SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 557: Mythical Armor—1

Leon looked at the mythical armor in its protective casing and made a decision.

he thought.

He set the casing down in the center of the glass field, stepped back a hundred meters, and started.

First pass — his epic-ranked sword channeling everything he had into a single focused strike, holy energy and spatial compression combined. The blow landed and produced a sound like reality objecting.

CRACK!

He inspected the casing.

A hairline scratch. Already fading.

he thought.

He tried again. Different approach — ice and lightning fused, the combination that had served him well against the hardest targets he’d faced. He drove it into the casing with the precision of someone who understood exactly what they were targeting.

Another scratch. Fading faster than the first.

He spent the next several hours working through everything systematically. Every skill he possessed. Every technique he’d developed across the tower, the dimensional world training, the years compressed into days. Individual elements first, then combinations, then combinations of combinations, each attempt producing marginally more effect than the previous and each effect healing before he could build on it.

he thought, watching another scratch fade to nothing.

He activated Elemental Surge.

The boost hit him like a wave — his affinity ranks climbing from their natural level through seven, past the uncertain territory of seven-plus, arriving at something that could only be described as rank eight temporarily. Every element responded at that level simultaneously, and for the duration of the skill’s window Leon felt what it meant to exist at that depth of elemental mastery.

he thought, his whole body humming with the combined resonance of every element at rank eight,

The feeling was not metaphorical. Every element in the air around him bent toward his awareness without effort. Space folded at a thought. Fire existed because he decided it existed. Lightning was his nervous system externalized. The entire elemental spectrum responded to him the way his own hands responded to him — without intermediary, without effort, without any gap between intent and reality.

He channeled all of it into his sword.

The blade transformed — not the metal changing but the space the metal occupied filling with something that exceeded what metal should be able to contain. Every element layered simultaneously, white holy energy woven through the combination as stabilizer, the whole construct blazing with a light that had no single color because it contained all of them.

He threw everything into the casing.

The strikes continued for hours more, each one drawing deeper than the last, the toll accumulating in ways his body registered with increasing honesty. Blood vessels in his hands burst and sealed, burst and sealed, holy energy working continuously to keep him functional as the mana expenditure climbed toward numbers that should have been impossible to sustain.

His body was not happy about any of this.

he thought, tasting blood again.

He stepped back. Several hundred kilometers, teleporting in rapid succession, each jump covering more distance than the last as his newly expanded spatial range demonstrated itself.

Above him, he built the attack.

Not a sword exactly — a concept that happened to be shaped like a sword, enormous, spanning the sky above the glass field, every element he possessed poured into its construction without reservation. Thirty thousand mana. Everything. His blood vessels were announcing their displeasure loudly and he ignored them, holy energy and his Primordial Void Heart working in tandem to keep him standing while he put the last of what he had into the construct above him.

His hands were trembling. Both of them. Blood on his lips, on his chin, on his clothes.

he thought.

He launched it.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sound wasn’t a sound. It was a physical event, a pressure wave that traveled outward from the impact point at speeds that made the concept of running from it irrelevant. Leon teleported the moment he released the construct — once, twice, three times in rapid succession, each jump several kilometers, putting as much distance between himself and the impact as his depleted mana could manage.

It wasn’t enough.

The shockwave caught him at twenty kilometers and hit like a wall made of compressed air and force and the aftermath of thirty thousand mana detonating against a surface that hadn’t wanted to accept it. His ribs announced themselves with a sound he felt rather than heard — not broken, but the kind of cracked that left no ambiguity about how close to broken was.

He was airborne for a moment and then not, the ground finding him rather than the other way around.

He coughed blood, which was becoming a familiar sensation, and let the holy energy work.

Five hundred kilometers away, in the settlement, James was mid-sermon when the ground moved beneath the congregation’s feet and a sound arrived that had no business existing at that distance. The new converts — Pyrans and humans both, Pope James having made considerable progress with his mission — looked around with expressions ranging from alarmed to curious.

James looked up from his text with the serene expression of a man whose faith had specific and well-tested dimensions.

"Our God is working," he said, and returned to his sermon without further comment. The congregation settled. This was simply what living in Leon’s world sometimes involved.

His wife Mia, sitting in the front row with their daughter on her lap, caught his eye with a look that communicated considerable skepticism about his calm. He gave her the small private smile that he reserved for her specifically.

She shook her head and looked forward.

Leon healed, stood, and floated to the crater.

Several kilometers wide. Deep enough that filling it with water would produce a lake of meaningful size. The glass field around it had been transformed — the crystalline ground compressed and rearranged, the impact having done more to the landscape than any of his previous training combined.

He looked at the casing at the crater’s center.

A circular crack sat in the transparent encasing. Small — the size of a bullet entry point, the geometry of it almost delicate against the scale of what had produced it. Around the crack, a visible healing process was underway, the material knitting itself back together in real time.

He stared at it.

he realized.

He watched the healing complete itself. The crack sealed. The casing returned to its previous flawless state as though nothing had touched it.

Leon’s mouth hung open slightly.

He’d put thirty thousand mana into a single attack. Had cracked his own ribs from the shockwave at twenty kilometers. Had spent an entire subjective day attempting every technique and skill combination he possessed.

And he had produced a crack the size of a coin that had healed in thirty seconds.

he thought, with the flat clarity of someone arriving at an honest conclusion rather than a defeated one.

He reached for the casing to store it back in his inventory.

The spatial fluctuation happened right beside him.