SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 173: The Variable,The Anchor of Fate

No," Alvian said. "improvising."

He looked at Valeria. "Valeria. Hit me."

Valeria blinked. "What?"

"Hit me! With everything you have! Titan’s Bash! Now!"

Valeria hesitated for a fraction of a second, then she trusted him. She screamed, activating her [Titan Bloodline]. She swung her shield with world-breaking force, aiming directly at Alvian’s back.

Alvian didn’t block. He didn’t dodge. He activated [Runic Aegis].

"Reflect."

"CLANG!"

The shield hit the runes. The kinetic energy was absorbed. But Alvian didn’t fire it back at Valeria. He held it. He held the explosive force of a Titan’s full-power strike inside his own magical matrix.

[Warning! Kinetic Overload. Containment Failing.]

Alvian turned to Prime. He was glowing with unstable golden light. He was a walking bomb.

"You can predict my moves," Alvian said, his skin cracking from the pressure. "But you can’t predict her."

He used [Void Step].

He appeared directly in front of Prime.

"Delivery!"

He released the stored energy. Not as a beam. As a punch.

"SMASH!"

Prime’s eyes widened. He hadn’t calculated the variable of the ally. He hadn’t accounted for the friendly fire boost. He tried to raise a shield, but he was too slow.

Alvian’s fist, carrying the combined force of the Godslayer and the Titan, slammed into Prime’s chest.

"KRA-KOOOOM!"

The impact shattered the sound barrier. Prime was launched backward. He crashed through the invisible wall of the arena. He flew into the grey mist of the void, skipping like a stone.

Alvian collapsed, his arm shattered, his mana drained.

"Inefficient," Alvian whispered, grinning through the pain. "But effective."

Far in the distance, Prime stabilized himself. He looked at the dent in his armor. He touched it. He looked at Alvian. For the first time, the cold mask of the Warden cracked. He smiled. A real smile.

"Variables," Prime muttered. "I forgot about the variables."

The black glass of the arena floor was spiderwebbed with glowing fractures where Alvian Prime had crashed. The impact of the kinetic reflection had been massive, enough to level a fortress, but the man standing up from the crater didn’t look broken. He looked irritated.

Alvian Prime dusted off his [Vestments of the Void Monarch]. The armor, woven from the fabric of space itself, rippled and knitted itself back together in seconds. He looked at the younger Alvian, then at Valeria, who was panting heavily, her golden aura flickering.

"Collaboration," Prime said, his voice echoing from every corner of the void. "You used a friendly fire mechanic to overload the absorption buffer. A clever exploit. But it is a trick that only works once."

Alvian stood his ground, though his mana channels burned. The [Tear of the Infinite] was spinning wildly in his chest, working overtime to repair the stress fractures in his own armor.

"One time is all I need to prove you bleed," Alvian said.

Prime narrowed his single, violet-star eye. "I do not bleed. I glitch. And glitches are corrected."

He raised his hand. The grey mist of the Dimensional Gap swirled, condensing into a sphere of pure, erasing white light above his palm. It wasn’t mana. It was a command line code given physical form. [System Purge].

"You rely on variables," Prime stated, his gaze shifting to Valeria and Seraphina. "Friends. Teammates. Emotional tethers. In my timeline, they were the first to die. They are the reason I lost. They are heavy. They are slow. They are inefficient."

He pointed his finger at Alvian.

"I will remove the variables. Then, we will see who is efficient."

The white sphere didn’t fly at Alvian. It split. Two beams of deletion energy shot out, curving through the air. They bypassed Alvian entirely.

They aimed for Valeria and Seraphina.

"NO!" Alvian shouted. He tried to activate [Void Step], but his cooldowns were desynchronized from the previous overload. He was a fraction of a second too slow.

Seraphina’s eyes widened. She tried to dodge, but the beam tracked her heat signature perfectly.

"Valeria, move!" Seraphina screamed.

But Valeria didn’t move away. She moved forward.

The Golden Knight roared, her voice cracking with strain. She didn’t raise her shield. She dropped it. She activated a skill that Alvian had never seen before—something she had unlocked in the crucible of the Golden Shard, something born not of the System, but of pure, stubborn will.

"[Titan’s Heart: Martyrdom]."

Valeria’s body exploded with golden light. She didn’t become a giant; she became a star. She intercepted both beams. She threw her body into the path of the deletion code intended for Seraphina and herself.

"BOOM!"

The impact was silent, but the shockwave tore the ground apart. The white light of the purge slammed into the golden light of the Titan.

Prime watched, expecting the gold to vanish. He expected the variable to be deleted. He remembered this moment from his own timeline—the moment Valeria tried to tank a spell she couldn’t handle, turning to ash in his arms. It was a fixed point in history. A canon event.

But the gold didn’t vanish.

Valeria stood there. Her armor was disintegrating, turning into pixels. Her skin was cracking, bleeding liquid gold. But she held. She caught the beams in her bare hands, her boots grinding into the glass floor.

"You..." Valeria grit her teeth, looking Prime in the eye. "You... talk... too... much!"

She crushed the beams. With a scream of effort, she shattered the code structure of the spell, dissipating it into harmless sparks.

Prime froze.

For the first time since the fight began, the cold, calculated mask of the Warden faltered. His eye widened. His hand, raised to cast another spell, stopped mid-air.

"Impossible," Prime whispered. "In iteration 404, she died. In iteration 809, she ran. She does not have the stats to tank a [System Purge]. The math... the math is wrong."

Alvian saw it. The hesitation. The glitch in Prime’s logic.

Prime was fighting a memory. He was fighting a simulation based on his own failed past. He couldn’t predict Valeria because this version of Valeria—the one who had fought beside the Anomaly, who had survived the Red Rain and the Golden King—didn’t exist in his database.

"She isn’t a variable," Alvian said, stepping forward. His mana bar was full. His cooldowns were ready.

"She is a constant."

Prime shook his head, trying to re-calculate. "No. No! Sentiment is weakness! Attachments lead to failure!"

"You didn’t fail because you had them," Alvian said, equipping the [Lance of the Void Winter]. "You failed because you didn’t trust them to hold the line."

Alvian activated [Genesis Mode].

[Stats Doubled.]

He vanished.

Prime reacted, bringing up his spear to block a frontal assault. But Alvian didn’t attack. He appeared beside Valeria. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

"System. [Mana Transfer]. [Runic Aegis]: Reinforce Ally."

He dumped half his mana pool into Valeria. The golden light around her flared, repairing her armor, healing her cracks. She stood tall, a revitalized goddess of war.

"Tag team?" Valeria asked, grinning through the blood on her teeth.

"Tag team," Alvian agreed.

Prime roared, his composure shattering. "ERROR! THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE!"

He charged. But this time, he wasn’t facing a single opponent. He was facing a wall and a spear. And he didn’t know the rotation.

The battlefield was no longer a duel; it was a raid.

Alvian Prime fought with the desperation of a god realizing his omniscience was a lie. He unleashed torrents of void fire, summoned meteors of deleted code, and warped gravity to crush his opponents. But every attack was met, countered, or endured.

"SMASH!"

Valeria slammed her shield into Prime’s flank. He tried to parry, but the timing was off. He expected her to be slow. She wasn’t. The [Greaves of the Tide-Runner] Alvian had given her accelerated her movement. She hit him with the force of a falling train.

[-12,000! Blunt Force!]

Prime stumbled.

"Slash!"

Seraphina appeared from the shadows of his own cape. She didn’t aim for a kill. She aimed for his joints. She severed the mana tendons in his knee with a [Void-infused] dagger strike.

[Status: Hamstrung.]

Prime swiped at her, but she was already gone, [Void Stepping] away to safety.

"Get away from me, insects!" Prime roared, releasing a pulse of repelling force.

Alvian stood his ground. He analyzed the flow of battle. Prime was strong—far stronger than any of them individually. His base stats were astronomical. But his connection to the Void... it was unstable. Every time he used a high-tier admin command, the grey mist around the tower churned.

"He draws power from the Gap," Alvian realized. "He isn’t generating the mana. He is channeling it. He is the Avatar of this prison."

To kill him, Alvian would have to destroy the prison itself. But that would kill them all.

"Inefficient," Alvian muttered. "I don’t need to destroy the power plant. I just need to cut the cord."

He opened his inventory. The five [Reality Anchors] he had gathered floated out. Earth. Wind. Fire. Water. Lightning. They were unstable, vibrating with the potential to rewrite physics.