SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The war room of Eden had been carved before the Awakening.

Glen had always known that in the abstract — the stone was too smooth, the angles too precise, the acoustic design too deliberate for anything built after the System draped the world in its gamified interface. But he had never felt it until now, standing at the head of the oak table with the datapad in his hand and the weight of a covenant pressing down on the air like a change in atmospheric pressure. The walls drank sound. The old wards hummed in his molars. And every person in the room was very, very still.

Malachi sat at the far end, white mask catching the blue wash of the holographic projector, his dark robes pooled around him like spilled ink. To his right, Vane — silver mask cracked clean down the center now, a souvenir of Morrigan’s resurrection, his cybernetic eyes cycling through micro-expressions too fast for a human face. To his left, the third Pillar: Theron, who wore no mask at all, only a face lined like old leather and the steady, unhurried stillness of a man who had outlived every catastrophe the century had thrown at him. The three of them together filled the head of the table the way load-bearing walls fill a building — not with noise, but with the quiet certainty that nothing would move them.

Isla stood at Glen’s right shoulder, both pistols holstered, her limiter runes glowering sullen blue at her collarbones. Fraser braced the door, broadsword across his back, his hunched shoulders a wall of patched armor and muscle. And Morrigan — Morrigan sat apart from the table, on a stone bench against the wall, her shadows orbiting her in slow, watchful ellipses. She had not spoken since entering. She was listening the way a Shadow Weaver listened: with her whole body, every filament of attention extended into the room.

Glen set the datapad on the oak.

"This is everything I found beneath the Celestial Tower," he said. His voice sounded wrong to him — too even, too controlled, the voice of a man who had rehearsed this in his head for three weeks and was now discovering that rehearsal meant nothing. "The conduit chamber. The control consoles. The power station. And a record vault, deeper than any of it, with a stone tablet the Administrators left behind." He tapped the pad. The holographic projector above the table flickered to life. "I’m going to show you what they wrote."

He let the covenant fill the room.

The words scrolled upward in cold blue light, and the war room went silent in a way that had texture — a thickening, a compression, the feeling of air being squeezed out of a sealed space. Glen watched them read it. He had read it three times himself in the sub-levels of the Tower, and then a dozen more on the trawler and the long walk home, and the words had not lost their weight. They had gained it.

We who built the shields acknowledge our sin. We left billions outside the barriers to die...

Malachi did not move. His mask gave nothing away, but Glen saw the gloved fingers on the table’s edge curl inward, slowly, the fabric pulling taut across the knuckles. When the scroll reached the line about the System converting the descendants of the damned into structured energy, the fingers stopped. Held. A man bracing against something.

...humanity survives on the power of its own dead. It is a monstrous bargain. But it is the only bargain we have.

Vane’s cybernetic eyes had stopped cycling. They had locked onto the floating text and gone perfectly, unnaturally still — the stillness of a machine that had encountered input it could not immediately process. His synthesized breathing, usually a faint mechanical undertone, had ceased entirely. For a long, uncomfortable moment, the third Pillar of Eden was simply not breathing, and Glen wondered if Vane had forgotten to, or if the part of him that was still flesh had simply stopped caring whether it did.

If you are reading this, you carry a piece of the void. You are the only one who can open the conduits. You are the only one who can close them. Choose wisely.

The scroll ended. The blue light held the last words in the air like a blade suspended mid-strike.

Nobody spoke.

Theron was the first to break. He did it the way old men break silences — not with words, but with a sound, a low exhale that carried the weight of a century of suspicion collapsing into confirmation. "We suspected," he said. His voice was dry, weathered, the voice of a man who had spent decades reading between the lines of pre-Awakening archives. "Every Pillar since the founding has suspected. The numbers never added up, Glen. The energy budget of the shields, the throughput of the Towers, the rate at which the dungeons produced harvestable cores — the math required a fuel source the System never acknowledged. We theorized. We argued. We tore our archives apart looking for proof." He looked at the floating words. "We never found it. You found it in three days beneath a Tower the Administrators sealed with their own hands."

"I didn’t find it," Glen said. "It found me." He touched his chest, the unconscious gesture he could never quite stop. "The tablet translated itself. Because of this."

The void fragment pulsed once, soft and knowing, beneath his sternum. Recognition. It had felt the covenant chamber the moment the hologram lit — not the text, but the architecture beneath the text, the schematic data Glen had also downloaded. And it was interested. Patient. The way a key is interested in a lock.

"The schematics," Vane said.

His voice had come back, but the synthesized hum had lost its usual manic edge. When he spoke now, he sounded like a different man — or like the same man with a layer peeled away, the performative brilliance stripped down to something rawer underneath. "Show me the schematics."

Glen tapped the pad again. The covenant text dissolved, replaced by the conduit maps he had painstakingly reconstructed from the analog gauges and pre-Awakening consoles: cross-sections of the Tower’s foundation, the central column of black stone, the network of conduits radiating outward like the roots of a vast and terrible tree. They were neither blueprint nor spell-diagram. They were something older than both — mechanical in their precision, geometric in their logic, but inscribed with a script that predated the Awakening by generations. They looked like the work of engineers who had invented engineering in order to build the thing that would kill the world slowly enough to save it.

The conduits ran deep. Beneath the Celestial Tower, they plunged into the bedrock and branched — north, south, east, west — following ley-lines that Glen now understood were not natural formations at all but installed infrastructure, laid down before the Awakening, before the Guilds, before anyone alive had been born. They connected. The network spanned continents. And at the heart of every Mega-Sanctuary, at the base of every Tower, the conduits converged on the same architecture: a siphon, a filter, a conversion engine that drew raw void energy through the dimensional boundary and refined it into the steady golden current that held the shields aloft.

Vane leaned forward. The cracked mask caught the light along its fracture line. His cybernetic eyes whirred — recalibrating, magnifying, tracing the conduit paths in real time. "These are real," he said, and the words came out half-strangled, the voice of a man whose intellect had just collided with something that exceeded it. "These are — Glen, this is the complete infrastructure. Not a fragment. Not a Guild schematic. The original layout. The Administrators’ own drawings. The conduits don’t just power the Eastern Spire. They — " He traced a line with one finger, following a branch that arced across the projection. "— they route to Johannesburg. To Eden. The network is interconnected."

"The shields are one system," Glen said. "Not separate sanctuaries. One machine, fed by one network, drawing from one source."

"The void," Malachi said. His metallic voice had gone very quiet. "And the dead."

"Yes."

Morrigan moved.

She had been still against the wall, her shadows orbiting, and now she rose and crossed to the projection in three long strides. Her eyes — the fierce, tired eyes Glen had known his whole life — were fixed on the conduit cross-sections with an expression he had never seen on her face. Not horror. Not calculation. Recognition.

"I’ve seen this," she said.

The room turned.

"Not these exact drawings. This architecture." She pressed her fingers to the projected stone, and the light passed through her hand as if she were reaching into the past. "Before the Awakening. Before Arthur was SSS-Rank, before the Vanguard was formalized. We were sent into pre-Awakening ruins — the old sites, the ones the System hadn’t catalogued. Reconnaissance. The Association didn’t know what they were. They sent us in to map them and report back." Her mouth tightened. "Arthur found a chamber. Deep, sealed, older than anything we’d catalogued. And on the walls — conduits. These conduits. This exact geometry. The siphon-column, the branching ley-routes, the conversion node at the center. He sketched them. He was obsessed with them for weeks. He said they looked like a machine built to pray."

She looked at Glen. The shadows around her had gone rigid, defensive, the posture of a woman remembering something that had cost her.

"He couldn’t read them. None of us could. The script was pre-Awakening, pre-System, pre-everything. But Arthur said — and I remember this exactly, because he said it the way he said things that mattered — he said, ’Whatever built this was trying to pull something through from the other side and survive it.’" She pulled her hand back. "He was right. He just didn’t know what the other side was. We didn’t know about the void then. Not really. Not the way we do now."

The fragment pulsed again, and this time it was not soft. It pressed against Glen’s ribs with a pressure that was almost eager — a leaning-toward, a reaching. It knew these conduits. Not from the datapad. From something deeper, something woven into the fabric of what it was. The void fragment was a piece of the very energy the conduits drew, and looking at the schematics was like a fish being shown the plumbing of the aquarium. It understood the architecture on a level Glen’s conscious mind could not reach — not as drawings on a wall but as channels it could flow through.

Open them, something said.

Not words. Not quite. A pressure behind his thoughts, a direction, a gravity. The fragment did not speak in language. It spoke in want. And what it wanted, with a clarity that cut through the noise of the room, was to feel those conduits open beneath its — beneath his — hands.

Glen’s jaw tightened. No.

The fragment subsided. Not defeated. Patient. It could wait. It had been waiting since Ka’thor.

"Corruption," Isla said, quietly, from his shoulder. She had felt him tense. She always did. "How much?"

"34.5. It moved when the schematics came up." He did not lie to her. He had decided, somewhere over the black glass of Johannesburg, that he would not lie to the people in this room. The cost of that decision was that they would all know how close the parasite was to the steering wheel. "The fragment recognizes the conduit architecture. It wants me to open them."

"And can you?" Malachi’s voice was careful. Not accusatory. The voice of a man reorganizing his understanding of the world in real time and needing to know the new shape. "The covenant says you are the only living human who can."

Glen looked at his hands on the table. The scarred, aged hands of a boy who had stolen too much. "The covenant says I carry a piece of the void, and that makes me the key. I felt it in the chamber — the conduit responded to me. The fragment is the same energy the siphon draws. I’m a living extension of the network." He met Malachi’s masked gaze. "I can open them. I can close them. And if a Monarch — or someone carrying a stronger piece of the void — reached a conduit, they could do the same. Reverse the flow. Pour the void’s entropy through the network instead of drawing power from it. Tear the shields down from the inside."

The room absorbed that.

"Caleb," Fraser said from the door. The name landed heavy. "He’d know this. The Nobles showed him the System’s infrastructure. If he reaches a conduit before we do—"

"Then the shields fall," Glen said. "And the Monarchs walk through Johannesburg into an unshielded continent."

Malachi stood. The motion was slow, deliberate, the movement of a man whose body had just received information his mind was still processing. He walked to the projection and stood within the floating conduit map, the branches passing through his robes like light through water. "This changes the strategic calculus entirely," he said. "If the Monarchs come through Johannesburg — and Morrigan has confirmed the Vanguard is mobilizing — the conduits beneath this city become the most critical infrastructure on the continent. Not the shelters. Not the Guilds. The conduits. Whoever controls them controls the shields. They can reinforce them. Or they can tear them down."

"Or," Glen said, "we find a third option."

The room stilled again. A different kind of stillness — not horror, but attention. The sharp, hungry attention of people who had been surviving for so long they had forgotten what it felt like to be offered a way out.

"The covenant says the System must continue until someone finds a way to power the shields without the void," Glen said. "Without the harvest. The Administrators wrote that like it was a footnote. Like it was an impossible wish they tacked on at the end to salve their conscience. But they built the sentence. They left the door. They said until. That word means they believed it was possible. They just couldn’t do it themselves."

"You want to re-engineer the conduits," Vane said. He was no longer looking at Glen. He was looking at the schematics, and his cracked mask could not hide what was happening behind it — the old Vane, the manic genius, surfacing through the shell-shock like a man waking from a nightmare into a laboratory. His fingers were moving now, tracing the conversion node, muttering. "The siphon draws void energy and converts it to shield power. The conversion is the harvest — the structured energy of cores is the medium. But if you could change the conversion medium... if you could find an energy source that isn’t the void, that isn’t the dead... the conduit geometry wouldn’t care. It’s a channel. It carries whatever you pour into it."

"Can it be done?" Theron asked.

Vane’s cybernetic eyes locked onto the conversion node and stayed there, spinning through calculations at a speed that made Glen’s Predator Domain prickle. "I don’t know," he said. And for Vane — for the man who always knew, who spoke in certainties and manic proclamations — the admission was its own kind of earthquake. "The schematics are complete but the underlying physics is pre-Awakening. Half my models are built on System-era assumptions. This is older than my models. I would need to reverse-engineer the conversion process from first principles. Months. Maybe years. And I’d need Glen — I’d need the fragment — to interface with a live conduit to get real-time data on the flow dynamics. Simulations won’t be enough. The void doesn’t simulate."

The fragment pulsed at that. Yes, it said, without words. A live conduit. Let me touch it. Let me—

Glen pressed his hand flat to his chest and held it down. "We don’t have months. The Monarchs are coming. Caleb is coming."

"Then we do it faster," Vane said, and the manic edge was back — sharpened now, tempered by the weight of what he’d just read, no longer careless but no less hungry. "Or we die knowing the shape of the machine that killed us. Either way — I need these schematics. All of them. Now."

Glen copied the encrypted file to the war table’s local system and watched Vane pull it into his own interface, cybernetic eyes already devouring the conduit geometry, already three problems ahead of anyone else in the room. Malachi and Theron had withdrawn to the far end of the table, speaking in low voices Glen’s Predator Domain could hear but he chose not to parse — strategy, timelines, the grim arithmetic of how many people they could save and how many they could not. Isla had not moved from his shoulder. Fraser had not moved from the door. Morrigan had returned to her bench, her shadows slow and heavy, her eyes on the fading projection the way a person watches a grave.

The void fragment settled in Glen’s chest. Not silent — never silent — but quiet in the way it was quiet when it had learned something new and was deciding what to do with it. It had seen the conduits. It had felt their geometry. It knew, now, the shape of the locks it was made to open, and Glen knew, with a cold certainty that sat in his stomach like a stone, that the fragment would not forget. Could not forget. Every step he took toward the third option was a step the fragment took with him, learning the architecture of its own liberation one schematic at a time.

That was the cost. It was always the cost. Every victory, every action, every truth uncovered — something permanent changed hands. He had the blueprints now. They all did. The System was a machine, and for the first time in the long history of humanity’s survival, the people who wanted to break the cycle had the drawings.

But knowing the truth and being able to change it were different things.

Glen looked around the war room — at the Pillars bent over strategy, at Vane already drowning in schematics, at his mother remembering a chamber Arthur had found before the world ended, at Isla standing watch at his shoulder like she intended to stand there for the rest of his life. He looked at the floating remnant of the conduit map, ancient and mechanical, the prayer-machine of dead architects, and he felt the fragment press gently against his ribs in something that was almost anticipation.

Choose wisely, the covenant said.

The room held the weight of it. All of them. Together. The blueprint of the machine that fed on the dead, laid bare on an oak table in a room older than the System itself, and the people who could act on it staring at the shape of a choice that might save the world or end it.

Nobody moved. The wards hummed. And the truth settled over them like a second ceiling, low and heavy, made of the knowledge that they had been handed the key to every lock that mattered — and that the key was also the thing that might burn the house down.

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