SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 643: Teeth in the Storm

Chapter 643: Teeth in the Storm

The communication window came at the eleventh mark.

Vyra ran it and Leon spoke, and he kept it exact.

"Camp located and intact. Wards active but degrading. No bodies, no blood, no battle residue, no evidence of search or robbery — reserve weapons, spirit stones, and stored samples all present. Personal field equipment absent, consistent with the team walking out to work. All three tracking formations still running. I have relocated them independently; all three reacquire the same physical point roughly thirty paces north of camp. The rising-water phenomenon described in the final record has reappeared and is ongoing."

Han Suwen’s voice came back thin through the plaque. "Assessment?"

"There’s a spatial anomaly at that location. I can measure its effect on distance, but I can’t find a stable way through it. We’ve detected no hostile presence or immortal-level power. We’re able to continue safely, and I’d like to keep working the survey route."

A pause, and then Ji Liansu.

"Continue. Your next window is in two days. If you miss it, the response leaves." A beat. "Do not attempt to force the anomaly."

"I wasn’t going to."

"I know. I am saying it so that the record shows I said it."

They worked the survey team’s final route through the rest of that day and the next, mapping the distortion while completing the resource survey alongside it.

Seraphine spent an afternoon on the stormglass. A shelf would accept a small, deliberate lightning discharge, retain it for several breaths, and then release it along the pale branching veins in a direction she had not chosen.

"It’s redirecting," she said. "The vein structure determines where the charge goes. I’ve put four discharges into the same shelf from four angles, and the energy exits at the same place every time."

Ira spent a morning on the fire-responsive ore near a vent and came back annoyed.

"It doesn’t want internal flame," she said. "I pushed calamity heat into it through the lance and it took about a third of what I gave it and refused the rest. Not resisted — Like it was already full."

Vyra tried the same ore with external flame and got a completely different answer.

"It drinks it," she said. "Ambient heat, controlled flame laid across the surface, it takes as much as I feed it and spreads it evenly through the whole piece." She turned the sample over. "So it’s not that the ore rejects fire. It rejects fire arriving from inside a body. Which is a strange thing for a rock to be able to tell."

Loriel took samples from six species and found that two of them, both growing within thirty paces of the distortion, had moisture content that changed depending on the time of day in a way she could not account for.

Nothing any of them found was a finished treasure. Every sample still needed evaluation, refinement, and a formal claim through the Palace’s contribution system.

The rising water became more common as the second storm came in.

It stayed local. It never spread past a rough circle three hundred paces across with the flat ground near its center, and inside that circle thin silver threads climbed steadily through the falling rain while ordinary droplets came down through them, and neither interfered with the other.

The formation needles moved.

Not much — small synchronized corrections, all three together, whenever the thunder came closer or the charge in the exposed stone shifted.

"I don’t think they’re tracking a person," Vyra said, watching them. "A person shouldn’t move a quarter degree every time the sky changes."

"Then what?"

"That’s the problem. It could be a formation. It could be a place. It could be a correspondence between two things that only exists while certain conditions hold." She shook her head. "I can’t distinguish those three with what I have."

It was Ira who noticed the ridges.

She had gone up to check the perimeter before the light went and she came back down at a fast walk without appearing to hurry, which was worse.

"Movement on the black ridges," she said. "North and northeast. Low, staying under the skyline, and it’s been keeping pace with us for a while."

Leon extended his perception and found them.

A call came through the rain — low, drawn out, and answered twice from two directions.

Down the northern slope, something large moved between two shelves, and along its flanks a scatter of pale deposits caught the lightning and flashed.

"That’s a pack," said Seraphine, drawing.

Behind the ones already visible, something heavier came unhurriedly out of the dark. The pressure rolling from it belonged to an Early Golden Core beast.

"Stormhide gorge-wolves," Vyra said, already backing toward the camp’s stone shelf. "They’re in the regional survey. Pack hunters, they nest in impact terrain, and the deposits in their hides are the reason nobody farms them."

"How many?" said Leon.

"Records say eight to fourteen."

Seraphine had counted. "Eleven visible. One alpha."

"Diamond," Leon said. "Backs to the shelf. Loriel inside."

They moved without discussion, and the pack came in.

They were bigger than Leon expected and faster than that, low-slung and heavy through the shoulders, their hides matted with the same pale mineral that ran through the basin’s stone. Where the lightning came, the deposits lit — a flicker of stormglass running along a spine or a flank as the animal moved, so that the pack came at them out of the rain as a scatter of intermittent pale lines.

Then Seraphine went forward, and Leon’s first concern—that the household might not be ready to fight together—eased.

She met the first two before they reached the shelf. Lightning flashed through her feet, carrying her to the leading wolf’s shoulder before it could adjust. Her sword entered beneath its jaw, withdrew, and turned with her in one continuous motion. A thin plane of light spread from the blade—not bright enough to blind, but precise enough to reveal movement through the rain. Seraphine read the second wolf’s charge two paces before it committed.

She did not shout instructions. She said "Left" once, quietly, and Ira went left.

Ira went left with her lance held low and calamity flame running inside the shaft rather than around it. She met a charging wolf head-on, which was insane, and turned out to be correct — the lance took it through the chest and the flame went off inside the wound rather than in the air, and the animal came apart from the inside with almost no visible fire at all.

"Two," she said. "Vyra, they’re flanking your side."

Vyra had been waiting for that.

She did not throw fire at the wolves. She laid it across the ground — a wide, low, unhurried curtain of flame that came up between the two shelves the flankers were using, and stayed there, and did not go out in the rain. Four wolves that had been coming around the eastern side found themselves in a corridor, and the corridor led exactly where Vyra had decided it would lead, which was into Ira.

"Three," said Ira. "Do that again."

"I intend to."

Loriel stayed inside the shelf line and was busy the entire time.

She could see the pack through the rain when nobody else could—their life signatures remained clear to her—and she called them out by position and number as they came in. When a wolf slipped past Seraphine and opened Ira’s forearm to the bone, Loriel clamped the torn vessels, bound the muscle with vitality, and stopped the bleeding in under four seconds. Ira did not break stride, though the wound would still need proper cleaning afterward. When another bite left black residue across Seraphine’s shoulder guard, Loriel purified it before the contamination could reach the skin.

She reinforced them. That was the part Leon found himself watching. A pulse of vitality going into Seraphine’s legs at the moment she needed a fourth stride out of three strides’ worth of energy. Something steadying Vyra’s hands as she held the fire curtain for a fourth minute.

None of it killed anything. All of it mattered.

Leon held the center, watched the whole field, and kept his hands mostly empty.

He put a spatial fold in front of a wolf that had gotten inside the diamond, and it arrived somewhere it did not expect and lost the two seconds Seraphine needed. He caught a piece of debris out of the air near Loriel. Otherwise he let them work, because they were working.

Seven wolves were down in under four minutes.

The alpha stopped watching.