SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 540: Second Floor of the Ascension Tower—3

Leon entered the chamber.

It was long and narrow, the ceiling lost somewhere in darkness above, the floor flat and polished in a way the platform space hadn’t been. Torches lined the walls at regular intervals — not fire, something that produced light without heat, steady and unwavering.

And on both sides of the hall, statues.

Eight of them total, four on each side, each one different in pose and proportion but sharing one quality — they were armed. Swords, spears, a halberd on the far left, a weapon he didn’t immediately have a name for on the far right. Each one was carved with the detail of something that had been made to last rather than to impress.

At the base of each statue, carved into the stone, is a question.

Above the entrance behind him, also carved, was a single line in runic script that he could read well enough by now to extract the meaning from.

Answer correctly or do not answer at all. There is no third option.

He understood immediately. The wrong answer meant the statue moved. He stood at the entrance for a moment and took stock of all eight questions before approaching any of them, reading each base inscription from a distance with his enhanced vision.

He started at the left side, the first statue.

I speak without a mouth and hear without ears. I have no body, but I come alive with the wind. What am I?

He read it once. Echo. He’d heard this one in a different form, in a different life, and the answer arrived without effort.

He pressed his hand to the base where a small indentation waited, clearly designed for a response mechanism, and spoke the word clearly.

"Echo."

The statue didn’t move. A faint tone sounded from somewhere inside the stone — low, confirming.

He moved to the second.

The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?

He almost smiled. "Footsteps."

Another confirming tone.

Third statue.

I have cities, but no houses are there. I have mountains, but no trees grow there. I have water, but no fish swim there. I have roads, but no horses travel them. What am I?

He read it twice, not because he didn’t know, but because the runic translation required a moment to confirm he’d read it correctly.

"A map."

Tone. He kept moving.

Fourth statue — and here he slowed.

I am not alive, but I can grow. I have no lungs, but I need air. I have no mouth, but water kills me. What am I?

He stood in front of it for a moment, turning the three conditions over.

Not alive but grows. No lungs but needs air. No mouth but water kills it.

"Fire."

Tone.

He crossed to the right side of the hall and worked back toward the entrance. Fifth, sixth, seventh — all answerable, all producing their confirming tones. The hall felt lighter somehow after each correct answer, the atmosphere less compressed.

Then he reached the eighth statue. The last one. The one closest to the entrance, which he’d read first and set aside because something about it had felt different from the others.

He stood in front of it now and read the inscription again carefully.

What question can never be answered with yes?

He stood with it.

The obvious answer arrived immediately — are you asleep? — and he turned it over, looking for the catch. If you were asleep, you couldn’t answer. So technically correct. But the question said never, which was absolute, and are you asleep could theoretically be answered yes under circumstances where someone was sleepwalking, or dreaming and speaking, or—

He set that aside and looked for something cleaner.

Are you dead? If you were dead, you couldn’t answer at all, so it could never be answered yes. But it also couldn’t be answered no by a dead person, which meant it wasn’t specifically unanswerable with yes — it was unanswerable entirely.

He spent four minutes on it. Genuine, focused engagement, running through categories of questions, testing each one against the absolute nature of never.

The more he worked at it, the more he felt the question resisting resolution — not because he wasn’t thinking hard enough, but because the resistance was intrinsic to the question itself. Every candidate answer he found had an edge case, an exception, a scenario where it broke down.

What if there is no answer, he thought. What if that’s the point.

The statue’s weapon arm moved.

Slowly. Deliberately. The carved stone shifted with the grinding inevitability of something that had been waiting for exactly this outcome — the question that had no answer producing the result it was always going to produce.

Leon watched the weapon rise and felt something clarify in his mind.

Why would I stand here and let it hit me?

The question had no answer. Fine. That was apparently true. But nothing in the inscription at the entrance had said he had to stand still for the consequence. It had said to answer correctly or do not answer at all. He hadn’t answered incorrectly. He simply hadn’t answered — which was the only honest response to a question with no answer.

The statue didn’t care about that distinction.

But Leon did, and more importantly, the statue was now committed to a swing that was fully readable, fully telegraphed, the stone arm moving on a fixed arc that his spatial awareness had mapped completely before it was halfway through the motion.

He stepped inside the arc and hit it first.

Not the blade — the joint at the shoulder, holy energy driving through the connection point the way he’d learned from the constructs on the platforms. The statue’s arm locked mid-swing.

It adapted. The other arm came around.

He ducked and drove his elbow into the statue’s midsection, pure physical force rather than any technique, and felt the internal structure respond — not breaking, but compressing, something shifting inside.

The statue was faster than the platform constructs. More committed in its movements, less mechanical, closer to something that had been designed to fight rather than designed to track. It pushed back with genuine weight, and he had to work for every position, using his spatial awareness to stay ahead of a reach that was longer than his and a mass that was considerably more than his.

CRACK. CRACK. BOOM.

He took the knee joint on the third exchange, the shoulder joint on the fifth, and the base of the spine on the seventh.

The statue went down.

THUD.

He stood over it, breathing steadily, and looked at the hall around him.

All eight statues are silent. All eight questions answered — seven with words, one with something else entirely.

From the center of the chamber floor, stone ground against stone as something rose. A pillar, smooth and dark, climbing to chest height and stopping. On its surface, a handprint pressed into the material as if the stone had been soft when it was made.

Above it, carved in the same runic script as everything else in this tower, was a phrase he read carefully and translated as best he could.

Those who forget may enter. Those who remember may survive.

A notification appeared before he’d finished processing what that meant.

[Memory suppression: initiating.]

He looked at the handprint.

The pull toward it was immediate and specific — not compulsion exactly, more the quality of a door that was clearly meant to be opened and was waiting for the person who’d earned the right to open it.

He placed his hand against the stone.

The chamber disappeared.