SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 657: The Thief Behind the Glass

Whoever held the other end of the relay possessed more charge than Vyra, but she understood the network better.

He hit her containment across nine routes at once, attempting to overload the entire structure. Vyra had spent twenty minutes learning how much pressure each route could carry. She shifted her fire instead of meeting his strength directly.

”Every one of those routes draws from the same reserve,” she reported. ”He can force them open, but each attempt costs him. Sera, west arc again.”

The sentinel came back for the fifth time and Seraphine took it apart in nine seconds. It came back a sixth time and Ira had that one.

”Each return costs him,” Vyra said. ”That reserve cannot sustain this indefinitely.”

Leon stayed on the anchor and let them handle it.

He had the spike mapped now, and it was uglier than expected. The thing was doing two jobs. Its original function was straightforward butchery — driven through the principal channel to sever it. But somebody had come back afterward and threaded a control line through the shaft, turning a saboteur’s wedge into a crude relay, and the relay had roots in six directions.

Pull it and everything on those six branches comes home at once.

”Ira. Six branches. I’m going to mark them, and I want them gone in order from the outside in, and I want the last one still standing when I start.”

”Why the last one?”

”Because if I take all six, he’ll know. I want him holding a line he thinks still works.”

”That,” said Ira, ”is a genuinely unpleasant idea. I like it.”

They executed it together and it took less than a minute.

Vyra forced every active defensive charge in the chamber into one contained route and sealed the rest, which meant that for about six seconds there was exactly one path the hostile will could push through, and it was surrounded by Crownfire.

Seraphine flooded the anchor’s three uncut channels with clean lightning, so the instant the obstruction left, the column would have power waiting rather than an empty second to fall through.

Ira destroyed five of the six relay branches in the order Leon marked and left the sixth.

Loriel watched the sentinel’s borrowed circulation, and when the hidden controller reached for it again to rebuild the construct a seventh time, she reversed the false circulation at the exact instant the connection opened. The command went out and did not arrive. The sentinel did not re-form.

In the gap that made, Leon separated the control path from the anchor.

It was fine work and it was fast. He took the hostile line where it entered the spike, folded four inches of space around it, and displaced it — not cut, moved, so that the far end was still pushing into somewhere and the somewhere was no longer connected to anything. Then he drew the spike out clean and closed the severed channel while Seraphine’s lightning was still standing in it.

The column came on, and every other light in the chamber came on with it.

Sixteen stormglass constructs collapsed at once. They did not rebuild. The pieces lay on the floor and stayed pieces, and the enormous distributed network running through four layers went quiet and orderly and stopped being a weapon.

Vyra let her fire out, sat down on the terrace step, and said, ”Well.”

Restoring the defensive anchor opened a direct maintenance route back to the nexus. Leon tested the correspondence before allowing anyone through. The passage held without shifting, and all fourteen returned together. They carried the three formation-breaking spikes and laid them across the outer terrace. Vyra took the nearest step while the nexus processed the restored network.

The nexus spoke, and this time it spoke almost like something that knew what it was saying.

Defensive governance: restored. Spatial alignment: restored. Temporal regulation: restored. A pause. Exit authorization: withheld. Central layer compromised. Central layer occupied.

Log recovered. Unauthorized access, central layer. Extraction attempt: spatial-temporal core. Method: anchor severance, three instances. Implement signature—

The projection produced an image of a spike, rotating, the cut characters visible along two faces.

—signature unrecognized. Origin external. Extraction incomplete. Personnel present.

”It doesn’t know who they are,” said Mo Rui.

”It doesn’t need to,” Leon said. ”I do.”

The three spikes lay in front of him. Their metal, cut characters, and formation signature matched the construction method of the ward-breaking disc used during the Shen estate attack. The connection was real, even if the identity of the people behind both operations remained unknown.

Then the platform changed.

It happened all at once. Sections of the black stormglass disk lost their colour — not shattering, not opening, simply becoming transparent, so that fourteen people found themselves standing on a floor they could suddenly see through.

Beneath it, occupying a space Leon’s perception insisted was both directly below and somehow inside the platform, was a chamber.

Circular, roughly forty paces across, its walls lined with the same channels as everything else. At its centre stood a dais, and the dais was damaged — a section of its surface cut away and the housing beneath forced open, with the tools that had done it still lying on the floor.

Seven people stood in that chamber.

Six were arranged around the walls in a defensive spread. Leon read all six at once: Golden Core, three early and three middle. They appeared competent, but none posed a personal danger to him or the four women.

The seventh stood at the dais with one hand on it.

He was perhaps sixty in appearance and very still, dressed in dark travelling clothes with the sleeves bound, and the pressure off him was Nascent Soul. A small notched iron ring was worked into the collar of his robe.

He had looked up at the exact moment the floor turned clear, and he was looking at Leon.

For three full seconds his face showed nothing but astonishment.

Leon watched the astonishment disappear. The man made a quick assessment of the fourteen people above him, then focused with the alert calculation of someone revising a plan under pressure.

Beside Leon, Ira cracked her neck.

”That’s him?” she asked. ”The one who’s been fighting Vyra?”

”Apparently.”

”He’s been here longer than we have, and she still took the network away from him.”

Loriel had gone up on her toes to look. ”Six Golden Core and one Nascent Soul. Young Master, do you want me to keep the surveyors back, or—”

”Back. All nine of them, behind the second terrace.”

Yu was already moving his people, and moving them fast, and he did not ask why a Peak Foundation Establishment medicinal attendant had assessed a Nascent Soul cultivator in the tone of somebody reading a supply list.

Behind Leon, Xie Lan said, very quietly, to Mo Rui: ”Did she just—”

”Don’t,” said Mo Rui. ”Whatever it is, don’t.”

The man at the dais did not shout, or threaten, or waste time on outrage.

He looked at the three spikes lying on the terrace above him. Then he looked at Vyra, sitting on the step with her hands loose, and something in his expression suggested he had spent the last twenty minutes forming an opinion about her.

Then he put his other hand on the damaged dais.

The nexus’s projection stuttered.

—competing maintenance authority. Two authorities registered. Central layer authority: active. Outer authority: active. Conflict—

Every light on the platform dimmed by a third and came back.

The man took his hand away, and Leon understood exactly what he had been shown.

He can’t defeat the five of us directly. He doesn’t have to.

He was standing inside the core chamber with a hand on the only control surface that mattered, and the exit had not opened, and the thing that opened it was under his palm.

Leon looked down through forty paces of transparent stormglass at a man looking back up at him. Neither moved. Above and below them, the nexus continued announcing that two competing maintenance authorities remained active.

Leon’s household could clear that chamber quickly once they reached it.

Getting to it was going to be the entire problem.