SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 646: The People Beyond the Rain

They had two hours and they used all of them.

Vyra reseated the three tracking formations in a triangle around the shelf, at ranges she had chosen so their bearings would cross at the tightest point, and then recorded every reading twice — before the front arrived, and again as the first thunder came within four seconds of its flash.

”They’re tightening,” she reported. ”All three, steadily. The increasing charge corresponds exactly with the bearings drawing closer.”

Seraphine took the shelf itself. She spent an hour tracing the pale veins under the black glass with her fingers a half-inch above the surface, working out where a strike would enter and where the mineral would decide to send it.

”There,” she said, marking a point near the shelf’s northern end with a chip of stone. ”It’ll come in high on the ridge and run down through here. Everything on this shelf feeds through that one channel.”

Loriel took the boundary line and watched the water.

Ira took the perimeter, and did it without being asked, and did not complain once — because four people were about to have their entire attention on a rock, and she had been the one to spot the wolves.

Leon stood where the two spaces came closest and kept his perception open.

Nobody pretended they were in control of any of it. They had positioned themselves around a natural phenomenon and were waiting to see what it did.

The front arrived at the eighth mark and the basin went dark under it.

Rain came down hard enough to hurt. Inside it, the rising threads thickened — no longer thin beads breaking free one at a time, but continuous silver lines climbing out of every pool and every wet hollow along the curve, moving up through the downpour without either one disturbing the other.

The charge came into the stormglass ahead of the lightning. Leon watched the pale veins brighten under the wet black surface, running and forking, until the whole shelf was lit from within like something with a circulatory system.

”Bearings holding,” Vyra called. ”Tighter than anything I’ve recorded. All three crossing within a pace.”

Leon felt it in his own perception and it was the strangest sensation he had experienced since crossing worlds.

Two structures. Occupying almost exactly the same place. Close enough that his sense could not cleanly separate them, and still — still — with no seam, no boundary, no door. Two things in one location, and no way at all to get from one to the other.

The thunder cracked directly overhead.

Then the lightning came down on the ridge, exactly where Seraphine had said it would, and ran into the shelf.

The stormglass took it and rang.

Every vein in thirty paces of black stone lit at once, the light coming up through the wet surface so brightly that the rain above it turned white — and for the length of several breaths, the flat ground stopped being empty.

Another basin lay over the one they were standing in.

It was not a mirage, reflection, or ghost. Leon’s spatial perception registered structure within it: terrain in daylight beneath a sky without rain, with the same black shelves, steaming cracks, and contours as the basin around them. The second landscape lay at a slight offset, as though two copies of the same map had been placed together without aligning their corners.

And there were people in it.

Leon counted them in the first breath because that was the trained thing to do, and got nine.

A man in deacon’s grey stood near a mineral pool with a record plaque in one hand, pointing toward something on the far ridge while he gave instructions Leon could not hear. Two younger cultivators in disciple robes adjusted a formation box between them, one gesturing sharp disagreement over its placement. Six others spread across the visible ground with marker stakes and measuring chains, doing exactly the kind of routine survey work recorded in the ledger back at camp.

Their equipment matched the mission records. Their clothing was dry.

None of them was starving, injured, frightened, or searching for a way out. One of them laughed at something.

They think they’re still surveying.

”That’s Deacon Yu,” Vyra said, her voice unsteady. ”Leon, that’s the man from the recording. He hasn’t even changed his robe.”

Ira was already shouting.

”Hey!” She had come off the perimeter without being told and was ten paces onto the flat ground, waving both arms. ”Over here! Hey!”

The deacon went on talking to somebody out of view.

Seraphine sent a flash — controlled, tight, bright enough to be seen at four kilometers on a clear night, directed at the two disciples with the formation box.

Neither of them looked up.

Leon released a spatial pulse into the visible layer, restrained and precise and unmistakable to anybody with any sensitivity at all.

One of the surveyors adjusted his footing on uneven ground and continued measuring.

Nothing crosses.

He tried harder — reached out with his perception toward the deacon, twenty paces away, standing in plain sight — and found the same thing he had found for three days. The distance was there. It went somewhere. It stopped mattering before it arrived.

He could see the man’s face. He could see the ink on his record plaque. He could not have touched him with anything he possessed.

The light in the stormglass began to fade.

”Leon,” Loriel said urgently. ”It’s going.”

He stopped trying to shout across and spent the last of it doing the only useful thing available: memorizing.

The exact sensation of two spaces at their closest. The precise point on the shelf where his perception had come nearest to crossing. The angle. The depth. The way the charge had felt running through the mineral in the instant before the overlay appeared, and the way it felt now as it drained.

He did not try to cross. He wanted to, badly enough that he noticed himself wanting to, and he stood still instead — because he did not know what stepping into that would do to a body, and there were four people behind him who had followed him eleven days north on his judgment.

The pale veins dimmed. The overlaid basin thinned, went transparent, fractured across the reflective surface of the shelf like an image on breaking ice.

The deacon turned to say something to a disciple, and was gone.

Rain came down on empty black stone.

Nobody spoke for a while.

Ira was still standing out on the flat ground with the water running off her, both hands at her sides.

”They didn’t hear me,” she said. ”I was eleven paces away.”

Vyra had already begun writing, which was what she did instead of reacting. ”Nine of nine. Alive, apparently uninjured, and still working. Their field positions match the final survey route, and none of them reacted as though they had been missing for weeks.” Her stylus stopped. ”They don’t know.”

”Know what?” said Ira.

”That anything has happened.” Vyra looked up. ”They’ve been gone for more than three weeks outside. In there, they appeared to be continuing the same survey recorded before they vanished. Whatever time is doing in that space, it is not moving at the same rate as ours.”

Loriel had crouched where the boundary line ran and put her hand flat on the wet stone, the way she did with soil.

”If the layer hasn’t shifted, they’re still there,” she said quietly. ”Right now, while we’re standing here, continuing the same survey.”

Seraphine came to stand beside Leon at the edge of the shelf.

”We can’t reach them,” she said. It was not a question and she did not say it as a defeat. She was already thinking about the next thing; he could hear it in her voice. ”Not with anything we brought and not with anything we know.”

Leon looked at the stretch of ordinary dark stone thirty paces away, where a man had stood moments ago with a record plaque in his hand.

Nine people. Alive. On ground he could walk across in fifteen seconds.

Leon had crossed between worlds. He had rebuilt a road the Upper Ones erased and carried a civilization through it. He had spent thirty-one days building a cultivation route because none of the existing paths could hold what he was.

And the deacon of a Jade Moon survey team was standing close enough to see, on the other side of the rain, and there was no door.