SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 570: Hall of the Uncounted

Chapter 570: Hall of the Uncounted

Leon gave up on forcing the passage to obey him.

Instead, he kept moving, watched the joined fragments, and used their pull to find each nearly invisible seam. The misplaced sword mark, the false echoes, and the distant image of his own back stopped mattering once he knew what they were. The process took time, but it asked for patience rather than power. His mana continued recovering throughout the search.

At the last seam, the fragments reacted differently.

They no longer pointed toward some tiny flaw in the stone. Their pull settled on a section of wall that appeared completely untouched. No crack. No thin scar. Even with his perception focused on it, Leon found nothing unusual.

The joined shape strained toward the blank stone as if what it sought lay beyond the wall, not along its surface.

Leon stepped closer. He adjusted the two fragments until their broken edges sat together and the unfinished symbol became as complete as the pieces allowed. Then he placed the pattern flat against the wall.

The stone opened.

No notification appeared.

There was only the quiet grind of stone shifting where stone should not have been able to shift. A section of the wall drew inward, folded aside, and revealed a staircase leading down into deeper darkness.

An inscription had been carved across the lintel above the opening. The old letters had worn shallow with time, forcing Leon to read their shape through his senses more than his sight.

THE COUNTED ASCEND.

THE UNCOUNTED DESCEND.

He considered the words, but they explained very little.

Whoever had carved them was unknown. So was when they had been written, or what exactly was being counted. The choice itself was clear enough, though. Leon had already made it when he entered the unmarked passage.

He returned the fragments to storage, kept one hand close to his sword, and descended.

The staircase continued far below the labyrinth.

With every turn, the place felt older.

The difference from the official maze was impossible to miss. The labyrinth above had been maintained perfectly. Its floors were clean, its walls seamless, and every block sat exactly where it belonged.

None of that care reached this stairway.

The farther Leon went, the rougher the stone became. Cracks crossed the walls and split the steps. Thick dust covered the stairs, untouched and deeper than anything he had seen elsewhere on the floor. Some sections of wall had collapsed entirely, leaving piles of rubble that forced him to slow and climb around them.

Whatever this hidden place was, the Tower had abandoned it to time.

His boots left the only tracks behind him.

Nothing followed, but seeing those prints somehow made the stairwell feel less empty. They showed that no challenger had passed this way recently.

Or that anyone who had come before had left by another path.

The air cooled as he descended. It smelled dry and stale, like stone that had remained sealed for centuries.

At the bottom, the Tower still offered no message.

Its silence followed him just as it had around the fragments.

The staircase opened into a wide chamber with a low ceiling. Cracks ran through the room, and a single pale light shone from somewhere overhead. Leon couldn’t locate its source. The weak, colorless glow spread across the chamber and stretched every shadow.

He was not alone.

Figures stood throughout the room.

At first, Leon took them for statues. A closer look confirmed it. Weathered stone people filled the chamber, each carved in the shape of a challenger.

Past challengers.

Their faces were gone.

Time hadn’t worn them away. Someone had deliberately removed them, smoothing every face until no feature or identifying mark remained. None of the figures could be distinguished from another by who they had once been.

Some held keys.

Broken keys.

The bronze shapes had snapped in half and remained gripped in stone hands. Other figures hugged treasure chests against their bodies. A smaller number knelt with their hands reaching toward the center of the floor, where an incomplete black symbol had been carved into the stone.

Leon recognized it immediately.

It was the same symbol formed in part by the fragments in his storage.

The statues had not all met the same end.

One armored challenger held two halves of a key, positioned as though it had broken between his hands. A robed woman clutched a chest with both arms while fractures spread through the stone around her feet. Another had dropped to one knee, one empty hand stretched toward the unfinished symbol.

Whatever had happened in this room, owning something had not protected any of them.

There were no names.

No dates.

Nothing explained who the challengers had been or why they had been left beneath the trial. Only the final poses remained. Broken keys. Treasures held tight. Empty hands reaching for a symbol none of them had completed.

Leon studied the kneeling figures for another moment, then pulled his attention back to the rest of the chamber.

One figure knelt at the center, separate from all the others.

It wasn’t made of stone.

Black armor rested at the heart of the carved symbol, tall even while kneeling. A complete suit held a long spear across its lap. Behind a protective plate in the breastplate sat another black fragment.

The third piece was made from the same light-drinking material as the two Leon carried. Under the pale light, it gave off a dull glint.

Leon stopped well outside the armor’s reach.

He asked the Tower interface to identify it.

Nothing responded.

The Cosmic System gave him no name for the guardian, no trial notice, no danger rating, and no reward. Like the fragments, the armor seemed invisible to every system that should have recognized it.

That silence was warning enough.

The moment he reached for the fragment, the thing holding it would almost certainly wake.

Still, the sight confirmed something important. The hidden route contained more than the two pieces he had already found. However many fragments existed in total, a third now sat within reach.

Leon prepared before touching it.

Void Dominion spread across the chamber as he tested the space.

Down here, beneath the maintained labyrinth, the Tower’s authority felt weaker. Space responded to him again, folding cleanly under his intent. He checked the available exits and found two: the staircase behind him and another closed passage elsewhere in the room.

The time spent solving the loop and descending the stair had allowed his passive mana recovery to replace much of what the mandatory trial had cost. His left arm was whole, his channels were clear, and his conscious bronze-gold armor had no remaining damage.

Void Dominion spread without instability. Leon also kept Leximancy, Elemental Surge, Raijin, and his combined elements ready. An uncounted guardian deserved more caution than the official constructs, not less.

He fixed the exits and the chamber’s geometry in his mind before advancing.

Leon reached toward the fragment.

The armor moved.

Its hand snapped up with far more speed than something that large should have possessed. Metal fingers closed around Leon’s wrist a fraction before he touched the plate.

Cold seeped through his gauntlet.

There was no trace of living warmth in the grip.

The spear slipped from the armor’s lap and landed in its free hand as the figure rose. It unfolded to its full height, standing a head taller than Leon, then planted its feet in the black dust.

Leon tore his wrist free and retreated, bringing his sword up between them.

That brief grip told him more than either silent interface had. The strength behind it had already passed the Ethereal Initiate enemies he could handle with ease. Combined with the speed of the movement, the empty armor felt closer to an Ethereal Lord-class threat. Leon could not assign an exact rank to something the Tower refused to acknowledge, but he would not mistake it for an ordinary Floor Three construct.

The Tower still named nothing.

There was no announcement. No title for the guardian. No rules waiting for him to read.

Only a suit of black armor holding a narrow spear, blocking the fragment embedded in its chest.

Leon needed some name for it, even if the name existed only in his thoughts.

He chose the simplest one that fit.