Ex-Rank Awakening: My Attacks Make Me Stronger - Chapter 382

Chapter 382: EX 382. Darling In The Front
“This path leads to the memorial ground of the day Pandora was freed,” she said.

Leon felt the squad behind him grow still.

Even Adrian and Eden seemed caught by the weight in her tone.

The Dowager stepped aside, allowing them a full view of the towering descent carved into the earth itself.

She let the silence hang for a heartbeat.

Then, with a voice edged in solemn finality, she said:

“These are the Steps of Liberation.”

****

Leon repeated her words under his breath, almost testing how they felt on his tongue.

“Steps of liberation.”

The Dowager glanced over her shoulder at him. In the dim glow rising from the marble beneath their feet, her expression softened.

“I hope that one day these steps are used for what they were meant for,” she said quietly.

“Not for mourning. Not for running. But for walking toward a future worth protecting.”

She turned back to the massive staircase. Another breath slipped from her, steady and long, the kind someone lets out when they’re done hesitating.

Then she moved, one step, then another step, her boots touching stone as if she were greeting an old memory rather than entering a nightmare.

The staircase gleamed beneath her.

Each stair was pristine, white as untouched snow, stretching so wide it could carry a fleet of ten thousand colossal ships side by side without brushing rails.

Leon followed her without a word.

Then Nikko. Rachel and Elizabeth stayed close behind. Adrian and Eden trailed them, while Malachi took up the rear.

Their footsteps echoed through the void.

Nothing else did.

The dark around them swallowed every sound except their descent.

At the barrier’s edge, the mist had glowed faintly. But here, the staircase itself gave off the light, a soft pulse that kept the shadows at arm’s length.

Leon felt the creatures hidden in that darkness. They were countless, watching and waiting.

They clung to the walls of the void like parasites pressed against glass, but they never crossed the line of the stairway’s glow.

That light was the only thing holding back the headaches Leon had wanted to avoid, headaches that now crawled beneath his skin.

He’d come here planning to test his squad’s new talents, to push them, to see what they were capable of.

But whatever he’d sensed earlier had killed that plan in an instant.

His gut had told him this place wasn’t something they explored.

It was something they ended.

‘If we can reach the tether and I destroy it,’ he thought, ‘then this trial is over. All of it.’

Originus stirred in the back of his mind, the dragon’s grumble rolling like distant thunder.

‘You just had to say something so tempting,’ he muttered.

Leon didn’t get the chance to ask what that meant.

As a pulse swept through the staircase.

Every sense sharpened at once. Ahead of them, the Dowager stopped mid-step, her gaze cutting toward the dark.

Her voice dropped low.

“Get ready for battle.”

The stairs trembled.

Then the sound came, millions of tiny claws scraping stone.

Something surged upward through the void, swallowing the glow as it rose.

The swarm hit their vision a heartbeat later, a rolling mass of corrupt creatures piled over one another, racing up the steps so densely they turned the light into a flickering haze.

Leon exhaled slowly, almost tired.

“Why do they always rush to their deaths.”

****

As the horde skittered upward, the details of the monsters sharpened in the faint glow of the steps.

They were reptilian things, slick-bodied and wrong, each no larger than a house cat.

In any other place, that size might have made them harmless.

Here, in the dark of the Hallow, they came across like nightmares that crawled out of a child’s drawing.

Leon pictured waking in a silent room to see one perched on his bed.

That alone was enough to drive any sane person to therapy.

Each creature dragged itself forward on only two front limbs, its lower body dead weight, yet that handicap didn’t slow them.

They pulled their bodies up the Steps of Liberation in quick, jerking motions.

Their hides were a dark, moldy green, and every one of them had a single lonely eye set above a maw packed with teeth far too large for their heads.

Rank Sevens made up most of the swarm, but the stronger ones weren’t rare enough.

Rank Eights scattered through the mass, and the Rank Nines; hundreds of them, moved like commanders pushing the wave forward.

Leon felt his muscles coil.

He was half a heartbeat from moving when Elizabeth stepped past him without a word.

Her expression didn’t change as she spoke, her voice calm and unhurried.

“Leave this one to me, dear.”

Leon slowed looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

If anyone could wipe out this kind of pest problem, it was her.

The Dowager watched Elizabeth with a tight stare.

The memory of Adrian and Eden tearing through a hundred corrupt creatures still lingered in her mind, but this was different.

That time there had been two of them against a hundred.

Now a single girl walked toward a swarm measured in millions.

The Dowager almost said something.

Emphasis on almost.

She held her breath instead, choosing to watch and judge if madness was about to make sense.

Elizabeth kept walking until she was far enough from the group that the ground trembled beneath her feet from the incoming mass.

With each step, draconic sigils lit across her skin like embers waking in the dark.

Two horns pushed from her skull, curving elegantly as power pooled in her three cores.

By the time she stopped, she looked less like a girl and more like a queen taking the field.

The swarm closed in, a rolling tide of claws and teeth that swallowed the light around it.

Elizabeth exhaled once.

Her voice rang out, steady and cold.

Her [Throne of Finality] answered in the same breath, its power blooming outward like a silent detonation.

“BEGONE.”

****

-Authors Note-

Mass release if we reach top 60 Golden Ticket ranking! Come on, guys, the month is about to end!