SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 558: Mythical Armor—2

Leon recognized the fluctuation immediately.

Xyra materialized beside him, her silver hair drifting in the absence of any wind, and stood looking at the destruction around them without speaking. Her gaze moved across the crater first — several kilometers wide, the glass field transformed beyond recognition — then to the scattered evidence of every failed attempt he’d made across the past subjective day, and finally to the casing sitting undamaged at the crater’s center.

She said nothing.

Leon stood beside her and felt the silence become increasingly uncomfortable with each passing second.

he thought.

He lasted approximately thirty seconds before he couldn’t stand it anymore.

"Why are you here?" he asked. "And why are you looking at me like that?"

She didn’t answer the question. Instead she looked at him directly and said: "Give me your hand."

Leon hesitated for exactly one second — processing the request, finding no obvious reason to refuse, reminding himself of the contract — and extended his right hand toward her.

Pain detonated through his wrist.

Sharp, clean, complete — the specific pain of something that had happened too fast to be prevented and had already finished happening before his nervous system fully registered the beginning of it. He looked down.

His hand was severed at the wrist.

Clean cut, the kind of precision that left no ragged edges, blood beginning to spray in the rhythmic way that meant something serious had just happened to something important. His hand sat a single inch from his wrist, separated, the gap between them impossibly neat.

his mind started.

Then his hand was back.

Not healed — back. Restored. The cut was gone, the blood was gone, his wrist was completely intact and had apparently always been completely intact. The entire event had occurred and been undone in less time than it took him to form the thought about the contract.

He stared at his hand.

he thought.

"Look there," Xyra said.

Her voice was calm. She was pointing at the crater’s center, where the mythical armor’s casing sat.

A crackling sound was coming from it.

Leon looked and felt the pieces assemble in his mind simultaneously. On the surface of the transparent casing — which had resisted thirty thousand mana and a full day of his absolute best efforts without producing anything more significant than a coin-sized crack that healed in thirty seconds — a fracture was spreading.

On its surface, a small amount of liquid was visible. Deep red with a slight golden undertone.

His blood.

The single drop of blood that Xyra had obtained from the clean cut she’d made and immediately reversed had landed on the casing, and the casing was breaking. Not healing — breaking, the fractures spreading outward from where the blood had contacted it with the momentum of something that had been waiting for exactly this and had now received it.

The casing shattered.

Clean, complete, final — it came apart like thin glass struck by a precise force, the pieces dissolving into nothing before they could even fall, and the mythical armor sat in the open air of the crater for the first time since Leon had acquired it.

Leon stared at it.

Then he stared at the space where the casing had been.

Then he looked at his hand, which remained entirely intact.

he thought.

"Leon."

He looked at her.

"Do you feel stupid right now?"

The question was delivered without cruelty and without particular softness. Just honest. She genuinely wanted to know, or genuinely already knew and was giving him the opportunity to acknowledge it himself.

He felt his face do something involuntary. His head lowered slightly.

"Yes," he said, to the ground somewhere near his feet.

Xyra continued without letting the moment breathe too long. She told him what she thought of his approach — the brute forcing, the complete absence of coming to ask her first, the pattern she’d observed across everything she’d watched him do in which he threw himself at problems headfirst and relied on his luck and his constitution to survive the consequences. She’d watched him do this repeatedly from her cage. She’d watched him do it after. The fact that he was alive was not a testament to good judgment. It was a testament to luck that she found genuinely remarkable and slightly infuriating to witness.

Leon listened to all of this with his head still angled slightly downward and the expression of someone absorbing accurate information about themselves.

She also told him about the armor.

It had consciousness, she said. She’d felt it from a significant distance — a presence inside the mythical armor that was aware of its surroundings and had been aware of everything Leon had been doing for the past fourteen subjective hours. The consciousness had watched him. Had not attacked him, despite having the capability to do so and despite the significant provocation of someone spending an entire day slamming various forms of energy against its housing.

Two reasons for that restraint. The first was recognition — the armor had known, from whatever sense a conscious mythical armor used to know things, that the person attacking its casing was the same person who owned it. The second was, in Xyra’s estimation, something closer to entertainment. Fourteen hours of increasingly desperate attempts from the armor’s owner had apparently constituted sufficient spectacle that attacking had seemed like an interruption.

Leon thought.

He wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about that.

"You don’t need to think about repayment," Xyra said then, her tone shifting into something that was still matter-of-fact but carried a different quality underneath it. "I’ll help you when you need it. We have all the time in the world — neither of us is going anywhere."

As she said the last part, her silver eyes moved over him with an unhurried deliberateness that made the statement feel like it was carrying more than its literal meaning.

"But," she added, and her voice gained an edge that made the back of his neck do something, "if I find you doing something this reckless again without coming to me first, there will be consequences."

She left the nature of those consequences entirely unspecified, which was somehow worse than a specific threat.

Leon nodded at her with the reliable frequency of a mechanical toy.

"Good," she said, apparently satisfied, and looked at the mythical armor now sitting exposed in the crater.

Leon followed her gaze.

The armor was exactly what he remembered from that first glimpse — crimson scales edged with molten gold, the dragon emblem on the chest plate alive with something that wasn’t quite light. The greaves and gauntlets and helm all present, all waiting, radiating the quiet authority of something that had existed for a very long time and expected to continue existing for considerably longer.

It was the most beautiful and the most dangerous thing he’d ever looked at that wasn’t Xyra.

he thought, looking at the conscious mythical armor that had spent fourteen hours watching him make a fool of himself.