SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 562: Labyrinth of Avarice

Chapter 562: Labyrinth of Avarice

The portal dropped Leon into the next trial without warning.

He went from standing inside the restless glow of the third-floor gate to solid stone beneath his boots. Behind him, the light folded in on itself and disappeared with a quiet sigh.

A round chamber surrounded him, about thirty paces from one side to the other. Cleanly carved stone blocks made up the walls and continued overhead into a shallow dome. Nothing showed the passage of time. There was no dust in the seams, no cracks, and no worn edges. Whatever maintained the Ascension Tower kept this place untouched.

Three doors had been placed evenly around the room.

Dark bronze formed the first, and a key had been engraved across its center.

The second door was silver. Its symbol showed an open treasure chest.

The last one was black from edge to edge.

No light came back from its surface. Leon couldn’t find a handle, hinges, or even a clear border where the door met the frame. His eyes kept slipping away whenever he looked at it. He had to make a conscious effort to hold his gaze there.

Before he moved closer, text appeared in front of him.

[ASCENSION TOWER — FLOOR THREE]

[Trial: Labyrinth of Avarice]

[Collect three Tower Keys.]

[Reach the central gate.]

[Defeat the Gatekeeper to clear Floor Three.]

[Optional treasures may be claimed throughout the labyrinth.]

[Every optional treasure claimed will strengthen the Gatekeeper.]

[Death within the trial is permanent.]

[Adaptive Calibration Active.]

[Trials and guardians will adjust to the challenger’s demonstrated capabilities.]

Leon went over the message twice.

The conditions themselves weren’t complicated. Find three keys, reach the center, and kill the Gatekeeper. Everything else was optional.

The calibration notice mattered more. Floor Three would not send ordinary Ascendant- or Sage-rank obstacles against him and pretend they were meaningful. Its constructs, traps, and trial pressure would scale to what he demonstrated. Rank alone would be a poor measure inside the labyrinth.

Anyone focused only on survival would take the bronze paths, gather the necessary keys, and leave the extra rewards alone. That route would keep the final enemy as weak as possible and offer the safest way upward.

The silver door represented the other choice.

Treasures would improve Leon’s strength, but each one would also improve the Gatekeeper. The Tower wasn’t hiding what it wanted. It placed greed in front of every challenger, then charged them for giving in.

He didn’t choose immediately. First, Leon spread his spatial awareness across the chamber.

The entire room settled into his perception. He traced the exact curve of the dome, measured the chamber’s dimensions, and caught the tiny joins between each fitted block. With a thought, he folded the distance to the opposite wall, brought it briefly closer, then let space return to normal.

His control felt as steady as ever.

He directed that awareness toward the bronze door.

It reached the threshold and stopped.

The silver door blocked him in the same way. When he tested the black one, the result was worse. His perception touched the flat surface and simply disappeared. Nothing from beyond the door reached him.

Leon returned his attention to the bronze entrance. He couldn’t sense through it, but its placement gave him a rough idea of where the passage on the other side should start. He tried forming a fold across that short gap.

The connection ran into something absolute.

There was no resistance he could push through. He found no formation to study, no barrier to dismantle. At the doorway, his authority over space ceased to matter.

He maintained the unfinished fold for several seconds, then released it.

Fair enough. Keys and locked routes wouldn’t mean much if a spatial user could skip the entire labyrinth and appear beside the central gate.

His abilities should still work inside any section he had already entered. They just wouldn’t carry him through boundaries the Tower had sealed.

With that settled, Leon crossed the chamber to the black door.

Up close, its empty surface looked even less natural. He pressed his palm against it. The material was perfectly smooth, but it gave him nothing else. No heat. No chill. Not even the faintest vibration.

Mana failed to stir it.

Holy energy sank into the black surface and vanished.

Through Void Dominion, Leon pressed against the space around the doorway. Every fold ended at the same invisible limit. Even the authority he possessed as a challenger inside the Tower produced nothing.

The door wasn’t fighting him.

It simply didn’t recognize him as someone capable of using it.

Leon lowered his hand and took a step back.

The bronze door displayed a key. The silver one displayed treasure. Both made their purpose obvious. The black door explained nothing at all. In a place built with as much intent as the Ascension Tower, that couldn’t be meaningless.

There was something behind it.

He committed the door’s measurements to memory, along with the strange sensation of its surface. For now, he lacked whatever was needed to open it. Standing there longer wouldn’t solve that problem.

Only two real choices remained.

Leon looked once at the key engraved on the bronze door, then faced the silver door and its open chest.

The warning had been clear. Taking an optional reward would make the Gatekeeper stronger. There was nothing dishonest about the exchange.

And a treasure from the Ascension Tower probably wasn’t some common trinket. Leon hadn’t come here to take the safest route available and avoid every meaningful risk. He wanted rewards that justified entering the Tower in the first place.

More importantly, walking away without even checking what waited beyond the silver door would annoy him far more than fighting an empowered enemy later.

"It’d be impolite not to take a look," Leon said.

His palm touched the silver door.

It opened without making a sound.

A narrow stone passage stretched beyond it. The floor was made from shifting tiles, with full rows sliding side to side in patterns that kept changing. Fine wires ran between the walls at several heights. In the weak light, some were almost impossible to see. A few floor stones rested slightly below the others, revealing pressure mechanisms beneath them.

Space itself had also been trapped.

Small distortions hung throughout the corridor, bending direction and distance around their edges. Anyone who stepped into one carelessly might be turned sideways, hurled into a wire, or deposited directly onto a pressure plate.

Leon stayed at the doorway and sent his awareness into the corridor.

It wasn’t a collection of separate traps. The whole passage worked as one moving system. Each sliding row altered the safe path, while several pressure plates waited exactly where someone in a rush would naturally place a foot.

At the far end, the corridor opened into another room.

A pale blue object floated above a pedestal there.

The Tower had placed the reward where it could be seen from the entrance.

A faint smile touched Leon’s mouth. It wanted challengers staring at the prize while they hurried through the danger.

He watched one complete cycle of the moving floor before stepping inside.

The first stretch gave him little trouble. He cleared two pressure plates, bent beneath a wire, and paused until a sliding row lined up with the next safe section.

The timing changed before the cycle should have ended.

Stone started dropping under his right foot.

Leon folded the gap between his position and the next safe tile. He slid across the shortened distance as spikes burst from both walls. One blade scraped his bronze-gold sleeve before he escaped their path. It left a thin line that his conscious armor erased almost at once.

A moment later, the spikes disappeared back into the walls.

Leon glanced at the narrow tear along his arm.

Nothing had malfunctioned. The corridor had let him trust the pattern, waited for him to commit, and then changed the timing.

"So you adjust too."

The labyrinth offered no reply.

He continued, but no longer treated the patterns as fixed rules. His experience guided his pace and kept him from trying to force a quick crossing. Leon watched each tile until the final instant, ready to change direction whenever the corridor reacted to what he expected.

Halfway through, three wires had been arranged to block every reasonable route.

Rather than touch them, Leon folded the space around the highest one. Its anchors stayed where they were, but he bent the distance between them enough to shift the wire’s path by several inches. That gave him just enough room to pass. Once he was clear, he released the fold and let the corridor return to its original shape.

The pale blue treasure became easier to make out with every step.

So did the thing waiting behind it.

A long metal creature stood near the chamber’s rear wall. It had the shape of a thin hound, though each front leg ended in a narrow blade instead of a paw. Leon saw no eyes, no mouth, and no heat coming from its body.

He halted on the corridor’s final tile.

The creature disappeared.

Without crossing the intervening distance, it appeared again three paces to one side.

A notification formed before Leeon.

[Optional Guardian: Blinksteel Stalker]

Its smooth, featureless head turned in his direction.

Leon drew his sword.

The force concentrated inside the construct sat comfortably in Ethereal Initiate territory, far above anything appropriate for an ordinary third-floor challenger. Leon had handled enemies at that rank with ease before several of his later upgrades. Raw power alone did not concern him.

The way the creature moved did.

The creature vanished once more.