SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 563: Blinksteel Stalker

Chapter 563: Blinksteel Stalker

Leon was already moving when the Stalker returned.

He shortened the space to his left and slipped away from the corridor’s final tile. A silver foreblade passed through the spot his ribs had occupied barely a moment before.

Instead of flesh, it struck one of the wires.

The impact sent a clear metallic note through the passage.

Every trap still waiting in the corridor triggered together.

Floor tiles dropped. Blades shot from the walls. The warped areas of space widened until they crowded the route behind him. Leon twisted through the sudden chaos, but the Stalker had disappeared once more.

His integrated combat experience warned him before his senses found anything.

Leon turned and brought up his sword.

The construct appeared at his back, both bladed forelimbs sweeping for his neck. His sword caught the first. The second kept coming toward his shoulder.

Space stretched around Leon’s body.

Only a little distance remained between him and the blade, but he lengthened it enough. The edge swept across the front of his chest instead of cutting through him.

Leon drove a kick into the creature’s narrow torso. The blow knocked it out of the corridor and sent it skidding across the chamber floor.

He went after it immediately, unwilling to let the passage spring something else on him.

He could have opened with Leximancy or buried the construct beneath far more elemental force. Instead, he kept those options in reserve. A spatial guardian stood between him and a spatial treasure, and its current attacks were not getting through his armor. As long as that remained true, learning how its movement worked was worth more than ending the exchange one breath earlier.

As soon as both boots entered the room, everything behind him went still. The shifting rows locked into place. Wall blades pulled back, and the spatial distortions collapsed until none remained.

Near the pedestal, the Stalker pushed itself upright.

With the corridor no longer demanding his attention, Leon spread his spatial awareness through the construct. Energy traveled along fine channels inside its silver-gray frame, passing between the torso and limbs. Almost all of them gathered under its wedge-shaped head, where several metal layers protected a dense knot.

That had to be the core.

Before Leon could study it any longer, the Stalker disappeared.

It didn’t accelerate or leave behind a blur. It was simply across the room, then beside him. One of its blades was already cutting for his ribs when it arrived.

Leon met it with his sword.

The collision carried the force of an Ethereal Initiate and sent a hard vibration through his armor. The guardian’s thin body hid far more weight than it appeared to carry. It had also attacked from an angle that no creature approaching on foot could have managed.

Leon started a counterstrike.

The Stalker vanished before his blade reached it, leaving him to cut through empty air.

It appeared behind him again.

Nine integrated years of battle turned recognition into movement before conscious thought caught up. His stance dropped, his hips turned, and his sword rose into the descending forelimb.

Metal slammed against metal.

Leon stepped back and guided the force past his body. The Stalker touched down, visible for no more than an instant, then jumped away again.

His awareness could follow anything that crossed ordinary distance.

The Stalker crossed none.

For a fraction of a heartbeat during every jump, it disappeared entirely from Leon’s perception. Once he found it again, the next strike had already begun.

A blade came in from the right.

Leon curved the space along its path.

The weapon’s arc shifted several inches away from him. Instead of reaching his side, the blade continued into the guardian’s own flank.

A shrill scrape tore through the chamber as metal cut against metal.

The Stalker stumbled aside. A deep groove now ran along its body.

Leon moved in to exploit the opening.

The construct vanished before his sword could reach the damaged section.

It returned at a greater distance this time. One foreblade sat at a changed angle, while the other had been drawn tight against its torso.

Their next clash proved what Leon had begun to suspect.

He bent the path of another strike, but the Stalker altered its motion halfway through. The fold still dragged the blade aside, just not enough. Its edge scraped across his conscious armor and left a bright streak over the bronze-gold surface. The mark vanished as the armor repaired itself.

The guardian was adapting.

Leon blocked the next attack, then gave ground without trying to answer it. Pursuing the Stalker through every exchange was pointless. Whenever the situation turned against it, the construct could jump somewhere safer.

Predicting the attacks wasn’t enough.

He needed to know where the creature would appear.

Leon pushed his spatial awareness to cover the whole chamber.

Any spatial fold disturbed the area around it. Leon crossed distance by compressing the gap between two places, then letting it settle behind him. The Stalker’s method wasn’t the same, but its jumps left a related sign. A tiny seam opened at the destination to receive its body.

That opening lasted almost no time at all.

But it formed before the Stalker arrived.

The construct jumped.

Leon let its disappearance go and searched the room instead.

A seam opened beside his left shoulder.

He turned quickly enough to stop the first blade. The second slammed into his side and drove him backward. His armor took most of the force, though pain still spread along his ribs.

The discomfort faded almost immediately. Nothing in the strike had pierced the conscious plate or exceeded what his body could repair.

The approach worked.

His body just needed to keep up with it.

Attack after attack followed. The Stalker emerged from a new angle every time. Leon no longer tried to damage it. He blocked, moved back, and watched how the chamber changed before each arrival.

His integrated combat experience covered details conscious thought could not process fast enough.

Nine years of remembered battle let him pick meaning out of the guardian’s stance before it vanished. When its front half dipped slightly, the next attack would begin from above. A twist in its thin torso came before an appearance at Leon’s back. Even the position of its foreblades indicated whether the jump would be short or long.

Those signs gave him the small amount of time he had been missing.

The Stalker lowered itself, both blades turned inward.

Then it disappeared.

A destination seam began opening directly ahead of Leon.

He had already prepared for it.

Leon compressed the space around the forming point. He didn’t close it off. If he blocked the jump completely, the Stalker could simply abandon that destination and choose another. Instead, he allowed just enough room for the transfer to complete while tightening everything around it.

The construct appeared inside the compressed space.

Pressure closed in from every side. Its jump succeeded, but its legs couldn’t spread far enough to support a proper landing. The raised blades also lost most of their reach.

Leon’s sword had begun its strike before the Stalker fully emerged.

A thin white line of holy energy gathered along the edge.

He stepped inside the guardian’s shortened range and drove the point upward beneath its wedge-shaped head. His target was the knot where all the internal channels met.

The sword struck the outer shell.

The metal held.

Leon kept pressing and sent a controlled pulse of holy energy through the point. The casing around the core split, and the sword broke through.

The Blinksteel Stalker convulsed.

One foreblade lashed at him without aim. Compressed space slowed the attack enough for Leon to lean away. He twisted the sword inside the guardian and released another pulse.

The core broke apart.

Energy flashed down every channel in the Stalker’s frame. Its limbs locked in place, and whatever had powered the blades vanished.

Leon let the spatial compression go.

The construct hit the stone floor.

He kept his sword ready and watched it.

Nothing moved.

Leon finally breathed out and rolled his shoulder out of habit. The guardian hadn’t demanded his full power. It had demanded attention and control. That was likely intentional. Someone who crushed it immediately would gain less from the fight than someone who learned what its movement actually did.

The pale blue crystal above the pedestal stopped rotating.

Notifications appeared in front of him.

[Optional Guardian Defeated: Blinksteel Stalker]

[Optional Treasure Available]

[Spatial Tempering Crystal — Epic]

[Effect: Strengthens spatial comprehension and permanently increases resistance to hostile spatial manipulation when absorbed.]

Behind Leon, the Stalker’s remains slowly lost their heat while he examined the crystal.

An Epic treasure, already available on the third floor.

The Ascension Tower had shown him the reward.

Now he had to decide whether claiming it was worth making the Gatekeeper stronger.