SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 511: The Temple—7

The city wasn’t small, and the attack had spread across every corner of it.

Leon moved fast, covering ground in bursts, his spatial awareness painting the full picture as he went — clusters of corrupted beasts in the market district, a breakthrough near the eastern residential blocks, smaller scattered groups in the side streets that the Pyran teams were already handling. He touched down where the pressure was heaviest, cleared it, and moved again before the dust settled.

His clone was doing the same on the other side of the city.

Same mind, same read of the situation, no coordination needed between them. Where Leon went north, the clone went south. Where Leon hit the dense concentrations, the clone handled the spillover. Two bodies, one purpose, the city getting worked on from both ends simultaneously.

The clone came across Luna near the opposite gate.

She was holding a defensive line almost entirely on her own — life element barriers layered in front of her, beast after beast breaking against them while she pushed back with everything she had. Strong, genuinely. The barriers were well-constructed, and her control was precise. But the numbers pressing against her were too many, and she was slowing.

The clone landed beside her without announcement and started clearing.

What followed was short.

The beasts that had been overwhelming her position went down in rapid succession — holy energy cutting through the corruption at the root, each beast dropping the moment the abyssal energy sustaining it was burned out. The clone didn’t waste motion. Every strike landed exactly where it needed to, and the horde that had been threatening to break Luna’s line simply stopped existing as a threat within two minutes.

Luna stood in the sudden quiet and looked at the clone beside her.

She’d thought, when it arrived, that it was someone from the groups she’d been watching work across the city all evening — the unfamiliar fighters who had appeared from nowhere and spread out to handle the chaos with a competence that had no business being present in a crisis this unexpected. She’d been grateful for them without understanding them.

Up close, this one was different.

The ease. That was what hit her first. The beasts she’d been straining against had gone down like they were nothing. No visible effort, no signs of the exertion that fighting at that level should have produced. Just clean, efficient destruction, start to finish.

She stared at him for a moment.

She’d revised her estimate of Leon after he’d healed her — revised it significantly, the ease of what he’d done to the abyssal infection rewriting her ceiling of what was possible. But watching this, she found her revised estimate was already too low.

What she didn’t know was that she was looking at the clone. A body running on a fraction of Leon’s actual capacity, holding back the way you hold back when you’re working in a crowded space and don’t want to level the surrounding buildings.

She didn’t know that. She just looked at what she was looking at and quietly stopped putting numbers on it, because the numbers kept feeling wrong.

The unfamiliar fighters across the city — she’d been wondering about them all evening, watching them from a distance between her own fights, trying to make sense of how they’d appeared so quickly and organized so smoothly in a crisis that had caught everyone else completely off-guard. Strong, all of them. They worked in coordinated groups like they’d trained together for years.

She thought about the young man who had walked into her hidden room and destroyed a terminal abyssal infection in under a minute.

Her gut had an answer. Her mind found it slightly illogical, and then looked at the evidence and stopped arguing.

she thought simply.

She also thought about her daughter — about Loriel, who was transparently obvious to anyone who knew her even slightly, and about the young man who had apparently noticed and was choosing his steps carefully around it. She approved of the carefulness. She also thought that if things continued in the direction they appeared to be heading, she was going to end up with a very unusual son-in-law.

She’d had worse prospects presented.

Two hours after it started, the city went quiet.

Not peaceful quiet — the kind of quiet that came after something bad, when the immediate danger was over, but the reality of what had just happened was still settling. Fires in a few districts, some streets partially collapsed where the heaviest beasts had pushed through, the sounds of people calling out for family members mixing with the general hum of a city catching its breath.

The casualties were under two hundred.

For an attack of that scale, hitting a city that had most of its fighting force elsewhere, with no warning and no preparation — under two hundred was a number that should have been impossible. It was possible because of the speed of the response, the teams spreading out and reaching the worst points before the carnage could compound.

Luna moved through the aftermath with the authority of someone who had spent her life doing exactly this — organizing healers, directing resources, keeping the calm that prevented manageable situations from becoming catastrophic ones. The anger underneath it was real and steady. Whatever had planned this attack, whatever was behind the crack and the corruption and the coordinated infiltration — she had thoughts about that, and none of them were kind.

Leon found Seraphine, Ira, and Loriel together in the market district, where the last cluster of beasts had been cleared not long before.

He checked them immediately, his awareness moving across each of them before he’d consciously decided to do it.

Loriel was spotless. Clean armor, no injuries, not even a mark. She’d fought as support — keeping the others functional, neutralizing corruption on the edges, working in the role she was genuinely best at. It suited her, and it had kept her safe, which he was glad about.

Seraphine and Ira both had light scratches on their armor. Surface damage, nothing underneath. He looked anyway, satisfied himself, and said nothing about the looking.

Ira caught him doing it and smiled in that knowing way she had. He ignored her.

Vyra arrived a few minutes later, dropping down from above, landing lightly beside the group. She looked exactly as she had when she’d left — not a mark on her, not a scuff on the armor he’d given her, the kind of pristine condition that came from fighting well below your ceiling and never once being in genuine danger.

She was the strongest person present after Leon, and the threats she’d encountered tonight had felt it.

He moved to her anyway.

His holy energy spread through her in a quiet sweep — thorough, checking for any trace of abyssal corruption that might have found its way in through contact, the kind that didn’t show up as wounds but was dangerous over time. He’d checked the others the same way.

Vyra went slightly still as the energy moved through her. A faint color appeared on her cheeks, visible on human-appearing skin. She said nothing, kept her composure, and looked at a point slightly above and to the left of his face while he finished.

Ira, watching from three steps away, made a small giggling sound she didn’t bother to hide.

Vyra heard it and said nothing. The color deepened marginally.

Leon finished, confirmed she was completely clean, and stepped back.

"All clear," he said simply.

Vyra straightened her posture and returned to looking exactly as composed as she always looked, which almost worked.

Almost.