SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 520: The Battlefield—2

The thirty minutes passed quickly.

Leon used the time well, opening the cosmic shop and moving through it with purpose. He found a magical cane suited for Loriel — increasing healing effectiveness by a significant margin while boosting mana recovery by two hundred percent.

A few million casualties for the epic-rank piece. Not the absolute best the shop offered, but it fit her role perfectly, complementing her natural affinity for support rather than direct combat.

He restocked revival treasures too — the priority resource for his people. Seraphine, Ira, Vyra, Loriel, Aurelia, Crystalline. His clone would lead them all, along with the rest of the Pyrans and humans it had pulled through the portal earlier. He wanted every one of them to have a chance, however slim, of pulling back from the edge if something went wrong.

He asked Seraphine, Ira, and Vyra if they wanted new equipment.

All three declined.

Seraphine first — quick, certain, the kind of refusal that came from already having decided the answer before he finished asking. Then Ira, following the same logic. Both of them understood exactly what gear of this caliber cost, and both knew their current equipment was already strong enough for what was coming. They were aware Leon was holding back causality for something he needed more — though neither of them knew exactly what — and they chose not to push for more when their own kits were perfectly serviceable. Vyra didn’t have the full context, but she watched the other two turn it down and followed their lead without needing it spelled out.

Loriel didn’t get a choice. Leon simply handed her the cane the moment it materialized, the air rippling faintly as the item folded into existence between them. He’d already noted that her equipment wasn’t suited to her role — capable, but mismatched, like someone fighting with the wrong tool because no one had thought to hand her the right one. He wasn’t giving her room to argue about it.

Then he opened the spatial ring holding everything looted from Isabella’s treasury — weapons, armor, skill scrolls, potions, all of it laid out in his mind’s inventory like a small armory waiting to be claimed.

First pick went to Seraphine, Ira, Vyra, and Loriel, and none of them held back this time.

Loriel didn’t take any armor. What she already wore — a robe with self-healing properties woven directly into the fabric — was of epic rank, a holy treasure belonging to her church for generations. The only epic-rank item of its kind Leon had encountered anywhere in this world. She understood exactly what she had on her back.

Luna had tried to give her the cane, which was the second treasure of the church before any of this, and Loriel had refused it a hundred times over the past weeks, only relenting now because there was simply no version of this fight where refusing made sense anymore.

Seraphine, Ira, and Vyra each picked out a few spare weapons — backups, secondary options for situations where their primary tools might fail or need switching mid-combat. None of them touched the potions. Leon had already supplied them with something better weeks ago, and nothing in Isabella’s collection came close to matching it.

After that, the rest of the group moved through what remained. Roughly fifteen hundred Pyrans and the forty or so humans who’d come through the portal took whatever caught their interest — armor pieces that fit, weapons that matched their fighting style, the occasional scroll or stone that might give them an edge. Leon didn’t stop any of it. He watched them sort through the pile with the focused, businesslike energy of people preparing for something they understood could be the last preparation they ever made.

He couldn’t give everyone a revival treasure. Couldn’t hand out top-tier potions to fifteen hundred people and still have enough reserved for the core group who’d be fighting closest to the actual danger. This was the best distribution he could manage with what he had. Beyond this point, they’d be relying on their own strength and training, with his clone leading and protecting as much as a single figure reasonably could across a battlefield this size.

His clone had already been honest with them about that. No comfortable lies, no inflated promises of safety. There was a real risk here. People might die today.

They’d joined anyway.

Leon found something genuinely worth respecting in that. He didn’t need people who needed to be lied to in order to find their courage. He needed fighters who understood the stakes and chose to stand in the line regardless.

More had wanted to join — both Pyran and human, people pushing forward, eager to be part of something this significant. His clone had turned a good number of them away. Too weak for a battle operating at this scale, where even strong warriors risked being caught in the crossfire of forces beyond their ability to track or counter. Bringing them wouldn’t have added meaningful strength to the line. It would only have added bodies for the corruption to claim.

His own body would go in completely alone. Full power, nothing held back, no restraint applied to anything he did once the fighting started. Anyone standing close to him in that state was in more danger from the sheer scale of his output than from anything the beast horde could throw at them directly.

Luna arrived not long after his preparations were finished, exhaustion written into every line of her face — the specific tiredness of someone who had spent the last thirty minutes arguing, persuading, and calling in every favor she’d accumulated across decades of leadership. Behind her walked two people Leon recognized immediately.

Aurelia. Crystalline.

Both gave him a single nod, brief and measured. He returned it the same way.

He could read, from their expressions and the careful neutrality they were both maintaining, that the conversation behind the scenes hadn’t been simple. Not everyone in the command structure had agreed easily to throwing the entire coalition force into an offensive after months of stalemate defense. Some had likely fought it hard.

He didn’t particularly care how the argument had gone, as long as it had been won. The reward sitting in front of him — almost a million corrupted beasts, each one carrying a core, the higher-ranked specimens carrying considerably more — represented something he genuinely wanted. A real chance to finally push his accumulated causality high enough to afford the Cradle of Elemental Seed he’d had his eye on for longer than he liked to admit. That alone made today worth fighting properly for, setting aside everything else this battle meant for the people standing around him.

Luna managed a tired but genuine smile.

"Everything is done," she said, her voice carrying the particular rasp of someone who’d been talking urgently and persuasively for half an hour straight without pause. "You can start the attack. Everyone is joining in."

The cost of getting there showed plainly on her face. Without Aurelia and Crystalline standing behind her, lending their reputations and their visible support to back her case, Leon suspected the outcome might have gone very differently.

He reached out and patted her shoulder once — a simple, direct acknowledgment of what she’d just accomplished. No elaborate words are needed for it.

Then something sharper lit behind his eyes.

"Let’s get ready," he said.

He turned to Vyra and sent a single thought directly into her mind — no words wasted, just clean intent transferred in an instant, the kind of communication that didn’t need translation between them anymore.

Her eyes caught fire in response, a literal flame briefly visible behind her irises before settling back into focused readiness. She gave a single, hard nod.

The battlefield in front of them was about to change completely.