SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 541: Second Floor of the Ascension Tower—4

Leon opened his eyes.

Dirt floor. The smell of wood smoke and something cooking — root vegetables and whatever the season allowed. Morning light came through a single window cut directly into the wall, no glass, just an opening with a cloth hung over it that moved in the breeze.

He sat up from a straw mattress and looked at his hands.

Small. The hands of a child, eight years old at most, the knuckles unformed, the palms soft. He turned them over and back, and felt nothing unusual about doing so, because he was Kaen, and he had always been Kaen, and these were simply his hands.

His mother called from the other room.

He got up, ate breakfast, and went outside for chores.

The village was forty people on the edge of a forest that nobody entered after dark. That was simply a fact of life, like hard winters and short summers. You didn’t discuss it because discussing it made the days harder to get through.

Kaen was quiet and methodical in a way that the adults around him occasionally noticed without being able to articulate why. He didn’t think much about it. He was just good at things.

The night the creatures came, he was eight years and four months old.

He heard them before he saw them.

Something in the quality of the forest’s nighttime silence changed — a wrongness his body registered before his mind did — and he was sitting up in the dark before the first scream reached the house.

His father’s voice, low and urgent:

He grabbed Ren’s arm. She woke confused and started to make a sound, and he put his hand over her mouth — firm, communicating rather than — and pulled her toward the corner where the loose floorboard was.

They went under. The board went back above them. Ren shook against him in the dark, and he held her and counted his own breathing until it steadied.

The sounds outside were bad. He didn’t fully process what they meant.

When the floorboard tore away from above, the creature looking down into the gap found them immediately. Large. Wrong in its proportions, limbs too long, head too flat. It reached down.

Something happened in Kaen’s right hand.

Not a thought. His hand came up, and his fingers arranged themselves in a configuration he had never consciously learned, and from that arrangement something extended outward — invisible, weightless, present in a way he had no language for. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know that in another life he would have called it spatial energy, would have recognized it as an extension of an affinity he’d spent months developing, would have understood exactly what he’d just done and why it worked.

Here, he only knew that his hand had done something, and the creature had stopped.

Frozen in place above the gap, its reach interrupted, its forward motion simply absent.

One second. Two.

His father came from the side.

After the village counted its losses and morning came gray and quiet, Kaen sat on the step outside and looked at his right hand.

There was something in it. Not a feeling exactly — more like a pressure, a potential, the sense of a word he knew the shape of but couldn’t pronounce yet. Something that had been there his whole life, he thought, in the way that things could be present without being noticed until they were needed.

He pressed his fingers together the way they’d arranged themselves in the dark.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, differently, and felt the faintest response — a resistance in the air just in front of his palm, barely there, gone before he could examine it.

His father came and sat beside him. Neither of them spoke about it. Eventually, his mother called them inside.

Years passed.

The thing in his hand — he had no better name for it, only — developed not through training but through use. When danger was present, it surfaced with a clarity and ease that startled him. When danger was absent, it receded into that background pressure, available but quiet.

By twelve, he’d understood it affected space in some way. Objects moved when he didn’t touch them. Distance behaved differently when he focused. He couldn’t have explained the mechanism because he had no framework for it — in this world, in Kaen’s world, there was no vocabulary for what he was doing. People who could do unusual things existed, but what they did had names and traditions and teachers.

What Kaen did had none of those things. It was simply his, appearing from nowhere, answering to instinct rather than instruction.

The other thing appeared later.

He was fourteen, badly injured in a farming accident — a cut deep enough that his father’s face had gone pale looking at it — and something warm moved through his hand as he pressed it against the wound. Not the spatial thing. Different. Softer, if energy could be soft. It moved through the injury, and the bleeding slowed faster than it should have, the tissue responding in ways that his father watched with an expression he couldn’t quite categorize.

He didn’t know the word holy. He didn’t know the word energy in the sense he would have used it in another life. He only knew that his hand could do two different things, and that the second one was warm where the first one was precise, and that together they made him something that didn’t fit the available categories in any world he’d found himself in.

He kept both of them quiet. Not from shame — from the practical understanding that things people couldn’t categorize made them uncomfortable, and uncomfortable people made poor company and sometimes worse enemies.

By seventeen, the creatures from the forest had pushed into the valleys beyond his village, and the region was organizing.

He enlisted.

The army was the first time he’d been around enough people to see clearly what different looked like from the outside. The other recruits were capable — some genuinely, fighters with real training and tactical education.

They were not like Kaen.

He didn’t announce it. He simply did what was asked and occasionally did more when the situation required, and the results spoke plainly enough that conclusions formed around him without his participation.

In a river valley engagement where everything went wrong simultaneously, he held a position that shouldn’t have been holdable, using the spatial thing in ways that the people beside him saw as instinct or luck or talent rather than what it actually was. Nobody died in his section who didn’t have to die.

They gave him a name after that. The old convention — earned rather than assigned.

Varek.

He didn’t argue.

The women came with the reputation. Some of them were extraordinary — genuinely, in their own right. A healer attached to the third division was someone whose thinking he respected and whose company he returned to when campaigns allowed.

But he didn’t fall for any of it.

Not from indifference. From something underneath Kaen, underneath Varek, underneath nine years of built life — a quality he recognized without being able to source. A warmth he already had, somewhere he couldn’t access from here, that made every other warmth feel like a reflection of the real thing rather than the thing itself.

He knew he belonged somewhere else.

The healer asked him once why he always seemed like he was waiting.

He thought about it honestly.

"I think I already have what I’m looking for," he said. "I just can’t remember where I left it."

She looked at him for a long moment. "That’s either the most romantic or the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard."

He smiled and didn’t try to explain.

The fragments came faster as years accumulated — a reflex in a fight that no one had taught Kaen, a spatial read that went beyond anything this world’s experience had given him, a relationship with certain energies that felt remembered rather than learned.

He didn’t examine them too directly. They worked when he needed them.

By twenty-three, he was leading significant engagements. By twenty-six, with the creatures pushing into every major city’s territory, he was one of four commanders coordinating the response across the region.

He was good at this.

said the general who had watched him since his first enlistment.

Somewhere underneath Kaen, underneath Varek, underneath all of it — something heard that and almost surfaced.

Almost.