SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 539: Second Floor of the Ascension Tower—2

The construct crossed the gap between platforms in two steps and swung.

Leon ducked under it, the strike passing close enough that he felt the displaced air against the top of his head, and came back up with his sword already moving.

CLANG!

The blade connected with the construct’s forearm and the impact told him several things at once. Dense. Not stone despite looking like it — the internal structure was something harder, more uniform, without the grain or fracture points that stone had. His sword had moved it but hadn’t damaged it.

Not a material I can cut through easily, he noted, stepping back and giving himself room.

The construct reset its stance. No aggression in the movement — just efficiency, the repositioning of something that had been designed to be difficult rather than fast. It was slightly slower than him. Not dramatically, but measurably.

He tested that margin with a straight thrust aimed at its center mass, pulling back before it could grab his blade, moving laterally before it could redirect its weight.

It tracked him accurately. Reacted without delay. But the reaction always came just after his movement rather than with it — processing, not anticipating.

It responds to what I do, he thought. It doesn’t predict.

That was useful. It meant unpredictable movement would work better than committed attacks. He was faster. If he stopped trying to cut through it and started using that speed differently, the fight changed shape.

He teleported behind it.

The construct turned — correctly, tracking the spatial displacement — but Leon was already moving laterally again before it completed the turn, and the combination of the teleport and the immediate secondary movement produced a half-second window where the construct’s tracking fell behind.

He drove his sword into the joint where its neck met its shoulder, holy energy channeled through the blade, and felt something give.

Not damage to the material. Something internal — a mechanism, a connection point, whatever translated the construct’s central function into its physical movement. The holy energy wasn’t destroying it. It was disrupting it, interfering with whatever animated the structure the way it interfered with abyssal corruption.

The construct’s left arm stopped responding.

There it is, Leon thought.

He moved faster now, the pattern clarified — targeting joints and connection points rather than trying to break the material itself, using holy energy as an interference tool rather than a destructive one. Three more strikes in quick succession: the right shoulder, the left knee, the base of its spine.

The construct went down on the fourth hit, not destroyed but fully disrupted, its animating function interrupted enough that the body simply stopped.

THUD.

Leon stood over it and caught his breath — not from exertion, just from the focused intensity of working out a problem under pressure. He’d felt fully engaged in that fight in a way that straightforward overwhelming force didn’t produce.

Good design, he thought, looking at the construct. You can’t just hit harder. You have to understand what you’re hitting.

He turned his attention back to the platform space.

The configuration had changed when he’d inserted the disc — he’d registered it happening and filed it for after the fight. Now he looked properly at what had shifted.

Roughly thirty platforms in the upper section of the space had moved, rearranging into a new pattern that hadn’t existed before. Several that had been isolated were now adjacent to each other, forming a loose chain leading toward a section of the darkness he hadn’t been able to fully map yet. At the end of that chain, further out than his spatial awareness reached comfortably, he could feel something — a density, a concentration, the sense of something significant sitting beyond his current range.

The disc had unlocked a path.

He moved along it, platform by platform, his awareness reading each one before he arrived.

The second platform on the chain held another disc — different rune configuration, different weight, corresponding to a different lock somewhere in the space. He picked it up with the same care as the first, reading its trigger layer before touching it. Slightly more complex than the previous one. He pocketed it.

The third platform held a construct identical to the one he’d just disabled, and this one engaged the moment he landed without waiting for a condition.

He dealt with it faster this time — the pattern already understood, the joint targeting already mapped. Forty seconds instead of the three minutes the first one had taken.

The fourth platform held something new.

A panel of runes carved directly into the platform’s surface, arranged in a grid pattern, each symbol capable of being pressed. There were forty-two symbols total and no instruction. Above the panel, carved into a small raised block of stone, was a single phrase in a script he didn’t recognize at first glance.

He studied it for a moment.

Upper One script, he realized slowly. The same script style from the tower’s exterior carvings.

He couldn’t read it fully. But his intelligence was high enough and his exposure to the tower’s architectural language sufficient that he could extract partial meaning from the structure of the phrase — the way certain symbol combinations repeated in patterns that suggested grammatical function rather than unique meaning.

The phrase was a question. He was almost certain of that. The structure matched interrogative formations in two other symbol systems he’d encountered. What the question was asking, he couldn’t fully determine.

He looked at the forty-two symbols in the grid.

Some of them he recognized from the disc’s rune configuration. Some matched markings he’d seen on the tower’s walls during the walk to the floor two portal. A smaller subset were entirely unfamiliar.

He didn’t press anything yet.

Instead he spent four minutes simply looking at the grid, mapping the relationships between symbols, trying to build enough of a framework to make an informed choice rather than a random one.

Patterns emerged. The familiar symbols clustered in the corners. The unfamiliar ones concentrated in the center. The symbols he recognized from the disc were distributed across the grid in a configuration that wasn’t random — they were spaced in a way that matched the disc’s own internal pattern, the same spatial relationship reproduced at larger scale.

The disc is the key and the answer, he thought. Press the symbols that match the disc’s pattern in the same relative positions.

He pressed the first symbol.

A tone sounded — low, resonant, coming from somewhere beneath the platform rather than from the panel itself.

He pressed the second. Third. Fourth. Working through the pattern he’d mapped from the disc, reproducing its spatial arrangement on the grid’s larger scale.

On the ninth press, something clicked.

The platform shuddered. The panel’s symbols went dark. And above him, in the upper darkness of the space, something massive and slow began to move — a structure he hadn’t been able to see before, lit now by a pale light that hadn’t existed a moment ago.

A door. Enormous, built into what had appeared to be empty darkness, now visible and opening.

Beyond it, the concentration he’d been feeling at the edge of his awareness resolved into something he could read clearly.

A chamber. And inside it, the sense of something waiting — not a construct, not a mechanism, something with a different quality entirely. Something that had been in there for a very long time.

Leon pocketed the second disc, checked his sword, and headed toward the door.