SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 161: Dragon vs. Anomaly, Shattering the Stage

He threw the sphere. It didn’t travel fast. It drifted. But everything it touched simply ceased to exist. The floor. The air. The mana. It was an expanding void of absolute nothingness.

Alvian watched it come. He calculated. He couldn’t block it. He couldn’t dodge it; the tracking was absolute.

"Inefficient," Alvian whispered.

He reached into his inventory. He pulled out the [Fragment of the World Shell]. It was the only thing that could interact with the code of reality itself.

"System," Alvian commanded, his eyes bleeding violet light. "Inject [Fragment] into [Voidpiercer]. Override safety protocols."

[Warning! Weapon destruction imminent.]

"Do it."

The dagger in his hand screamed. The black metal cracked, unable to hold the power of the World Shell. A white light shone from within the cracks.

Alvian didn’t throw the dagger at Apollyon. He threw it at the grey sphere.

"Delete this," Alvian roared.

The dagger hit the sphere.

"SCREEEEEEEEE!"

M

The sound of reality breaking filled the ocean. White light met grey void. The arena exploded.

The explosion of white light and grey void cleared, revealing a crater where the center of the arena had been. The water of the Coral Plains rushed in to fill the void, boiling as it touched the residual energy.

Alvian stood at the edge of the destruction, his chest heaving slightly. The [Voidpiercer +1] in his hand smoked, the blade glowing with a hungry, unsatisfied violet light. He had deleted the [Reality Erasure] sphere, but the effort had taxed even his enhanced physiology.

Across the crater, floating above the churning water, King Apollyon clapped. It was a slow, mocking sound that cut through the roar of the ocean.

"Impressive," Apollyon said, his voice smooth and untroubled. "You deleted a command. You edited the script. I haven’t seen a user do that since the Beta."

He raised a hand. The liquid metal armor on his body shifted, forming a hundred small vents.

"But editing takes time," Apollyon sneered. "And execution is instant."

"[Hellfire Barrage]. [Glacial Storm]. [Thundergod’s Wrath]. [Void Collapse]."

He didn’t cast one spell. He cast four. And then he cast them again. And again.

In the span of a single second, the sky above the arena turned into a solid wall of magic. Meteors of green fire, spears of absolute zero ice, bolts of red lightning, and spheres of crushing gravity rained down. There was no pattern. There was no rhythm to exploit. It was a saturation bombardment powered by a cooldown of zero.

"Inefficient," Alvian muttered, though his eyes narrowed in concentration.

He couldn’t dodge this. The area of effect covered the entire arena.

"System. Maximize [Runic Aegis +2]. Omni-Directional Mode."

Fourteen runes materialized around him, spinning so fast they blurred into a solid sphere of purple light. Alvian poured his infinite mana into the shield, reinforcing it with the [Tablet of the Earth Core]’s density.

"BOOM! CRACK! ZZZZT!"

M

The bombardment hit. The shield groaned. The sheer weight of the magical ordnance drove Alvian into the seabed. The rock beneath him pulverized, turning into fine sand.

[-5,000 Shield Integrity.]

[-10,000 Shield Integrity.]

[Regenerating...]

The shield held, fed by the [Tear of the Infinite], but Alvian was pinned. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t attack. He was a turtle hiding in its shell while a god hammered on it with a sledgehammer.

"Is this the power of the Anomaly?" Apollyon laughed, floating closer. He pointed a finger, firing a continuous beam of disintegration magic while maintaining the bombardment with his other hand. "You have infinite mana. I have infinite speed. But I dictate the pace. You are reacting. I am acting."

Alvian analyzed the situation. Apollyon was right. The [System Breaker] talent was a hard counter to Alvian’s build. Alvian relied on high-impact, high-cost skills. Apollyon relied on volume.

"If I drop the shield to attack, I take damage," Alvian calculated. "If I keep the shield up, I lose by attrition. The arena barrier prevents me from leaving. The spatial lock prevents me from teleporting behind him."

He needed to close the distance.

"System. [Void Step]."

[Error. Spatial Coordinates Locked.]

Apollyon’s grin widened. "You can’t blink, rat. I locked the server for this region. We are in a cage. And I have the key."

Alvian looked at the barrier surrounding the arena. It was a red, translucent wall of hard-light, generated by the four pylons Apollyon had set up before the duel. It wasn’t just a wall; it was a rule. No one leaves.

"A cage," Alvian whispered. A cold smile touched his lips. "You locked us in a box to ensure I couldn’t run. But you forgot one thing about boxes."

He dropped the [Runic Aegis].

The bombardment slammed into him. Alvian didn’t block. He activated [Genesis Mode].

"System. Divert all mana to [Physique]. Maximize [Terra-Form] passive."

His skin turned grey, then black. He became a statue of living adamantite. The spells hit him, exploding against his skin.

[-2,000 HP]

[-1,500 HP]

He took the damage. He ignored the pain. He launched himself not at Apollyon, but at the ground.

"Physics Lesson Number Twenty," Alvian roared, diving downward. "Structural Integrity."

He drove the [Lance of the Void Winter] into the bedrock of the arena.

"[Glacial Void Pierce]: Planet Cracker."

He didn’t aim to freeze the ground. He aimed to delete it. He channeled the full force of his infinite mana into the tip of the lance. The black ice blade punched through the stone, through the coral foundation, and into the magical ley lines supporting the floating platform of the arena.

"TEAR!"

M

A massive crack appeared in the center of the arena. It wasn’t a crack in the stone. It was a crack in the map. The void energy ate through the code holding the battlefield together.

Apollyon stopped casting. His eyes widened.

"What are you doing?" the Dragon King demanded. "You cannot break the arena! It is an admin-locked zone!"

"I’m not breaking the arena," Alvian said, twisting the lance. "I’m deleting the floor."

"CRUMBLE." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

The entire foundation of the Arena of Tides gave way. The white sand, the coral pillars, the barrier generators—it all fell. The ground simply vanished, replaced by the yawning darkness of the sub-oceanic abyss.

The red barrier flickered and died as its anchors fell into the deep.

[System Warning: Zone Integrity Compromised.]

[Spatial Lock: Failed.]

Alvian floated in the open water, debris raining down around him.

"Now," Alvian said, looking up at the stunned Dragon King. "The cage is open."

"[Void Step]."

He vanished. He appeared directly behind Apollyon. The Dragon King spun around, raising a hand to cast an instant shield, but Alvian was already moving.

"Slash."

[Voidpiercer] cut through the air. It sliced through Apollyon’s liquid metal armor.

"ARGH!"

Apollyon flinched, teleporting away instantly. A line of blood appeared on his chest. It wasn’t red. It was gold.

"You bleed," Alvian noted.

Apollyon stared at the wound. His perfect, admin-generated avatar had been flawed. Rage, hot and genuine, replaced his boredom.

"You broke the map," Apollyon hissed. "You think destroying the stage saves you? It just means we fall together."

Alvian pointed his lance at the infinite darkness below them.

"I didn’t break the map," Alvian said. "I opened the door to the basement."

From the shattered crust of the ocean floor, something began to pull. The destruction of the arena’s core had created a vacuum, a massive displacement of water and mana. It wasn’t a whirlpool. It was a dimensional rift, torn open by the sheer density of the void energy Alvian had unleashed.

The water turned grey. The sound of the ocean faded.

"Gravity," Alvian whispered. "Is about to get very complicated."

The concept of "down" ceased to have meaning.

When Alvian shattered the foundation of the Arena of Tides, he didn’t just create a hole; he punctured the membrane separating the Game World from the chaotic space between server clusters—the Dimensional Gap.

The water of the Eternal Sea didn’t rush in. It rushed out.

A massive suction force, stronger than any gravity spell, pulled everything in the vicinity toward the tear. The debris of the arena, the coral, the water itself—it was all dragged into the grey, swirling void that had opened beneath them.

"RETREAT!" A Dragon Knight screamed from the ridges, trying to fly away, but the suction caught him. He was dragged down, his wings crumpling under the pressure.

Thousands of Draconic Legion soldiers, who had been watching the duel, were pulled off their perches. They tumbled into the abyss, roaring in confusion as they fell not through water, but through empty, grey air.

"Valeria! Seraphina!" Alvian shouted into his comms. "Hold on to something!"

"There’s nothing to hold on to!" Valeria’s voice crackled back, filled with static. "The ground is gone! We’re falling!"

Alvian looked up. He saw his team. They were falling, tumbling through the debris field. Valeria had hooked her arm around a massive chunk of the arena wall, holding onto Seraphina with her other hand.