SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The command chamber of Eden’s sanctuary had never been built for this many people.

It was a long, low room carved from the living rock of the plateau, its walls threaded with conduit lines that pulsed a faint, sickly blue. A table of polished obsidian dominated the center — a relic salvaged from a fallen Sanctuary before the borders collapsed — and around it sat the closest thing Glen had to a general staff.

Morrigan sat at the far end, her shadow-cloak drawn tight around shoulders that had once carried the weight of an SS-Rank Shadow Weaver’s full authority. Now the cloak was more affectation than armor. The power beneath it had been bled away, siphoned by the same curse that kept her alive and kept her small. Her face was pale, sharp, watchful.

Beside her, Malachi leaned forward with both gloved hands flat on the table, the white mask turned toward Glen like an empty moon. Vane sat one seat down, his silver mask tilted at an angle that suggested neither agreement nor disagreement — only patience, the kind that had outlasted centuries.

Isla had taken a position near the door, not out of deference but habit. The A-Rank Spirit Gunner never sat with her back fully to an entrance. Her rifle lay across her knees, disassembled, her fingers cleaning a firing mechanism that was already clean. Fraser stood behind her chair, arms folded, the heat of a B-Rank Pyromancer radiating off him in a faint shimmer that made the air above his shoulders dance. He hadn’t spoken since entering the room.

And at Glen’s right hand, battered and half-bandaged, sat Kaelen Cross.

The Shadow Sword Commander looked like a man who had crawled out of his own grave and then gotten dressed for a meeting. His left arm was splinted. A long cut ran from his temple to his jaw, held closed with surgical glue that was already yellowing at the edges. His armor was gone — burned away in Johannesburg — and he wore a borrowed coat over a chest wrapped in so much gauze he looked padded, oversized.

He was alive. That was the miracle. Everything else about him was a cost.

Glen stood at the head of the table, the Administrators’ Covenant still glowing faintly in his memory like a brand. He had read it to them. All of it. The truths the Monarchs had buried, the architecture of the conduit system, the reason the shields were thinning, and the name that sat at the center of everything like a splinter in a wound.

Caleb is coming.

The silence stretched. Then Glen broke it.

"Two weeks. Maybe three." He put both hands on the table and leaned in. "That’s the window the Covenant gives us before the Monarchs’ vanguard reaches Johannesburg. The shields there are the thinnest of any standing Sanctuary — the conduit network was patched after the last breach, and the patches are failing. If Caleb hits them at full strength, they fold. We lose the city. We lose the southern corridor. And then the war is over before it starts."

He let that sit.

"So. Options."

Morrigan spoke first. She always did. It was one of the things Glen had learned to rely on in the weeks since he’d learned who she was — not just the diminished SS-Rank who trained him, but his mother, Mary, wearing a name the void had given her like a second skin.

"Fortify." Her voice was flat, final, the voice of someone who had commanded armies before any of them were born. "Johannesburg holds because its shields hold. We reinforce the conduits, we pull every ranked fighter in the southern Sanctuaries into a consolidated defense, and we hold the line until the other Sanctuaries can send reinforcements. We make Caleb break himself against walls instead of against flesh."

She turned her head toward Glen.

"That is how you win a siege. You do not meet a superior force in the open. You make the open field cost more than it’s worth."

Fraser nodded, once, slow. The Pyromancer’s voice came out like gravel dragged over coals. "She’s right about the cost. I held the eastern barricade in Johannesburg for eleven hours. We lost nineteen fighters. Nineteen, holding one stretch of wall." His eyes were steady, unblinking. "Defense bleeds. But offense against a force that size? That’s a slaughter."

Kaelen stirred in his chair, and the movement cost him a grimace. "The Commander’s not wrong about the numbers," he said, and for a moment Glen didn’t know whether Kaelen meant Fraser or himself — the titles had gotten tangled in the wreckage of Johannesburg. "We don’t have the bodies for a strike force. I came out of that battle with a third of my shadow swords. A third. You want me to march what’s left of my command against a Monarch vanguard? I’ll do it. But I want you to know what you’re spending."

The void fragment stirred at the base of Glen’s skull.

He’s right, you know.

The whisper came like a thought that wasn’t his, silk over a blade.

You don’t have the numbers. You never have. That’s the whole point of you — you take what others have. So take. Take from the vanguard. Take from Caleb. Take until there’s nothing left to take.

Glen closed his eyes for half a second. The Corruption readout pulsed in the back of his awareness like a second heartbeat: 34.5%. Up from 33.8 the week before. The fragment was growing, and it was getting louder.

He opened his eyes and ignored it.

"I hear you," he said. "All of you. And the numbers are real — I’m not going to pretend we can field a conventional army. But fortifying alone is a slow death. We reinforce the shields, Caleb breaks them, we reinforce again, and every cycle costs us fighters we can’t replace. Weeks become days. The shields thin. Eventually they fold." He looked at Morrigan. "You know that. You’ve watched it happen before."

Morrigan’s expression didn’t change, but something behind her eyes did.

"The alternative," she said, "is that you march into the field and die faster."

"No." Glen straightened. "The alternative is we hit him before he’s ready. The Covenant shows the vanguard’s staging routes. Caleb is consolidating his forces in the dead zones north of the Limpopo before he moves south. Right now, today, he’s scattered. He’s absorbing corrupted remnants from the fallen border Sanctuaries, and they’re not organized yet. If we strike the staging ground before he finishes, we break his momentum. We don’t need to destroy the vanguard. We need to make him late."

Isla looked up from her rifle. "That’s a gamble on intelligence we haven’t confirmed."

"It is."

"Then we confirm it." She slotted the firing mechanism back into place with a clean click. "We don’t need to argue strategy before we know what we’re strategizing against. I can take a small team into the dead zones — scouts, not a strike force. We map Caleb’s exact strength, his timeline, his formation. We find out whether the staging ground is really scattered or whether that’s wishful thinking." She met Glen’s eyes. "You want to strike first? Fine. But strike blind and you lose the only advantage we have left."

Vane spoke for the first time. His voice, behind the silver mask, was unhurried, almost gentle. "The girl is correct." Isla’s jaw tightened at girl but she said nothing. "Intelligence first. But I would note that a strike and a defense are not the only paths." He turned the silver mask toward Malachi. "You have been quiet, Pillar."

Malachi had been quiet. The white mask had not moved since the meeting began, the eye-slits dark, the gloved hands still flat on the table. When he spoke, his voice came out the way it always did — flat, measured, as if each word had been weighed on a scale before leaving his mouth.

"There is a third option," he said. "The Covenant gives us the conduit data. Not just the maps — the architecture. The shields are thinning because the conduits were designed to draw from a source that no longer exists. The Administrators built the system to tap a resonance we can’t currently access." He paused. "But the data includes the resonance signatures. If we can replicate even a fraction of that feed — redirect power from intact conduits, rebuild the routing — we can reinforce Johannesburg’s shields to a level that holds for months. Not weeks. Months."

The room shifted. Glen felt it — the way the energy in the chamber tilted, the way three different people leaned forward at once.

"That’s buying time," Kaelen said. Not a objection. A clarification.

"It is buying time," Malachi agreed. "Time is the resource you lack. Every other plan on this table assumes you have less of it than you need. This plan gives you more."

"And the cost?" Glen asked. He always asked. He’d learned.

Malachi’s mask turned toward him. "The conduit work requires a Pillar to interface with the network directly. Vane or myself. The process is not without risk. The network was built for Administrators. Forcing a human consciousness through the routing is... unpleasant. And prolonged exposure degrades the interface."

"How much degrades?"

"Enough that the one who does it may not do it twice."

Another cost. Another permanent thing given for a temporary gain. Glen felt the void fragment pulse approvingly, a cold satisfaction that wasn’t his.

Everything costs. Isn’t that what you always say?

He shoved it down.

"We’re not choosing one path," Glen said slowly, and the words settled into the room like stones dropping into still water. "We’re taking all three."

Morrigan’s eyes narrowed. "You can’t do all three. You don’t have—"

"We don’t have enough of any one thing. That’s the point." Glen looked around the table. "Morrigan fortifies the city. Pulls the southern fighters in, consolidates the defense, gets the walls ready for a siege. Malachi and Vane work the conduit data — reinforce the shields, buy us the months instead of the weeks. Isla takes a scout team into the dead zones and gets us the intelligence we need to know whether a strike is even viable."

He paused.

"And while all of that happens, I find the cure."

The silence that followed was different. Heavier.

Morrigan leaned back. "What cure."

"The one that frees your power." Glen held her gaze. "You’re SS-Rank. You were the SS-Rank. The thing that’s eating you — the thing the void did to you — it’s the same class of corruption that’s eating the conduits, eating the borders, eating Caleb. If I can find a way to strip it out permanently, you fight at full strength. You fight the way you were built to fight. And suddenly the numbers change."

Morrigan stared at him for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet, and very direct.

"Caleb chose the void, Glen. He looked at what was happening and he walked toward it. He wasn’t taken. He wasn’t tricked. He chose." She let that land. "You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved."

The words hit him in a place he hadn’t armored. Glen felt his jaw tighten, felt the Corruption tick upward in his awareness — or maybe that was imagination, the fragment feeding on the spike of emotion. 34.5%. The number held.

"You said that about me once." His voice came out steady, but it cost him something to make it so. "When you found me in the borderlands. When I was half-corrupted and half-feral and you weren’t sure which side was going to win. You said I was too far gone. That the void had too much of me. That pulling me out would cost more than it was worth."

Morrigan didn’t answer.

"And you pulled me out anyway." Glen held the silence. "And here I am."

The chamber was very still. Fraser’s heat shimmered. Kaelen’s bandaged hand rested on the table, unmoving. Isla had stopped cleaning her rifle.

Morrigan looked at him for a long time, and something passed across her face that might have been grief, or pride, or the place where the two became indistinguishable.

"That," she said softly, "is not the same thing."

"It might be."

"It might not."

"Then we find out." Glen straightened, and when he spoke again his voice carried the room. "Three fronts. Fortify. Scout. Cure. We move on all three starting now. Malachi — you and Vane decide between you who interfaces with the conduits. Whoever it is, the other covers the city’s defenses alongside Morrigan. Isla, pick your scouts and move tonight. The dead zones get harder to cross every day we wait."

Isla nodded once, already reassembling the rifle with practiced speed.

"Kaelen." Glen turned to the battered Commander. "I need your shadow swords for Isla’s scout detail. Not a strike force — eyes. Small teams, fast, in and out. Can your people do that with what’s left?"

Kaelen considered it. The cost was visible on his face — not the physical pain, but the weight of spending the last third of a command he’d spent years building. "They can do it," he said. "I’ll lead the detail myself."

"You’re injured."

"I’m alive. Being alive is the qualification." He met Glen’s eyes, and there was something dry and hard in his voice that had nothing to do with disagreement. "You’re spending us carefully. I can see that. Keep doing it."

Glen nodded.

Fraser spoke last, from the back, his voice low and steady as a banked fire. "I’ll hold the line in Johannesburg while the shields come up. Someone has to be there when Caleb arrives, whether it’s in weeks or months." He paused. "I know what defense costs. I’ll pay it."

The meeting broke apart in fragments — Isla already moving for the door, Kaelen rising with a hiss of pain and a hand braced on the table, Malachi and Vane turning toward each other in the silent conference of masks. Morrigan lingered, and for a moment Glen thought she would say something — something about the cure, about Caleb, about the look on his face when he’d pushed back against her.

She didn’t. She drew her shadow-cloak tighter and left, and the blue pulse of the conduit lines followed her out like a fading heartbeat.

Glen stood alone in the command chamber.

The Covenant’s knowledge sat in his skull like a second consciousness. The Corruption sat at 34.5% and climbing. The void fragment whispered to him in a voice that was learning to sound like his own.

You’re a leader now. Leaders make the calls that kill people. You’ve already killed three of them today — Malachi or Vane takes the conduit damage, Kaelen’s last swords go into the dead zones, Fraser holds a wall he told you himself would bleed.

Was it the right call?

Does it matter? You made it. That’s what power is.

Glen pressed both palms flat on the obsidian table and breathed. The stone was cold. The conduit lines pulsed. Somewhere far to the north, in the dead zones beyond the Limpopo, Caleb was gathering the shattered remnants of a broken world into something that walked and thought and wore his brother’s face.

He had weeks. Maybe less.

He had three fronts and not enough people for any of them. He had a mother whose power could end the war if he could find the thing that would give it back to her. He had a brother who had chosen the void, and a voice in his own skull that was starting to argue Caleb had been right.

And he had the weight of command — the thing he’d never asked for, the thing that settled onto his shoulders now like a second cloak, heavier than the shadow-cloak Morrigan wore, heavier than the Predator Domain he carried in his bones. Not the weight of a fighter. Not the weight of a Skill Predator who took what he needed and moved on.

The weight of the people who were going to die because of the calls he’d made tonight, sitting in the quiet of an empty room, pressing his hands to cold stone, and knowing he’d make the same calls again tomorrow.

Glen closed his eyes.

The void fragment was silent. Even it seemed to understand that some weights weren’t meant to be lifted — only carried.

He straightened, turned, and walked out of the command chamber to begin the war.

Corruption: 34.5%

Status: War Council concluded — three fronts authorized.

Time remaining: estimate 14–21 days.

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