SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 543: Second Floor of the Ascension Tower—6

~3 minute read · 735 words
Previously on SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100...
Varek led a campaign into the forest to find the source of coordinated creature attacks, losing many soldiers but developing his spatial and healing abilities. He discovered an ancient structure at the forest's center. Upon entering, the attacks ceased. Inside, he touched a pulsing light and regained his true name, Leon, and his memories of the past nine years. This triggered the structure's final assessment, resulting in all creatures dissolving and Varek achieving the highest possible rank on the second floor of the Ascension Tower.

[Overall Grade: EX — First ever recorded on Floor Two]

[Rewards Calculating...]

A pause. Longer than any notification pause he’d experienced before, as though whatever system ran beneath the tower was doing something more involved than pulling from a predetermined list.

Then:

[PRIMARY REWARD]

Void Dominion — Spatial Mastery: Transcendent

Leon read that twice.

he thought. Do not move through it. Fold it.

He flexed his right hand slowly, feeling the difference immediately — the spatial awareness that had always extended outward from him now felt different in quality, like the difference between looking at something and being able to reach into it. The space around his hand responded to the flex in a way it hadn’t before, the air compressing slightly at his fingertips, reality briefly agreeing to be a different shape before returning.

He kept reading.

[SECONDARY REWARD]

Echo of Varek — Nine-Year Combat Integration

He noticed this one immediately too — not as a feeling but as an absence of the slight delay that had always existed between perceiving a threat and responding to it. Something had closed that gap. He didn’t have to think to know what to do. The thinking happened underneath, faster than thinking.

[TERTIARY REWARD]

Title Acquired: Suppression Breaker (Mythic)

A new title. Mythic grade. He added it to the list without ceremony and kept going.

[FOURTH REWARD]

Legendary Instance Seed — One

A small crystalline object materialized in his palm — roughly the size of a closed fist, faceted, pulsing with a slow internal light that moved like something breathing. It was warm. Not the warmth of temperature — the warmth of something alive in the way that very old, very significant things were alive.

He closed his fingers around it carefully.

he thought.

He thought about the Pyrans. About the humans. About fifteen thousand people in his world were training on cores and ambient mana and whatever the world fragment merger had produced, and who would now have access to a repeatable instance that scaled to them and paid out real rewards on completion.

The fourth reward was quietly the most significant thing on the list in terms of long-term impact, and it had been listed fourth.

He was still thinking about it when the final notification appeared.

[HIDDEN REWARD]

A single line of runic script materialized in the air in front of him — not part of the standard notification format, not bracketed or labeled, just present, as though the tower itself had decided to say something outside its own system.

It held for three seconds.

[Ascension Tower Second Floor Acknowledgment Received]

Then it was gone. Completely. No record of it in his notification history, no system log, nothing. As though it had been said rather than displayed.

[FLOOR TWO: CLEARED]

[Portal to Floor Three: Now accessible]

Leon stood in the chamber for a long moment after the notifications cleared.

The obsidian pillar was dark beside him, its handprint smooth and unremarkable now, nothing in it suggesting what it had produced. The hall behind him was silent. Eight statues, seven answered and one fought through, all motionless.

He looked at the crystalline seed in his closed hand, opened his fingers, and studied it in the steady torchlight.

Nine years. Compressed, yes — but lived fully, every day of them real within the instance’s logic. Kaen, who became Varek, saved a world that didn’t exist. People he’d lost whose names he still carried. A healer who’d asked him why he always seemed like he was waiting and hadn’t gotten a complete answer.

The weight of it was real, even though the world wasn’t.

He pocketed the seed carefully in the inventory connected to his soul.

Then he checked his sword, rolled his right hand once more — feeling the Void Dominion sitting in it like something that had always been there and had simply decided to reveal its full nature — and turned toward the Portal beside the floor three.

The one leading to the Tower main hall, which led to the exit, he didn’t know how much time in reality had passed; he was a bit anxious and hoped not too much time had passed.

Hoping he hadn’t missed the Seraphine and other Class Reawakening Dungeon Trials, right now, he felt relieved that he had left them in the care of Xyra, or else he would have worried out of his mind for them.