Ex-Rank Awakening: My Attacks Make Me Stronger - Chapter 282

Chapter 282: EX 282. Wavelength
Leon’s voice hadn’t stopped Originus out of pride or recklessness. It wasn’t stubbornness that drove him to endure the agony threatening to tear him apart, it was instinct, the raw and terrible certainty that if the bond was severed now, he would die.

“I… can feel it,” Leon gasped through clenched teeth. “If the binding stops, I die.”

At first, he hadn’t understood the pain. It was so immense, so absolute, that thought itself became a blur. His mind had been nothing but chaos, every nerve screaming in protest. But then, amid the burning, something in him shifted. A spark of clarity pierced through the torment, and his instincts screamed the truth at him.

This pain wasn’t an accident. It was a clash, a collision of existence itself.

From his earlier exchange with Originus, Leon had learned something impossible yet undeniable: his true origin traced back to the Primordials. And that revelation explained everything that followed.

He was no mere human.

No simple vessel.

No child of the Blue Planet.

He was a being born of something far older and yet, something far different.

Leon’s breath came in ragged bursts as he pieced it together. When a new race was born from the Primordials, it always carried the prefix Primordial in its name. That was the mark of its ancestry the acknowledgment that its bloodline stemmed from creation’s first breath. Elizabeth had once told him this, in the quiet of a moonlit evening, her voice filled with wonder as she described the divine hierarchy of races. Even Originus himself was proof of it, a Primordial Dragon, one of the first of his kind.

But Leon… he had no such title.

His race, as shown by his system, was not Primordial Void Spawn.

It was simply Void Spawn.

And that single absence changed everything.

It meant he wasn’t a descendant of the Primordials. He wasn’t even part of the natural order shaped by them. He was something entirely new, something born from the void itself. A being without a place in the universe’s design.

The realization hit him harder than the pain itself.

That was why the bond burned.

Originus’s essence was a pure fragment of creation, raw order, structured life. But Leon’s existence… was the opposite. His soul resonated with nothingness, an echo of the void that defied both time and reality. When those two forces tried to merge, it wasn’t harmony it was war.

The ore wasn’t rejecting Leon. It was struggling to understand him.

Every scream, every pulse of agony was the universe itself trying to reconcile what he was, a creature that shouldn’t exist.

Leon gritted his teeth, his vision swimming in black and gold light. “It hurts… because I don’t belong here,” he muttered, half to himself. “Because I’m not… meant to be.”

His body trembled, but his resolve didn’t waver. If he stopped now, the delicate balance within him would shatter, and his existence, already unstable, would collapse entirely.

So he did the only thing he could. He endured.

Originus watched in silence, awe flickering through its vast consciousness. The dragon had seen gods rise and fall, had watched worlds ignite and die. But never—never—had it seen a being like this one.

A creature born of the void, binding itself to creation through sheer will.

It was unnatural. It was dangerous. It was magnificent.

****

As a soul-bound ore, Nigg’erite was unlike any other mineral in existence. It didn’t just recognize a wielder’s mana or life essence, it bonded directly with their soul’s wavelength, an imprint as unique as a fingerprint yet universal enough to exist in harmony across all known races. Every living being, human, elf, beastkin, even dragons, shared a similar rhythm of existence, a natural pulse within creation’s design. That was why, for countless millennia, there had never been a single recorded case of the ore reacting violently during bonding.

Until Leon.

The moment the bond began, Nigg’erite had already linked itself to his wavelength. But as soon as that connection deepened, something went wrong, terribly wrong. The ore had tried to merge with his soul, and the collision of those two incompatible frequencies sent a storm of agony tearing through him.

The problem wasn’t in the ore. It wasn’t even in Leon’s will.

It was in his existence.

Leon’s soul didn’t follow the patterns of life as the universe knew it. It pulsed with an alien rhythm, a void born resonance that refused to align with creation. So when the Nigg’erite tried to harmonize, their frequencies clashed, folding in on each other.

If the bond stopped now, the partial merging would unravel his soul entirely, tearing apart the threads that made him who he was.

But if it continued unchecked, the collision would shatter his soul beyond repair.

It was a lose-lose situation, unless he found a third path.

Leon understood what he had to do.

He had to sync his own wavelength to the ore’s.

It sounded simple in theory, just match frequencies, align harmonics, balance the resonance. But the soul wasn’t a muscle to be trained or a core to be molded. It was the very essence of self. To manipulate it directly was to risk erasing one’s identity entirely.

But Leon didn’t have a choice.

Through the searing pain, he reached inward, deeper than he ever had before, past flesh, past thought, into the trembling core of his being. There, within that vast inner space, he could see it: his soul, luminous yet frayed, with a dark substance weaving through it like spilled ink twisting into clear water.

That dark wave was the ore’s binding essence, alive, invasive, and utterly alien.

Leon steadied his breath, if only out of instinct. The black energy pulsed violently, its rhythm jagged and chaotic. He could feel every pulse crash through him like thunder.

“I can’t fight it,” he thought, grimacing. “So I’ll match it.”

Closing his eyes, Leon began to mold his soul—not by force, but by resonance. He let his inner light shift, stretch, and bend, slowly aligning itself to the ore’s alien pattern. The instant he did, agony unlike anything he’d ever felt tore through him.

It wasn’t pain of the body, it was pain of being.

His vision fractured. His thoughts splintered. Every heartbeat felt like a hammer striking glass. But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.

He forced his wavelength to twist with the black pulse, each motion sending shards of his consciousness scattering into the void. The air inside the dome trembled as his essence rippled outward, two distinct wavelengths, one of creation, one of the void, fighting, merging, and reshaping each other into something new.