SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 538: Second Floor of the Ascension Tower—1

Leon stepped through the portal.

The space on the other side wasn’t what he’d expected.

The first floor had announced itself immediately — grand, deliberate, the architecture of something built to impress before it began killing you. This was different. The portal deposited him onto a narrow stone platform suspended in open air, and beyond the platform’s edges there was simply nothing. No floor, no ceiling, no walls he could see. Just dark space extending in every direction, and hanging within that darkness, at varying distances and heights, hundreds of stone platforms exactly like the one he was standing on.

They were connected by nothing. No bridges, no paths, no obvious route between them.

Each platform had something on it. From where he stood he could make out shapes — some held objects, some held what appeared to be constructs or mechanisms, a few held things that were moving. The platforms themselves varied in size from barely large enough to stand on to broad expanses the size of small courtyards.

No overseer appeared. No voice explained the rules.

Leon stood on his platform and took it all in for a full thirty seconds, his spatial awareness expanding outward to map what he was working with.

he thought.

His awareness gave him the dimensions of the space — enormous, far larger than the first floor had been, the darkness extending further than his range could fully cover. He counted the platforms within range: two hundred and fourteen, arranged without obvious pattern, spread across three dimensions rather than just horizontal space. Some were above him, some below, some at angles that made no gravitational sense.

Several of the moving things on distant platforms noticed him at the same moment his awareness touched them. He felt them orient in his direction with the specific quality of things that had been waiting for something to arrive.

he noted without urgency.

He looked at the platform nearest to him — about fifteen meters away, slightly below his current position. It held a stone pedestal with something resting on top of it. Too far to read clearly even with his enhanced vision, which told him whatever it was had some kind of visual obscuration on it.

The second nearest platform was larger, roughly twenty meters away and at the same height. It held one of the moving constructs — humanoid in shape, standing still now but clearly aware of him, its head tracking his position.

He made a decision and teleported to the platform with the pedestal.

The construct on the adjacent platform moved the instant he did — not toward him, but repositioning, the movement precise and considered. It wasn’t charging. It was adjusting to his new position with the measured response of something that was tracking rather than attacking.

Leon thought.

He looked at the pedestal. The object resting on it was a flat disc of dark stone, roughly the size of his palm, covered in runes he didn’t immediately recognize. Not the basic runes he’d been studying since acquiring the Rune Scriber’s kit. These were different — older in feel, more compressed, each symbol doing more work than the ones he’d learned.

He didn’t touch it. Not yet.

He extended his awareness across it carefully instead, reading the energy structure the way he’d learned to read corrupted cores — looking for the shape of what it was doing rather than trying to force it open.

The disc was a key. That was the closest analogy he could construct. It held a pattern that corresponded to something else in this space, a lock somewhere among the two hundred and fourteen platforms that this specific configuration of runes would open or activate. Touching it without understanding the pattern would — his awareness caught the secondary layer of the object — trigger something he didn’t want triggered.

He filed the disc as not yet and turned to look at the construct that was still watching him from the adjacent platform.

It was waiting for him to make a mistake with the disc. That was his read of it. Touch it wrong and the construct engaged. Navigate it correctly and something else happened.

He looked across the space at the other platforms within visible range, trying to find the one that corresponded to this disc.

He spotted it after about forty seconds — a platform roughly sixty meters away and twenty meters below his current position, larger than most of the others, with a circular depression in its center that matched the disc’s dimensions exactly. The rune pattern around the depression’s edge corresponded to the disc’s surface pattern in a way that confirmed the relationship.

The problem was the space between here and there.

Teleportation was the obvious solution. He could teleport to that platform directly and deal with whatever was there.

But he spent another ten seconds just watching the space instead of moving, because the first floor had taught him that the obvious solution in this tower was usually a test of whether you’d noticed the non-obvious element first.

He found it on the eleventh second.

Between his current position and the target platform, three of the intervening platforms held constructs similar to the one already watching him. All three were oriented toward the direct path between the two points, positioned at angles that suggested they’d been placed specifically to cover that route.

They weren’t blocking it in a way that made the teleportation impossible. They were covering the approach in a way that made a blind teleport directly to the target dangerous — he’d arrive on the target platform with three constructs already responding to his movement, in positions that gave them immediate angles on him.

he thought.

He looked for a different route. Not direct — angled, using platforms the constructs weren’t covering, accepting a longer path in exchange for arriving at the target without three things already oriented toward him.

He found one. Four platform hops instead of one direct jump, angling below and around the construct coverage zone before coming up to the target from a direction none of the three were watching.

He pocketed the disc — carefully, with his awareness fully engaged on its secondary trigger layer, making sure the act of taking it didn’t activate anything. It didn’t. The trigger was contact with the disc’s face in a specific way, not simply taking it.

Then he moved.

First hop: platform thirty meters to his left and slightly below.

FWOOSH.

The three constructs tracking his previous position adjusted. Not fast — deliberately, methodically, the movement of something recalculating rather than reacting.

Second hop: another platform, dropping further below the construct coverage zone.

FWOOSH.

Third hop: angling back upward, coming around the far side of the space.

Fourth hop: the target platform, arriving from below and behind the angle any of the constructs had been watching.

He landed clean, the disc in his hand, the circular depression directly in front of him.

He pressed the disc into the depression and felt the rune patterns align.

The platform shuddered. From somewhere in the darkness above, a section of the space shifted — platforms moving, a configuration changing, something new becoming accessible that hadn’t been before.

And from the adjacent platform, the construct that had been watching him since he arrived finally moved toward him with purpose.

Leon thought, his sword already in his hand.