SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 163: The Glitch Stalkers, Code of the Void

The grey mist of the Dimensional Gap was not air. It was static. It tasted like ozone and forgotten memories, a sensory input that the human brain struggled to translate into coherent data. Alvian stood amidst the ruins of what looked like a city built by a madman—stone castles fused with steel skyscrapers, floating islands of dirt defying gravity, and weapons sticking out of the ground that flickered in and out of existence.

He stepped forward. His boot didn’t crunch on gravel. It passed through the texture of the ground for a fraction of a second before finding resistance.

"Collision detection error," Alvian muttered. "The physics engine here is barely functional."

He checked his interface. It was a mess of scrolling text and corrupted characters.

[System Alert: Connection to Main Server Lost.]

[Local Mode: Survival.]

[Warning: Environmental Stability at 14%.]

He wasn’t in a zone anymore. He was in the recycling bin of the universe. The things here—the buildings, the land, the air—were assets that the System had discarded. They were broken, overpowered, or simply unfinished. And like any trash heap, it had scavengers.

A sound tore through the silence. It wasn’t a roar. It was the sound of audio feedback, a high-pitched screech of digital noise that made Alvian’s teeth ache.

"Skree-zzzt-onk."

From the shadow of a twisted clock tower, a shape emerged. It looked like a wolf, but it was wrong. Its body was composed of jagged, white lines—a wireframe mesh without a skin. Its eyes were blocks of solid white pixels that emitted no light but pierced the gloom with malicious intent.

[Target: Glitch Stalker]

[Level: ??]

[Status: Corrupted Data]

It didn’t walk. It lagged. One moment it was fifty meters away; the next, it was ten meters away, frozen in a mid-run animation frame, before snapping back into motion.

"A lag beast," Alvian noted, equipping his [Lance of the Void Winter]. "Inefficient movement patterns."

The Stalker lunged. It didn’t leap through the air; it clipped through it. Alvian sidestepped, thrusting his lance at the creature’s flank.

"Pass through."

The lance went straight through the wireframe body without resistance. There was no impact. No damage number. The Stalker didn’t even flinch. It snapped its jaws, biting Alvian’s arm.

"CRUNCH."

[-3,500 HP!]

Alvian winced. The attack was real enough. The physical damage bypassed his armor’s defense because the attack didn’t technically "hit" the armor; it spawned inside his arm coordinates.

"Physical immunity," Alvian realized, backflipping away. "Or rather, it lacks a hitbox for physical matter."

The Stalker howled, summoning two more of its kind from the debris. They circled him, their movements jerky and unpredictable.

Alvian analyzed the situation. If physical attacks failed, he needed energy. He needed something that interacted with the fundamental code of reality.

"System. Activate [Voidpiercer]. [Void Corruption] infusion on Lance."

[Ding!]

[Weapon properties updated. Void Damage added.]

The lance’s tip glowed with a dark, violet light. The Void wasn’t just magic; it was the absence of data. It was the eraser. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

The second Stalker charged, glitching forward in a series of staccato frames. Alvian didn’t try to intercept its body. He aimed for the center of its wireframe mass, where a small knot of code pulsed.

"Delete."

He thrust. The Void-infused lance connected. This time, there was resistance. A sound like shattering glass echoed through the graveyard.

"ZZZT!"

The Stalker shrieked as the void energy ate through its code. The wireframe lines unraveled, turning into floating pixels that dissolved into the grey mist.

[Target Deleted.]

[Experience Gained: Error.]

"No XP," Alvian noted. "Figured. They aren’t part of the progression system."

The remaining two Stalkers hesitated. Their AI routines were struggling to process the deletion of their packmate. Alvian didn’t give them time to recalibrate. He used [Void Step].

He didn’t teleport to them. He teleported into the glitch. He timed his jump to match their lag spike. As the third Stalker froze in a frame, Alvian appeared beside it.

"Desynchronized."

He slashed with the lance. The creature shattered into data dust.

The last Stalker tried to flee, clipping through a wall. Alvian threw [Voidpiercer]. The dagger phased through the stone and struck the monster’s core.

[Target Deleted.]

Alvian retrieved his dagger. The immediate threat was gone, but the ground beneath him began to tremble. Not a physical quake. A data quake. The grey dust on the ground rearranged itself, forming geometric patterns.

From behind the clock tower, a massive shape rose. It was a giant, forty feet tall, shaped like a humanoid made of unfinished grey polygons. It had no face, only a smooth, flat surface where a head should be. It carried a club that was literally a texture file labeled "TEXTURE_MISSING" in bold red letters.

[Boss Detected: Wireframe Behemoth]

[Level: Unquantifiable]

[Status: Rejected Asset]

"A deleted boss," Alvian mused, looking up at the monstrosity. "Probably removed for being too buggy. Let’s see why."

The Behemoth swung its club. The attack was slow, but the hitbox was broken. The club was ten feet away from Alvian, yet the force slammed into him as if he had been struck directly.

"BANG!"

Alvian was sent flying, crashing into a pile of floating rocks.

[-12,000 HP!]

[System Warning: Phantom Hitbox Detected.]

"Its reach is larger than its model," Alvian analyzed, wiping blood from his lip. "That’s annoying."

The Behemoth raised its foot to stomp. Alvian saw the wireframe grid on the ground light up red—the danger zone indicator. It extended twenty meters beyond the foot’s actual size.

"Physics Lesson Number Twenty-Two," Alvian whispered, his eyes glowing violet. "If the code is broken, exploit the crash."

He didn’t dodge out of the zone. He ran toward the boss. He activated [Genesis Mode], pushing his speed to the absolute limit.

"System. Maximize [Void Step]. Chain cast."

He teleported. Once. Twice. Five times in a second. He was a flicker in the system, moving faster than the Behemoth’s targeting script could update. He appeared on the Behemoth’s knee, then its shoulder, then directly in front of its faceless head.

"You have no textures," Alvian said, gripping his lance with both hands. "Let me give you one."

"[Glacial Void Pierce]: Blue Screen."

He drove the lance into the center of the Behemoth’s chest. He didn’t just inject mana; he injected the raw, chaotic energy of the [Chaos Sovereign Seed] he had consumed. He introduced a variable the boss’s code couldn’t handle.

"ERR-OR... ERR-OR..."

The Behemoth froze mid-swing. Its grey polygon body began to flash rapidly between red and blue. The texture file on its club scrambled. The sound of a computer crashing—a long, droning buzz—filled the air.

"Crash," Alvian commanded.

He twisted the lance. The Behemoth exploded. It didn’t shatter into rocks; it burst into a shower of white pixels and static.

[Target Deleted.]

[System Adaptation: [Void Monarch] learns [Glitch Step].]

[New Ability: Passively ignore 10% of enemy collision detection.]

Alvian landed softly on the ground. He checked his inventory. No loot. Just the satisfaction of debugging the world.

"Inefficient rewards," Alvian muttered. "But necessary survival."

He looked toward the horizon. Through the grey mist, he saw a tear in the environment. A patch of vibrant, sickly green color that didn’t belong in this grey world. It looked like a rip in a painting, revealing a different layer beneath.

"The Wood Shard," Alvian realized. "Seraphina."

He started walking. The glitches of this world were annoying, but a corrupted forest? That was something he could burn.

The transition between the grey wasteland of the Glitch Zone and the Wood Shard was instant and nauseating. Alvian stepped through the tear in reality and was immediately assaulted by a wall of humidity and the cloying scent of over-ripe flowers.

He stood on a thick branch of a tree that was easily a kilometer high. Above him, a green sky churned with clouds of pollen. Below him, an endless canopy of twisted vegetation stretched into the dark. This wasn’t a forest; it was a tumor made of wood and leaf.

[Zone Identified: The Wood Shard]

[Environmental Hazard: [Mana Siphon]. The flora consumes ambient energy.]

[Warning: Do not touch the flowers.]

"A parasitic ecosystem," Alvian noted. He watched a bird—a creature made of bark and leaves—land on a flower. The flower snapped shut, crushing the bird and drinking its glowing blue blood.

He checked his mana. The drain was constant. The air itself was trying to eat him.

"Inefficient," Alvian muttered. The [Tear of the Infinite] in his chest spun, generating mana faster than the environment could steal it. He was a walking buffet that never ran out of food.

"Seraphina," Alvian tapped his comms crystal. "Location."

Static. Then, a faint, breathless voice.

"Alvian... roots... endless... can’t cut..."

"Hold on," Alvian said. "I’m coming."

He moved. He didn’t walk; he leaped from branch to branch, his [Vestments of the Void Monarch] repelling the grasping vines that tried to snag him. The plants here were aggressive. Thorn-whips lashed out. Spore-pods detonated. But against Alvian’s 800 Physique and [Void Shell], they were nuisance weeds.

He followed the mana trace. Seraphina’s signature was faint, flickering like a dying candle. She was deep in the understory, the darkest part of the shard.