SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

Chapter 105: The Ascent

The transition from the Outer Rings to the Inner Sectors of Neo-Kyoto was not a gradual shift in architecture. It was a hard, unforgiving border, enforced by a massive wall of reinforced plasteel and a secondary, localized energy shield.

Glen stood on the roof of a decaying, ten-story apartment block in the slums, looking across the fifty-yard gap that separated the two worlds.

On his side, the rain was acidic, the neon signs flickered with failing power, and the air smelled of rust and desperation. On the other side of the barrier, the rain didn’t even fall. The secondary shield repelled the weather, leaving the Inner Sectors bathed in a pristine, artificial twilight. The skyscrapers there were sleek, towering spires of white composite and glass, connected by elegant, sweeping sky-bridges.

And rising from the very center of it all, dwarfing the skyscrapers like a monolith among pebbles, was the Celestial Tower.

Level 40. That was the Ferryman’s price.

Glen looked down at his right arm. The flesh was still charred black from the backlash of Corrupted Synthesis, the skin tight and weeping fluid. He couldn’t use the arm for heavy lifting, and he certainly couldn’t use it to channel mana. If he tried to force another skill through those ruptured channels, the arm would blow off at the elbow.

He had to do this with one hand.

He reached into his jacket with his left hand and pulled out the stolen Astra datapad. The Ferryman had uploaded a localized map of the Celestial Tower’s exterior before kicking Glen off the ship.

"You can’t go through the front door, Wraith," the smuggler had warned, pouring himself another drink. "The lobby is guarded by Empress Ryun’s Imperial Vanguard. They’re all A-Ranks, and they don’t ask for ID. They just shoot. You have to scale the exterior. The Tower’s surface is smooth obsidian, but there are maintenance vents every ten levels. You get to Level 40, breach the vent, and you’re in the vault."

Glen deactivated the datapad and slipped it away.

He stepped up to the edge of the roof. The fifty-yard gap between the slums and the Inner Sector wall was a sheer drop into a heavily trafficked mag-lev trench.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t calculate the trajectory or worry about the wind shear. He just stepped off the ledge.

He plummeted toward the glowing tracks below. At the last possible second, he triggered Lightning Movement. The explosive burst of blue electricity didn’t just propel him forward; it acted as a kinetic dampener, arresting his downward momentum and launching him across the gap like a railgun slug.

He slammed into the smooth plasteel wall of the Inner Sector, the impact jarring his teeth.

Before gravity could pull him down, he raised his left hand. Shadow Thread. Five razor-sharp lines of black mana shot from his fingertips, biting deep into the reinforced plasteel. He used the threads as a makeshift grappling hook, hauling himself up the sheer face of the wall with brutal, one-handed pulls.

He crested the top of the wall and rolled over the edge, landing silently on a pristine, white-tiled sky-bridge.

He was in.

Glen stayed low, his Shadow Cloak wrapping around him, bending the ambient light to render him practically invisible. He moved quickly across the sky-bridge, avoiding the glowing patrol drones that swept the area with sweeping red lasers.

The Inner Sectors were eerily quiet. There were no street vendors, no scavengers, no chaotic hum of humanity. The elites of Neo-Kyoto lived in isolated, heavily guarded luxury, completely detached from the suffering of the Outer Rings.

Glen navigated the pristine streets, his eyes fixed on the massive black monolith looming ahead.

When he finally reached the base of the Celestial Tower, the sheer scale of it was paralyzing. The obsidian stone was perfectly smooth, devoid of any seams, windows, or handholds. It didn’t look like it had been built; it looked like it had been grown from a single, impossible seed of dark magic.

He walked up to the base, placing his left hand against the cold, black stone.

It didn’t feel like rock. It felt like a living thing, humming with a deep, resonant frequency that made the void fragment in his chest pulse in response. The Tower was a conduit, a massive needle piercing the fabric of reality, drawing raw, chaotic mana from the void and filtering it into the city’s grid.

Glen looked up. Level 40 was roughly four hundred feet above him.

He couldn’t use Lightning Movement to run up the wall. The smooth obsidian offered no friction, and the explosive kinetic energy would just push him backward into the air.

He had to climb.

He raised his left hand, his fingers splayed wide. He activated Shadow Thread, but he didn’t shoot them out like whips. He condensed the black mana, forcing the threads to wrap tightly around his own fingers, forming razor-sharp, hardened claws of pure shadow.

He slammed his left hand into the obsidian wall.

The shadow-claws bit into the impossibly hard stone, grinding and sparking as they found purchase. Glen gritted his teeth, the muscles in his left arm bulging as he pulled his entire body weight off the ground.

He hung there for a second, suspended by one hand.

He couldn’t use his right arm. He had to rely entirely on his legs and his left hand.

He kicked his heavy combat boots against the smooth stone, finding a microscopic imperfection in the obsidian, and pushed upward. At the apex of his push, he ripped his left hand free, reached higher, and slammed the shadow-claws back into the wall.

Clack. Push. Reach. Clack.

It was an agonizing, brutal rhythm. Every time he pulled himself up, the ruptured mana channels in his right arm screamed in protest, the charred flesh tearing slightly with the exertion of his core. The wind whipped around him, growing colder and more violent the higher he climbed.

Ten levels. Twenty levels.

His left arm was burning, the lactic acid building up despite his Enhanced Regeneration. The shadow-claws were beginning to fray, the condensed mana destabilizing under the sheer physical strain.

Thirty levels.

He risked a glance downward. The pristine streets of the Inner Sector looked like glowing micro-circuits far below. If he slipped now, not even his dense core would save him from the fall.

Thirty-five levels.

The wind was howling now, a localized gale generated by the Tower’s massive energy displacement. It battered against him, trying to peel him off the smooth stone. Glen pressed his body flat against the obsidian, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps.

He looked up. Just fifty feet above him, he saw it. A narrow, rectangular indentation in the smooth black stone. The maintenance vent.

He pushed through the pain. He ignored the burning in his lungs and the agonizing throb of his ruined right arm. He channeled the cold, absolute anger of the void fragment, letting the rot numb his physical limitations.

Clack. Push. Reach. Clack.

He reached the indentation. He slammed his shadow-claws into the edge of the vent, his fingers curling over the lip. He hung there for a long moment, his chest heaving, his forehead resting against the freezing obsidian.

He had made it.

Glen pulled himself up, swinging his legs over the lip and dropping into the narrow, metallic shaft of the maintenance vent.

The air inside was stale and smelled of ozone. The shaft was barely wide enough for his shoulders, forcing him to crawl forward on his stomach. He dragged his ruined right arm uselessly by his side, using his left hand and his knees to propel himself through the dark.

According to the Ferryman’s map, this vent bypassed the outer security grid and led directly into the ceiling of the Level 40 vault.

After fifty yards of agonizing crawling, the metal shaft ended abruptly at a heavy, grated grate.

Glen peered through the slats.

Below him was a massive, circular room. The walls were lined with glowing, cyan-lit stasis pods, each containing a pre-Awakening artifact. There were ancient, rusted swords that hummed with residual mana, glowing geometric cubes, and pieces of armor that looked like they had been forged from starlight.

But Glen wasn’t looking at the artifacts.

He was looking at the guards.

There were two of them, standing in the center of the room. They didn’t wear the sleek, corporate armor of the Astra Guild. They wore heavy, ornate samurai armor forged from a dark, iridescent metal that seemed to absorb the light. Their faces were hidden behind terrifying, demonic menpo masks.

Empress Ryun’s Imperial Vanguard.

They stood perfectly still, their hands resting on the hilts of long, curved nodachi swords. Their mana signatures were terrifyingly dense, radiating a calm, disciplined power that made the Astra enforcers feel like children playing with toys.

They were A-Ranks. Elite killers, hand-picked by an SSS-Rank Champion.

Glen lay in the vent, his breathing shallow. He couldn’t fight two A-Ranks in a straight brawl. Not with one arm, and not in a confined space where they had the tactical advantage.

He needed to end this before it even began.

He closed his eyes, focusing entirely on the void fragment in his chest. He didn’t try to suppress it. He didn’t try to control it. He opened the floodgates, letting the raw, necrotic anti-mana bleed into his system.

He didn’t channel it into his sword. He channeled it into his Predator Domain.

The invisible aura didn’t just expand; it mutated. The oppressive weight of his presence was infused with the absolute, entropic decay of the void. It became a localized field of rot.

Glen kicked the grate.

The heavy metal shattered, and Glen dropped from the ceiling, landing silently in the center of the vault, directly between the two Vanguard guards.

The guards reacted instantly. Their training was flawless. They didn’t shout, they didn’t hesitate. They drew their nodachi swords in a synchronized blur of iridescent metal, stepping forward to execute the intruder.

But the moment they stepped into Glen’s mutated Predator Domain, they froze.

It wasn’t fear that stopped them. It was physics.

The anti-mana infused in Glen’s aura slammed into their refined, structured cores like a sledgehammer. The ambient mana in the room was instantly negated, creating a suffocating vacuum. The glowing cyan lines on their ornate armor flickered and died. The residual magic humming in their nodachi swords evaporated.

For the first time in their lives, the elite A-Rank guards were completely cut off from the Awakening System. They were just men in heavy armor.

Glen didn’t give them time to process the shock.

He pivoted on his heel, the Abyssal blade flashing in his left hand. He didn’t use a skill. He didn’t need to. He just used the raw, brutal physical strength of his dense core.

He swung the heavy black iron in a devastating horizontal arc. The blade cleaved cleanly through the neck of the guard on his right, the ornate armor offering no resistance without its magical shielding.

The guard collapsed, his head hitting the floor with a heavy thud.

The second guard stumbled backward, his discipline shattering as he stared at his fallen comrade. He raised his nodachi, his hands trembling, trying desperately to channel mana into the dead blade.

Glen stepped forward, his dark eyes locking onto the terrified eyes behind the demonic mask.

"The Empress isn’t here to protect you," Glen whispered.

He drove the Abyssal blade through the guard’s chest, piercing his heart and shattering his core in a single, brutal thrust.

The guard gasped, his hands weakly gripping the blade, before slumping to the floor.

Glen stood in the center of the vault, surrounded by priceless artifacts and the bleeding corpses of the Imperial Vanguard. He hadn’t taken a single hit. He had weaponized the void, turning his very presence into a lethal weapon.

He didn’t bother consuming their cores. He didn’t have time. The moment their life signs flatlined, the Celestial Tower’s internal security grid would trigger a lockdown.

He walked over to the specific stasis pod the Ferryman had highlighted on the map.

Inside the glowing cyan cylinder rested a small, unassuming object. It looked like a simple, wooden puzzle box, covered in intricate, interlocking geometric carvings.

Glen smashed the glass with the hilt of his sword, grabbed the puzzle box, and shoved it into his jacket.

Sirens began to wail, a deafening, high-pitched shriek that echoed through the vault. The heavy blast doors at the far end of the room began to slide shut, sealing the room.

Glen didn’t run for the doors. He ran for the exterior wall.

He triggered Lightning Movement, blurring across the room. He didn’t stop when he reached the wall. He channeled every ounce of kinetic energy he had left, raised his heavy combat boot, and kicked the solid obsidian stone with the force of a cannon shell.

The unbreakable stone of the Celestial Tower cracked, spiderwebbing outward from the point of impact.

Glen kicked it again. And again.

On the third strike, the obsidian shattered, blowing a massive hole in the side of the Tower.

The howling wind of the Neo-Kyoto skyline rushed into the vault, sucking the loose debris out into the night.

Glen didn’t look back at the blaring sirens or the approaching reinforcements. He stepped through the jagged hole and threw himself out into the empty air, plummeting forty stories down toward the neon-lit streets of the Inner Sector.

He had the Ferryman’s toll. Now, he just had to survive the fall.