SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The stairs went down for longer than Glen thought was reasonable.

Not in the way a normal staircase went down — not the steady, countable descent of steps cut into stone. These stairs folded space. Each landing he reached was dimmer, colder, and further from the world above than the math of his stride should have allowed. He counted forty steps between the first landing and the second. Forty between the second and the third. By the fourth, he stopped counting, because the number forty had begun to feel like a lie the architecture was telling him to keep him calm.

Vane walked a half-step behind, his cybernetic eyes doing the soft mechanical tick they always did when he was scanning something that resisted easy cataloguing. The sound was almost soothing. Almost.

"You’re sure about this," Vane said. It wasn’t a question.

"Eden said the archives were open to me. Full access."

"Eden said a lot of things in that war council." Vane’s voice echoed strangely off walls that shouldn’t have been there. "Most of them were about how we’re all going to die if we don’t move fast. I don’t remember him saying ’and then Glen should wander into the oldest, least-mapped part of the facility alone.’"

"You’re here."

"I’m here because if something eats you, I want footage."

Glen almost smiled. Almost. The smile died somewhere in his chest, where the fragment lived — that cold, patient weight that had been with him since the day he’d stolen the wrong skill from the wrong dead thing. It pressed against the inside of his ribs now, the way it always did when he was close to something old. Something it recognized before he did.

Corruption: 34.5%.

The number floated up from his status the way a heartbeat did — automatic, unwelcome, impossible to ignore. Thirty-four point five percent of him, now, was something other than Glen. Thirty-four point five percent of his cells, his channels, his soul-architecture, had been quietly rewritten by the void fragment he carried like a second passenger. He’d gotten good at not thinking about it. The archives were making that hard.

The stairs ended.

They ended the way a sentence ends when the speaker decides the rest of it doesn’t matter — abruptly, without ceremony, in a vast dark that opened in front of them like a held breath finally let go. Glen’s [Predator Domain] uncurled instinctively, tasting the space, and came back to him tasting of age. Of dust that had been dust for longer than some civilizations had been civilizations.

Vane’s eyes adjusted first. The cybernetics threw a low amber wash across the chamber, and the light caught what was waiting inside.

"Oh," Vane said, very quietly.

The Archives of Eden were not a library.

A library implied an order, a taxonomy, a human logic organizing human knowledge into human-shape shelves. This was something else. This was what happened when a civilization knew it was dying and tried to cram everything it had ever learned into a hole in the ground before the dark swallowed it.

The chamber was enormous — a cathedral cut downward instead of built upward, its ceiling lost in shadow, its floor a terraced descent of smooth black stone. And on every terrace, on every shelf and plinth and recessed alcove, were the records.

Scrolls. Thousands of them, rolled tight and sealed in something that looked like wax but wasn’t, stacked in columns that rose taller than Glen. Stone tablets, their surfaces dense with a script that made his eyes slide sideways when he tried to read it directly — the kind of writing that had been designed for minds that processed language differently than modern humans did. Crystalline data cores, fist-sized, humming with a faint internal light that pulsed in patterns too slow to be called a heartbeat but too regular to be called anything else.

And deeper — much deeper, on the terraces where the amber light from Vane’s eyes barely reached — shapes that Glen didn’t have names for. Structures that looked like they’d been grown, not built. Records that had been encoded into the stone itself at a level below the molecular.

"This predates the System," Glen said. The words felt inadequate.

"This predates the Awakening," Vane corrected. His eyes were ticking fast now, scanning, cataloguing, the soft mechanical rhythm speeding up as the data poured in. "Some of this — Glen, some of this is old. Not old like ’before the current era’ old. Old like ’before the current world’ old."

Glen stepped down onto the first terrace. The stone was warm under his boots, which made no sense this far underground and unsettled him more than the cold would have.

He had two goals. He’d stated them plainly in the war council and no one had argued, which told him they were the right two goals even if no one knew how to reach them.

First: a way to manage his corruption. Thirty-four point five percent and climbing. Every skill he copied, every class fragment he absorbed, every time he pushed [Skill Predator (Evolved)] past what it was designed to do, the void fragment ate a little more of him. He needed a mechanism. A valve. Something that let him keep being what he was without the parasite finishing the job it had started.

Second: a permanent cure for Morrigan’s diminished state. His mother — Mary, who was also Morrigan, who had been diminished and fragmented and reduced to a sliver of what she’d once been — was stable, for now. Stable the way a candle flame was stable in a room with no wind. The moment wind found her, she’d gutter. He needed more than stability. He needed her back.

He started with the scrolls.

The first hour produced nothing useful and everything terrible.

The scrolls were written in a language that Glen’s skill-enhanced cognition could partially parse — the System, it turned out, had been lazy about stripping translation protocols from the conduit infrastructure it had co-opted. Fragments of meaning bled through. Enough to read. Enough to wish he couldn’t.

The world before the Awakening had not been the world he’d been taught about. He’d known this, in the abstract — everyone with any real involvement in the System’s upper tiers knew that the official history was a comfortable story told to keep the newly Awakened from asking dangerous questions. But knowing it was abstract and reading the receipts was something else entirely.

The System was not natural. The System had been imposed.

Glen read a scroll through twice, then a third time, because the first two readings his brain had refused to process the implications. The Administrators — entities the scroll called by titles, not names, titles that made the inside of his skull itch — had designed the System. Engineered it. Rolled it out across a planetary population that had no framework to understand what was being done to them. The Awakening wasn’t an emergent phenomenon, wasn’t evolution, wasn’t the universe waking up to its own potential. It was a controlled process. A harvest.

The fragment stirred.

Not the passive press Glen had grown used to. This was a shift, a reorientation, the way a predator’s ears pricked toward a sound it recognized. The void fragment knew this material. Not the way Glen knew it, through reading — the way a participant knows a story they’d lived through. It had been there. Or something that had contributed to it had been there. The knowledge bled sideways across the connection between them, and for a moment Glen felt the echo of something vast and cold and old turning its attention toward the scroll the way a person turns toward a photograph of a place they used to live.

"You’re recognizing this," Glen said. He didn’t make it a question. He’d learned that the fragment answered questions with silence and statements with pressure.

The pressure came. Affirmative. Hungry.

What are you?

The fragment offered nothing but a sensation of vast patience, the way a glacier might answer a question about its weight. Glen filed the reaction away and kept reading, and the fragment’s hunger sat behind his sternum like a second heartbeat, watching.

Vane found the Conduit Adept references first.

"Glen." His voice carried the particular flatness it took on when his cybernetics had cross-referenced something his organic brain didn’t want to accept. "Over here. Third terrace, eastern alcove."

Glen crossed to him. Vane had a crystalline data core cradled in both palms, its internal light pulsing faster now, as if his proximity or his scanning had woken it. His eyes were wide — the organic eye and the cybernetic one both, which meant whatever he was seeing was bad in a way that transcended the usual categories.

"Conduit Adepts," Vane said. "Humans who could interface with the conduit system directly. Not through the System — under it. At the infrastructure level. The System is a front-end interface, Glen. A UI. These people could touch the back-end."

Glen took the data core. The fragment lurched so hard against the inside of his chest that he staggered.

That’s me, he thought, and it wasn’t entirely his own thought. The fragment had pushed the recognition into his mind like a hand pushing a door open. I’m a Conduit Adept. The skills I copy, the way I interface with absorbed class fragments — I’m not just mimicking abilities. I’m reading the conduit architecture they run on.

He’d always assumed [Skill Predator (Evolved)] was a class. A powerful one, a unique one, but a class — a System-granted framework like any other. The data core suggested otherwise. Suggested he was something the System had been designed to prevent from existing. Something that had slipped through the harvest’s filters.

The scroll beside the data core listed the Administrators’ response to Conduit Adepts. It was short. It was not kind.

"They purged them," Glen said.

"Systematically," Vane confirmed. "Over a span the core describes as ’seventeen cycles.’ I don’t know what a cycle is in this context. Could be years. Could be centuries. Either way, the Adepts are listed as ’resolved.’ Present tense: resolved. The core thinks the category is empty."

The fragment pressed against his ribs, and the pressure had a quality Glen had never felt from it before. It felt like defiance.

"Let’s find out what else they thought was resolved," Glen said.

The Purification Protocol was buried deep. Deeper than the Conduit Adept records, deeper than the System-architecture schematics, on a terrace where the crystalline data cores had gone the color of old bruises and the stone tablets were inscribed in a script Glen’s translation-bleed couldn’t touch.

It took Vane’s cybernetics twenty minutes to crack the encoding. It took Glen another ten to accept what the decoded output was telling him.

The Purification Core — the function he’d encountered before, the one that stripped corruption, that had been used on him, that he’d seen applied to others — was a toy. A consumer-grade tool. A flattened, simplified, deliberately weakened version of something far older and far more complete.

The Purification Protocol was the original.

Not a cleansing. A restoration. The Protocol didn’t strip corruption the way the Core did, by burning away the contaminated material and accepting the collateral loss. It read the original soul-architecture of the subject, compared it against the corrupted version, and rewrote the corruption back into coherence with the original pattern. It didn’t remove the foreign material. It integrated it — folded it back into the subject’s own structure so completely that the line between ’self’ and ’parasite’ ceased to exist.

The fragment went still.

Glen felt the stillness the way you’d feel a room go quiet. The void fragment, which had been pressing and hungry and defiant all the way down, had stopped. Was listening. Was, for the first time since he’d carried it, afraid.

Because the Protocol could cure Morrigan. That was obvious — could take a diminished, fragmented soul-architecture and restore it to its original pattern, whole and intact. But the fragment understood something about the Protocol that Glen hadn’t reached yet, and it was afraid of it.

"What does it need?" Glen asked the data core. "The Protocol. What’s the activation requirement?"

Vane cross-referenced. His eyes ticked. Then they stopped.

"A Void Crystallization Core," he said. The words came out careful, like he was handling something fragile. "A component the Protocol uses as a — I’m translating loosely here — a ’pattern anchor.’ It needs a stable crystalline structure of condensed void-matter to hold the original soul-architecture against the rewrite process. Without it, the Protocol has nothing to measure against."

"Where do you get one?"

Vane was quiet for a long time. The data core pulsed in his hands.

"You don’t get one, Glen. You are one. Or you become one. The core describes the formation process. It’s — " He swallowed. "It requires a living host with a pre-existing void symbiosis. The host’s own void fragment has to be deliberately crystallized. Coaxed into a stable lattice. And the scroll is very specific about what that does to the host in the process."

Glen looked at the data core. The fragment in his chest had gone from afraid to something worse. It had gone quiet in the way a trapped animal goes quiet — not calm, but still, watching the walls of the trap for a gap.

Every victory cost something permanent. He’d known this. The war council had known this. The universe had been telling him this since the day he’d Awakened with a skill that ate other skills and a parasite that ate him.

To cure his mother, he would have to let the Protocol crystallize the fragment he carried. And the scroll — the cold, precise, pre-Awakening scroll — was clear about what crystallization meant for the host. It didn’t kill him. It was worse than that. It fixed him. Permanently locked his corruption at whatever percentage he’d reached when the lattice set. Made the fragment a permanent, irremovable part of his architecture. Cured the progression. Committed the infection.

He could stop the corruption from climbing. He could not undo what it had already done. The thirty-four point five percent would be his forever — structurally him, indistinguishable from himself, woven so deep that no force short of annihilation could pull it back out.

And in exchange, Morrigan would be whole.

The fragment understood the bargain. And it hated it. And it had no way to refuse.

Glen was about to close the data core when Vane made a sound he’d never heard the man make before. It was small, involuntary, the kind of noise a person made when they read something that rearranged the furniture inside their head.

"Vane?"

"Read this." Vane’s hands were shaking as he angled the data core toward Glen. "The last section. The one the Administrators sealed. Glen, read it."

Glen read it.

The Purification Protocol, the sealed section explained, had been designed before the System. Before the Awakening. Before the harvest. It had been designed during the era when the conduit infrastructure had a different purpose — when the network that now fed the System had been used to power the planetary shields, the vast defensive lattice that had kept something out. Something the scrolls referred to only as the dark beyond the veil. The shields required energy. Constant, enormous, the kind of energy that could only be harvested from the one process the universe had never learned to make cheap: the dissolution of a soul at the moment of death.

The Administrators hadn’t invented the harvest. They’d co-opted it. The System was a refinement of an older mechanism, repurposed from shield-maintenance to energy-extraction, the shields left to slowly fail while the Administrators fed on the surplus.

And the Purification Protocol — the original function, the one that could read a soul-architecture and rewrite it whole — had a second mode. A mode the Administrators had sealed because it threatened everything they’d built.

When the Protocol crystallized a void fragment, it didn’t just restore the subject. It created, for a span the scroll measured in moments rather than minutes, a stable crystalline void-structure of enormous energetic density. And that structure, if the conduit flow was deliberately reversed during the window of crystallization, could be pushed back through the conduit network. Not into the System. Into the shields.

The cure wasn’t just a cure.

A Conduit Adept who ran the Purification Protocol on himself — who crystallized his own void fragment, who paid the permanent price, who became the anchor for his own restoration — could, in the same act, invert the conduit flow and dump the entire energetic output of the crystallization into the planetary shield lattice. Reinforce it. Restore it. Buy the world time the Administrators had been stealing for generations.

Morrigan would be whole. The shields would hold. And Glen would carry thirty-four point five percent of the void inside him forever, permanent and irremovable, the price paid in full and in advance.

The fragment was screaming. Not in sound — in pressure, in cold, in the sick vertigo of a parasite that had just learned its host could turn it into a weapon. It had been content to eat him slowly. It had not signed up to be spent.

Glen closed his hand around the data core and felt its pulse slow to match his heartbeat.

Every answer opens new questions, he thought. But this one opened a door.

He looked at Vane. Vane looked at him. Between them, in the vast cold cathedral of the Archives, the oldest knowledge in the world waited to see what he’d do with it.

"Get everything on the inversion procedure," Glen said. "Everything. Every scroll, every tablet, every core. I want to know exactly what it costs and exactly what it buys."

"It costs you," Vane said.

"I know what it costs me." Glen’s voice was steady. The fragment’s fear was not. "I want to know what it buys everyone else."

He turned and began the long climb back up the stairs that folded space, carrying a cure and a weapon in the same hand, and behind his ribs the void fragment pressed against the bars of a cage it had only just realized it was in.

The Archives held their breath behind him, and did not let it go.

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