SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 510: The Temple—6
The ground shook again, harder this time.
BOOOOOM! RRRUMMMBLE!
Not from outside the city walls. From directly behind them.
Leon turned. The betting arena they’d walked out of thirty seconds ago was already in chaos — screaming pouring out through every entrance, people streaming out in every direction, the sound of something large and destructive happening inside mixing with the crowd’s panic into a single wall of noise.
But that wasn’t all.
The same roaring, the same rumbling, was coming from the north side of the city. The east. The south. Multiple directions at once, each one carrying the same quality of destruction, the same scale.
Not a raid. A coordinated assault hitting the entire city simultaneously, inside and outside the walls, timed to land at the same moment.
Loriel’s face went pale.
She looked at Leon, and her eyes said everything before her mouth could form words. She’d grown up in this city. She knew exactly how many fighters were currently inside it — and the answer was not enough, not even close, because the real force was deployed on the front lines outside, where the battle had never fully stopped. What remained here was a skeleton force, good enough for ordinary security, completely inadequate for something like this.
They’d gotten in everywhere. That was the part that made her chest tighten with real fear. Not just outside the walls — inside them. Everywhere. The infiltration had been going on longer than anyone realized.
she thought, the words forming cold and clear.
Leon was already moving — not physically yet, but she could see it in his eyes. The quick, calm assessment of someone who had already taken in the full picture and was deciding what to do about it.
He looked at Seraphine, Ira, Loriel, and then Vyra.
"Seraphine, Ira, Loriel — the arena. Start there and work outward." His voice was flat and quick. "Vyra, take the north district, work toward the gates."
Even as he spoke, his hand was already opening a portal.
Silver-white light split the air beside him, the gateway to his dimensional world forming clean and immediate. His clone stepped through first, and behind it came the rest — Pyran fighters, sage rank and peak ascendant alike, moving out in organized groups without needing instruction. Same mind, same assessment of the situation, no explanation required between them.
He’d held most of the sage-rank Pyrans back when he’d deployed to the middle domain earlier — only about thirty percent had gone, roughly six fighters. Now the rest came through, along with the peak ascendants, arranged already into teams before they’d even fully stepped out of the portal. One sage rank with three peak ascendants each, enough firepower to handle serious threats, and enough numbers to cover multiple locations simultaneously.
No humans in this deployment. The situation was too chaotic, and the risk of dying with their only like entry Ascendant strength in a crowded city was too high with fighters who didn’t have the combat awareness to navigate it cleanly.
They spread out without a word, each team taking a direction, moving fast.
The clone took the arena district alongside Seraphine, Ira, and Loriel.
Leon went to the city gates.
WHOOOOSH!
He covered the distance in under a second, arriving at the northern gate where the sound was loudest, the commotion most concentrated. The gate itself was still standing, but the area in front of it was chaos — corrupted beasts had broken through the outer perimeter in multiple places, pouring into the streets, the city’s defenders trying to hold lines that were collapsing faster than they could be reinforced.
Leon landed in the middle of it.
The nearest beast — massive, its eyes solid black with corruption, easily three times human height — turned toward him and lunged with the single-minded aggression of something that had stopped having a self and was now just a weapon pointed in whatever direction the abyssal energy wanted it to go.
Leon took one step to the side and put his holy energy blade through its skull on the way past.
The corruption burned out instantly. The beast dropped like its strings had been cut, every cell the abyssal energy had been sustaining collapsing simultaneously.
THUD!
He didn’t pause. Already moving to the next one.
Three beasts converging from his left — he swept through them in a single motion, the holy energy blade leaving trails of golden light in the air, each pass destroying the corruption at the root rather than just damaging the body around it. They fell before the motion was completed.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The defenders nearby stared.
Leon ignored them and kept moving.
The corruption here was dense — denser than what they’d encountered on the road coming in, which made sense given how close they were to the crack’s location. The beasts were stronger for it, faster, their regeneration more aggressive. A normal sage rank fighter would have been working hard against even one of them.
Leon moved through them like the weather.
He extended his spatial awareness outward as he fought, mapping the full scope of what was happening inside the city simultaneously. The arena — Seraphine and Ira were already through the worst of it, the corrupted beasts inside going down fast, the crowd casualties being held low by the speed of their response. Clone handling the spillover into the surrounding streets. Good.
North district — Vyra, moving through a cluster of mid-tier corrupted beasts with the efficiency of someone who had fought things considerably more dangerous and found this manageable. She was fine.
The team deployments were working. Each sage rank leading their group like an anchor, the peak ascendants clearing the space around them, the areas they passed through going quiet in their wake.
The city gates were different.
This was where the real weight of the assault was concentrated — the largest beast numbers, the highest corruption density, the most dangerous individuals in the horde. Whatever intelligence was driving this attack had pushed its strongest assets here, probably trying to break the gate entirely and flood the interior.
Leon stepped into the thickest part of it.
A beast the size of a building came at him — some kind of corrupted earth-type, its body dense and armored, the abyssal energy so deeply integrated that its skin had gone almost black. It hit the ground with each step hard enough to crack stone.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
It swung at him with a limb the size of a tree trunk.
Leon ducked under it, placed his palm flat against the creature’s chest, and pushed holy energy through the contact point with everything he had.
The corruption inside it didn’t burn out gradually. It detonated — the holy energy and the abyssal energy meeting inside the beast’s body and producing an internal explosion that went through every corrupted cell simultaneously.
CRAAAACK! BOOM!
The beast came apart from the inside.
Leon was already moving before the pieces hit the ground.
Two more converging — he took them both simultaneously, one with the holy blade and one with a compressed burst of light element fired from his free hand, the combination cleaning out the corruption completely in both cases.
SLASH! CRACK! ZZZZAP!
He drove forward into the horde, not waiting for them to come to him, pushing the line back toward the gate rather than holding position. Every beast he passed through dropped behind him, the holy energy leaving nothing viable for the abyssal corruption to continue operating through.
The beasts ahead of him — the ones that hadn’t reached him yet — began doing something he found interesting. They were pulling back. Not fleeing exactly, more like whatever was directing them had registered that something in front of them was consuming its assets faster than it could push them forward, and was making an adjustment.
he thought.
That was useful information.
He pushed faster, not giving the thing behind the horde time to fully recalculate.
WHOOOOSH! CRACK! BOOM! CRACK!
The gate district went quiet in stages — first the largest beasts, then the mid-tier, then the scattered stragglers that had gotten into the surrounding streets while the main line was collapsing. The defenders who’d been barely holding their positions found the pressure simply gone, the beasts they’d been fighting against dropping mid-attack as Leon moved through the area behind the horde’s forward line.
He stopped at the gate itself and looked out through it into the darkness beyond the walls.
The pull on his spatial awareness told him the crack was somewhere in that direction. Not close — but not impossibly far either, it was beyond spatial awareness, something like instinct.
he thought.
Tonight, the city needed to survive intact first.
He turned back and started moving toward wherever the next cluster of commotion was registering on his awareness.