SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 509: The Temple—5

Soon they were out of the temple, stepping into open air and natural light after the underground passage and its cramped, hidden room. Leon told Loriel about the garden — that Seraphine and the others were waiting there — and she led him without hesitation, her earlier embarrassment tucked away somewhere behind the practical business of moving.

She spotted them from a distance.

Two women with red hair, standing in the garden’s shade. The illusion Leon had cast sat cleanly over their appearances, their skin reading as normal human coloring to anyone without reason to look closer. Loriel had reason — not because she could see through the illusion, but because she recognized them.

The taller one she remembered from the arrival — when the portal had opened, and thousands of red-skinned people had come through with his clone, which caused a big commotion, and right then he came alone with this same tall red-haired woman. That entrance had been impossible to forget, regardless of what anyone looked like afterward.

The slightly shorter one she’d seen later, right before Leon had departed with Seraphine. She’d said something that hadn’t carried across the distance, and then all three of them had simply vanished. Together.

Loriel had not thought much about it at the time. Leon had Seraphine — that combination was an established fact, and Seraphine was the kind of person whose general presence made alternative theories feel inadvisable. The idea that there might be anyone else hadn’t occurred to her.

She thought about it now.

She thought about it with some force, actually, given what had happened in her bedroom approximately five minutes ago.

Her feet stopped briefly. Not long — just a fractional pause, a single moment of recalibration.

Then she looked at Leon sideways.

Then she hmph’d and brought her foot down lightly on the stone path.

Leon caught all of it, because he caught everything, and stood there beside her trying to determine what he’d done wrong in the past thirty seconds and arriving at no clear answer. He decided silence was the defensible position and maintained it.

When they reached the garden, Seraphine closed the distance to Loriel immediately — arms out, genuine warmth in it. Loriel returned the hug without hesitation, and for a moment the two of them just held on, the kind of contact that carried months of correspondence and shared meals inside the dimensional world’s compressed timeline.

When they separated, Loriel looked past Seraphine to the red-haired woman behind her. Curious look. Direct.

"Who is she?"

Seraphine opened her mouth.

Ira spoke first, which appeared to be her general policy.

"I’m Ira." Chest out, voice easy and unembarrassed. "Leon’s woman. I love him a lot, and he loves me too."

She said it the way she said most things — without performance, without calculation, simply because it was true and she saw no reason to manage how it landed.

Loriel’s expression stayed relatively composed on the outside. On the inside, she was giving Leon a very specific mental accounting.

she thought.

The side glances she directed at him came at irregular intervals, each one carrying slightly more information than the last. Leon was a wolf. She had apparently not appreciated the full scope of this. She’d been around him for a significant amount of time and had somehow failed to update her understanding of the situation.

She filed this away without showing it.

Then she looked at the taller woman.

Vyra was standing slightly apart from the others — tall, composed, radiating the particular quality of someone who had been in charge of things for a very long time and carried the habit of it even when nothing was currently requiring her to be in charge.

Loriel’s look moved from Vyra to Leon and back with the specific focus of someone doing arithmetic.

"Is she too?"

The blush that moved across Vyra’s face was quick and visible, sitting on human-appearing skin with considerably less cover than it would have had on deep red. "I am not. I’m Ira’s aunt. My name is Vyra."

Technically accurate. Delivered with the composure of a centuries-old leader.

Undermined entirely by the blush.

Loriel saw it. Seraphine saw it. Even Ira, from her angle, caught the color and went briefly quiet with thoughts that moved across her face in a way that made their contents unreadable but their presence unmistakable.

Loriel and Seraphine both turned to look at Leon simultaneously.

The particular quality of two women looking at one man with matching expressions of patient, pointed assessment was, Leon discovered, considerably more unsettling than facing an Ethereal rank opponent. At least opponents had a readable attack pattern.

He cleared his throat.

"Loriel, didn’t you want to show us around the city?"

She recognized the deflection for exactly what it was. Under normal circumstances, she might have pressed it.

Seraphine was here, though. And the day was good, and her Mother Saintess was healed, and the city she’d grown up in was still standing despite everything — and honestly, she found she didn’t want to spend it in a tense conversation. She wanted a normal afternoon with people she cared about in a place she loved.

She also found that with Seraphine present, the feelings she’d been carefully managing felt slightly less impossible. Seraphine knew. Seraphine was here. And somehow that made the whole complicated architecture of it feel more navigable rather than less, which she hadn’t anticipated. She thought Seraphine would be the one to put a tight leash on him, which was a feeling she got from her, but it doesn’t seem to be the case, and she was not complaining.

She led them out.

The city delivered on every promise the temple district’s grandeur had made about it.

Bigger restaurants with menus that went on for pages, the food arriving at a quality that made every previous meal feel like a rough draft. Shopping districts that stretched for blocks, the variety shifting from practical to extravagant in the space of a single turn. Clothes in materials that felt different between the fingers, jewelry that caught light with the specific intention of being noticed.

Skill stones and technique scrolls in dedicated shops with serious-faced vendors who quoted prices that would have meant something to people who didn’t already own better.

Ira and Vyra glanced at the equipment sections and lost interest immediately in what they were wearing, which outclassed everything on display by a margin that made comparison feel slightly charitable. As for the skill stones, both of them possessed techniques and abilities that made this market’s inventory look like a beginner’s selection.

The shopping itself, though, was a different matter.

Vyra participated. Actively. Not with the reserved, arm’s-length engagement of someone tolerating an activity — genuinely, asking Ira’s opinion on colors, checking with Seraphine on cuts, glancing at Loriel when she was uncertain about something. Slightly shy about it, the shyness sat oddly on someone who had commanded armies without apparent difficulty, but was present and real.

She had apparently decided that if embarrassing things were going to happen to her in Leon’s vicinity regardless of her behavior, she might as well shop openly.

Leon, seeing it all happen in reality, couldn’t help but find this Vyra somewhat cute.

The beast fighting arena pulled all of them in without much resistance. Tiered seating around a well-maintained ring, serious competitors, the crowd’s energy having the particular quality of people who had been watching these matches for years, and had opinions.

They bet. All of them.

They all won, which produced a series of reactions ranging from Ira’s loud satisfaction to Vyra’s quiet nod that conveyed the same thing in considerably fewer words. Their collective read on the fighters had been essentially perfect — the advantages that came with their level of combat experience made the arena’s match dynamics straightforward to assess. Leon kept his stakes modest. A few hundred gold, tripled. The amount was functionally irrelevant to him, and he knew it, and the point had never been the gold.

It was a good afternoon. Easy in a way that recent days had not frequently been easy.

The five of them came out of the arena into the amber light of late afternoon, the city settling into its evening rhythm around them, and for a moment, everything felt like it might just be normal for a while.

Then the ground shook beneath their feet.

Then the roar came — massive, layered, not from one direction but from several simultaneously — and the screaming started a second later, cutting through the city’s evening noise like something tearing through fabric.