SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The number glowed behind Glen’s eyelids like a brand.

34.5%.

He hadn’t needed Vane to tell him. He could feel it the way a man feels a splinter working its way toward bone — not the pain, exactly, but the presence of something that did not belong. A weight in the hollow of his chest where his heartbeat should have been clean and simple and his.

Thirty-four point five percent.

It had been thirty-three this morning. Thirty-two before the archive’s third sublevel, before the sealed door, before his fingers had gone black to the wrist and the lock had shrieked open like something dying.

One use of Void Touch. One point five percent of himself, handed over to a thing that wore his soul like a coat.

Glen sat cross-legged on the stone floor of the small chamber Vane had commandeered for the examination — a windowless room deep in Eden’s understructure, lit only by the cold blue wash of a diagnostic array Vane had jury-rigged from salvaged Covenant tech. The walls were bare. The air tasted of copper and ozone. Somewhere far above, the archive’s wards hummed their eternal, indifferent song.

He was alone with the number, and the number was climbing.

Not climbing, he corrected himself. Climbed. It climbed when he chose. When he let the void in. When he reached for that cold, perfect nothing and bent it to his will. Every time he used Void Touch, the fragment took its cut. A tithe. A tax on existence itself.

And the fragment — the thing living in the space between his ribs — had grown patient about collecting.

"You’re not breathing."

Vane’s voice cut through the quiet like a scalpel. Glen opened his eyes. The older man stood across from him, cybernetic optics catching the diagnostic light and throwing it back in pale, fractured shards. One eye was human still, brown and tired and deeply lined. The other was a lattice of silver filaments that clicked and refocused as Vane tilted his head, reading wavelengths Glen couldn’t imagine.

"I’m breathing," Glen said.

"You’re holding your breath. There’s a difference." Vane crouched, and his cybernetic eye whirred — a soft, insectile sound. "I need you to let the array finish. Don’t suppress anything. Don’t push back. Just... let it see you."

Glen exhaled. "It doesn’t like being seen."

"I know. I can watch it not liking it. Your corruption signature spikes every three seconds like clockwork. It’s pulsing." Vane’s mouth pressed into a thin line. "That’s new. Last week it was a steady bleed. Now it has a rhythm."

A rhythm. A heartbeat. The fragment was developing its own.

Glen closed his eyes again and felt it — that second pulse, nested inside his own like a parasite curled around its host’s spine. Thump. Thump. Thump. Not quite in time with his heart. A half-beat off. A thing pretending to be part of him while making sure he always knew it wasn’t.

You’re thinking about me, the fragment whispered.

It didn’t use words, exactly. It used something worse — meaning, pressed directly into his thoughts like a thumb into a bruise. He understood it the way he understood hunger or fear: not as language but as undeniable internal fact.

You’re sitting in a room made of light and metal and the old man’s fear, and you’re thinking about me. I’m flattered.

"Shut up," Glen said, quietly.

Vane looked up. "Talking to it?"

"Always talking to it. The trick is not listening."

"The trick," Vane said, straightening, "is that there is no trick. There’s only delay." He turned to the diagnostic array — a slab of Covenant crystal mounted on a salvaged stand, its surface alive with scrolling figures in a script neither of them could fully read. Vane had spent three days teaching it to speak in numbers instead. The numbers were bad enough.

The scan took forty seconds. Vane watched in silence, his cybernetic eye clicking through focal lengths, recording everything. When it finished, he didn’t speak for a long moment. He just stared at the array.

"Vane."

"Give me a second."

"You’re scaring me."

"Good. You should be scared." Vane turned, and for the first time Glen saw something in the human eye that the cybernetic one couldn’t fake: genuine, weary dread. "Thirty-four point five percent confirmed. Integration is asymmetric — the fragment isn’t spreading evenly, it’s rooting. It’s building structure inside you. Threads. Pathways. It’s learning the shape of your mind so it can—" He stopped. Started again. "So it can replace it."

Glen had known this. Knowing it said aloud was different. Knowing it said aloud by someone with silver in his eye and numbers on a screen was worse.

"What’s the threshold?" he asked. His voice came out steady. He was proud of that.

Vane was not.

"Don’t ask me that."

"You already ran the projections. I can see them on the array. What’s the threshold?"

Vane exhaled through his nose — a long, controlled breath, the kind a man takes before he sets a bone. "Fifty percent. That’s where the integration shifts from passive to active. Below fifty, the fragment is a passenger. It whispers. It presses. It wants. But it can’t act without your permission, because it doesn’t have the infrastructure yet. Above fifty—" He tapped the array. A graph bloomed across the crystal, a curve climbing like a scream. "Above fifty, it starts to have opinions that aren’t yours. Impulses you’ll mistake for your own. Decisions you’ll believe you made freely. You won’t hear the whisper anymore, Glen, because you’ll be the whisper."

Glen stared at the curve. "And seventy?"

"I don’t want to answer that."

"Vane."

"Seventy." Vane’s voice was flat. Clinical. The voice of a man who had decided that hiding the truth would be a worse kindness than the truth itself. "At seventy percent integration, there is no ’you’ left for it to whisper to. The host personality collapses. What remains is... something that has your memories, your face, your skills, your voice. It will call itself Glen. It will believe it is Glen. And it will use everything you are to do the one thing the void sent it here to do."

Open the conduits.

The thought hit him like cold water. Because the fragment knew. It knew about the Covenant — not the way Glen knew it, as history, as warning, as the inherited weight of a mother named Mary who had become something named Morrigan. No. The fragment knew about the conduits the way a starving thing knows where the food is kept. It had learned. It had been listening, all this time, to every archive he cracked open, every secret he pulled bleeding into the light. It had been feeding on his understanding, building its own map.

You opened three conduits in the simulation, the fragment said, and the meaning poured through him like ink into water. You felt it. The way they sang when you touched them. The way the void poured through. You felt how right it was, Glen. How clean. How complete.

"I didn’t feel that," Glen said. His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs. "That was you."

Is there a difference, at thirty-four percent?

He didn’t answer. Because the worst part — the truly horrifying part — was that he wasn’t sure.

Vane was watching him. Reading the tremor in his hands, the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes had gone distant. The cybernetic eye whirred.

"It spoke to you just now."

"Yes."

"What did it say?"

"It said the conduits feel clean."

Vane flinched. It was small — a twitch at the corner of his mouth, a fractional tightening of the silver eye — but Glen caught it. "It’s using your own memories against you. You opened conduits in the simulation archive. The fragment was there for that. It recorded what you felt."

"It’s lying about what I felt."

"It’s editing," Vane corrected. "Subtle difference. It takes a real memory and shifts the emotional weight. Turns doubt into certainty. Turns ’I could feel the void moving’ into ’the void felt like home.’ The technique is—" He paused. "Elegant. It’s learned to do this from inside you. It’s using your own cognitive architecture as a forge."

Glen made himself breathe. In. Out. Count of four. Count of four. A trick from before, from a life when the worst thing inside him was grief.

"How many more uses?" he asked. "Of Void Touch. Before I cross fifty."

Vane looked at the array. Ran the numbers again. The crystal flickered.

"Each use costs between one and one-point-five percent, depending on depth and duration. You’re at thirty-four point five. You need to stay under fifty. That gives you—" He did the math in his head; Glen watched the cybernetic eye flicker with it. "Roughly ten to fifteen safe uses. Maybe a few more if you keep them shallow. After that, you’re in the override zone. You’ll feel fine. That’s how you’ll know it’s started — because you’ll stop being afraid, and you should never stop being afraid."

Ten to fifteen. Maybe twenty if he was careful, if every use was a graze instead of a cut, if he never needed to reach deep. Twenty uses of the one ability that had let him crack sealed doors, peel hidden truths from ancient walls, touch the locks the Covenant had built to be untouched.

Twenty uses, and then he stopped being Glen.

"That’s not enough," Glen said.

"It’s what you have."

"The archive alone has six more sealed sublevels. The Covenant conduits — if we’re going to understand what Mary became, what Morrigan is — I need to get deeper. I need Void Touch for—"

"I know what you need it for." Vane’s voice had gone sharp. "I also know what it needs it for. Every time you use that skill, you’re not just spending corruption. You’re teaching it. Every sealed door you crack, every barrier you dissolve — you’re showing the fragment how to do the same thing to the walls inside your own mind. You’re not picking locks, Glen. You’re training your replacement."

Silence.

The fragment didn’t whisper then. It didn’t need to. It just pulsed — that half-beat-off heartbeat — and Glen felt something he would not, for hours, be willing to name. Agreement. A tiny, traitorous part of him that looked at the curve on the array and thought: maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe at fifty, or sixty, or seventy, I’d finally stop carrying all of this. Maybe the thing that replaced me would be stronger, and what does it matter if it’s not me, if it can do what I can’t?

He crushed the thought. He felt it die between his teeth like glass.

But he’d felt it. And the fragment had felt him feel it. And somewhere in the dark architecture it was building behind his sternum, it filed that feeling away.

We’ll come back to that, it whispered, almost gently.

"Is there a way to remove it?" Glen asked. He looked at Vane directly. "The fragment. Can it be cut out?"

Vane was quiet for a long time. The cybernetic eye dimmed, then brightened — cycling through whatever internal search routines the optics ran, cross-referencing, finding nothing.

"I don’t know," he said finally. And the admission cost him something; Glen saw it in the set of his shoulders. "The fragment isn’t a physical object. It’s not even magic in any framework I have. It’s a predicate — a statement written into the structure of what you are. Removing it would be like removing the letter ’e’ from a book. You can’t extract it without unwriting part of the sentence."

"But the archives—"

"The archives might have something. The Covenant studied the void for centuries. If anyone ever found a method of excision, it would be buried in there." Vane met his eyes. "But the archive is exactly what the fragment wants you to open. Every sealed sublevel you crack with Void Touch is a step closer to fifty percent. You’re trying to find a cure in the very place the disease is leading you. You understand the problem."

Glen understood the problem. He understood it the way you understand a noose while you’re tying it.

The fragment hummed. It was pleased. Not triumphant — it was too clever for triumph, too patient. Just... pleased, the way a river is pleased when it finds the path of least resistance to the sea.

He’s right, it offered, almost conspiratorially. The archives are where the answer is. And the conduits. And the truth about your mother — the truth you came here for, Glen, the truth you can feel waiting for you in the dark. I’m not your enemy. I’m the only one who can get you there. All I ask is that you let me in a little further. Just a little. You won’t even notice.

Glen stood up. The motion was too fast — his vision greyed at the edges, and for a half-second he felt the fragment brace inside him, steadying him, keeping him upright. Helping. It was helping.

He hated that most of all. That it helped. That it made itself useful. That every time he stumbled, it was there, and every time it was there it grew a little stronger, and a little more justified in its strength.

"Vane." His voice was hoarse. "I need you to do something for me."

"Name it."

"I need a ledger. A real one. Not in my head — the fragment can reach my thoughts. I need it somewhere outside. Paper. Ink. Something it can’t edit." He met Vane’s eyes. "Every time I use Void Touch, I write it down. The date. The percentage. What I used it for. What it cost. I want a record that exists outside of me, so that if I stop being able to trust my own memory, there’s something left that tells the truth."

Vane studied him. The cybernetic eye clicked.

"You’re planning for the version of yourself that’s already lost."

"I’m planning for the version of myself that’s trying not to get lost." Glen’s jaw tightened. "If I cross fifty, I want you to have proof. A pattern. Something that shows where I changed, so you can know it wasn’t me anymore."

"And if the thing wearing you can fake the ledger too?"

"Then you’ll know it’s too late. And you’ll do what has to be done."

Vane said nothing for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and produced a small, battered notebook — one of the old kind, paper pages, hand-stitched, the cover worn soft from years in his pocket. He held it out.

"I’ve been carrying this since before the augmentation. It’s mine. It’s never been connected to anything digital." He pressed it into Glen’s hands. "Start tonight."

Glen took the ledger. It was heavier than it should have been. Everything was heavier than it should have been.

Vane left to check the array’s calibration, and for a little while Glen was alone.

He sat on the stone floor with the notebook open on his knee and a stolen pen in his fingers, and he wrote. He wrote down the number — 34.5% — and the date, and beneath it he began a list. Every use of Void Touch he could remember. The archive door on sublevel one. The sealed ward on sublevel two. The third lock, the one that had screamed. Each entry a line in black ink, each line a percentage point handed to the dark.

He wrote, and the fragment watched him write, and it did not interfere. It didn’t need to. It just observed — calm, curious, amused — and Glen felt its attention on his hands the way you feel a stranger’s gaze on the back of your neck.

You’re making a list of the times you chose me, it said. That’s sweet. I’ll remember them too.

He kept writing. His hand was steady. He would not let it shake.

When the list was done, he stared at it. Seven entries. Seven uses. Each one a door he’d needed to open, a truth he’d needed to find, a step closer to his mother’s secret. Each one a step closer to not being himself.

And then, because the room was quiet and the light was blue and cold and there was no one to see, Glen looked down at his hands.

The black veins were there. They had been there for weeks, and he had stopped seeing them the way you stop seeing your own scars. But now he looked. Really looked. The veins traced the backs of his hands like the tributaries of some dark river, branching from his wrists up toward his knuckles, disappearing beneath his sleeves. They didn’t pulse. They were still. Patient. Permanent.

He turned his hands over. The palms were clean. The veins were only on the outside — only where the void had touched the world through him. Only where he had let it through.

How much of this was him? How much of the steadiness in his hands was discipline, and how much was the fragment bracing him from inside, propping up a host it wasn’t done with yet? How much of his determination was his own, and how much was the void’s quiet, logical persuasion — stay alive, stay functional, open the doors, let me in, I can help, I can help, I can help?

He looked at the ledger in his lap. Seven entries. His handwriting. His choices.

Weren’t they?

You wrote them, the fragment murmured, almost tenderly. Every one. I was there, and I watched, and you wrote them. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that proof you’re still you?

Glen closed the ledger. Pressed it shut. Held it against his chest like something that could keep the cold out.

Outside the chamber, the archive hummed its endless, indifferent song. Six more sublevels. The conduits. The truth about Mary, about Morrigan, about what he was becoming.

And inside him, curled around his spine with its half-beat-off heart, the fragment waited — patient, and logical, and growing, and so very, very close to home.

Thirty-four point five percent.

Fifteen uses left. Maybe twenty, if he was lucky, if he was shallow, if he never once reached for the deep.

Glen stared at his hands, at the black veins tracing their dark rivers, and for the first time he asked himself the question he had been running from since the day the void first touched him:

How much of me is already gone?

The fragment didn’t answer.

It didn’t need to.

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