SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 174: The Usurpation, Crown of the Empty King

"System. Initiate Fusion. Target: [Voidpiercer]."

[Warning! Weapon durability insufficient for divine-tier fusion.]

"I don’t need the weapon to survive," Alvian said. "I need it to cut."

He grabbed the Anchors. He didn’t use the forge. He crushed them against the blade of his dagger. The elemental energies screamed as they were forced into the black metal. The dagger turned white hot, cracks spreading along its surface. It was dying. It was becoming a single-use key.

"Valeria! Seraphina! Pin him!" Alvian shouted.

"On it!" Valeria yelled.

She threw her shield. It spun through the air, ricocheting off the invisible walls of the arena. Prime knocked it aside, but that was the distraction. Valeria tackled him. She wrapped her arms around his waist, locking her hands.

"[Titan’s Embrace]!"

She rooted herself. Her weight became infinite. Prime thrashed, raining blows on her back, denting her armor, breaking her ribs, but she didn’t let go.

"Let go, you glitch!" Prime screamed.

"Seraphina!"

Seraphina appeared on Prime’s shoulders. She drove both daggers into the gaps of his pauldrons, locking his arms in place.

"Gotcha, landlord!"

Prime was immobilized for one second. One critical second.

Alvian moved. He didn’t use [Void Step]. He walked. He walked calmly up to the struggling mass of gods and heroes. He looked Prime in the eye.

"You built this tower to hide," Alvian said. "You paused your time because you were afraid of the ending. You disconnected from the server."

Alvian raised the glowing, cracking dagger.

"I’m plugging you back in."

He didn’t stab Prime in the heart. He didn’t stab him in the head. He stabbed the empty air directly behind Prime’s neck.

"SEVER."

He drove the [Voidpiercer] into the fabric of the Dimensional Gap. He targeted the thread of silver light that connected Prime to the infinite mana of the void.

"TEAR!"

The sound was like a violin string snapping in a silent room. The silver thread was cut. The [Voidpiercer] shattered into dust, its job done.

Prime went rigid. The violet light in his eyes flickered. The oppressive aura of the Administrator vanished instantly. He wasn’t a god anymore. He was just a high-level player with no mana regeneration.

"My... my admin access..." Prime whispered, falling to his knees as Valeria released him. "You... you disconnected me?"

"I revoked your privileges," Alvian said, standing over him. "Admin rights are for those who maintain the system. Not those who hoard it."

The grey mist around the tower began to swirl violently. The stability of the Dimensional Gap was failing without its master.

"The realm is collapsing," Prime laughed, a broken, wheezing sound. "You killed us all. Without me to stabilize the Gap, the void will consume this data."

"No," Alvian said. He looked at his hand. He looked at the [Tear of the Infinite] in his chest.

"The void doesn’t need a master," Alvian said. "It needs a Sovereign."

The Spire of Deleted Dreams was dissolving. The black glass floor turned to smoke under their feet. The walls of the office melted into code. The sky turned a terrifying, static white.

"We need to leave!" Seraphina shouted, grabbing Alvian’s arm. "The instance is crashing!"

"Not yet," Alvian said. He shook her off gently. "Go. Take Valeria. Use the [Earth Anchor] remnants to guide you back to Azureus."

"And leave you?" Valeria coughed, blood staining her lips. "Not a chance."

"I’m not staying to die," Alvian said. He looked at the swirling chaos of the collapsing dimension. It was raw data. It was unformed reality. It was infinite potential. "I’m staying to loot."

He pointed to the exit. "Go. That is an order from your High Marshall."

Valeria looked at him. She saw the violet fire in his eyes. She saw the calculation. She nodded. She grabbed Seraphina and jumped off the crumbling platform, activating her return stone. They vanished in a flash of blue light.

Alvian was alone with Prime.

The older version of himself sat on the dissolving floor, staring at his hands. He was fading. His level was dropping. Level 99... Level 80... Level 50...

"You’re going to absorb it, aren’t you?" Prime asked quietly. "The Gap. The Code. The Authority."

"It’s inefficient to let it go to waste," Alvian replied.

"It will kill you," Prime warned. "It drove me mad. The voices of the deleted. The weight of the timelines. No human soul can hold the Void."

"I am not just human anymore," Alvian said. "I am an Anomaly."

Alvian opened his arms. He didn’t cast a spell. He opened his soul. He activated the [Super Upgrade System], but he didn’t target an item or a skill. He targeted the environment.

"System. Target: The Dimensional Gap."

[Warning! Target is a Plane of Existence. Size exceeds parameters.]

[Error. Authority Insufficient.]

"Override," Alvian commanded. "Consume the [Tear of the Infinite] as fuel. Consume my Health. Consume my Levels. Upgrade the User."

[Critical Warning!]

[Initiating Forced Evolution...]

"AAAARGH!"

Alvian screamed as the white static of the collapsing world rushed into him. It wasn’t mana. It was information. It was the history of a thousand failed timelines. It was the screams of every deleted character. It was the cold, hard logic of the game’s source code.

His skin cracked. His eyes burned out, turning into twin black holes. His level plummeted. 56... 40... 10... 1.

He was being unmade.

"Submit," Alvian roared at the void. "I am the player! You are the game! SUBMIT!"

He forced his will upon the chaos. He structured the data. He built a fortress in his mind to house the infinite nothingness. He didn’t try to fill the void; he became the container for it.

Prime watched, his fading eyes wide with awe. "He’s... he’s re-compiling the zone inside himself."

The grey mist vanished. The static cleared. The Spire was gone.

Alvian stood in the center of a perfect, silent blackness. He was floating in nothing. But he wasn’t lost. He was the nothing.

[System Alert: Evolution Complete.]

[Class Update: [Void Monarch] -> [Void Sovereign].]

[Rank: SSS (Admin Privilege Acquired).]

[New Skill: [Realm of the Empty King]. You may pull targets into your personal dimension.]

[New Skill: [Absolute Erasure]. Delete target data. Cooldown: 7 Days.]

Alvian opened his eyes. They were no longer violet. They were galaxies.

He looked at Prime. The older Alvian was transparent now, a ghost of a ghost.

"You did it," Prime whispered, a smile touching his scarred lips. "You cheated the house."

"I won," Alvian corrected.

"One piece of advice, kid," Prime said as he began to dissolve into particles of light. "The Convergence isn’t just an invasion. It’s a merger. The System isn’t trying to destroy Earth. It’s trying to save it. But the method... the method is flawed."

"Then I’ll fix it," Alvian said.

"Good luck, Anomaly. You’re going to need it."

Prime vanished.

Alvian was alone in his new kingdom. He clenched his fist. The dimension rippled. He had the power. He had the army. He had the authority.

He swiped his hand. A portal opened. Not to Azureus. To the surface. To the location of the Dragon King Apollyon.

"Playtime is over," Alvian said. "Time to clear the board."

He stepped through the rift. The King had returned.

The silence following the destruction of the Spire was absolute. It was not the quiet of a library or the hush of a sleeping city; it was the total absence of auditory data. Alvian stood in the center of the void, his feet resting on a plane of existence that he had essentially willed into being. He was no longer just a user of the system; he was a part of its architecture.

The [Void Sovereign] class hummed within his soul, a cold, dark sun that had replaced the frantic, burning engine of his previous self. He looked down at his hands. They were pale, flawless, glowing with a faint, inner luminescence that shifted between the violet of the void and the white of creation. He felt heavy, as if he carried the gravitational pull of a black hole in his chest, yet his mind was clearer than it had ever been.

Across from him, the translucent form of Alvian Prime flickered. The older, scarred version of himself was dissolving, his data integrity failing now that the Dimensional Gap had been absorbed by his younger self. The Warden’s chair, his desk, his screen—they were already gone, deleted from the cache. Only the man remained, holding on through sheer force of will.

"You upgraded the environment," Prime whispered, his voice sounding like static on a dying radio frequency. "You didn’t just break the tower. You consumed the prison."

"Efficiency," Alvian replied, his voice resonating with a strange, metallic echo that he hadn’t intended. "Leaving raw resources untapped is wasteful. You built a kingdom of garbage. I refined it into fuel."

Prime smiled, a sad, crooked expression that cracked the scars on his face. "Arrogant. Just like I was. But stronger. I calculated every variable, Alvian. I ran the simulations a million times. The Convergence is an inevitable event. It is a merger of two hard drives. The file size is too big. The corruption is inherent in the transfer process."