down to somewhere below the collar of her robes.

Leon stood in the middle of her bedroom for a moment after she’d gone, looking at the door.

he thought.

That was accurate. He’d gone in expecting to make a point about her lack of self-preservation instinct, and had ended up spending a minute kissing her forehead on demand while she held his shirt hostage.

She’d walked out with the last word.

He followed after her, and wisely said nothing.

[A/N: Thank you so much for all the support, guys! Your comments and thoughts about the story up until now are much appreciated!]