SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 202: The Corrupted Father, Reclaiming the Sea

"Inefficient," Alvian muttered, his voice echoing weirdly inside the localized air bubble of his own aura. "If I wanted to move this slowly, I would have taken the stairs."

His enhanced vision, capable of piercing through stealth magic and dimensional rifts, finally picked up a light in the impenetrable gloom below. It wasn’t the gentle, bioluminescent blue of the Azureus deep. It was a sickly, pulsating yellow glow that made the water around it taste like rotting meat and corrupted data.

Alvian engaged his repulsors, the [Greaves of the Tide-Runner] flaring to life. He slowed his terminal-velocity descent to a gentle, controlled drift, touching down on the silt-covered floor of the trench without kicking up so much as a cloud of dust.

He looked ahead. The Primary Beacon stood before him, a horrific monument to the Syndicate’s desperate engineering. It was a towering spire of black, jagged metal, completely overgrown with massive, fleshy tentacles that writhed with a sickening sort of sentience. The structure throbbed with a visible distortion field, pumping a gravitational tether directly into the bedrock of the planet. This was the anchor. This was the needle pulling the moon out of the sky.

But it wasn’t unguarded.

The water in front of the Beacon shifted. It wasn’t a natural current; it was the displacement of a massive, unnatural presence settling into a combat stance.

Alvian’s eyes narrowed. "System. Scan."

[Target Identified: Corrupted Sovereign - Oceanus]

[Level: 70]

[Status: Resurrected / Syndicate Puppet]

[Threat Level: Calamity]

Alvian’s grip on the [Lance of the Void Winter] tightened until the dark metal groaned in protest.

The entity floating before him bore the face of Lord Oceanus, the ancient City Lord of Azureus who had sacrificed his life, his city, and his very soul to save his people from the first wave of the Draconic Legion. But all the nobility, all the quiet grace of the old king, was gone.

His once-proud blue skin was now a translucent, sickly grey, stretched tight over rusted, corrupted cybernetics that pulsed with that same nauseating yellow light. His eyes were empty, glowing voids. In his hand, he held a twisted, jagged mockery of his coral scepter, dripping with toxic black ink that hissed as it touched the freezing water.

The Syndicate hadn’t just killed him. They hadn’t just let him rest. They had scraped his deleted data from the server logs, recompiled it with their cosmic horror malware, and turned a king into a junkyard guard dog.

"High... Marshall..." Oceanus’s voice bubbled through the water. It wasn’t a voice; it was a distorted, agonizing gurgle of a soul trapped inside a broken machine, forced through vocal cords that had forgotten how to speak. "You... should not... have come..." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Alvian felt a sensation in his chest that had absolutely nothing to do with stats, multipliers, or system prompts. It was a rare, hot flare of genuine, unadulterated anger. He didn’t just respect Oceanus; he understood him. The City Lord had been a variable that chose duty over survival. This resurrection was a gross inefficiency. It was a desecration of a perfectly good sacrifice.

"They broke your code," Alvian said softly, his violet eyes locking onto the tragic figure of the former king. He raised the [Edge of Entropy] in his off-hand, the colorless blade humming with the promise of absolute erasure. "I am going to fix it. I will grant you a proper deletion, my friend."

Oceanus shrieked. The sound tore through the water like a physical blow, a concussive wave of sorrow and rage that rattled Alvian’s teeth. The corrupted City Lord raised his jagged scepter, and the water around them instantly turned pitch black with ink and localized malice.

Alvian didn’t hesitate. He charged into the dark.

The water immediately pushed back. This wasn’t just swimming against a current; this was fighting the ocean itself. Oceanus didn’t need to cast spells to manipulate the water down here; he simply commanded it. A wave of solid, pressurized water, hard as titanium, slammed into Alvian’s chest.

"CLANG!"

Alvian slid backward, his boots carving deep trenches into the seabed. He activated [Genesis Mode], his stats doubling instantly, the white light of the evolution fighting against the inky blackness of the trench.

"Physics Lesson Number Twenty-Eight," Alvian muttered, his jaw set. "Pressure is just force applied over an area. Decrease the area."

He thrust the [Lance of the Void Winter] forward. He didn’t aim for Oceanus. He aimed at the wall of pressurized water pushing against him. "[Glacial Void Pierce]."

The black ice blade acted as a drill, freezing the water into a solid cone and then shattering it into a million harmless shards. Alvian stepped through the opening, closing the distance.

But Oceanus was a Level 70 Calamity. He didn’t just have one trick.

The corrupted king swung his scepter. "[Corrupted Sovereign Art: The Rotting Wave]."

A tsunami of necrotic, fleshy water—a slurry of dissolved monsters and corrupted mana—surged toward Alvian. It was so wide it filled the entire trench, and so tall it scraped the ceiling of the abyss. Dodging was a mathematical impossibility. If that water touched his [Vestments], the cosmic decay would eat right through the fabric and start unspooling his DNA.

"I really hate it when they spam AoE," Alvian grumbled.

He didn’t raise a shield. A shield would just break under the sheer mass of the attack. Instead, he raised his left hand, his [Draconic Storm Bracers] flaring to life, but he didn’t summon lightning. He called upon the skill he had ripped from the depths of the void itself.

"[Void Vortex]."

He didn’t cast it at Oceanus. He cast it directly in front of himself.

A singularity, a tiny, localized black hole, tore open in the water. It didn’t just pull; it devoured. The massive tsunami of rotting water slammed into the vortex. The sheer volume of the attack should have overwhelmed the spell, but the [Void Vortex] scaled with the density of the threat. The more Oceanus pushed, the harder the singularity pulled.

Millions of gallons of corrupted water were sucked into the marble-sized black hole, compressing with a deafening, high-pitched whine.

"SQUELCH."

The wave vanished, leaving a perfectly dry, vacuum-sealed tube of space between Alvian and the corrupted king.

Alvian didn’t wait for the water to rush back in. He used [Void Step], blinking across the gap and appearing directly above Oceanus. He brought his lance down in a brutal, two-handed overhead strike aimed at the glowing yellow circuitry exposed on the king’s neck.

Oceanus reacted with the speed of a machine. He raised his jagged scepter, parrying the blow.

The impact was cataclysmic.

Down here, under miles of ocean, the force of their weapons clashing didn’t just create a shockwave. It created a massive cavitation bubble. The water literally boiled away from the sheer kinetic energy, creating a spherical void of superheated steam around them.

"You are... an error..." Oceanus’s mechanical voice glitched, his dead eyes staring up at Alvian as their weapons remained locked in a terrifying test of strength.

Alvian’s muscles strained, his [Chaos Body] pushing to its absolute limit against the Level 70 boss. He could feel the [Tear of the Infinite] in his chest burning like a miniature sun, frantically pumping mana into his limbs just to maintain the stalemate.

"I’m the patch," Alvian corrected, his voice a low, terrifying rumble.

He twisted his wrist, disengaging the lance, and seamlessly drove a front kick directly into Oceanus’s chest plate.

The kick carried the weight of 1800 Strength. The cybernetic armor buckled, sparking violently. Oceanus was launched backward, crashing through a field of ancient, calcified coral and slamming into the fleshy, pulsing base of the Primary Beacon.

Alvian landed softly on the seabed, the cavitation bubble collapsing around him with a sound like a thunderclap. He checked his stamina. He checked his mana. The numbers were stable, but the trend line was negative.

Oceanus pulled himself out of the rubble. The dent in his chest plate was already glowing, the yellow, corrupted mana knitting the broken metal back together in seconds. The ocean around them began to swirl again, the currents answering the call of their master.

Alvian sighed, resting his lance on his shoulder. "Right. Fighting the ocean while standing inside the ocean. Statistically speaking, that was a very stupid plan."

—-

The battle at the bottom of the world had devolved into a brutal, grinding war of attrition. And Alvian, despite his infinite mana regeneration and his [Chaos Body], was intimately aware that attrition was a losing game when your opponent was the environment itself.

Lord Oceanus, corrupted and twisted into a Syndicate puppet, did not tire. He did not bleed. Every time Alvian landed a devastating blow—shattering a cybernetic arm, freezing a section of his torso, or carving a chunk out of his armor with the [Edge of Entropy]—the ocean simply rushed in to fill the gap. The ambient water pressure crushed the ice, and the yellow, sickening mana of the Primary Beacon instantly repaired the mechanical flesh.

Oceanus was drawing power from the entire Pacific.