SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 650: The Road That Would Not Stay Still

”Nobody moves,” Leon said.

Ira stopped with her weight already shifting forward. Loriel lowered the foot she had started to raise. Vyra kept one hand on Seraphine’s shoulder, giving both of them a physical point the formation could not reinterpret.

Leon spread his spatial perception through the ground around them. It showed him a basin whose distances contradicted what his eyes reported, but the contradictions were not random.

”Walk back to the marker,” he told Seraphine. ”Count every step.”

She returned to it in four.

”One step forward became twenty paces,” Vyra said. ”Four steps back crossed the same ground.”

”The terrain isn’t moving,” Leon said. ”The path is changing. The formation decides how much distance each step crosses, and it can assign different distances to different people.”

He had Ira take one step northeast. She moved less than two paces.

Loriel repeated it and travelled nearly six.

Seraphine looked toward the place where the surveyors had disappeared. ”It’s trying to separate us.”

”It may be,” Leon said. ”For now, that remains a theory. We assume it can and give it no opportunity.”

Ira took a length of braided field cord from her pack. ”Belts. Nobody objects.”

They tied themselves together with enough slack to fight but not enough for someone to vanish without pulling the others. Leon took the front, with Seraphine behind him, Loriel in the centre, Vyra fourth, and Ira guarding the rear.

Before moving, Leon checked the corridor.

The paired anchors were still cycling energy. He could feel the outer plate through the spatial correspondence, faint but steady, while the tracking formations continued supplying the recognition pattern. Whatever controlled the changing roads had not touched their retreat.

”We advance until that changes,” he said. ”If the flow through the anchors weakens, we turn around.”

The next hour required patience more than strength.

Leon tested every direction before allowing the group to move. Some steps carried them exactly where they should. Others stretched a pace into fifty or reduced ten careful strides to the length of a man’s arm. Twice the apparent ground ahead led back toward their own marker line despite pointing northeast.

Seraphine laid sheets of controlled light across the stone. The light travelled according to the true distance even when the terrain looked nearer, giving them a second measure against Leon’s perception.

”That ridge appears forty paces away,” she said at one point. ”The light crosses ninety-three.”

Vyra recorded each discrepancy and placed numbered markers behind them. She found the repetition after twenty minutes.

”Forty-one seconds,” she said. ”The paths change on a forty-one-second cycle. Northeast stretches, contracts, then the lateral routes reverse before everything resets. If we move during the contraction, we gain ground.”

They began moving on her count.

Before committing farther, Leon made them test the return route. They turned as a group and followed Vyra’s next contraction cycle back toward the marker Seraphine had placed after entering. The path remained distorted, but it did not prevent movement in reverse. The paired anchors continued carrying a steady current when they reached the marker.

”We can still retreat,” Leon said. ”That is the only reason we continue.”

They retraced the same ground on the next cycle. It took a different number of steps, but Loriel’s count of their true separation never changed.

Ira drove an anchor spike into the stone whenever the formation presented an easier route that had not existed before. One path opened between two black shelves and showed the mineral pool directly ahead, close enough that Leon could distinguish the colour of Deacon Yu’s robe.

His perception found the path curving west beneath its own surface.

”Not that one,” he said.

”It looks shorter,” Loriel said.

”It ends behind us.”

Ira planted a spike across the entrance. ”Then it can keep its shortcut.”

They moved around it. The inviting path folded shut before they had gone twenty paces.

The braided cord did not always look honest. At one point, Vyra appeared a hundred paces behind Seraphine even though only Loriel stood between them. The cord stretched across the apparent distance without tightening.

Loriel closed her eyes.

”Vyra is eleven paces from me,” she said. ”Seraphine is nine in the other direction. Ira is twelve behind Vyra. Young Master is seven ahead of Seraphine. Nobody has been moved.”

Her perception of their life signatures remained consistent even when space made every other measure disagree.

”Keep calling us,” Seraphine said.

Loriel did. Every few breaths, she named their order and true separation. Her voice made the shifting basin easier to ignore.

They reached a region of narrow shelves where the formation changed tactics. The ground stopped stretching ahead of them and instead shortened the routes leading sideways. A single careless step would have carried one person away from the line while the others barely moved.

Leon ordered them to close the slack in the cord and proceed shoulder to shoulder.

The mineral pool appeared again. This time, one of the Foundation Establishment surveyors was driving a marker into the ground while Deacon Yu watched. None reacted when Ira raised her voice.

”Still no sound across the separation,” she said.

”But we can see them without lightning now,” Vyra said. ”The realm is bringing us into the same local structure.”

They advanced another forty paces on her count. The surveyors grew clearer.

Then the terrain shifted, and Leon felt a new current enter the stormglass beneath their feet.

”Stop.”

The five of them halted together.

Behind them, the corridor remained stable. The paired anchors still carried their closed circuit, but deeper in the realm, energy was gathering along five separate junctions.

”The roads didn’t work,” Leon said. ”It’s changing methods.”

Black stormglass pushed out of the ground twenty paces ahead.

Four columns rose to human height and folded into the shapes of armored cultivators. Pale lines spread through their chests and limbs. A fifth column continued upward until it stood half again as tall as Ira, broad through the shoulders and carrying enough pressure to make the surrounding air tremble.

Leon’s System identified them as their cores ignited.

[Stormglass construct — Early Golden Core] ×4

[Stormglass sentinel — Early Nascent Soul]

”They’re not alive,” Loriel said. ”I can’t feel anything inside them.”

Vyra watched the pale currents running from the ground into their feet. ”Formation bodies. Whatever controls this place built them from the network under us.”

Seraphine drew her sword. Ira untied the rear of the cord and took up her lance. Vyra’s fire spread in a thin line across the stone, while Loriel stepped clear of the cord and studied the false circulation inside the constructs.

Leon moved toward the Nascent Soul sentinel because its stronger connection offered the clearest path into the formation beneath them. The rank itself did not concern him.

The sentinel turned its blank head toward him.

Then all five constructs attacked.