SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 768: Worth the Trouble

Leon stepped back before the guardian finished standing.

It stopped with one knee still on the floor. The light in its visor remained fixed on the doorway, but it made no attempt to follow him into the passage.

He waited, ready to retreat around the turn.

Nothing happened.

He moved farther back along the landing before crouching to inspect it. A guardian that tolerated him at the door might react differently once he attacked. He had no intention of discovering its reach with his face.

The chamber was round, roughly sixty paces across. Thick pillars supported a domed ceiling, and the floor between them was mostly clear. Behind the guardian, a circular grate revealed a much deeper space filled with pale, slowly moving light.

The reservoir, most likely.

Large stone conduits ran from that central opening toward the walls. Their steady vibration reached him through the landing. The crystalline banks occupied the back half of the room, gathering thickly near places where light seeped around the older joints.

Leon studied the guardian’s feet and the stone around them. There was no visible cable or pipe connecting it to the chamber. A glow inside its chest brightened whenever it shifted, while the conduits maintained their own rhythm.

That suggested a separate power source. It didn’t prove there was no hidden connection.

He followed the exposed lines as far as he could from the doorway, looking for anything that changed with the construct’s movements. Nothing obvious did. If he chose to fight, he would still have to keep his attacks away from the grate and pipes.

First, he needed to know whether the deposits were worth that trouble.

A small accumulation had formed on the landing, outside the defended room. He cut a bead from its edge and carried it back around the turn. The guardian remained where it was.

Leon set one of Ji’s crucible plates on a level piece of stone. He’d brought several with his testing supplies, and for once his habit of packing more than he expected to use had paid off.

The solid bead’s weight was interesting. Its hardness told him very little about how its energy would behave once prepared.

He scraped off a tiny portion, isolated it on the plate, and worked at it with a controlled thread of power until it began releasing essence. The amount was small enough to disperse safely if it resisted containment. A pale haze gathered above the surface.

He caught that haze inside a simple external enclosure.

Then he began compressing it.

At the first pressure level, it gathered evenly. At the next, it still held without the uneven thinning he’d seen in some of his earlier fuel samples. He paused between increments, watching the interior as carefully as the surface.

The lesson from the inheritance was too recent to ignore. A smooth shell could conceal an ugly amount of strain.

He held the sample at a pressure he’d already tested with familiar fuel, then eased it down again. The essence expanded without the abrupt release he’d been watching for.

Leon leaned closer.

He repeated the cycle, this time keeping it compressed longer. A little energy escaped around his enclosure, but the sample itself remained unusually orderly. He set a small measure of familiar fuel beside it and repeated the same bounded test for comparison.

The difference was clear enough to make him grin.

He looked toward the doorway, where the wall deposits cast pale light across the landing.

There were whole banks of this stuff.

He ran one more modest cycle before putting the samples away. Three successful tests weren’t permission to pour it into his body. He still had to determine what preparation it required, how it interacted with different branches, and what happened when it circulated instead of merely sitting inside an enclosure.

But he could already see several experiments he’d wanted to attempt with the external model. Stable behavior at a useful compression range would let him investigate the structure without wondering whether bad fuel was causing every failure.

It wouldn’t solve his Golden Core for him. He almost preferred knowing that now, before he got excited enough to do something expensive.

The excitement remained anyway.

He imagined laying out the prepared samples on Ji’s plates, comparing the strain checks he’d learned from the inheritance, and finally having enough of one promising material to repeat a failed trial properly.

Then he pictured the guardian standing between him and all of it.

"Of course," he muttered.

He packed the plate and the unused bead, keeping the tested portion separate. The small quantity he’d already taken could go home with him if he chose to leave. Nothing was forcing him to fight.

That made the decision pleasantly simple. He wanted more, and the construct was the obstacle he would have to overcome to get it.

He wasn’t going to attempt it tired.

For the rest of the second day, he examined the accessible passage and watched the chamber from different points along the landing. The guardian kept its attention on him whenever he approached. It neither abandoned its station nor sank fully back into its earlier stillness.

He marked the nearest turn in his mind as his retreat. The passage beyond narrowed sharply, giving him room to escape something built on that scale. The landing itself offered much less protection than he’d first hoped; the guardian’s hammer could easily reach through the doorway.

He also checked the available footing. A layer of loose crystal grit near the threshold would slide under a sudden change of direction. He cleared only the patch he expected to use, then stopped before the scraping provoked a response.

When fatigue began catching up with him, he returned to the bend and raised earth barriers on both sides of a resting space. He left ventilation and set his attention on the barriers before lying down.

Sleep came quickly.

He woke, ate, and spent the remaining rest period restoring what the infiltration had cost. His ordinary reserve returned to full. His holy reserve recovered most of the separate expenditure, including what he’d used on the Stiltreaver’s Avatar.

By his reckoning, the third day had begun outside.

Leon checked the wrapping on his forearm, called up his repaired armor, and walked down to the landing. The chamber looked exactly as he’d left it. The guardian’s visor followed his approach.

He stood well back from the threshold and sent a short, hard lance of fire toward its left shoulder.

Its shield rose, but light reached the shoulder first. Seams flared around the threatened plates, and the fire splashed away.

Leon sent lightning at the opposite knee. The glow shifted down through the body to meet it.

For a fraction of a breath, both the shoulder and the knee were dim.

He saw the delay. The guardian saw where the attacks had come from.

It stood to its full height and advanced on the doorway, hammer rising.