SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 192: The Truth of the Convergence, Voice One
With shaking hands, she tapped her comms crystal.
"Alvian," Seraphina said, her voice tight, terrified, and devoid of its usual snark.
"Status, Seraphina," Alvian’s voice came back, calm and steady amidst the distant sound of crumbling metal.
"We’re fighting the wrong war," Seraphina whispered, looking up at the bruised, purple sky. "The Syndicate didn’t cause the Convergence. They’re trying to hide from what’s following it. Alvian... the server isn’t merging. It’s screaming for help."
—-
The static over the comms channel hissed like a dying snake. Seraphina’s voice, normally dripping with unshakeable confidence and sarcastic wit, was raw and trembling.
"The server isn’t merging. It’s screaming for help."
Alvian stopped mid-stride. The rain-slicked asphalt of the terrestrial Syndicate base crunched beneath his heavy boots as his [Chaos Body] arrested his momentum instantly. Around him, the smoking wreckage of bipedal mechs and the gray, dissolving data of deleted mercenaries painted a picture of absolute victory. Yet, the rogue’s words chilled the blood in his veins far more effectively than the [Frost Heart] ever could.
"Explain," Alvian commanded, his voice tight.
"I can’t... I can’t process it all over the comms," Seraphina stammered, the sound of her dry-heaving echoing faintly in his ear. "Just get to the central command room. Get to Voice One. He knows. They all know. We’ve been looking at the board upside down, Alvian."
Valeria stepped up beside him, her [Aegis of Terra] humming with a low, golden resonance that pushed back the crimson downpour. She wiped a streak of Syndicate blood from her cheekplate, her grey eyes scanning the towering monolith of black glass ahead of them. The terrestrial Pentagon.
"If Seraphina is spooked, we’re walking into something worse than a dragon," Valeria noted, her tone pragmatic but laced with underlying concern. "Are we breaching?"
"Efficiency dictates we don’t knock," Alvian said, his eyes narrowing as he locked onto the highest floor of the obsidian tower.
He didn’t wait for an elevator. He didn’t look for a stairwell. He crouched, the concrete spider-webbing beneath his feet, and activated his [Limit Breaker] physique in tandem with a directional [Void Step].
"Up," Alvian ordered.
He grabbed Valeria’s waist, pulling her flush against his side, and launched them both into the air. They tore up the side of the skyscraper like a reverse meteorite, the sheer kinetic force of their ascent shattering the reinforced glass windows of every floor they passed.
They reached the ninetieth floor in a span of three seconds. Alvian didn’t bother looking for a door; he simply angled his shoulder and used his 900 Strength stat to physically bulldoze through the exterior wall.
"CRASH!"
The reinforced durasteel and poly-glass crumpled like wet tissue paper. Alvian and Valeria rolled into the sprawling, dimly lit expanse of the Syndicate’s central command room.
The aesthetic was sterile, cold, and meticulously clean. Rows of sunken holographic terminals formed a semi-circle around a massive, raised dais. The screens were flashing frantic red error messages, tracking the catastrophic losses of their terrestrial fleet and the localized server wipes Alvian had just orchestrated.
Standing in the center of the room, bathed in the crimson glow of failing planetary defense grids, was Voice One.
The leader of the Syndicate’s Earth operations didn’t look like a final boss. He wasn’t clad in mythical armor or wielding a weapon forged from a dying star. He was an older man in a bespoke, pristine white suit. His digital mask, a swirling vortex of shifting pixels that usually hid his identity, was glitching wildly, revealing a pale, sweat-drenched face underneath. He held a glass of amber liquid in a hand that shook so violently the ice cubes rattled against the crystal.
Valeria raised her shield, stepping into a defensive stance, anticipating a trap. "Hands where we can see them! Call off the remaining guards!"
Voice One didn’t look at her. He didn’t even look at the massive hole they had just torn in his impregnable fortress. He just stared at the holographic globe in the center of the room, taking a slow, shaky sip of his drink.
"There are no guards left," Voice One said. His voice was a hollow, empty rasp. "You deleted them. Or they ran. It doesn’t matter anymore."
Alvian stepped forward, his [Vestments of the Void Monarch] absorbing the red emergency lighting. He leveled the [Edge of Entropy] at the man’s chest. The colorless, jagged tear in reality hummed, eager to backspace the Syndicate leader out of existence.
"You sought to merge our worlds," Alvian stated, his tone devoid of anger. He was simply stating facts. "You introduced the Red Rain. You offered Salvation Chips to enslave the survivors. You assumed you could ride out the apocalypse and rule the ashes. Your calculations were flawed."
Voice One slowly turned to face Alvian. To Alvian’s surprise, the man wasn’t defiant. He wasn’t calculating a counter-attack. He was terrified.
And then, he began to laugh.
It started as a low chuckle, bubbling up from a place of pure, broken hysteria, escalating into a manic, wheezing cackle that echoed off the sleek walls of the command center.
"Rule the ashes?" Voice One gasped, clutching his stomach. "You think... you think we wanted this? You think the Syndicate caused the Convergence to conquer a rock floating in space?"
"Your actions dictate your intent," Alvian said coldly. "You accelerated the timeline."
"We accelerated the lock!" Voice One screamed, slamming his glass onto the console so hard it shattered. Amber liquid and blood dripped from his fingers. "We didn’t open the door, you arrogant, glitching anomaly! We were trying to slam it shut and barricade it from the inside!"
Valeria frowned, her golden aura flaring slightly. "You’re not making sense. We saw the extraction portals. We saw your troops fighting alongside the Draconic Legion."
"The dragons are an immune response!" Voice One laughed bitterly, his eyes wide and bloodshot. "You think you’re the Administrator, Alvian? You think because you found a few exploits in Gods Domain and got a fancy title, you own the server?"
Voice One pointed a trembling, bleeding finger at the Godslayer.
"You’re just the janitor! And the System you love so much? It’s not a game. It’s not a world. It’s a quarantine zone. It wasn’t meant to trap the players inside. It was meant to keep Them out!"
Alvian’s violet eyes narrowed. The unease that Seraphina’s message had planted in his chest began to take root. He didn’t like variables he couldn’t see, and Voice One was speaking of an equation Alvian hadn’t even factored.
"Inefficient rambling," Alvian muttered. "If you won’t give me straight answers, I will pull them from your directory myself."
Alvian raised his left hand, his eyes shifting into swirling galaxies of white light. He tapped into his SSS-Rank Admin Authority. If Voice One was an NPC, a player, or an asset of the Syndicate, he had a data file. And Alvian could read it.
"System. Target: Voice One. Action: [System Read]."
[Initiating Data Extraction...]
A stream of green, glowing binary code began to flow from Voice One’s body toward Alvian’s hand. It was the standard visual representation of a data breach. Alvian prepared to parse the man’s memories, his operational directives, and the blueprints for the Syndicate’s entire network. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦
But halfway across the room, the code changed.
The crisp, orderly green ones and zeros began to rot. They didn’t turn into the red error text of the System. They turned into a color that Alvian’s brain struggled to process—a sickening, iridescent hue that seemed to fold inward on itself.
[Warning: Data Corruption Detected.]
[Parsing Error: Language Not Recognized.]
[Error. Error. Err—]
The system interface in Alvian’s vision violently glitched. Static roared in his ears, a sound like grinding teeth and screaming metal.
Alvian stumbled back, instinctively cutting the connection. He gripped his head, a sharp, piercing pain lancing through his frontal lobe.
"Alvian!" Valeria shouted, dropping her guard to grab his shoulder. "What’s happening?"
"The data..." Alvian gritted his teeth, his [Chaos Body] automatically purging the localized feedback loop, but the headache lingered. "It’s encrypted. But not by a firewall. It’s... decaying."
Voice One smiled, a grotesque, broken expression. He looked down at his own hands. The flesh at his fingertips was beginning to unravel, not into pixels, but into something wet, writhing, and deeply wrong.
"You can’t read it, can you?" Voice One whispered, his voice gaining a strange, dual-toned echo that didn’t belong in a human throat. "Your Admin privileges only work on things built within the System. But the code inside me now... it comes from the outside."
Alvian tightened his grip on his spear. He stepped in front of Valeria, his protective instincts overriding his analytical mind.
"What did you do?" Alvian demanded.
"We tried to hide," Voice One wheezed, falling to his knees as his body convulsed. "The Convergence was a distress beacon. The System was calling for help because the quarantine was failing. The Salvation Chips... they weren’t to control humanity. They were to rewrite our genetic signatures. To make us mathematically invisible to the cosmic sensors of the true enemy."
