SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 191: Shadow in the Mainframe, Seraphina’s Heist
Valeria was the immovable object. She drew the fire, her golden [Titan’s Aura] flaring brightly, acting as a massive beacon that forced the enemy AI and targeting systems to lock onto her.
Alvian was the unstoppable force. He used [Void Step] to blink through the shadows she cast, exploiting the openings she created. When a mech overextended to punch Valeria, Alvian appeared on its shoulder, driving his colorless spear into the cockpit, deleting the pilot from existence. When a squad of assassins tried to flank her blind spot, Alvian was already there, a horizontal slash of void energy erasing them before their blades even swung.
[System Alert: Extreme Combat Synchronization Detected.]
[Resonance matching at 99.9%.]
[Hidden Mechanic Unlocked: Paired Skill - Event Horizon Vanguard.]
Alvian’s interface flashed with the notification, but he didn’t need to read it to feel the shift. Valeria felt it too. Her eyes met his over the rim of her shield for a split second. A silent question, followed by an immediate, absolute trust.
"Expand the aura," Alvian ordered softly.
Valeria slammed her shield into the earth and screamed, pouring every ounce of her mana into the [Titan’s Aura]. The golden light didn’t just glow; it solidified. It expanded into a massive, thirty-meter dome of absolute, inviolable physical law. Inside this golden sphere, the Syndicate’s anti-magic dampeners shattered. Their plasma weapons fizzled.
She was holding the world back. She was the Anvil.
Alvian stepped to the center of the dome. He raised the [Edge of Entropy]. He tapped into the Void Sovereign’s core, bleeding his dark, terrifying mana into the golden light of her shield.
He was the Eraser.
Inside the [Event Horizon Vanguard], Alvian’s attacks were no longer bound by distance or trajectory. The golden light acted as a conduit for his void strikes.
"Delete," Alvian whispered.
He didn’t swing. He simply willed it.
Every Syndicate soldier, every mech, every automated turret trapped within the thirty-meter radius of Valeria’s golden dome suddenly found themselves overlapping with Alvian’s void energy. They didn’t get cut. They didn’t explode. The code dictating their physical forms was simply highlighted and backspaced.
Dozens of elite mercenaries turned to grey static and vanished into thin air. The massive bipedal mechs crumbled into harmless piles of unrefined iron ore as the complex engineering holding them together was conceptually erased.
It wasn’t a fight. It was a localized server wipe.
In less than three minutes, the fortified courtyard of the Syndicate base was completely empty. There were no bodies, no blood, just the eerie silence of deleted data and the ragged breathing of the two warriors in the center.
The golden dome faded, retracting back into Valeria’s armor. She leaned heavily on her sword, her chest heaving with exertion. The mana drain of the paired skill was astronomical.
Alvian walked over to her. The cold, mechanical hum of his void aura vanished, suppressed instantly so it wouldn’t chill her. He stopped inches away, taking in the sight of her. Her hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, and a smudge of dark ash marred her cheek.
He reached out. His thumb gently brushed the ash away, his touch lingering against her warm skin.
"You held," Alvian said, his voice entirely human.
Valeria looked up, leaning her cheek slightly into his hand, her tired eyes softening as she caught her breath. "I always hold. As long as you’re the one doing the erasing."
The silence between them was comfortable, a profoundly intimate pocket of peace amidst the wreckage of a conquered base. They didn’t need to say anything else. The cleared courtyard spoke for itself.
"The perimeter is secure," Alvian said, reluctantly dropping his hand to tap his comms. "Seraphina. What’s your status?"
Static crackled in his ear, followed by the sound of rapid, frantic typing.
"Alvian," Seraphina’s voice came through, tight and laced with a fear he rarely heard from the rogue. "We have a massive problem. We’re fighting the wrong war."
—-
While Alvian and Valeria operated as the loudest, most destructive distraction in modern terrestrial history, Seraphina was playing a completely different game.
The terrestrial Pentagon—the Syndicate High Command—was a monolith of black glass and biometric security that made Azureus’s defenses look like a child’s toy box. Laser grids crisscrossed the ventilation shafts. Pressure-sensitive floor tiles wired to thermal detonators lined the hallways. It was a fortress designed to keep physical threats out.
Fortunately, Seraphina was no longer entirely physical.
She stood in a dark alleyway adjacent to the massive facility, listening to the distant, rhythmic thud of Valeria’s shield bashes echoing through the city. The Syndicate guards stationed at the side entrance were distracted, their comms chattering with panicked reports of the golden titan tearing apart their forward operating base.
Seraphina smiled, a sharp, dangerous curving of her lips. "Amateurs."
She closed her eyes and activated her Mythical class ability, [Mistress of Whispers].
Her earthly body dissolved. She didn’t turn invisible; she turned into data. Her physical form broke down into a cascade of dark, static-laced pixels, shedding the limitations of biology. She stepped forward, her foot passing completely through the solid steel of the reinforced security door without making a sound.
To Seraphina, the world shifted. The physical walls of the Syndicate base faded, replaced by the sprawling, neon-lit labyrinth of their digital mainframe. The concrete corridors became streams of glowing blue fiber-optic data. The laser grids were just lines of poorly written firewall code that she stepped through as easily as parting a beaded curtain.
She was a ghost in the machine.
She glided down the primary data artery, heading straight for the central server room. Along the way, she passed the Syndicate’s anti-virus hunter-killer programs—hulking, mechanical hounds made of red code that prowled the network looking for intruders. One of the hounds sniffed the air right next to her, its digital eyes scanning the corridor. It looked right through her. Her conceptual stealth meant she registered as empty space.
"Too easy," she murmured, her voice a ripple of static in the datastream.
She reached the core. The central server room manifested as a massive, circular vault of blinding white light. Floating in the center of the room was the Syndicate AI—a towering, multi-armed construct made of shifting geometric shapes, guarding the planetary data logs.
[System Defense Matrix: OVERLORD AI.]
[Status: Active / Hostile.]
"Unauthorized access detected," the AI droned, its voice a synthesized amalgamation of a hundred different tones. The room flared red. The AI raised its geometric arms, preparing to initiate a localized quarantine protocol to trap her data packet.
Seraphina didn’t try to out-hack a supercomputer. She was a rogue, not an IT specialist.
She materialized directly behind the AI, drawing her digital daggers. The blades, infused with Alvian’s void code, hummed with deletion energy.
"Ctrl-Alt-Delete, ugly," Seraphina chirped.
She drove both daggers into the central processing node of the AI’s back. The void energy severed the AI’s connection to the main network. The construct shrieked—a horrible, dial-up modem screech—before freezing in place, its geometric limbs locking up as it was forcibly quarantined by her strike.
With the guard dog paralyzed, Seraphina walked around to the front of the terminal. She plunged her hands into the raw data stream of the Syndicate’s classified files, her Chrono-Eye spinning wildly as it decrypted the information.
She expected to find troop deployments. She expected to find the blueprints for the ’Salvation Chips’. She expected the standard megalomaniacal plans for world domination.
Instead, she found the truth.
The files downloaded directly into her consciousness. She saw the true nature of the [Red Rain]. She saw the cosmic telemetry data the Syndicate had been hiding from the public.
The Convergence wasn’t an invasion plotted by the Syndicate to rule Earth. It was an automated distress beacon.
Centuries ago, the original creators of the System—the Precursors—had designed Gods Domain as a quarantine zone, a digital lockbox meant to contain a threat far worse than the Draconic Legion. The Syndicate hadn’t dragged the game to Earth out of ambition; they were trying to forcibly crash the server. They were using the Red Rain and the Salvation Chips to overwrite humanity’s genetic code, making Earth mathematically ’invisible’ to the cosmic sensors of the true enemy.
They weren’t trying to conquer the world. They were trying to turn the lights off and hide under the bed.
Because the system logs showed what was coming. The Outer Gods. Beings of pure cosmic horror that fed on stagnant reality, currently zeroing in on the massive mana flare caused by the Convergence.
Seraphina gasped, physically recoiling from the data stream. The sheer scale of the horror threatened to break her mental fortitude. The Syndicate wasn’t the final boss. They were just the panicked rats chewing through the ship’s hull before the kraken arrived.
She ripped her hands from the terminal, her data-form shuddering as she forcibly extracted herself from the mainframe. She phased backward through the walls, traversing the distance back to the alleyway in seconds.
She collapsed onto the wet pavement, her physical body snapping back into reality with a painful jolt. She hit the ground on her hands and knees, the cold rain soaking her hair as she dry-heaved from the temporal whiplash.
