Ex-Rank Awakening: My Attacks Make Me Stronger - Chapter 405

Chapter 405: EX 405. Shut Down
Leon hovered above the cracked earth, a faint trail of dust still drifting from the crater he’d crawled out of.

The silence felt wrong. Too still. Too empty. He swept a slow look around and exhaled.

“So where am I?”

He knew the answer. This was the trial world. But he hadn’t stepped out of God’s Temple.

He hadn’t even landed anywhere familiar. It felt like someone had tossed him out blindly into a forgotten corner of the realm.

He clicked his tongue.

“I wonder if she did that on purpose.”

He rose higher, drifting through the stale air until the ruined horizon stretched far beneath him.

Then he narrowed his eyes and activated Racheal’s talent. His senses expanded in a wave, rolling across the entire trial world like a pulse of light.

What came back made him freeze.

“What… happened?”

He searched again, deeper this time, but the result didn’t change. Nothing. Not a single living person anywhere. The whole world felt hollow.

Leon streaked forward, moving so fast the landscape blurred beneath him. He crossed mountains and dead forests before landing above the human settlement, what used to be the human settlement. The buildings stood intact, untouched by battle or time, but abandoned. Silent. Empty.

And it wasn’t just this place.

In the mortal zone, the ascendant zone, the divine zone, every shelter that should have been bustling with trial takers lay deserted.

Worse, he felt no resistance at all when he crossed boundaries that should have resisted him.

A divine-stage being should never have been able to step foot in the mortal zone.

Yet here he was.

The rules were breaking.

The foundation itself felt thin, flickering, like a dying flame.

Leon stared into the quiet streets, a cold realization settling over him.

“It can’t be…” he muttered. “The trial world has stopped working.”

****

The words of the Brightest Star echoed in Leon’s head, heavier now than before. A futile endeavor, she had said, and she had been right.

Leon’s gaze swept across the silent ruins. “Since the trial world’s purpose has been served,” he muttered, “it no longer has a reason to keep running.”

The trial world had never been just a source of power.

It was a mechanism, a shelter carved from Pandora’s echo to create a separate timeline untouched by corruption. Now that its purpose was complete, the system had simply… stopped.

Leon clenched his fists as the realization sank in. No more trials. No more rewards. No awakenings. No advancements. The engine that had driven the trial races forward was gone.

He could almost see it, the confusion, the fear that must have spread across the worlds when the trial world went silent. The one thing that had given them strength against the demons, gone without warning.

His eyes narrowed.

“I have to find a way back.”

But when he turned toward the teleportation pads, his resolve met reality. The runes were dull, lifeless, their faint hum of power now replaced by silence. Leon sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.

“So…” he muttered under his breath, “how do I go back?”

****

Smoke clung to the ruined skyline of Blue Planet like a shroud, curling out of half-collapsed buildings and drifting through empty streets.

The city looked dead at first glance, but it wasn’t. Something moved in the rubble.

Demons stalked the broken avenues, their claws scraping against cracked pavement.

“Resistance rats don’t know when to give up,” one snarled, kicking aside a chunk of debris.

“They’ve already lost. Yet they keep fighting.”

Another demon snorted.

“That’s the thing with inferior races. They don’t know their place. Once the higher-ups find their rabbit hole—”

A voice cut him off from somewhere in the ruins, sharp and mocking.

“Know our place? Don’t make me laugh.”

A second voice followed, dry and irritated. “These demons get more arrogant every day.”

The demons snapped into formation at once, weapons raised. In the next heartbeat, a barrier surged to life around the entire city, a dome of shimmering force that sealed every exit. Panic rippled through the demon ranks as they realized they were trapped.

Two figures stepped into view.

The first was a red-haired, middle-aged man with sharp crimson eyes, Luke, Eden’s father.

The second carried himself with a heavy, grounded presence. Blonde hair, forest-green eyes, and a great axe resting on his shoulder, Darian Kael, Leon’s father.

Darian’s SS-rank aura erupted, shaking dust from ruined walls.

“Let’s end this quickly,” he said, shifting his grip on the axe. “Before a Lord notices the mess.”

Luke nodded, drawing a rapier as his own SS-rank power surged. The air around him warped with heat.

“You inferior species—you dare—”

The demon’s words never finished.

Darian’s veins lit with golden light as his Extraordinary talent, [God of War], roared to life. Thousands of weapon forms, movements, and killing paths flashed through his mind in an instant.

He blurred forward and appeared in front of the loudest demon, splitting its skull open with a single clean strike.

Before the corpse hit the ground, another demon lunged toward Darian, but Luke was already on the move.

His talent [Mad Tyrant] ignited, twisting his form into a towering red shape, muscles corded with power. He vanished in a streak of crimson and drove his rapier through the forehead of the nearest demon.

The two men ended back to back amid a sea of snarling demons. There was no fear on their faces, only steady resolve.

Then they moved.

Darian and Luke cut through the demon ranks with the practiced ease of men who had lived far too long on the edge.

Each movement carried the weight of SS-rank mastery. Even if they couldn’t advance further, the power they had forged was more than enough for the S-rank demons closing in around them.

****

-Authors Note-

19-Day Challenge: If we stay in the Top 50 of the Golden Ticket rankings until the 19th of this month, I will do a mass release on that day.

To make the conditions easier: If the book receives one thousand or more power stones before the 19th, the mass release is guaranteed. I believe we can pull this off, let’s go!