SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 196: Beacon One, The Paris Deadzone
"I don’t accept those odds," Alvian muttered.
He tapped into his SSS-Rank talent. "Use two daily charges of [Super Upgrade System]. Force the integration. Override physical limitations."
The starlight anvil roared to life. Blinding white light erupted from the forge, engulfing the nuclear missile and the three mythical items. The heat in the room spiked so violently that the air rippled with mirages. Alvian didn’t step back. He stood his ground, raising his hands and physically manipulating the streams of mana, forcing the conflicting elements together.
It was like trying to shove a hurricane into a teacup. The [Tear of the Infinite] in his chest spun frantically, pumping thousands of units of mana into the forge every second to stabilize the reaction. The fire of the dragon fought the water of the core. The Earth’s physical metal groaned, threatening to crack under the pressure of the raw data.
"Submit," Alvian roared, his eyes turning into swirling galaxies of white light. He slammed his fists down onto the air, projecting a massive wave of [Void] energy to crush the elements into a single point.
ZZZZT-KABOOM!
The flash of light was absolute. Behind the blast shield, Valeria threw her arms over her eyes, the sheer force of the shockwave rattling the reinforced glass.
When the light faded, the room was eerily silent. The smoke cleared, sucked away by the forge’s ventilation runes.
Floating above the anvil was no longer an olive-green missile. It was a sleek, perfectly smooth cylinder of iridescent black metal. It didn’t look like a bomb. It looked like a tear in reality that had been molded into a physical shape.
┌──────[ Item Forged ]──────┐
│ Name: The Genesis Warhead
│ Grade: Transcendent
│ Effect: Detonates across three overlapping dimensions simultaneously. Ignores all physical and magical resistances. Imposes a 50-kilometer radius of [Absolute Erasure].
│ Note: Do not drop.
└───────────────────────────┘
"Well," Alvian breathed heavily, wiping a line of blood from his nose. "That’s one way to clear a room."
He carefully stored the Genesis Warhead in a specialized, stasis-locked compartment of his inventory. He had five targets. He would need to make four more. But first, he had a promise to keep.
"You can come out now," Alvian called out.
Valeria stepped out from behind the glass, letting out a long whistle as she surveyed the scorched floor of the forge. "I genuinely thought I was about to become a shadow on the wall. You did it."
"I always do," Alvian said. He turned to her. "Now, it’s your turn. Bring me the shield."
Valeria unslung the massive, golden tower shield from her back. The [Titan’s Fortress] had saved their lives more times than Alvian could count, but it was showing its age. The edges were chipped from blocking the Dragon King’s greatsword, and the center was marred by a deep, blackened scorch mark from the Red Rain.
She handed it to him. "Be careful with it. It’s gotten me this far."
"It’s inefficient for where we are going," Alvian said, taking the heavy metal. He set it on the anvil. From his inventory, he pulled out several massive, dull-grey ingots. "Depleted uranium. Harvested from the terrestrial tanks. It’s incredibly dense. Highly resistant to physical trauma, and completely immune to the phasing properties of the Outer Gods."
"You’re going to line my shield with tank armor?" Valeria asked, her eyes lighting up with genuine excitement.
"I’m going to fuse it," Alvian corrected.
He didn’t use the massive, flashy explosion of the warhead for this. This required precision. He placed his hands over the shield and the uranium. He activated his final daily charge of the [Super Upgrade System].
Golden light, warm and steady, flowed from his hands. It wrapped around the dented shield, melting the uranium and weaving the dense, heavy atoms directly into the magical lattice of the [Titan’s Bloodline] enchantments. The metal hissed, reshaping itself. The chips smoothed out. The golden hue deepened, taking on a dark, unyielding luster.
The process was quiet, almost intimate. Valeria stepped closer, standing right beside him, watching the light reflect in his focused violet eyes. She could feel the heat radiating from him, a comforting warmth that chased away the chill of the dying world outside.
The light faded. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮
Resting on the anvil was a masterpiece. The shield was slightly larger, the edges sharpened into lethal angles. It pulsed with a heavy, gravitational weight, as if it was anchored to the very core of the planet.
┌──────[ Item Forged ]──────┐
│ Name: Aegis of Terra
│ Grade: Mythical
│ Effect: Grants user [Planetary Anchor]. While planted, user becomes completely immune to spatial displacement, phasing attacks, and knockback. Physical defense increased by 400%.
└───────────────────────────┘
Alvian picked it up. Even with his 900 Strength, he could feel its immense weight. He turned and handed it to Valeria.
She took it, her arm dropping slightly under the new mass before her Titan stats compensated. She ran her hand over the smooth, dark gold surface.
"It’s perfect," she whispered, looking up at him. Her gaze locked with his, the shared history of their battles hanging in the narrow space between them.
"Don’t break this one," Alvian said, his voice low, his hand lingering for a moment against the metal edge of the shield, just brushing her knuckles.
"I’ll try my best," Valeria smiled softly, her eyes holding his for a long, quiet beat. "I’m the unbreakable wall, remember?"
"I remember," Alvian said. He turned away, the moment breaking as he checked his tactical interface. "Get your gear on, Commander. The Vanguard deploys in thirty minutes. We have a Beacon to erase."
—-
The deployment from Azureus was not a stealth operation. When you are dropping from a flying dreadnought to fight cosmic horrors, stealth is a mathematical impossibility.
Alvian stood at the edge of the deployment bay, the wind whipping his dark trench coat around his legs. Below them, the Earth was a tapestry of grey clouds and ruined landscapes. The coordinates Seraphina had pulled from the Syndicate mainframe led them to Sector 3—the ruins of what used to be Paris.
It was no longer a city of light. It was a deadzone.
Through the visual enhancement of his interface, Alvian could see the target. The Eiffel Tower had been completely consumed. A massive, pulsing spire of fleshy, iridescent tentacles wrapped around the iron lattice, stretching hundreds of feet into the air. The Beacon throbbed with a sickly, rhythmic heartbeat, pumping a visible distortion field into the sky—the gravitational tether pulling the Outer Gods’ dimension closer.
The air around the city was heavy, warped by the madness radiating from the structure. It looked like the atmosphere itself was bruising.
"That is aggressively ugly," Seraphina muttered over the comms, hovering in a stealth-skiff nearby.
"Aesthetics are irrelevant. It’s a target," Alvian replied coldly. He looked to his right.
Valeria stood at the head of a joint strike force. Five hundred Vanguard knights in their golden armor stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a battalion of Earth’s heavily armed marines. The human soldiers looked terrified, clutching their newly enchanted rifles tightly as they stared down at the nightmare below.
"Vanguard! Marines!" Valeria’s voice boomed over the bay, infused with the [Titan’s Command] aura. "We are dropping into a hot zone! The enemy ignores standard physics, so we are going to introduce them to ours! Lock shields, check your ammo, and do not break the line!"
Alvian stepped off the edge.
He plummeted toward the earth like a black meteor, using his [Void Step] to bypass the atmospheric friction. Behind him, the bay doors opened fully, and the joint strike force followed, raining down upon the ruined streets of Paris via grav-chutes and teleportation arrays.
Alvian landed in a massive plaza a mile from the Beacon. His [Chaos Body] absorbed the impact, cracking the ancient cobblestones. He didn’t even bend his knees.
The moment his boots touched the ground, the enemy reacted.
They did not swarm out of buildings or rise from the sewers. They simply peeled themselves out of the distorted air. They were "Cosmic Aberrations." They had no set form, appearing as shifting, geometric shapes made of wet, grey flesh and unblinking eyes. They glitched as they moved, defying the 3D space they occupied.
"Contact!" a marine captain screamed as the troops landed behind Alvian. "Open fire!"
The marines unleashed hell. Hundreds of enchanted rounds, tipped with void-energy and armor-piercing cores, tore through the plaza.
The bullets hit the Aberrations—and passed right through them.
The fleshy geometries didn’t dodge. They simply didn’t exist in the same phase of reality when the bullets arrived. A massive, triangular mass of flesh floated right through a hail of gunfire, extending a jagged appendage that phased directly through a marine’s chest plate, dissolving his heart without breaking the armor.
"Magic!" Valeria shouted, charging forward. "Use the arts!"
The Vanguard knights swung their claymores, unleashing arcs of hydro-slashes and golden fire. But the magic met the same fate. The Aberrations shifted, their forms rippling like water, and the spells simply dissipated against their non-Euclidean hitboxes.
"Broken hitboxes," Alvian muttered, watching a Vanguard knight get swatted aside by a floating rectangle of eyes. "The devs really dropped the ball on this patch."
