SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The deeper chambers of the Johannesburg sanctuary were not built for comfort.

They were carved from the living rock beneath the old mining works, reinforced with layered barrier-wards that hummed at a frequency Glen felt in his teeth more than heard with his ears. The air down here tasted of cold stone and ozone and something older — something that had no name in any language he’d learned in the shelters. Isla had walked him to the first descent and then stopped, her hand on his arm, her expression carefully neutral in the way that meant she was hiding something she thought he wasn’t ready for.

"She’s been waiting three days," Isla said. "She hasn’t slept."

"Since when does that matter to an SS-Rank?"

"Since it’s your mother, Glen."

He’d had no answer for that. He still didn’t.

The corridor narrowed, then opened into a vaulted chamber lit by drifting motes of shadow — not darkness, exactly, but light’s opposite given form. They orbited a central figure like satellites around a dim star, tracing lazy ellipses that left afterimages when Glen tracked them too long. The chamber itself was bare: a stone bench, a low table, a single blanket folded with military precision. No comfort. No pretense of it.

And on the bench, sitting with the stillness of something carved from the same rock, was Morrigan.

Glen stopped walking.

He had prepared himself for this. On the flight from Nairobi he had rehearsed what he would say, how he would stand, what his face would do. He had imagined the woman he knew — Mary McDonald, with her thin wrists and her rattling cough and the way she flinched when doors slammed — wearing a new shape like an ill-fitting coat. He had expected to see his mother pretending to be someone else.

That was not what he found.

Morrigan was not Mary wearing a costume. Mary had been Morrigan wearing a leash. The woman on the bench was the real one, and the difference was not cosmetic. It was structural. She sat the way Isla sat — the way every high-ranker Glen had ever fought sat, with the economy of someone who had already killed everything in the room once and was calmly waiting to see if it would get back up. Her spine was straight. Her hands rested on her knees, fingers loose, and the shadows around her bent toward her the way flames bend toward wind. Her hair, which Glen had only ever known as lank and grey-streaked, was dark and heavy and pulled back from a face that was sharp where he remembered softness.

She looked younger. That was the wrong word. She looked unbroken.

Then she looked at him, and Glen’s rehearsal collapsed.

Her eyes — he’d know those eyes in any body, in any life. They were the same tired, fierce, terrified eyes that had watched him from across a thousand shelter cots, checking whether he’d come back with blood on him, checking whether the blood was his. They found him now across thirty meters of warded stone and went wide for exactly one heartbeat before something behind them shuttered closed.

She stood. The shadows rose with her.

"Glen."

Her voice was different too. Clearer. It carried the way a blade carries light — not loud, but you felt it in your chest. He remembered a voice that whispered. This one could command a battlefield, and from what Isla had told him, it had.

"Mom."

The word came out wrong. Too small. Too young. He hated it immediately, but he didn’t take it back.

She crossed the distance between them in strides that ate the stone, and for a moment Glen thought she was going to embrace him, and for a moment — just a moment — he wanted her to. Then she stopped two paces short, and her eyes tracked over him the way a veteran Hunter assesses a threat: posture, breathing, the set of his shoulders, the minute tells of what he was carrying. She wasn’t looking at her son. She was reading him.

"You’re holding your left arm higher than your right," she said. "The clavicle’s been broken and healed wrong. You favor Predator Domain on that side — there’s a density in the shadow around your left shoulder that the right doesn’t have. Your breathing’s shallow at the top of the inhale. Either a cracked rib that hasn’t set or something sitting on your lungs." Her gaze stopped at his sternum and stayed. "And there’s something else. Something that isn’t yours."

Glen’s hand moved to his chest before he could stop it.

Morrigan’s expression didn’t change, but the shadows in the room did. They contracted, pulling tight against the walls like a dog backing away from a snake.

"How much?" she asked.

"You know I can’t—"

"How much, Glen."

He owed her that. He owed her more than that, and they both knew it. "Thirty-four point five percent. Last I checked. It moves."

"It always moves." She turned away, and the motes of shadow followed her, agitated now, orbiting faster. "I could feel it the moment you entered the upper wards. I thought — I hoped — it was residual. That you’d brushed against something and walked away." She pressed her hand flat against the chamber wall, and the stone drank her shadow like water. "It’s not residual. It’s threaded through you. Like stitches through cloth. When did you take it in?"

"Ka’thor. The dungeon break in the Ashen Reach. The demon core — I had to—"

"You had to." She said it flatly, without judgment, but also without mercy. "Of course you had to. Your father always had to, too."

The name landed like a slap.

Glen had been carrying that name for four days — Arthur Pendelton — turning it over in the dark of his bunk, testing its weight, trying to fit it to a shape he’d never been given. He had not expected to hear it from her. He had not expected her to say it so easily, like it was a fact she’d been waiting to be allowed to speak.

"You know that I know," he said carefully.

Morrigan’s hand stayed on the wall. The shadows around her went very still.

"Ryun," she said. Not a question.

"She told me the name. Arthur Pendelton. SSS-Rank." Glen let the silence stretch until it hurt. "You could have told me. Any time in the last eighteen years, Mom. You could have told me his name."

"I could have." She didn’t turn around. "And you’d have gone looking for him at fourteen, with a copied skill and a head full of fury, and you’d have died. Or worse — you’d have found him, and he’d have looked at you the way he looked at me, and you’d have understood what it means to love something that the void is eating from the inside, and you’d have—"

She stopped herself. Her hand on the wall was shaking.

Glen didn’t move. The fragment in his chest — the thing that was not him, that had never been him, that lived in the space where Arthur Pendelton’s son had carved himself into something the world couldn’t kill — shifted. It didn’t whisper, not here, not with Morrigan’s shadow pressed against the walls like a living warning. But it listened. It always listened. It had been listening since Ka’thor, and it learned faster than Glen was comfortable with.

"You have his jaw." Morrigan finally turned. Her eyes were dry, which was worse than tears. Tears he knew how to meet. This — this control, this containment — was the woman he had never been allowed to see. "And his stubbornness. He had the same look when he’d decided something was his to carry. The same set to the mouth. I used to tell him he’d carry the whole sky on his back if someone let him, and he’d say—"

"’Someone has to.’" Glen finished the sentence before she could.

Morrigan stared at him.

"He said that to you," Glen said. "And you told me the same thing, every night, in every shelter, every time I came home bleeding. ’Someone has to, Glen. Might as well be someone who can take it.’ I thought that was yours."

"I borrowed it." Her voice cracked on the second word, just a fracture, just enough. "I borrowed a great many things from him. I told myself it was to keep him alive in you. That was a lie. It was to keep him alive in me."

Glen sat down on the stone bench because his legs decided it for him. The fragment throbbed — a slow, deep pulse like a second heartbeat offset from his own, the parasite marking the moment, filing it away. The mother grieves. The mother weakens. The host weakens with her. It didn’t say the words. It never said the words. It just bent his attention toward the thought, gentle as a hand on his shoulder, and let him do the rest.

Morrigan saw it happen.

He watched her see it. Her Shadow Weaver senses — diminished, she’d told Isla, the Purification Core’s cure imperfect, the full breadth of what she’d once commanded still locked behind scar tissue — were enough for this. She could read the void the way a surgeon reads an X-ray: not the whole picture, but enough to know where the rot sat.

"It’s speaking to you," she said. Not a question.

"It doesn’t speak. It... suggests."

"That’s worse." She crossed to him and knelt — knelt, SS-Rank, in front of her C-rank son, in a warded chamber, and the shadows folded themselves around her knees like they’d been trained to. "Glen. Look at me. I need you to hear what I’m about to say, and I need you to hear it as a woman who took a demon’s spear through her chest in the Third Breach and spent six years paying for it."

He looked at her.

"The void doesn’t fight you. That’s what no one tells the ones who survive. The corruption doesn’t claw. It agrees. It tells you you’re right, and you’re strong, and the things you’re afraid of are the things it can remove for you. It makes your will its instrument, and you never feel the moment you stop being the one holding it." She put her hand over his, on his knee, and her skin was cold — not old-cold, not shelter-cold, but shadow-cold, the temperature of something that lived half in the space between light. "I have seen a good man become something else by degrees so small he never noticed the total. I will not watch my son do the same."

Glen’s throat was tight. "You’re talking about Dad."

"I’m talking about Arthur. Yes." She didn’t flinch from the word. "Arthur Pendelton was SSS-Rank, and the void took him the way it takes everyone who reaches for that high — not all at once, but grain by grain, until the man you loved is standing in front of you wearing a face you recognize and making decisions the man you loved would have died before making. I didn’t hide his name from you to protect him. I hid it to protect you from becoming him."

"Too late for that," Glen said, and meant it as a joke, and heard it land like a confession.

Morrigan’s grip tightened on his hand. The shadows in the room shivered.

"Don’t." The word was a blade. "Don’t you dare make that small. You are not Arthur. Arthur never had to claw his way up from nothing — he was born into the old Awakening families, handed power and told it was his due. You built yourself from a shelter floor and a copied skill and a mother who couldn’t stop coughing long enough to tell you the sky was real. Everything you are, you chose. Everything he was, he inherited and then lost. Do you understand the difference?"

The fragment pulsed. She underestimates you. She always did. She called you weak for eighteen years. She let you bleed for her while she played human.

Glen shut his eyes. "It’s louder when I’m angry."

"Then don’t be angry with me. Not now." Morrigan’s voice softened — not to the whisper he remembered, but to something new, something that had room in it for both the mother he’d known and the warrior kneeling in front of him. "Be angry later. Be angry when the war comes and you need it. But right now, in this room, let me be the thing I should have been allowed to be since the day you were born."

"What’s that?"

"Your mother. The real one. The one who can finally, finally stand between you and something instead of lying in a cot watching you walk out the door to fight things that should have been mine to fight."

Glen opened his eyes.

She was crying. She was crying the way warriors cried — silently, without performance, the tears tracking down a face that refused to move with them. The shadows around her had gone perfectly still, as if even they knew to be quiet.

"You were always my mother," Glen said, and his voice cracked, and he let it. "The coughing. The shelters. The way you’d stay up until I got back even when the meds knocked you out. That was you. Not Mary. You. Morrigan, sitting in a shelter pretending to be nothing so that I’d have someone to come home to. Don’t tell me that wasn’t real."

"It was real." She reached up — slowly, the way you reach for something fragile — and put her hand against his jaw. The same jaw she’d said was Arthur’s. Her thumb traced the line of it, and her mouth did something complicated that was trying to be a smile. "It was the truest thing I’ve ever done. And it cost me eighteen years of being able to protect you, and I would pay it again. Don’t you dare feel guilty about that, Glen. Don’t you dare."

"I don’t feel guilty."

She gave him a look that said she knew he was lying and loved him for the attempt.

The fragment shifted again. Not a whisper. A pressure. The sense of a hand resting on the back of his neck, patient, waiting, utterly confident that its turn would come. Thirty-four point five percent. Thirty-four point five percent of him that was no longer entirely his, and Morrigan could feel it there the way she could feel the wards in the walls — a thing installed, a thing with architecture, a thing that had begun to build.

"The Purification Core," she said, dropping her hand. "Isla told me you’ve used it. On others."

"On others. Not on myself. It doesn’t... it doesn’t like being turned inward."

"It wouldn’t. The void is not a status ailment, Glen. It’s a tenant. And the more power you feed it, the more room it takes." She stood, and the shadows rose with her, settling back into their orbits with the ease of long practice. "I want to try something. I want to map it — the fragment, the threading. My Shadow Thread technique isn’t what it was, but I can still read shadow that’s been touched by the void. If I can see how it’s seated in you, maybe—"

"Maybe what? You pull it out?"

"Maybe I learn something we can use. Maybe I learn how long you have before it stops being thirty-four point five and starts being something we can’t take back."

The cold honesty of that sat between them. Glen nodded.

Morrigan raised her hands, and the shadows in the chamber answered — not the drifting motes now, but the deep shadow, the shadow that lived under the stone and behind the light. Threads of it, gossamer-thin, spun from her fingertips and reached toward him like the tendrils of something vast and careful. They touched his chest, his temples, the backs of his hands, and where they touched, Glen felt the fragment recoil.

It didn’t like her. It didn’t like her at all.

And in that recoil, in the way the parasite flinched from his mother’s shadow, Glen understood something he hadn’t before: the fragment was afraid. It was afraid of what she could see, and what she could name, and what she might teach him to do about it. It had spent four days whispering that she was weak, that she was a liar, that she had let him bleed — and now he knew why. Because she was the one thing in this room it couldn’t digest.

Morrigan’s eyes went distant. The threads brightened, dimmed, brightened again. Her breath came slow and measured, and Glen watched sweat bead at her temple — the effort of an SS-Rank, diminished, pushing against something that had no rank at all.

"It’s deeper than I thought," she said quietly, as if to herself. "It’s not sitting on top of you, Glen. It’s woven through you. Into the channels your skills use. Into Predator Domain. Into the places where you copy and the places where you keep. It’s feeding on the architecture of your class. The Skill Predator — evolved — it gave you something the void wants."

"What does it want?"

"Your reach." She pulled the threads back, slowly, and the shadows settled. Her face was grey with the effort, but her eyes were sharp and terrible. "Your father was SSS-Rank. The void took him because he could reach across the world. You’re not there yet. But you will be. And the fragment knows it. It’s not trying to kill you, Glen. It’s trying to arrive. It’s building itself a seat in a body that’s going to be powerful enough to hold all of it."

The silence after that was the loudest thing Glen had ever heard.

"How long?" he asked.

"I don’t know. Months. Years. It depends on how fast you grow, and how much you use the power it’s nested in." She looked at him, and the woman who had pretended to be frail for eighteen years looked at him with a steadiness that made every shelter night he’d ever lived through make sense. "But you are not going to grow into its shape. You hear me? You are not Arthur’s ending. You are not the thing the void has been waiting for. You are my son, and I did not crawl out of a demon-scarred death to watch you become furniture for a parasite."

Glen laughed. It came out rough and wet and real, and the fragment hated it — he felt the hate like a cold spike behind his eyes, gone as fast as it came.

"Okay, Mom."

"Okay." She reached out and gripped his shoulder — his broken-collared, Predator-Dense, void-threaded left shoulder — and squeezed hard enough that something in the joint popped. "Okay. We have a war to survive, a name to bury or avenge, and a parasite to evict. And we do it together. Not you carrying me. Not me pretending to be less than I am. Together."

"Together," Glen said.

The fragment pulsed once, patient, and waited.

It had time. It thought.

Morrigan’s shadow slid across the floor toward Glen’s feet and stopped there, curling around his ankles like a guard dog settling in for a long watch. It was warm, in the way shadow could be warm when it was chosen, when it was given, when it came from someone who had spent eighteen years learning to love quietly and had finally been allowed to love loudly.

Glen looked at his mother, and his mother looked at him, and between them lay a name and a war and a thing that lived in his chest — and none of it was small, and all of it was theirs, and the night outside the sanctuary was already beginning to scream.

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