SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 524: The Battlefield—6

The first attack connected — a deep, devastating impact that tore a massive gaping wound across the entity’s body, the holy energy burning through its outer mass and reaching toward the core Leon had been tracking through his spatial awareness.

His familiarity with different energy signatures, sharpened over months of fighting, made the core’s location almost obvious to him despite the dense corruption surrounding it.

The first attack wounded it. The second finished the job.

The timing between both strikes had been nearly seamless — no meaningful gap between them, the clone’s attack arriving just as the first had done its work of opening the path.

The core ruptured, the holy energy consuming it completely, and the entire entity simply came apart — not explosively, not dramatically, just dissolving outward in dark smoke that thinned and dispersed against the open air.

Then silence where the screaming had been.

The soldiers nearest to the impact zone stood very still for a moment, processing what their eyes were telling them. Then sound returned to the battlefield — not organized cheering, just the raw collective exhale of people who had been holding their breath and had finally been given permission to let it go.

Relief moving through the ranks in a visible wave, shoulders dropping, hands unclenching from weapons, faces showing things that months of desperate defense had buried.

Leon checked the notification that arrived almost immediately.

The grotesque transformation had consumed roughly three hundred thousand beasts in its formation — those were gone entirely, converted into the entity he’d just destroyed. But around a quarter of the original horde still remained, scattered across the battlefield, the loss of the central mass having disrupted whatever coordination had been directing them. They were still fighting, but without the unified purpose they’d had.

His clone was already moving through them.

Leon joined in with a smile settling on his face.

he thought simply.

He moved through the remaining beasts with relaxed efficiency, the holy energy sword sweeping through clusters while his light element handled the ones at a distance. No urgency. No strain. Just methodical work, the kind he could sustain indefinitely, each kill adding to the notification count that had been climbing steadily since the battle began.

The corrupted cores the beasts dropped — most people would consider them worthless, too contaminated with abyssal energy to use safely. Leon looked at them and saw a different picture entirely.

Cleansing corrupted cores was straightforward with his holy energy, just a matter of time and intention. The arcane ones scattered among the haul were particularly interesting — those would go to Ira, Loriel, and Seraphine first, and he’d absorb a few of the others himself to push certain levels further. The bulk of them would serve as rewards and resources for the people in his dimensional world.

And speaking of his dimensional world — he was genuinely excited to return.

Xyra had been working on the World Fragment merger. The process should be complete by now, or close to it. He didn’t know exactly what rank it had achieved — rank two certain, rank three possible — but either way, dungeons and secret realms and naturally forming treasures awaited.

The thought kept him moving cheerfully through the remaining beasts.

It didn’t take half an hour.

When the last one fell, the battlefield went quiet for the second time, and this time it stayed quiet.

Luna found her voice before anyone else did.

She said nothing for a long moment first — just stood looking at the field that had been holding them hostage for months, at the absence where the beast horde had been, at the canyon Leon had carved at the start and the scattered remnants of what remained afterward.

Then she laughed. Short, exhausted, genuine — the laugh of someone who had carried something impossibly heavy for an impossibly long time and had just set it down.

Loriel was already crying, which surprised no one who knew her. Not dramatic tears — quiet ones, the kind that arrived when relief was too large for expression and leaked out through the only available channel. She wiped them without comment, standing beside Luna with her new cane held loosely and her face doing several things simultaneously.

Crystalline’s composure was more intact than either of theirs, but her eyes were bright in a way that suggested the composure was working harder than it looked.

She’d been fighting this crisis since its early stages, had watched the line thin month by month, had made the calculations about how much longer they could hold, and had arrived at answers she hadn’t shared with anyone who didn’t need to know.

She looked at Leon now with an expression that was partly assessment and partly something she hadn’t expected to feel on this battlefield today — genuine, uncomplicated gratitude.

The way the army looked at him had changed completely.

The soldiers who had initially dismissed him as an attendant or minor officer, who had registered his presence only when his voice had boomed across the battlefield — they were looking at him now the way people looked at something they didn’t have a category for yet. Not worship, not fear. Something more honest than either.

Recognition. The simple acknowledgment that what they had witnessed today was real, and that the person responsible for it was standing among them, apparently unconcerned.

Luna approached him directly.

She didn’t make a speech. She’d spent all her speech on the army earlier and had nothing performative left. She simply looked at him and said, quietly and without decoration, that this would not be forgotten.

Leon nodded once. Simple. Accepting it without deflecting.

Then he told her what needed to be said — the soldiers who had been exposed to the abyssal energy during the battle needed attention before anything else. The corruption didn’t show up as wounds, but it had gotten into people, and the longer it sat, the more difficult it became to remove.

He told her his clone would handle it. Light element, moving through the affected soldiers efficiently — tens of people in seconds, the process was fast enough that the scale wasn’t a real obstacle. Pyrans were faring considerably better than most due to their fire affinity and physical constitution, and those with light, life, or lightning affinities would eventually manage on their own, though lightning-attribute users would take longer.

Luna listened, nodded, and immediately began directing the most affected soldiers toward where the clone was working.

As for the loot — she waved at it openly. Take it all, she said. The army had no use for corrupted cores and even less infrastructure for processing them. Whatever he wanted, it was his.

Then she paused and made one request, stated simply and directly.

One Archon-ranked core. Purified. She understood it was a bold ask, but she believed he could do it easily, and she needed it for something she didn’t explain further.

Leon agreed without hesitation. One core was nothing. He’d have given her more if she’d asked.

Her expression when he said yes — the quiet steadiness of someone who had correctly judged a person and been confirmed in that judgment — was something he filed away without comment.

Leon left the loot collection to his clone and the others.

Seraphine, Ira, and Vyra were already helping with the core extraction, working through the field systematically while the regular army soldiers kept their distance from the heaviest concentration areas. The clone moved among the soldiers, the light element purification work steady and efficient.

Leon moved alone toward the crack.

He extended a field of holy and light energy around himself as he went — a dispersal barrier, pushing the dense abyssal atmosphere back enough to move through it safely. The density increased sharply as he went deeper, and it became clear why the army had never been able to press this far. Even fully capable fighters would have been overwhelmed by direct exposure to the concentration levels he was moving through now.

The beasts themselves had been positioned in the outer zones — areas where the abyssal energy was heavy but not completely saturating. Even corrupted creatures apparently couldn’t function at full concentration near the source.

Which meant the transformation he’d interrupted — the merging, the grotesque consolidation — had been an attempt to build something capable of surviving deeper exposure. Something that could operate at the crack itself.

He didn’t want to think too carefully about what that would have eventually become.

The crack came into view ahead.

And then something made every instinct he possessed scream at once.

Behind the crack — visible through it, massive and dark — an eye.

A single enormous eye, the pupil a deep, churning red, fixed directly on him through the gap in reality with the patient, ancient focus of something that had been watching for a very long time and had just found what it was looking for.

The threat hit him like a physical force. Not the paralyzing helplessness he’d felt standing in front of Xyra’s full presence, not the awe of the tower’s trial overseer. Something different. Something that felt like genuine, serious danger — the kind his body recognized and responded to before his mind had finished processing it.

He didn’t freeze.

His epic-ranked sword was in his hand before the thought was conscious, buzzing with golden holy energy, the runic symbols along its surface clearer than they’d been before but still hazy at the edges, still not fully coherent.

He teleported directly in front of the crack.

Plunged the sword straight into the center of the red pupil.

The sound that came back was beyond anything the battlefield had produced — rage and pain compressed into a register that made his teeth ache. He pulled the sword out immediately and teleported upward, positioning himself directly above the crack, out of its direct line of sight.

The screaming continued.

Then, gradually, it faded. The eye was gone. The darkness beyond the crack had returned to simply being darkness, nothing watching from it anymore. The attack that had been building — he’d felt it preparing in the fraction of a second before he’d moved clear — had never landed.

He looked at the crack itself.

Football-sized now. Smaller than he’d expected given the scale of what it had been producing. At the rate it was currently growing — nearly stopped, the monster population that had been feeding its expansion now eliminated — a hundred years of natural growth before it became a serious threat again. Maybe more.

He had a plan for it already. An idea that had arrived while looking at the domain structure on the way here — the artificial separation of higher, middle, and lower, the invisible barriers the Upper Ones had built into this world’s architecture. Those same barriers could be used differently. A cleansing, conducted through the world’s own existing structure, surgical in approach and total in effect.

It would take time and resources he didn’t currently have, but by the time those were available to him, the crack would barely have moved.

He couldn’t close it outright. He’d felt that clearly standing in front of it — whatever sealed something like this required a capability he hadn’t reached yet. But that was fine. It would keep.

He turned and headed back to the others, carrying two things with him — the plan and the clear, pressing understanding that whatever had been looking at him through that crack was still on the other side of it.