SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

It came at 3:47 AM.

Glen was awake. He’d been awake since midnight, sitting on the roof of the operations building with his back against the ventilation housing. The sky above Johannesburg was clear. The shield hummed beneath him, a constant low drone he’d stopped noticing weeks ago.

The ley-line sense hit first.

A pulse. Not from any direction — from everywhere. The network of energy beneath the continent shuddered, and Glen felt it move through him like a wave through water. Every ley-line he’d learned to feel over the past week vibrated at once. The frequency was wrong. Lower than the pre-System hum of the reverting Towers. Slower. Deeper. A heartbeat buried under bedrock.

It didn’t stop at a pulse. That was what held him still, what kept his breath locked in his chest. A pulse was mechanical. A pulse was a signal, a ping, a test of whether the line still carried. This carried something else. Behind the beat, beneath it, woven into the silence that followed it the way heat clings to metal after the flame goes out — there was a presence. Vast. Diffuse. The ley-line sense had taught Glen to read the grid like a map, lines and nodes and currents. Now the map itself was breathing. The whole network drew in like lungs, held, and released. And in that held moment Glen felt something turn over. Something that had been still for an age shifted its weight in the dark.

He knew that sound. Every hunter knew it. The particular silence of a large animal adjusting in its sleep — the creak of mass redistributing, the long slow exhalation of a body too big for any enclosure. This was that, scaled beyond anything the word "animal" could hold. The court was testing whether it could reach through the network. Whether the channels still connected to the world it had last touched before the System, before the Towers, before anything that walked and named things. The pulse had been a question. The silence after it was the court listening for an answer.

His status window flickered. Not the System’s lag — something else. The deep indigo of his own shield pulsed once, bright enough to cast shadows across the roof.

Then it was gone.

Glen’s hand closed around the ring on his finger. The metal was warm. It had been room temperature a minute ago.

Below him, the compound woke up.

Not gradually. The shield’s hum changed pitch first — a thin edge of alarm creeping into the drone as the base’s defensive array registered the ley-line disturbance and couldn’t classify it. Then the lights. The perimeter floods stuttered on, throwing the barracks and training yards into sharp white relief. A door slammed somewhere on the second level of the residence block. Then another. Voices, muffled by walls, rising in pitch.

Glen moved to the roof’s edge and looked down. Three figures in the courtyard, barefoot, still in sleep clothes — S-Ranks who’d come out of their quarters looking for the source of what had shaken them awake. One of them, a broad-shouldered woman Glen knew only as Devereux, had her weapon manifested in her hand, the blade glowing faintly. She was turning in a slow circle, scanning a horizon for a threat that had no horizon. The man beside her — Kade, the Australian S-Rank who’d been on base for the reversion crisis — had both hands pressed to his temples. His mouth was moving. Glen couldn’t hear the words from the roof, but the posture was unmistakable. Kade was sensitive to mana flow in a way most combat-oriented S-Ranks weren’t, and whatever he’d felt through that sensitivity had left him talking to himself, trying to narrate the enormity of it down to something his body could hold.

The third figure sat on the ground. Not sitting down — collapsed. Sitting because standing had become impossible. Glen watched the man’s shoulders hitch. A panic attack. The S-Rank was having a panic attack in the courtyard at 3:48 in the morning, and Glen understood it perfectly, because the same impulse lived in his own chest, held there by nothing but the ring’s warmth and the training that had taught him to keep moving when moving was the last thing his body wanted to do.

More figures emerged from the residence block. Two, then five, then a stream — S-Ranks pulling on jackets, lacing boots, checking weapons they wouldn’t need against whatever had made that sound. The energy hadn’t been an attack. That was the part that scared them, Glen could see it in the way they moved, the way their eyes swept the sky and found nothing. An attack had a direction. You could face a direction. This had come from below and everywhere and nowhere, and their bodies were still buzzing with the residue of it, and there was nothing to hit.

A medic team reached the man on the ground. They knelt around him, one taking his wrist, another speaking low and steady. The man’s shoulders were still hitching. His hands were clenched in his own shirt, knuckles white. Glen recognized the gesture. The body trying to hold itself together when the thing that had unmade it was already gone.

The base PA crackled. A duty officer’s voice, clipped and controlled: "All personnel, alert status. Unidentified energy event detected at 0347 hours. All S-Rank personnel report to designated stations. This is not a drill."

The words moved through the compound like a second pulse. Doors opened. Boots hit concrete. The alert system hadn’t been built for this — it had been built for breaches, for Tower spawns, for the clean mechanical threats the System produced. A ley-line event with no classification, no vector, no enemy to engage — the system could only do what it knew how to do, which was shout orders and hope the bodies obeying them figured out the rest.

Glen’s phone buzzed. Mary.

"Tell me you felt that," she said.

"I felt it."

"That wasn’t the Towers. The Towers have a frequency. I know that frequency. This was something else." Her voice was steady but thin. "This was underneath."

"I know."

"The court."

Glen didn’t answer. He didn’t need to confirm what they both already knew. The Herald had told him. The court is older than the Tower. The court is hungry. And now the court was making noise.

"The signal traveled through the ley-line network," Mary continued. "Every anchor point. Every reverted Tower. Every active Tower. The whole grid carried it. I felt it in the archives — the seventh floor lit up. Every glyph on every tablet pulsed at the same time."

"Arthur’s records. Did they say anything?"

"They didn’t say anything. They reacted. The stabilization research on the seventh floor — the glyphs I showed you, the ones describing the bridge function — they resonated. Like they recognized the signal. Like they were meant to receive it."

Glen stood. The roof gravel crunched under his boots. Below, the compound was coming alive — lights in windows, voices in hallways. If Mary felt it in the archives, the S-Ranks on base felt it in their cores. Anyone with enough sensitivity to feel mana flow would have woken up.

"Meet me in the war room," he said. "Bring the seventh floor records. All of them."

Caleb was already there when Glen arrived. He was standing at the main display, arms crossed, staring at a waveform he’d pulled from the base’s sensor array. The waveform was a single spike — massive, brief, and gone.

"When did you get here?" Glen asked.

"I never left." Caleb pointed at the spike. "The sensors caught it. 3:47 AM, lasting approximately one point two seconds. The energy signature doesn’t match any known System classification. It doesn’t match the pre-System Tower frequency either. It’s something else entirely."

"The court."

Caleb turned. "You’re sure?"

"The Herald told me. The court has been sleeping. The reversion is waking it up. That signal was the first sign of consciousness."

Caleb sat down slowly. He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "I’ve been running the numbers on the reversion rate since yesterday. Twelve Towers have reverted. The acceleration curve shows another eight within the next seventy-two hours. If the court wakes when the reversion completes—"

"Then we have less time than I thought."

Caleb pulled the waveform wider on the display. The spike flattened into a shape that revealed more — a sharp rise, a plateau, a long slow decay. He traced the decay with his fingertip, following it down toward the baseline.

"Look at the tail," he said. "The signal doesn’t cut off. It fades. A conscious sender would cut the transmission — clean termination, square wave. This doesn’t terminate. It bleeds out. Whatever produced this sound didn’t stop making it. It just lost the amplitude to push it through the channel." He zoomed in on the plateau. "And the carrier frequency drifts. Half a hertz over the duration of the pulse. That drift is consistent with a system that’s regulating itself unconsciously — breathing, not speaking. If the court were awake and directing this, the frequency would be locked. Stable. This is a reflex. A stretch."

"A stretch," Glen repeated.

"Like a body shifting position in sleep. The muscles fire without intent. The signal is the muscle. The court is the body. It’s not awake. It’s not fully asleep either." Caleb pulled his glasses back on. "The waveform characteristics tell me the court’s state is ambiguous. Somewhere between dreaming and the first stirring toward consciousness. The reversion is feeding it — the energy from each Tower that reverts flows back through the ley-lines, and that flow is what’s disturbing the court’s dormancy. Each reversion is like an alarm going off in the next room. It hasn’t gotten up yet. But it’s turning toward the noise."

He tapped the plateau again. "There’s one more thing. The amplitude. It’s enormous — the sensors clipped at the top of their range, so the real peak is higher than what we’re seeing. But the energy didn’t come from a single point. It came from the network itself. The ley-lines didn’t just carry the signal. They generated it. The court pressed against the grid, and the grid resonated with the pressure. That’s why every sensitive on the continent felt it at once. The signal wasn’t broadcast. It was the network vibrating in sympathy with something too large to fit inside it."

Mary arrived carrying a stack of stone tablets wrapped in cloth. She set them on the table with a heavy thud. "The seventh floor reacted to the signal. Every glyph inscribed with the stabilization method — the ones Arthur spent years developing — they lit up. All of them. Simultaneously."

"Why would Arthur’s stabilization research react to the court’s signal?" Caleb asked.

Mary unwrapped the tablets carefully. "Because Arthur designed the stabilization method to interface with the Tower’s bridge function. The court’s signal travels through the same bridge network. They use the same infrastructure. The court speaks through the bridges. Arthur’s method uses the bridges."

"So the court’s signal and Arthur’s method are competing for the same channel," Glen said.

Mary nodded. "If you stabilize a Tower as a bridge, you’re opening the channel. The court can use that channel too."

The war room went quiet. Glen looked at the waveform on the display. One point two seconds. A single pulse. A heartbeat from something that had been sleeping since before the System existed.

"Then we have a problem," Glen said. "Stabilizing the Towers opens the bridge. The court uses the bridge. But letting the Towers revert fully also feeds the court — the reversion is what’s waking it. There’s no safe option."

"There’s never a safe option," Mary said. "There are only less dangerous ones."

Glen spent the next three hours with Mary and the tablets. The stabilization method Arthur had developed was detailed — a sequence of energy alignments, frequency calibrations, and structural resets that would restore a Tower’s bridge function while disabling the extraction engine. The carrier — Glen — would interface with the Tower’s core, channel pre-System energy through the ring, and hold the new configuration until the Tower self-regulated.

The process took twenty to thirty minutes per Tower. It required Glen’s full concentration. And it required him to open himself to the pre-System energy flow — the same flow the court used to signal.

Mary’s hands moved over the tablets with the familiarity of someone who’d read them a thousand times. She knew where Arthur’s notation tightened when he was certain. She knew where it loosened — where he’d been working fast, chasing an idea, the glyphs slightly uneven, carved in the small hours when the archive was empty and the only light was the glow of the stones themselves. She’d sat beside him on those nights. Glen could see it in the way she touched the edges of the tablets, the way her fingers lingered on the corners where Arthur’s hand had rested while he worked. There was grief in those hands. There was also something harder than grief — a purpose that had outlived the man who’d given it to her. Arthur had asked her to carry this. Not the tablets. The knowledge. The readiness. The understanding that when the signal came — and it would come, he’d told her that, he’d told her over and over — someone had to be ready to put the tools in the right hands.

Glen’s hands. Arthur had known it would be Glen’s hands, even before Glen existed. The contingency ran that deep.

"The court will feel it when I stabilize a Tower," Glen said. "The bridge activates. The channel opens. They’ll know."

"Yes," Mary said.

"And if I don’t stabilize, the Tower reverts, the extraction engine dies, and the court wakes faster."

"Yes."

"Then the only variable I control is timing. Stabilize the Towers before the court wakes, but each stabilization announces where I am and what I’m doing."

Mary looked at him. The same look she’d given him in the war room — the one that layered pride over fear over something older. "Arthur knew this. He planned for it."

"Arthur planned for a court signal?"

"Arthur planned for everything. He spent thirty years in this archive. The seventh floor isn’t just research — it’s a contingency. He knew the court would wake eventually. He knew the reversion would trigger it. He built the stabilization method to work within that constraint."

Mary paused. Her hand rested on the tablet that contained the first step of the sequence — the initial frequency alignment, the one that opened the interface between ring and core. Arthur had carved that glyph three times, over three different nights, each version slightly refined. Mary had watched him carve the third. Glen didn’t know this. Mary did. She remembered the night — the rain on the archive windows, the cold that crept in under the doors, Arthur working without a coat because he’d given his to her hours earlier when the heating failed. He’d been muttering to himself, the way he did when a problem was close to breaking open. She’d asked him what he was afraid of. He’d said: the thing that’s already asleep. She hadn’t understood. She understood now, standing in a war room in Johannesburg with Arthur’s son holding Arthur’s ring, and the thing that had been asleep sending its first pulse through the bones of the world.

Glen picked up one of the tablets. The glyphs were worn but legible. Arthur’s handwriting — small, precise, carved with a tool that left clean edges. His father’s hand. A man he’d never met, preparing for a crisis he’d never see, leaving the tools for a son he’d never hold.

The ring sat warm on Glen’s finger. He turned it. The metal caught the light.

"Show me the full sequence," he said. "Every step. Every alignment. I need to know this well enough to do it under pressure."

Mary started at the beginning. Glen listened. The war room filled with morning light. Outside, the compound moved. Inside, a dead man’s instructions came alive in his son’s hands.

By noon, Glen had the sequence memorized. Seven steps. Each one a specific frequency alignment, each one requiring the ring to interface with the Tower’s core at a different angle. The process was precise. A mistake at any step would destabilize the Tower further — or worse, open the channel without the bridge structure, giving the court a direct line.

"You’ll need to practice," Mary said. "The first Tower will be the test."

"I know."

"And you’ll need to be fast. Twenty minutes per Tower is the minimum. If the court sends interference—"

"I know, Mary."

She stopped. Looked at him. "You sound like him."

"Like who?"

"Arthur. When he was working through a problem. That tone. That certainty. Like the problem is already solved and the execution is just paperwork."

Glen didn’t know what to say to that. He’d never heard anyone compare him to Arthur. He’d never known the man. But Mary had. And the way she said it — quiet, with something that might have been grief or might have been love or might have been both — told him more about his father than any archive ever could.

"The first Tower," he said. "The one north of here that already reverted. I stabilized it temporarily with the ring. Eleven hours. That was without the full sequence. With the sequence, it should hold permanently."

"Should."

"Will. Arthur’s method is sound. The math checks out. Caleb verified the frequency alignments."

"Caleb verified the math. He didn’t verify the execution."

"That’s my job."

Mary packed the tablets. "When?"

"Tomorrow. I need one more day to train. The void — the merge changed how I access it. I need to work with it, not against it."

"The Tower changed you. The Herald’s death changed you. You’re not the same person who climbed the Black Tower."

"No. I’m not."

He said it without pride. A statement of fact. The Glen who’d entered the Tower had been powerful but bounded. The Glen who’d left was something the System couldn’t classify. The Herald’s death had pushed the void closer to the surface. The ley-line sense was proof. He could feel the world’s energy grid now — every ley-line, every anchor point, every Tower, active or reverted. The void had become a limb. An extension of his senses rather than a tool he reached for.

Training meant learning to move with that. To fight with it. To stabilize with it. The Tower had made him something new. He needed to learn what that meant.

"Tomorrow," he said again. "I start training today."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!