SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 577: The Hollow King of Avarice

Beyond them lay a throne chamber, heaped with treasure — not scattered and broken like the vault outside, but gathered, weapons and artifacts and chests of valuables piled around the walls and arranged around a single central seat.

On that seat sat the thing the seals had held.

It was tall and gaunt, wearing royal armor of black and gold gone to damage — cracked plates, a dented crown, the whole of it worn like something that had sat too long.

Through the gaps he saw no body, no flesh or bone, only a hollow darkness that deepened beneath the crown past anything his perception could read.

Broken weapons and dulled treasures orbited the throne, some drifting free and some chained to it, turning slowly around their seated king. Its hands were empty. In the center of its chest, behind a cracked seam in the plate, black-gold energy circulated — the drawn-off power of everything piled around it, cycling through a cavity where a heart should have been.

Words were carved deep into the stone of the throne, and Leon read them as the figure lifted its hollow head.

The Hollow King of Avarice.

He didn’t need a Tower panel to name it. The throne named it, and the thing carried the truth of the title in every stolen treasure and every dulled chain. This was no guardian set to watch a door.

Its combined pressure stood firmly within Ethereal Lord territory, stronger in total output than the Uncounted Warden.

Much of that strength was not its own. Power flowed from the surrounding treasures into the hollow armor, raising the sovereign far beyond the Ethereal Initiates Leon had already surpassed.

It didn’t attack. Its head tilted, the darkness beneath the crown considering him, and when it spoke the voice rose from everywhere at once, a dry resonance out of the treasure piles themselves.

”You took the rewards,” it said. ”Knowing each would strengthen what waits at your gate. Most who reach me flinched from every treasure the Tower offered, too afraid of the cost. You did not.” Something like approval moved through the words. ”You understand value.”

Leon said nothing, and kept his eyes moving over the chamber — the piled artifacts, the chains, the slow-turning treasures, mapping what sat where.

”I can offer more than the Tower ever will.”

The treasures stirred, and clear images rose from them. Greater elemental authority, fire and storm answering him at a scale he hadn’t yet reached. Spatial movement gone perfect and effortless, folds without strain. His conscious armor manifested fuller, more complete than he’d yet worn it.

The whole hoard of the vault, laid out as his. Access to the Tower’s hidden routes at a thought. And knowledge — the uncounted path explained, its makers named, the mystery he’d been chasing simply handed to him.

The offers were good. That was what made him careful. The power in them was real, or close enough, and the King held it out as though it cost nothing.

He reached along the edges of the offer with his own perception, not the System — the System had nothing, and he’d stopped waiting on it.

Under every gift ran the same thread of black-gold energy that bound the orbiting treasures to the throne, the same chains that held them.

Anything he accepted would carry that thread into him. Take the power, and the power would take him — bind him to the vault the way every dulled treasure in the room was bound, make him one more possession turning slowly around a throne he’d never rise from.

”No,” Leon said.

The hollow head stilled. ”You refuse power. Wealth. Even the answers you came chasing.”

”I refuse a leash.” He said it flatly.

He had no quarrel with power, and none with treasure — he’d spent the whole floor proving it, taking what he wanted and paying as the prices came. But a gift that made him a possession was worth nothing, and once he’d seen the thread through it, everything the King offered had emptied out.

”Keep all of it.”

The chamber went silent. Then the visions collapsed, the treasure-light drawing back into the piles, and the Hollow King rose from its throne.

”Then you are taken the harder way.”

It attacked.

Leon met it head-on, because the fastest way to learn a thing was to hit it and see what happened.

The King’s empty hand swept toward a pile and a weapon leapt to it — a long black blade full of borrowed light — and it crossed the distance faster than its size allowed.

Leon didn’t bother with restraint. He answered with real force: a sword strike backed by holy energy, then a lance of white fire that took the King square in the chest and blew a crater through the black-and-gold plate, deep enough to end most things twice over.

The crater filled itself in. Black-gold energy flowed up from the treasure piles into the cracked cavity and out through the armor, and the ruin he’d made sealed over, plates knitting whole while he watched.

Leon tested another path.

”Kneel.”

Leximancy struck the Hollow King hard enough to drive one armored knee toward the floor.

Before the command could hold, black-gold power surged through the four strongest threads linking it to the hoard. The burden of the word spread across several anchors instead of remaining fixed on one will, and the King forced itself upright.

The command worked. The structure supporting the King broke its hold.

He tried a cleaner kill. He folded space in a tight, stable arc — the Spatial Tempering held it steady even with the vault pushing back — and took the King’s head from its shoulders with a single pass of his blade.

The head crumbled to dust before it hit the floor, and a new one rose out of the hollow, the darkness beneath the crown simply extending itself back into shape.

Not a lack of force, then. He had force enough. The problem was that breaking the body did nothing to what fed it. As long as the treasures poured power into that chest, cutting the King down was like cutting water.

He reached to fold something larger — to tear open the ground beneath the throne, to distort the whole chamber and rip the King’s foundation out from under it.

The vault refused him.

The ancient structure pushed back against any distortion on that scale, the space around him going stiff and unyielding.

Short folds it allowed. Redirections, local pressure, a step of teleportation within the chamber — those held. Rearranging the room, it would not. He filed that away and stopped wasting strength on it.

The King fought with a cruel intelligence. When he pressed close it dropped the long blade back into the hoard and called a shorter, heavier weapon to rule the near distance. When he backed off to use elements it summoned an artifact and answered with stored elemental power, forcing him to defend.

And it used chains — lengths of golden-black energy lashing out from the throne, catching at his footwork, trying to bind him and drag him toward the seat.

One chain caught his forearm long enough for a stolen blade carrying Ethereal Lord-level force to split the conscious armor at his side. The weapon opened flesh beneath it and spilled blood.

Leon twisted free while the wound closed almost before the pain finished registering. Bronze-gold material flowed over the damaged plate just as quickly. Blood remained. The injury did not.

He was spending power, but his reserves ran deep and his mana trickled back even as he fought. He wasn’t in danger of running dry.

He was in danger of the chains — of the way they reached for more than his body, that thread of ownership riding under every one, trying to fix itself to him rather than merely cut him. Those he made very sure to sever fast.

Then he saw the channels clearly, and the fight changed shape.

Not every treasure fed the King. He’d assumed the whole hoard did, but watching the black-gold energy flow he saw it ran from only certain artifacts — threads connecting a handful of treasures to the cavity in the King’s chest, while the rest of the hoard sat dark and dead. A limited number. He picked out four that mattered, and the Mirrorheart tempering sharpened his eye for the pattern of them — for how the King’s power repeated, and which sources it drew from when.

One pulsed in time with the King’s regeneration, the treasure that rebuilt it. One thrummed whenever the chains lashed out. One flared each time the King loosed stored elemental power. And one held a deep, steady note beneath the others — the anchor, he judged, that held the King’s hollow identity and armored form together at all.

Destroy what feeds the body, not the body. That was the fight.