Ex-Rank Awakening: My Attacks Make Me Stronger

Chapter 425: EX 425. A Small World

Leon and the elf locked eyes across the shattered ground.

For half a heartbeat, escape crossed her mind. Instinct screamed at her to flee, to abandon this ruined base and vanish into the sky.

Then reality caught up. The barrier was already there, invisible but absolute, pressing against the air itself. No gaps. No weakness. Making every idea of running nothing but a fantasy.

So she stayed where she was, hovering stiffly, fear crawling up her spine as Leon regarded her in silence.

His voice soon broke the stillness, calm and stripped of mercy.

"You know what you’re supposed to do."

The words didn’t make sense at first. Confusion flickered across her face. Then understanding struck, sharp and humiliating.

Her body reacted before her pride could protest. She cut her own flight and dropped.

The impact was brutal. Stone cracked as she slammed into the ground, dust erupting outward in a thick cloud. The pain was real, but she welcomed it. Pain was better than hesitation.

From the settling debris, she crawled forward on all fours, head lowered, robes dragging uselessly behind her. Every movement felt like surrender carved into flesh.

Leon watched her approach without expression.

When she was close enough, he acted.

The world narrowed as Throne of Boundless Perception activated.

The elf screamed.

It wasn’t a sound pulled from her throat alone but from something deeper, more intimate.

Her mind was being forced open, layers peeled back without permission. Memories, thoughts, fears, all dragged into the open under an overwhelming pressure. She convulsed on the ground, fingers clawing uselessly at stone as if she could anchor herself to reality.

Leon stood over her, unmoved.

He felt the familiar backlash ripple through his body, the strain of overusing the borrowed thrones.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been dangerous. Crippling, even. But Leon wasn’t normal anymore.

Nikko’s Throne of the Wild Tyrant surged quietly beneath his skin, knitting damage as fast as it formed. The void answered him willingly, healing him with the energy of the darkness and the shattered environment; his own corrupted nature still working in his favor.

He could push as far as he wanted. There was no cost he couldn’t pay.

So he pushed.

He sifted through her thoughts with ruthless precision. Command structures. Power hierarchies. Ranks and movements. Whispers of demons growing stronger, of limits being broken, of things that should not have been possible becoming common.

He could have tried this on Gordon. But Gordon was broken, his mind too drowned in pain to be useful. At the time, Leon was also too blinded by fury to care about anything except the man’s torment.

Now, there were no distractions.

Leon violated the elf’s mind completely, extracting everything he needed while she writhed beneath him, reduced to nothing more than a source of information.

When he was done, the pressure vanished.

The elf collapsed, gasping, eyes vacant, her thoughts left in disarray.

Leon straightened slowly, gaze lifting toward the darkening horizon.

Before his gaze settled on the elf writhing on the shattered floor while he sifted through the fragments of her mind, separating truth from noise with cold precision. When he was done, a faint breath left him.

"What a small world."

Her name surfaced clearly. Getrude.

The realization settled in with grim weight. She was the elf who had planted traitors inside Racheal’s squad, the one who had orchestrated the betrayal before entering Pandora, back at the God’s Temple.

Leon remembered that day well. How he and his squad had intervened. How they had first encountered that strange, almost harmless-looking elf.

To think the architect of it all would appear here, tied to Gordon of all people.

It made sense now.

Gordon had been initiated by her. Proximity was inevitable.

Leon pushed her personal memories aside and focused on what truly mattered. The demons.

"They rebuilt everything," he murmured.

Before the shutdown, the hierarchy had been simple. F to D ranks were expendable foot soldiers. C to A ruled regions. S ranks were Great Demons. SS were Demon Lords. SSS stood at the peak as Demon Kings.

Now that structure was gone.

After the trial world’s collapse, anything below S rank had been reduced to laborers. Demons from S to SSS were no longer elites but common soldiers. The real power no longer lay with kings.

It lay with the lords and the entities above them.

Leon’s gaze sharpened as the implication settled in.

Leon pieced it together with cold clarity. The Lord rank was not just a single tier but fractured into three strata: low, mid, and high, known among demons as Viscount, Count, and Marquis.

By his estimation, they matched Origin Stage existences from level one to three. Threatening, but manageable.

He could crush them without much strain.

Above them stood the Duke rank, split again into three severities of power: Duke, True Duke, and Arch Duke. These were different. Dangerous.

Their strength aligned with Origin Stage levels four, five, and six. His level.

That realization brought no comfort. Matching an Arch Duke did not make him feel untouchable. It did the opposite.

Because there was still a rank above Duke.

And that single fact settled into Leon’s chest like ice. The world was not just dangerous. It had been holding its breath, waiting for something far worse to step forward.

Leon’s thoughts settled on the rank above Duke.

The Emperor.

From what he tore out of Getrude’s memories, even she did not know the full truth of them. Only fragments and whispers. But Leon could feel the weight behind those fragments. Emperor-rank demons stood far beyond him, perhaps even brushing against the level of the Brightest Star herself. That realization sent a quiet chill through him.

And it made no sense.

Demons were born of corruption. That much Leon knew better than anyone. Corruption was not a creator of power. It never had been. In the Era of Pandora, it survived by parasitizing the Origin Core, siphoning power through its people that had the natural ability to form normal cores and refining it.

Even then, corruption did not create strength. It refined what already existed, twisted it, recycled it.

When that era ended and the world reset, corruption lost its source. It could not rely on natural disasters anymore. It could not reach the Origin Core. So it evolved, birthing demons as tools to bring about the apocalypse.

But now those demons were growing stronger.

Far stronger than they should be.

Leon’s eyes narrowed as the realization dawned on him. Why had he not thought of this before?

’If corruption is not a source of power, how were the demons growing so much stronger?’

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Thank you for reading.