SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 198: The Kinetic Solution, Breaking the Geometry
The Herald refocused on Alvian. Its entire body began to unfold, expanding into a massive, jagged lotus of glass and eyes. A grey light began to build in its center, preparing an omni-directional burst that would age everything in the plaza to dust.
Alvian prepared to [Void Step] out of the blast radius, calculating the exact millisecond to jump.
But a massive shadow leaped over him.
"IRON SHELL!"
Magnus the Guardian landed squarely between Alvian and the expanding fractal. The towering Crab-Man slammed his legendary tower shield—a slab of metal that had survived the crushing depths of the Abyss—into the ground. He didn’t cast a protective bubble; he used his own massive body and shield as a physical barricade.
The grey burst erupted.
The wave of entropy washed over Magnus. Alvian watched, his violet eyes wide, as the Guardian’s impenetrable defense was tested against cosmic time. The legendary shield groaned. The enchantments etched into its surface flickered and died. The thick, black steel began to pit, turning a sickly, rust-orange.
Magnus roared, his muscles bulging as he poured his entire mana pool into the shield to slow the decay. The metal flaked away in massive chunks, turning to sand in the wind. The entropy bled through the dying shield, catching Magnus’s left arm and shoulder.
His thick, stony carapace instantly weathered, turning brittle and grey.
"Magnus, retreat!" Alvian commanded, seeing the Guardian’s health bar violently glitch and drop.
With a final, desperate heave, Magnus shoved his decaying shield forward, disrupting the Herald’s beam just enough to break its focus. The Guardian stumbled backward, clutching his withered, rusted arm, his breathing ragged and shallow.
"I can’t... hold that..." Magnus wheezed, falling to one knee, looking at the pile of dust that used to be his legendary shield. "It eats... endurance."
Alvian stood over the kneeling Guardian, his eyes locked on the shifting, impossible monstrosity preparing for another strike. His lance was useless. His admin commands were blocked by the server friction. And absolute defense was nothing but a delayed death against absolute entropy.
"You did your job, Guardian," Alvian said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, metallic calm. He unequipped the [Lance of the Void Winter]. "Fall back. I will handle the geometry."
—
The battlefield was a chaotic symphony of screaming marines, roaring Vanguard knights, and the eerie, silent hum of the Herald of the Outer Gods. Alvian stood at the epicenter, completely unarmed, staring down the fractal monstrosity that was currently reorganizing its glassy planes for another entropy burst.
"Alvian, what are you doing?" Seraphina’s voice crackled frantically over the comms. "Your weapon is gone! You can’t punch a concept!"
"Slashing and piercing rely on a flat plane of impact," Alvian replied, his analytical mind stripping away the panic of the battlefield. He watched the floating eyeballs within the Herald dart wildly. "This entity exists across multiple spatial dimensions simultaneously. A blade simply slips into the dimension where the blade isn’t. It’s a localized spatial distortion."
"English, please!" Valeria shouted, dragging a severely weakened Magnus behind the cover of a rusted Syndicate mech.
"I can’t cut it," Alvian said calmly. "So, I have to shatter it."
"With what?" Seraphina demanded. "It just rusted Magnus’s shield into a sandbox!"
"With physics," Alvian whispered.
He accessed his inventory. The [Draconic Storm Bracers] materialized on his forearms, the Mythical-grade armor clamping down with a heavy, metallic thud. Instantly, violent arcs of blue lightning, laced with the searing red heat of [Dragonfire], began to whip around his fists.
The Herald fired another beam of grey, entropic light.
Alvian didn’t dodge. He activated [Void Step], but not to retreat. He teleported directly into the center of the shifting, glass-like fractal.
Appearing point-blank, Alvian ignored the sickening vertigo of the non-Euclidean space. He reached out with both hands and physically grabbed two of the massive, shifting planes of the creature’s body.
The moment his hands made contact, the Herald shrieked—a horrific, high-pitched frequency of pure static.
"ARGH!" Alvian gritted his teeth as the edges of the fractal dug into his palms. It was like grabbing a handful of razor blades that existed in four dimensions. The [Vestments of the Void Monarch] tried to mitigate the damage, but the entity’s geometry bypassed standard armor values, slicing directly into the incredibly dense muscle fibers of his [Chaos Body].
His health bar flickered, taking raw, unmitigated damage. But Alvian’s grip was absolute. With his 900 Strength stat, he acted as a living vise, forcing the shifting planes to hold still.
"System," Alvian commanded, his eyes blazing with violet fury. "Maximize [Draconic Storm Bracers]. Override safety limits. Channel [Thermal Shock]."
He didn’t need to cast a spell. He just needed to abuse the elemental properties of his gear.
From his right hand, the searing, red [Dragonfire] poured into the glassy structure of the Herald. The creature’s body lit up like a dying sun, the extreme heat forcing its impossible molecular structure to rapidly expand. The floating eyeballs rolled wildly in panic as the glass-like material glowed cherry-red.
Simultaneously, from his left hand, Alvian channeled the absolute zero void energy that naturally emanated from his class. He dumped an ocean of freezing mana directly into the superheated planes.
The reaction was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The extreme, localized shift from thousands of degrees to absolute zero created a massive thermal shock. The impossible geometry of the Herald couldn’t flex or shift to disperse the energy. The glass-like material screamed, webbed with millions of tiny, glowing fractures.
"It’s brittle!" Alvian roared over the deafening hiss of steam and static. His hands were bleeding freely now, the fractured edges of the creature biting deeper into his flesh. "Valeria! Break it!"
From behind the cover of the ruined mech, Valeria didn’t hesitate. She didn’t question the insanity of striking the very thing Alvian was holding. She knew her role. She was the Anvil, and it was time to bring the Hammer.
"VANGUARD!" Valeria bellowed, her voice echoing off the ruined buildings of Paris.
She sprinted forward, her golden boots cracking the pavement. She didn’t use a sword. She reached to her back and unhitched her massive, newly reforged warhammer. As she ran, she channeled every drop of her Earth and Titan mana into the weapon.
She vaulted off the hood of a crushed humvee, launching herself thirty feet into the air. At the apex of her jump, she activated her ultimate physical strike.
"[Titan’s Meteor]!"
She became a falling star of pure, golden kinetic energy. She brought the massive warhammer down, not aiming at the Herald’s center, but directly at the spot where Alvian’s bleeding hands gripped the brittle, fractured planes.
Alvian didn’t let go. He looked up at the descending golden meteor, his expression entirely calm despite the agony in his arms. He trusted her accuracy perfectly.
"CRACK-DOOM!"
The hammer struck the exact junction Alvian was freezing.
The kinetic force of a Titan, combined with the catastrophic thermal stress, was too much for the cosmic entity. The non-Euclidean geometry couldn’t bend. It couldn’t shift.
It shattered.
The Herald exploded into a billion pieces of harmless, mundane glass. The eyeballs burst into grey smoke. The psychic pressure weighing down on the plaza vanished instantly, replaced by the ringing silence of a broken physical law.
Alvian was thrown backward by the sheer force of Valeria’s strike, sliding across the wet asphalt. He hit a concrete barrier, coughing as the breath was knocked from his lungs.
Valeria landed gracefully amidst the raining glass, her hammer resting on her shoulder, panting heavily. She looked at the empty space where the nightmare had been, then immediately turned to find Alvian.
Before the dust even settled, Alvian pushed himself up to a knee. He didn’t look at his ruined hands. He looked past the shattered Herald, toward the pulsing, fleshy Beacon wrapped around the Eiffel Tower. Without its defender, the structure was just a stationary target.
"Seraphina," Alvian said, his voice raspy but authoritative. "Plant the charges."
"Already done, boss," Seraphina’s voice chirped. She materialized near the base of the tower, tossing a detonator into the air and catching it. "I love a good demolition."
She pressed the button.
A chain of high-yield mana explosions ripped through the base of the fleshy spire. The tentacles shrieked, a grotesque biological wail, as the structure collapsed in on itself. The red, pulsing light of the Beacon sputtered, choked, and died.
Above them, the gravitational distortion field in the sky snapped. A massive, swirling tear in the clouds violently stitched itself shut, cutting off the terrestrial connection to the Deep Dark.
Alvian let out a long, slow breath. The suffocating alien atmosphere lifted.
"One down," Alvian muttered, finally allowing himself to look down at his hands. "Four to go."
—-
The destruction of the Paris Beacon sent a tangible ripple of relief through the European sector, but on the ground, the victory felt incredibly heavy. The spatial tether had snapped, and the immediate threat of the Outer Gods’ manifestation in this grid was gone, but the aftermath of the battle was a grim reality check.
