SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The cascade took six hours to fully propagate.

Glen felt every second of it. He sat on the highland plateau with his back against the hybrid Tower and his ley-line sense stretched to its limit, tracking the bridge frequency as it radiated outward through the network. One Tower at a time. Like watching a stone drop into still water and counting the ripples.

First: Dire Dawa, a hundred forty kilometers east. Reverted. The bridge frequency hit it and the reversion stuttered. The pre-System energy restructured. The extraction engine stabilized. Not a hybrid — just stable. The System’s architecture reasserting itself. The relay cut.

Second: Juba, a hundred ninety kilometers southwest. Reverted. Same process. The frequency washed through the ley-lines and into the Tower’s core. The reversion reversed. The relay cut.

Third: Djibouti, two hundred eighty kilometers northeast. Fourth: Kampala, two hundred sixty-seven kilometers west. Fifth: Khartoum — already stabilized, but the cascade reinforced the bridge structure. The fractures from the court’s attack sealed. The integrity climbed from eighty-nine percent to ninety-six.

Sixth, seventh, eighth — smaller anchor points, names Glen didn’t know, Towers in remote highland regions that protected scattered populations. Each one received the cascade signal. Each one stabilized.

Eight Towers. The cascade was real. The math had changed.

In the ley-line sense, it looked like ignition. Eight points of light kindling across the dark grid of the continent, each one a small steady flame where before there had been dead ash. Glen felt them catch one after another — Dire Dawa first, a spark in the east, then Juba blooming southwest, then the cluster of Djibouti and Kampala lighting within minutes of each other. Khartoum brightened from a guttering coal to a clean burn. The three small anchors flickered on last, faint but holding, rural Towers whose Keepers had been fighting reversion alone for weeks.

The relief hit him like a tide coming in. His shoulders dropped. His jaw unclenched. For six hours he’d been braced for the cascade to fail — for the bridge frequency to reach a Tower and scatter, or for the court to jam the signal mid-propagation, or for the whole chain to collapse at the third link the way the math said it should. It hadn’t. Eight Towers. The network held.

The cost came with the relief. His ley-line sense was raw, the edges frayed from six hours stretched to maximum range. The void sat at five percent and didn’t move. His hands trembled in his lap and he couldn’t stop them. Each Tower he’d tracked had taken something — not void, not energy, something closer to attention, the simple capacity to perceive. By the eighth he’d been squinting into the sense the way a man squints into a searchlight, and now the afterimage burned behind his eyes.

Caleb verified the data from the distribution array. The sensor network confirmed what Glen’s ley-line sense had already told him. Eight Towers stabilized. Eight relays cut. The court’s signal dropped by forty percent in a single pulse.

"Timeline recalculated," Caleb said. He was sitting on the ground beside Glen, laptop on his knees, data streaming in from every sensor on the continent. "With eight additional Towers stabilized, the court’s relay network is reduced from twelve to four. The signal intensity is below pre-crisis levels. The reversion acceleration has stopped. The flickering Towers are holding."

"How much time?"

"Fifteen days. Maybe twenty. The court is still waking — the signal isn’t gone, just weakened. But the acceleration curve flattened. You bought time."

"Fifteen days."

"Fifteen days to find the next step. To train another carrier. To replicate the hybrid at other Towers. To build a network of hybrid Towers that could stabilize the entire grid."

Fifteen days. It wasn’t enough. But it was more than they’d had yesterday. More than the math had allowed before the cascade. The race wasn’t won. But it wasn’t lost either. It was — for the first time — paused.

Mary sat on Glen’s other side. She’d been quiet since the hybrid locked. Her hand rested on the modified ring — the dual-channel ring, Arthur’s stone and her metal, built from two parents’ work for their son’s hand.

"Arthur would have wanted to see this," she said.

"He did," Glen said. "He saw it thirty years ago. He just couldn’t build it."

"He built the theory. He built the archives. He built the path. You walked it."

"He built it for me. That’s the same thing."

Mary was quiet. The highland wind moved across the plateau, carrying the scent of grass and the faint ozone of pre-System energy. The hybrid Tower hummed behind them — two frequencies, one structure, a cage with a door. The sun was past its peak. The shadows were long.

Vera and Yuki held the perimeter for four hours after the lock. No interference. No court response. The signal had weakened. The court had pulled back — not defeated, but reassessing. It had encountered something it didn’t understand. A Tower that was both bridge and extraction engine. A frequency it couldn’t jam. A door it couldn’t close.

At hour five, Vera lowered her bracers. The lightning loop died. She flexed her hands — cramped from holding the charge for so long.

"It’s quiet," she said.

"Too quiet," Yuki said. She’d dropped the barrier an hour ago. Her bracers were cool. The dual-frequency hold had drained her, but she’d recovered. "The court stopped pushing. After the hybrid locked, the pressure just... stopped."

"It didn’t stop," Glen said. "It changed. The court isn’t pushing anymore. It’s thinking."

"Thinking about what?"

"About what I just built. About what it means. About how to fight something that’s both cage and key."

Vera looked at the hybrid Tower. The dual-frequency hum. Indigo and gold intertwined. She’d been on the perimeter for every stabilization — Johannesburg, Lagos, Khartoum, Accra, Addis Ababa. Five Towers. She’d held the line while Glen changed the world. The professional assessment was automatic now — she didn’t need to check his structural integrity. She could read it in his posture.

"You’re spent," she said.

"I’m functional."

"You’re spent and you’re calling it functional. That’s not the same thing."

"It’s close enough."

Vera studied him. The dark circles. The trembling hands. The void at five percent. The ring hot on his finger. The carrier who’d just done something that had never been done, and was sitting on the ground because standing was optional.

"What happens now?" she asked.

"Now we go back to base. I sleep. The void recovers. The team prepares for the next phase."

"The next phase?"

"The hybrid worked at Addis Ababa. The cascade propagated. But twelve Towers are still reverted. Four relays are still active. The court is still waking. We need to replicate the hybrid at other Towers. Expand the cascade radius. Cut the remaining relays."

"That’s more stabilizations. More direct method. More risk."

"That’s the job."

Vera was quiet. Then she nodded. The professional acknowledgment. The S-Rank accepting the mission. No argument. No concern she’d voice out loud. Just the readiness.

"I’ll be in the ready room," she said. She walked to the helicopter.

Yuki followed. She paused at the door and looked back at Glen. "The barrier held. The dual frequency worked. If you need me for the next phase, I’m in."

"I need you."

"Then I’m in." She boarded.

Caleb and Mary helped Glen to the helicopter. His legs worked but slowly. The void at five percent meant his body was running on biology alone — no pre-System enhancement, no void-merged strength. Just muscle and bone and will.

On the flight back, Caleb compiled the data. The cascade propagation map. The signal reduction. The timeline extension. The remaining relay count. He sent it to the Monarchs’ network. Halsey would have it within the hour.

"The Monarchs will want to replicate this," Caleb said. "Other teams. Other Towers. The hybrid method applied across the continent."

"They’ll need carriers."

"They’ll need you to train them."

"I know. That’s the next phase. The hybrid works. The cascade works. But it only works if I’m the carrier. One carrier can stabilize six Towers and cascade eight more. That’s fourteen total. We need seventy-seven."

"Seventy-seven Towers. One carrier."

"Not for long. The Tower classified me Beyond. The System can’t define what I am. But the Tower can make more. Other climbers. Other summits. The Tower is still there. The proving ground is still open."

Caleb looked at him. "You want to send other people into the Black Tower."

"I want to give them the choice. The Tower changes you. I can’t pretend it doesn’t. But the choice is theirs. Same as it was mine."

"And if they don’t make it?"

"Then we keep going with one carrier. Same as now. But we try."

Caleb was quiet. The analytical mind processing the implications — the logistics, the risk, the potential. The math of one carrier becoming two, two becoming four. The exponential curve of replication.

"It could work," he said. Carefully. Precisely.

"It will work. The hybrid is the proof. The cascade is the proof. The method scales. The carrier scales. The math changes when the variables change. And I just changed the variables."

The helicopter flew south. The highlands fell away beneath them. The continent spread out — green and brown and gold, the ley-line network invisible beneath the surface, carrying the bridge frequency from the hybrid Tower outward. Eight Towers stabilized. The court’s signal weakened. The race paused but not finished.

Glen closed his eyes. The void was at five percent. Recovering. The ring was cooling. The dual channels settled. Everything Arthur had built and Mary had refined and Caleb had engineered and Vera and Yuki had protected had come together in one moment on a highland plateau, and the world was different now. Not saved. Not safe. But different. The cage had a door. The carrier held the key. And the court — the ancient, sleeping, hungry thing beneath the network — was still waking.

They landed at the compound at dusk. The base was alive — people moving, comms active, the operations center lit. The data from Addis Ababa had preceded them. Everyone knew. The hybrid had worked. The cascade had propagated. The math had changed.

Isla was at the landing pad.

She stood apart from the activity — not in the operations center, not with the Monarchs’ liaisons, not in the corridors where she walked when she was thinking. She stood at the edge of the helipad, hands at her sides, watching the helicopter set down.

Glen stepped out. His legs held. The void was at seven percent now — recovering slowly. He walked across the pad. The distance between them closed. Ten meters. Five. Two.

She looked at him. The composure was there. The aristocratic precision. But behind it — the thing that had been moving since the corridor, since the Tower, since the tournament. The thing that lived in the space between what they said and what they meant.

"You did it," she said.

"We did it."

"You did it. I coordinated from base. Caleb built the array. Mary modified the ring. Vera and Yuki held the line. But you — you stood at the Tower and held two frequencies for sixty seconds and built something that’s never existed. That was you."

Glen looked at her. The dusk light caught her face. The compound hummed behind them. The ley-line network pulsed beneath the concrete — eight new stable points, the court’s signal weakened, the race paused.

"Come back," she said. For the third time. The same words. The same weight.

"I did." For the first time. Not "I will." Not a promise. A fact. He came back. He was here.

Isla’s expression didn’t change. The composure held. But something behind it shifted — the light under the ice. She didn’t move. She didn’t reach for him. She didn’t say anything else. She just stood there, two meters away, and let the silence hold what words couldn’t.

Two meters. The same distance they’d kept since the first time she’d said it. Close enough that he could see the faint movement of her breathing, the way the dusk caught the edge of her jaw, the stillness in her hands that cost her something to maintain. Far enough that neither of them had to decide what this was. The gap had its own gravity. Every stabilization, every Tower, every near-death had widened it and narrowed it in turns, and still it held at two meters — the exact measure of everything they hadn’t said.

She held his gaze for one breath longer than the silence required. Then she looked away, and the moment folded itself up and went somewhere neither of them would name.

Then she turned and walked toward the operations center. Glen followed. The distance between them was two meters. It stayed two meters. Close enough to feel. Far enough to be professional. The space where they lived — the space between what they were and what they might be — held steady.

At 2200, the compound settled. The operations center dimmed. The Monarchs’ liaisons had reported to their directors. Caleb had archived the data. Mary had retired to the archives to study the cascade propagation records. Vera was in the ready room. Yuki was in the east wing.

Glen was alone in his quarters. The void was at twelve percent. Recovering. The ring was cool on his finger. The dual channels silent. The hybrid Tower in Addis Ababa hummed two thousand kilometers away — he could feel it through the ley-line sense. A steady pulse. Two frequencies. One structure.

He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The void hummed. The ley-lines pulsed. The continent’s network carried the bridge frequency outward — eight Towers stabilized, the court’s signal reduced, the timeline extended. Fifteen days. Maybe twenty.

Fifteen days to train another carrier. To replicate the hybrid. To cut the remaining relays. To find the next step in a race that never ended.

But that was tomorrow. Tonight, the math had changed. The hybrid worked. The cascade was real. The third option existed. The cage had a door.

Glen closed his eyes. The void recovered. The ley-lines pulsed. Somewhere beneath the continent, something ancient stirred in its sleep — weakened, slowed, but not stopped. The court was still waking. The signal was still there, attenuated but present. A heartbeat in the bedrock.

He tracked it the way you track a sound through a wall — not listening, but waiting for it to change. The rhythm held. Slow. Regular. The unconscious metronome of a thing that had been sleeping since before the System was built. Glen let it wash past him. His body was heavy. The void ticked upward — twelve percent, thirteen. The ley-lines carried their steady traffic. The eight new flames burned clean in the network’s dark. Sleep pulled at him.

And then, at 0247, the heartbeat changed.

Glen’s eyes opened. The ley-line sense fired — not a signal, not a pulse, not a probe. Something else. Something new. The court’s signal, which had been a rhythmic throb — slow, regular, unconscious — stuttered. Paused. Then resumed at a different cadence. Not faster. Not slower. Deliberate.

The court wasn’t dreaming anymore. The court was surfacing. The thin edge of consciousness poking through the layers of sleep. Not awake. Not yet. But aware. For the first time in uncounted years, the thing beneath the network was aware.

Glen sat up. The void pulsed. The ring hummed. The ley-line network carried the change — a shift in the court’s signal that propagated through every anchor point, every relay, every Tower on the continent. The sleeping thing had reached through the network with the first glimmer of conscious thought.

Not a word. Not a concept. Not a strategy or a plan or a command. Just the first stirring of awareness in something that had been unconscious since before the System existed. The first thought of a mind vast enough to span continents. The first moment of an intelligence older than human civilization opening its eyes.

One word. Not spoken — felt. Not heard — carried. Through the ley-lines. Through the network. Through every Tower and every anchor point and every conduit on the planet.

Hungry.

The court was awake. Not fully — not yet. But the first conscious thought had formed. The first desire had crystallized. The thing that had been sleeping was now aware that it was sleeping, and it wanted to stop.

Glen stood. The void hummed at twelve percent. The ring hummed on his finger. The ley-line network carried the word — hungry — in every direction, a single concept propagating through the earth’s energy grid like a ripple in still water.

The race wasn’t paused anymore. The court was waking. Not in fifteen days. Not in twenty. Now. The signal had changed. The thought had formed. The hunger was real.

Glen picked up his phone. Called Caleb.

"The court is waking," he said.

"I know. I felt it. The sensors are—"

"Hungry."

Silence on the line. Then Caleb’s voice, very quiet: "What?"

"The court’s first conscious thought. I felt it through the network. One word. Hungry."

The line was silent for a long time. Glen could hear Caleb breathing. The analytical mind processing. The human mind reeling.

"The hybrid worked," Caleb said. "The cascade worked. The timeline extended. But—"

"But the court felt the cascade too. The bridge frequency propagating through the network. The eight Towers stabilizing. The relays being cut. The court felt all of it. And the first thing it thought when it woke enough to think was—"

"Hungry."

"Yes."

The compound was quiet. The night was dark. The ley-lines pulsed beneath the concrete — the hybrid Tower’s bridge frequency and the court’s new signal, carrying that single word in every direction.

Glen hung up. He stood at the window. The compound lights were steady. The sky was clear. The continent was dark. And beneath it all, something ancient was opening its eyes.

The hybrid was real. The cascade was real. The third option existed. The cage had a door. But the thing outside the cage was awake now. And it was hungry.

The race continued.

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