SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 518: The Battlefield

Leon stepped through the portal with Seraphine and Ira beside him, and the look on both their faces was the kind that didn’t go away quickly. Deep, settled satisfaction — the specific peace of people who had spent the night exactly as they’d wanted and had no complaints about any of it.

It was morning. The City’s ambient glow had shifted into its version of early light, soft and even across the high-ground temple.

A knock came at the door not long after.

Ira went to open it, still wearing that expression, still moving with the particular ease of someone whose body had been thoroughly looked after and knew it.

Loriel stood outside. Luna is beside her.

Loriel took one look at Ira’s face and understood immediately, her eyes narrowing slightly as the picture assembled itself without needing explanation. She chose not to say anything. Some things were better left as private conclusions.

Luna’s reaction was different — and it had actually started the previous night.

She’d asked Loriel about the room arrangements. A natural question, a host wanting to ensure her most important guests were comfortable. Loriel had answered honestly: she’d put Leon, Ira, and Seraphine in one room. The best one.

One room. All three.

Luna had gone very still.

Loriel had explained, calmly and without embarrassment, which somehow made it harder to process rather than easier. But Luna was her mother in every way that mattered, and what Loriel had told her — gently, clearly — was that she’d accepted it. That’s what made him happy; she would support him.

Luna had sat with that for a while.

Hearing it and seeing Ira’s face now were, as she was discovering, genuinely different experiences.

They’d come to invite the group for breakfast before departure. Luna had tried for dinner the night before, too, which Loriel had fielded with a simple explanation that they were unavailable. Luna had not asked for details.

Ira and Seraphine both declined the breakfast with the comfortable ease of people who weren’t particularly hungry and didn’t feel the need to explain why. Leon accepted.

Which meant Ira and Seraphine followed him anyway, because that was apparently how it worked.

What Luna had prepared was not breakfast in any modest sense. More than twenty dishes covered the table — elaborate, hot, the kind of spread that took real effort and real intention to produce. Leon sat down with no particular hunger and found himself eating considerably more than he’d planned because the food was simply that good. His body could go weeks without eating if necessary, but there was no reason to exercise that when something this well-made was in front of him.

By the time it was finished, the morning was properly underway.

They didn’t linger. Departure came quickly after the last dishes were cleared, the group moving out through the temple and into the city’s early streets without ceremony.

They went on foot. It was the fastest option available — all of them were strong enough that ground travel at their pace covered distance faster than any mount or vehicle the domain could offer. Even Loriel, an early sage of rank and less oriented toward combat than Ira or Seraphine, moved quickly. The weakest link in the group set a pace that most fighters at their peak would have struggled to match.

Two hours to the City of Light. Comfortable estimate.

Leon carried everything his clone had gathered through the night.

Same mind — the clone’s experiences were his experiences, the information absorbed as cleanly as if he’d been there himself. The clone had covered significant ground. It had recalled all the people left in the Middle Domain back into his dimensional world, the portal opening remotely without issue. It had pushed closer to the crack than the coalition forces had managed — not into the dense abyssal energy immediately surrounding it, but close enough to read the shape of what was there.

Hundreds of thousands of corrupted beasts massed around the crack. The coalition forces were holding a line that had been holding, but barely, for a long time.

The clone had found nothing concrete about the Upper Ones. No remnant, no obvious marker, nothing that jumped out as evidence of their arrival or departure. But the feeling that the crack and the Upper Ones were connected hadn’t left — it sat as certainty without proof, the kind of instinct that had been right enough times before that Leon gave it weight.

He thought about it as they walked, turning it over without forcing it toward a conclusion he didn’t have enough information to reach yet.

The City of Light earned its name visibly — the architecture carried the particular quality of a place that had been built with light as an intention rather than a feature, the stone catching and distributing the morning sun in ways that made the whole city feel slightly luminous from the outside.

They didn’t stop inside it.

Leon asked Luna to lead them directly to the battlefield, and she did, moving through the city’s streets at the front of the group. He could have gone ahead — the clone had mapped every meter of the route — but Luna was leading, and he let her lead.

When they came out the other side of the city and the battlefield opened before them, Leon felt the scale of it land in a way that maps and secondhand awareness hadn’t fully communicated.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

The killing intent rising off them was almost physical — it materialized in the air above the army like something visible, a presence that pressed against his senses with genuine weight. He’d felt battle energy before, had stood in the middle of serious combat more times than he could count easily. This was different. This was what happened when a force that large had been fighting the same desperate defensive battle for months without relief, when everyone standing in that line had already decided they weren’t leaving.

He felt a chill. Not a threat — he wasn’t reading it as a danger to himself. Just the recognition of something he hadn’t encountered before at this magnitude. The pure concentrated human reality of people who had nowhere to go and had made their peace with it.

His vision cut through the distance easily. He found Aurelia before she could find him — the familiar figure he’d last seen in the Lower Domain, far away but clearly present near the front of the command formation.

Beyond the army, the beast mass was visible even from here.

Not as individual creatures at this distance. As a presence. A thick, dark concentration of corrupted bodies covered ground that dwarfed the space the coalition held — ten times the area, maybe more, the abyssal energy around the crack turning the air above it into something visibly wrong. A dark smear on the landscape that the eye kept trying to process as shadow or cloud before arriving at the accurate conclusion.

The coalition had numbers. The coalition had strength. The coalition had people who had decided this was the hill they were dying on if that’s what it came to.

And it still wasn’t enough. Had never been enough. The line had held through attrition and desperation and the specific stubbornness of people defending everything that mattered to them, and every day it held was a miracle that was wearing thinner.

Leon looked at all of it and felt the shape of what needed to happen settle clearly in his mind.