SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 594: Leon Is Still Leon

Chapter 594: Leon Is Still Leon

The first thing Leon did was stop defending. The four barriers he had maintained around the others dissolved at once, freeing the attention he had spent eleven minutes dividing among them.

The centipede pulled its head from the basin wall and charged.

Leon knew several attacks that could turn the valley into a crater, but he did not know who else inhabited this wilderness or what such destruction would announce. Instead, he let the creature drive him backward and watched. Its mandibles closed on empty air. The tail swept through a fold of space he had already left behind.

A lance of compressed cold entered a seam. Power arrived from the neighboring segment after four seconds, and the wound closed two seconds later. Leon repeated the strike, received the same result, then hit the eleventh segment, the ninth, and the eleventh again.

The second wound in the eleventh segment healed more slowly.

The creature could redistribute its power, but its reserves were finite. Some lay within its body, while more flowed from the star-metal veins beneath the basin. Leon dropped two hundred meters of metal-rich rock away from its forward third, and the glow beneath its plates dimmed.

He opened dozens of shallow wounds along its flanks. None threatened its life, but its instincts repaired every one, spending power until Leon stopped attacking the wounds and struck the crossings instead.

The circulating bundles met beneath the joints. A spear of hardened space entered the junction below the fourth segment and twisted, tearing something its neighboring sections could not repair. Leon repeated the process at the seventh and fifteenth.

When the centipede whipped around, part of its body failed to follow. Its first sound that was not rage shook the basin, and it dove toward the earth.

Leon pulled the lattice he had sunk earlier from the ground, raising a cage of stone and cold. It could not hold the creature, but breaking it cost four seconds. He used those seconds to move down its length and sever one junction after another. By the time the centipede tore free, two-thirds of its body had fallen silent, the mineral veins were buried, and the roads carrying power forward had been cut.

Its head rose unsteadily, white plates fading to dull iron.

Leon extended his perception and found the existence the System had warned him about: a knot of anchored intent buried a hundred meters beneath the basin, ready to rebuild the creature after the death of its flesh.

He struck the anchor and the centipede’s head at the same moment.

Only one impact made a sound. The armored length collapsed across the basin and did not move again.

Leon stood in the quiet for a moment, breathing this world’s heavy air, one arm hanging where the mandible had done more damage than he had let anyone see.

[Star-Iron Devouring Centipede — Slain]

[You have earned...]

He stored the entire corpse—plates, mandibles, and the core still glowing sullenly in its chest cavity—but not near any settlement or living ecosystem. Leon sealed it inside an empty storage region cut off from the inhabited lands until he understood whether its severed anchor was truly the only danger it carried. Whatever else this world was, it was rich, and a hundred meters of armored monster was not something a wise man left in a basin for someone else to find.

Then he sat down on a rock and talked to four angry women from inside the dimensional world through his connection.

"—could have held longer," Ira was saying.

"You couldn’t stand up."

"I could have up."

"Ira." He rubbed his eyes. "It gathered enough power to glass the whole basin. I could survive that. Loriel could not."

"I know," Loriel said quietly. "I felt it building."

"Knowing why doesn’t make it sit any better." Seraphine’s voice, flat and tired. "We came for this, Leon. Not to sit in a garden while you walk into an unknown world alone."

"I’m not asking you to sit in a garden. I’m asking for time." He looked out at the basin, at the black stone and the fallen petrified trees and the three moons that had barely moved. "There’s something here that the living things in this world have and none of us do. Their energy runs through a structure — roads, channels, something inside the body. That creature had it. Loriel felt the same kind of pattern inside the weed near our arrival. Until we know what it is and whether we can build one, you have to spend several times as much power for far less effect."

"And you’ll find that out how?"

"By finding people. Cities. Somebody who was taught this as a child and thinks it’s boring." He stood, tested the arm, found it mostly working. "I’ll come back the moment I have anything worth having. That’s not a promise to be careful. It’s a promise to come back."

"It’s a bad promise," Vyra said.

"It’s the one I’ve got."

He let the connection go quiet, and started getting ready.

They were not weak, but things right now were too mysterious and dangerous.

His armor sank from bronze-gold to lie dark beneath his skin. He suppressed his aura in layers, reduced the elemental crown to an ember, and changed into unembroidered gray clothes and plain boots. A cloth pack held a knife, a waterskin, and three days of ordinary food, because a man carrying nothing was more suspicious than one with a bad pack.

At a shallow stream an hour north, he checked his work in the water. There was no glow at his collarbone or shimmer along his arms. The gray clothes hung naturally, their hems worn in the right places, while his armor, elemental crown, and the deeper pressure of his aura had disappeared from sight.

Leon knew his appearance had changed along with the rest of his body. What he did not know was that his Divinordial refinement and Primordial Heart gave it a vitality and perfection that suppression could not hide. He had never needed to measure its effect on a stranger, while those closest to him had watched the transformation happen gradually until it was simply how Leon looked.

He saw no crown, no armor, and no advertised wealth or power. For the purpose of passing as an unimportant traveler, he judged the disguise adequate and moved on.

For nearly three days, Leon followed whatever suggested civilization: worn stone, a collapsed road beneath drifted grit, streams flowing somewhere useful, and the directions flying beasts seemed to avoid.

On the first afternoon, he found a cultivator’s bones in a gully. The ribs looked reinforced, but there was no cloth, ring, boot, pack, or blade remaining. Someone had even taken the pins from the dead person’s hair.

Near noon the next day, Leon crested a rise and saw six travelers on the road below, mounted on beasts with too many legs. Ahead of them, a man dragged himself along the roadside with one leg bent in a direction no leg should bend. The group passed without slowing. One rider adjusted his reins only to give the injured man a wider berth.

Leon went down the slope.

The man heard him coming, rolled over, and got a rusted knife up in both shaking hands.

"Stay ." His voice cracked in the middle of it. There was nothing in his face but certainty — not fear of a stranger, but a flat expectation of what a stranger in this place was for.

Leon stopped ten paces out, set the waterskin and half his food down on the stone, backed away, and walked up the slope without looking behind him.

Leon noted both encounters without deciding what the entire world was from them. A few days of travel could reveal what a road was like, not every person who lived beyond it, and he had built enough of a civilization himself to know how badly a stranger could misread one.

But he stopped leaving his back to open ground.

On the third night, the wilderness went quiet.

Not gradually. Between one step and the next, the small clicking things in the rocks stopped clicking, and the wind that had been moving through the petrified trees continued to move without making any sound at all.

Leon kept walking at exactly the same pace.

The silver moon was high and his shadow lay long and sharp across the pale stone ahead of him. He watched it for a hundred paces without appearing to watch anything.

At the hundred and first, his shadow’s left arm swung a fraction of a second after his own.

And in the middle of it, curled just below where his heart would be, something had been drawn that he had not put there. It was small. It was a mark of some kind, three strokes and a hook, and while he looked at it, it grew perceptibly darker.