Ex-Rank Awakening: My Attacks Make Me Stronger - Chapter 330

Chapter 330: EX 330. Core Formation
As all of Leon’s squadmates trained, he trained in his own way.

Inside the imperial palace, in his chamber, Leon sat cross-legged and shirtless. Elizabeth lay on the bed beside him.

She looked cleaner. Her clothes had been changed and the healers had done what they could removing the whip marks. But the stitches remained and the scar on her abdomen would not fade.

Leon’s eyes were closed. His face was a mask.

Originus’s voice suddenly crawled into his head. ‘Boy, if you keep forcing this you’ll break yourself.’

Leon did not answer.

Originus tried again this time softer. ‘She wouldn’t want you dead over her. Not like this.’

Leon opened his eyes at that statement, as he looked at Elizabeth’s stomach. The stitches were a clean, ugly line across pale skin.

‘It’s my fault,’ he thought. ‘If I hadn’t made those cores…’

Originus cut in before the shame could drown him.

‘You can’t be sure that’s all. You can’t measure fate like a tally.’

Leon’s jaw tightened.

‘If I didn’t put those cores inside her, he wouldn’t have found her. He wouldn’t have marked her. I made her a target.’

Silence filled the room, heavy and exact.

Originus exhaled in his mind.

‘You did it to save her.’

Leon’s reply was a whisper that even the walls couldn’t keep.

‘Then why does it feel like I condemned her?’

A cold knot of anger coiled under his ribs. He let it feed the stillness. He felt threads of corruption, the thing he could now taste in the air, and he wanted to pull it apart with his hands.

‘If I can’t kill that bastard,’ he thought, ‘dying will be the least of my problems.’

Originus watched, silent this time. The primordial dragon could not fix stitches or heal the past. He could only observe the boy who would try impossible things and break himself to do them.

Leon sat. He breathed. He tuned the world down to a single point, the scar, the name he hadn’t spoken aloud, the promise he’d carved into his chest.

He would find a way. He had to.

****

Since entering Pandora, Leon had felt like the world itself was built to help him grow.

First, there was the flow of time, how days in Pandora stretched into weeks outside, giving him more room to accumulate attack points. Then came the clusters and tethers. Each one he destroyed and absorbed pushed his power higher. Every fight, every fragment of corruption, seemed tailored to his advantage.

But even blessings can dull the edge of hunger.

‘It’s the same thing all over again,’ Leon thought. ‘Whenever things start feeling easy, I ease up.’

He had done it before. When he first awakened his EX-rank talent, [Attack], he’d coasted on its strength.

He’d gone back to grinding eventually, but the relapse was there. Pandora’s strange laws had made him lazy again. Maybe no one else would notice. Maybe others would say he was being too hard on himself. But Leon didn’t care. To him, that ease was a stain.

And he’d carry it as fuel.

Unlike normal trial takers, Leon’s path had never been ordinary. Trial takers trained their bodies, studied one art, and waited for enlightenment to raise their rank. It was slow but pure, each step earned through sweat, pain, and mastery.

Leon’s growth didn’t follow that pattern. His stats climbed on their own, fueled by [Attack].

His first rank-up had come not through learning someone else’s art, but by creating his own—Extreme Art—something unheard of in the Federation, where arts were inherited through trial rewards.

Extreme art was far beyond what most in Pandora could even understand.

The other two rank-ups were even more unorthodox. The first came when he absorbed the tether’s corruption in Shantel. The second, after defeating the golden man in Harlot’s Paradise. Both were unnatural. Both changed him.

Now, Leon wanted to do it the normal way, to achieve enlightenment on his own terms.

Tackling clusters wouldn’t cut it anymore. His stats were too high, his existence too dense. Reaching enlightenment would take something greater, something deeper.

His gaze shifted to Elizabeth’s sleeping form. Her breathing was soft, her presence faint but steady. The scar on her abdomen stood out even against her smooth skin.

That scar was his reminder.

His reason.

And staring at it, had given him an idea came—a way to break through, a way to truly ascend.

Not through corruption.

Not through shortcuts.

But through the kind of resolve that left no room for regret.

****

Leon sat in silence, thoughts drifting toward the old texts he’d read back in Shantel’s library.

The emperor had created arts as a means for humans to grow strong, like the beasts. Julius Arman, the first emperor, had been raised by wolves. That part always stuck with him. A boy nurtured by monsters, striving not just to survive among them but to match them. Out of that wild ambition, he’d built the foundation for all professionals in Pandora, the art system.

Leon could almost picture it. A lone man in a forest, surrounded by predators, crafting a path of strength that defied nature itself.

‘The emperor really was insane,’ Leon thought. ‘But it worked.’

Still, as he compared that ancient path to the one of the trial takers, the differences were clear.

Both aimed for growth through mastery, but the professionals’ evolution was… structured. Each higher rank came with a transformation. Rank 7s gained telekinetic control, Rank 9s grasped laws themselves, bending the world to their essence. It was systematic and refined.

The trial takers’ path, on the other hand, was raw and undefined. They achieved enlightenment through their art, earned skills and spells from orbs, but beyond that, it was Lackluster. No deeper evolution, no distinct thresholds. Compared to professionals, it seemed incomplete.

Leon exhaled slowly.

The emperor’s goal wasn’t just strength, he realized. He wanted the races of Pandora to create their own cores.

That was the endgame of the art system, core development. A personal core marked true advancement, the first step into genuine power. But even that path only carried one so far. Developing a core stopped at Rank 5—equivalent to B-rank in the trial system.

Leon’s eyes flicked toward Elizabeth’s sleeping body. Her chest rose and fell gently beneath the sheets.

He clenched his fist.

He didn’t want to stop at B-rank. He couldn’t. But to even reach it, to begin that phase—he had to do what the emperor had once done: create a core.

Just like the one he’d made for Elizabeth.