SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 559: Mythical Armor—3

Now that Leon had acknowledged his stupidity with sufficient sincerity, Xyra appeared satisfied.

"Try to merge with the armor," she said. "It will be fine."

Leon looked at her.

She had just finished telling him — at length and with considerable directness — that he was reckless, that his habit of throwing himself at problems without thinking was going to get him killed someday, and that the only reason it hadn’t yet was luck she found personally insulting to witness. And now she was telling him to walk up to a conscious mythical armor that had watched him make a fool of himself for fourteen hours and try to merge with it.

He looked at her for slightly too long.

Her silver eyes narrowed.

"Are you doubting me?" Her voice carried a specific quality that he’d learned to recognize. "You’re really asking for a spanking. I said it will be fine. Go."

Leon moved immediately.

The word spanking had a remarkable effect on his decision-making speed. He walked toward the armor without further deliberation, approaching across the crater floor, his hand extending toward it slowly — cautiously, with the careful movement of someone who had just watched the casing that had survived thirty thousand mana shatter from a single drop of blood.

The armor didn’t wait for him to finish the approach.

It moved.

Lightning fast — faster than his spatial awareness gave him useful warning about, the mythical armor simply deciding that his pace was unacceptable and resolving the distance itself. It hit him like liquid mercury at high velocity, and the first thing that happened was that everything he was wearing ceased to exist.

Clothes, light armor, everything — gone in the same instant the mythical armor made contact, burned away so completely that there was no residue, not even ash. The molten metal — because that was what it felt like, liquid and impossibly hot — began crawling across his skin with the purposeful movement of something that knew exactly where it was going.

It was the most painful thing he had ever experienced.

Leon had high pain tolerance. He knew this about himself with some confidence, having established the reference points through a series of genuinely terrible experiences. The race change. The fight with the ancient entity. The dimensional world battle that had left bones exposed. He had calibrated his understanding of pain against those events and considered himself informed on the subject.

This was worse than all of them.

The molten heat moving across every surface of his body — every surface, none of them spared, his brain receiving the information from all of them simultaneously — produced sounds from him that he had not planned to make. Not quiet sounds. Genuine, involuntary, completely undignified sounds, because the pain was at a level where social considerations stopped being relevant.

He heard himself and didn’t stop because stopping required a decision and decisions required cognitive resources he was currently allocating entirely to remaining upright.

From a distance, Xyra watched with the relaxed attention of someone viewing something she found very interesting.

Then the molten armor began trying to enter his body.

The pain increased by an order of magnitude that he would not have previously considered possible. It was trying to integrate — pushing through his skin, finding the pathways between muscle and bone, looking for wherever it needed to go to become what it was supposed to become. His blood was flowing in places and sealing in others, his holy energy and his Primordial Void Heart working frantically to keep him functional while something mythical rank rewrote the terms of his physical existence.

He screamed.

Not continuously — in bursts, between the grinding effort of staying on his feet, his teeth clamped together in the intervals between the sounds his body was making without his permission. The experience he’d had with soul-level pain during the tower gave him just enough reference point to hold himself upright rather than collapsing. Just enough. The margin was not comfortable.

he thought, in the fragments of coherent thought available to him.

Two minutes.

Approximately two minutes of subjective time that felt like several hours, during which Leon experienced the full range of what it meant to have a conscious mythical armor decide to integrate with a host it had apparently selected during a fourteen-hour circus performance and chosen not to incinerate.

Then it stopped.

The heat was gone. The liquid metal was gone. The pain was gone — completely, instantly, the way pain stopped when its cause stopped rather than gradually.

Leon looked down at himself.

No armor. No clothes. No anything covering him except for golden patterns that traced across his skin in designs he recognized from the armor’s surface — the dragon emblem on his chest, scales suggested in the markings along his forearms and shoulders, intricate detail work running down to his hands. The patterns glowed faintly, warm rather than hot now, and he felt no pain from them despite their appearance.

His legs had approximately enough structural integrity left to lower him toward the ground in something that resembled a controlled descent before giving up entirely.

As the ground came up toward him, his vision caught something in the corner of his awareness — the translucent golden screen of his system flickering to life, multiple notifications stacked on top of each other, the text moving across his fading vision with the patient insistence of something that considered itself important regardless of timing.

He ignored all of it completely.

he thought, with the absolute conviction of someone whose body had just been rewritten by a mythical consciousness and who had exactly zero remaining capacity for reading notifications.

The screen stayed visible for a moment longer, as though mildly offended by being dismissed, and then Xyra’s arms caught him and the notifications slid to the peripheral edge of his awareness where they would wait until he had the energy to look at them.

He didn’t reach the ground.

Xyra was beside him before he could fall, moving with a speed that didn’t announce itself, her arms catching him with a steadiness that made his current state of complete exhaustion feel adequately supported. He found himself leaning against her, which he lacked the energy to have opinions about.

She looked at him with an expression that was softer than her usual register — the ethereal beauty of her face carrying something that was genuine concern underneath its composure, her silver eyes moving across him with an attention that was checking rather than enjoying.

"Are you alright?" she asked, her voice quiet in a way he hadn’t heard from her before.

The softness of the question, combined with the face it was delivered from, combined with the way she was holding him — if he hadn’t known her, Leon thought distantly, he would have been completely undone by this moment. Completely. Without defense. He would have looked at her and felt something that would have required significant time to recover from.

He knew her.

Which meant the softness made him nervous rather than vulnerable, and the beauty made him cautious rather than charmed, and the concern — genuine as he believed it was — arrived in his awareness wrapped in the context of everything else she was.

"Fine," he said, his voice somewhat less steady than he would have preferred. "I’m fine."

She looked at him for a moment longer.

Then the smile appeared — small, knowing, the expression of someone who had observed something they found satisfying and wasn’t bothering to conceal it.

Leon decided he was well enough to stand on his own and began the process of making that true.