SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 644: When the Ground Lied

The alpha was half again the size of the others. Instead of charging, it came forward at a trot, angling as it read the shape of their formation. The mineral along its back was not scattered like the deposits on the lesser wolves. It formed a solid, glowing ridge from skull to hip.

Vyra dropped a wall of flame across its approach and it went through, and the flame did not slow it.

”Formation,” Seraphine said. ”Ira, hold it. Vyra, cut the rest off it. I’ll take the flank.”

It nearly worked.

Ira met the alpha’s charge and stopped it, which cost her both heels dug ten inches into wet stone. Vyra sealed the remaining four wolves away behind a curtain they would not cross. Seraphine came in from the alpha’s blind side with the sword already moving.

And then the distance broke.

Leon saw it happen and had a fraction of a second to understand it. Seraphine’s strike went in exactly where she had aimed — and the alpha was not there. It was two feet to the left of where all five of them could see it, and the thing that had been standing where they were looking was where the beast had been, some instant ago, on some other reckoning of distance.

Her blade went through empty air. Her momentum carried her forward into a position that put her inside the alpha’s actual reach with her sword committed and her guard open.

The head came around.

Leon moved.

He did not attack the beast. He seized the warped interval between Seraphine and the alpha and forced its visible and physical distances back into agreement. The Formless Myriad Scripture carried Space and Lightning through its neutral circulation: Space anchored the local geometry while Lightning gave his thoughts and movement the speed the correction required.

The false positions vanished. The alpha shifted two feet in everyone’s perception, and Seraphine found herself equally displaced. Her balance had never changed; only the distance she had been shown was wrong. She twisted her wrists and brought her sword across her body.

The jaws closed on her raised sword instead of her throat.

After that it was quick. Ira put the lance through the alpha’s flank while it was occupied, Seraphine tore her sword free and opened its neck, and Vyra dropped the fire curtain onto the remaining four and let Ira finish them.

The aftermath took longer than the fight.

Loriel worked her way through all four of them, and there was more to do than the fight had suggested: Ira’s forearm still needed cleaning before she could finish healing it; Vyra had concealed a deep bruise along her ribs; and Seraphine’s shoulder had taken more strain than she admitted.

Leon harvested the cores and the useful hide sections with Vyra and left the rest.

”Eleven and an Early Golden Core alpha,” Vyra said, writing. ”That matches the survey range. This was an ordinary pack in its ordinary territory.” She looked up. ”Nothing had to send them. We’ve been standing in the middle of their ground for two days, taking samples.”

Seraphine had gone back to the spot where her strike had missed and was standing on it.

”The stormglass,” she said. ”When I hit it with lightning earlier, the charge came out where the mineral chose. Just now, when the alpha crossed here—” She crouched. ”There’s a vein of it under this stone. My lightning went through it a half second before the position broke.”

Ira was still angry, and it took Leon a moment to understand what she was angry about.

”It was where I could feel it,” she said. ”That’s the part. I don’t fight by looking. I felt it standing there and it was standing there and it also wasn’t.” She shook her head sharply. ”Nobody’s formation broke. Sera’s strike was perfect. The ground lied.”

”Yes,” said Leon.

Vyra had gone quiet, marking positions on her diagram.

”Here,” she said, tapping. ”The misalignment happened here. Which is—”

”Nineteen paces from the flat ground,” Leon finished. ”The closest point of the entire fight.”

He walked out to the marked patch afterward, alone, and stood at the edge of it in the rain while the others broke down the harvest.

Two days of measurement had shown him that distance disagreed with itself here. Until tonight, that had been a curiosity.

For roughly a second and a half, physical and visible distance had come apart badly enough to nearly kill Seraphine.

And it had happened while Seraphine’s lightning was running through a vein of stormglass under the stone.

The charge does something.

They spent the next day and a half turning that into something they could use.

Leon mapped it properly, which meant slowly. Vyra drove marker stakes at measured intervals along four lines, and Leon walked each line reading the distance with his perception while she read it with a chain, and they compared.

The numbers were maddening at first and then stopped being maddening and started being informative.

Along three of the four lines, perception and chain agreed. Along the fourth — running roughly northeast, straight across the flat ground — they diverged, and the divergence was not random. It grew as you approached a certain point, held for perhaps eleven paces, and then shrank again on the far side.

”It has a measurable shape,” Leon said on the second afternoon. ”It isn’t behaving like a point or a hole. The distortion occupies a region, and its strongest area lies roughly where the needles indicate.”

”How wide?”

”Thirty paces across at the widest, as far as I can tell, and the effect extends above and below the surface.” He rubbed his eyes. ”The measurements fit an overlapping spatial layer better than anything else I can think of. If that model is right, it isn’t near this ground. It corresponds to the same ground. I can feel where the two spaces come closest, but I can’t find an edge or a wall to open.”

The next communication window opened while Vyra was copying their first complete map. She transmitted the battle record, their injuries and recovery, the synchronized movement of the tracking needles, and Leon’s current spatial assessment. Ji Liansu authorized them to continue, repeated her prohibition against forcing the anomaly, and ordered them to withdraw if the distortions spread beyond the marked region. The plaque closed with the next window fixed two days later.

They had mapped where the danger began and told the Palace exactly what it had done. They still had no way to reach whatever lay inside it.