SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 181: The Meat Grinder, Harvesting the Legion

Valeria lowered her claymore, her mouth slightly open as she watched the impenetrable red tide break and dissolve against their home. She glanced at Alvian’s profile, noticing the harsh, tired lines around his eyes softening just a fraction as the city’s defenses held perfectly. Without a word, she reached over and gently brushed a stray flake of ash from his dark collar, a quiet, intimate promise that she was still right beside him, even as he rewrote the rules of war.

"The defenses are self-sustaining," Alvian noted, his voice calm amidst the distant roar of dying monsters. "The more they attack, the stronger the walls become. It is a perfect closed-loop system."

"It’s a meat grinder," Valeria corrected, a shudder of awe in her voice. "They’re throwing themselves into a woodchipper."

Out on the battlefield, the arrogance of the Draconic Legion was breaking. The roars of conquest turned into shrieks of panic. The dragons were apex predators, but they had never encountered a prey that devoured them upon contact. The skies rained frozen blood, and the outer perimeter of Azureus glowed with an overcharged, terrible brilliance.

"They will realize it soon," Alvian said, his grip tightening on the [Edge of Entropy]. "The grunts will panic. The commanders will falter. And then, the King will have to step off his throne."

As if summoned by his words, the chaotic swarm of dragons suddenly halted. The skies darkened further as a suffocating, immense pressure rolled over the battlefield, snuffing out the localized mana storms.

The automated harvesting paused, not because the wards failed, but because the prey had stopped moving.

Alvian’s eyes narrowed. The first phase of the war was over. The stage was set, the fodder was cleared, and the true threat was finally walking into the light.

"Stay here," Alvian instructed, stepping toward the edge of the balcony. "The King is about to throw a tantrum."

—-

Miles away from the safety of the Azureus perimeter, hovering in the chaotic backlines of the Draconic Legion, a figure clad in shifting stealth pixels watched the massacre in absolute, paralyzing terror.

Voice Four, the Syndicate Handler assigned to coordinate the draconic assault, felt his breath catch in his throat. His tactical visor was flashing with so many critical error warnings it was nearly blinding him. He watched as twenty thousand of the most terrifying creatures in the server’s history were casually flash-frozen, shattered, and sucked into the city’s power grid.

"This is impossible," Voice Four stammered, his hands trembling over his command console. "The output required to instantly freeze a Level 60 Vanguard... the server shouldn’t even be able to process that math. He’s not fighting them. He’s farming them."

He tried to issue a retreat order, his fingers frantically flying across the holographic keys, but the command was overridden. A localized gravity field pinned his stealth-skiff in place. He looked up, his blood running cold.

Floating past the retreating remnants of the draconic vanguard was King Apollyon.

The Dragon King did not look like a general leading an army; he looked like a god descending to punish heretics. His liquid red metal armor rippled with a fury so intense it warped the air around him. He ignored the Syndicate Handler entirely, his burning golden eyes fixed solely on the floating, heavily armed fortress of Azureus.

"HALT!" Apollyon’s voice bypassed the physical atmosphere, ringing directly in the minds of every living creature on the battlefield. The remaining thirty thousand dragons froze in place, their wings beating in a synchronized, terrified rhythm.

"You feed yourselves to a machine!" Apollyon roared, his disgust palpable. "You die like mindless insects against a window! Stand down! I will break this glass myself."

On the balcony of the palace, Alvian watched the Dragon King approach the perimeter. The distance between them was miles, but with their enhanced perception, they were staring directly into each other’s souls.

"He’s going to manually breach," Alvian stated, his voice flat.

Before Alvian could step past the safety of the inner ward, Valeria caught his wrist. Her grip was tight, the metal of her gauntlet digging into his sleeve, betraying a flicker of fear she hid well. Alvian paused, letting his hand rest over hers for a fleeting second, drawing a quiet strength from her warmth before gently pulling away.

"I have to step outside," Alvian told her softly. "If he drops a World-Tier spell on the barrier, the feedback loop might fry the city’s core. I need to intercept."

He didn’t wait for her argument. Alvian activated [Void Step], vanishing from the balcony and reappearing a hundred meters outside the protective, multi-colored dome of Azureus. He stood in the open air, completely exposed, holding nothing but the jagged, colorless tear in space that was the [Edge of Entropy]. He didn’t even raise a shield.

Apollyon saw the solitary figure emerge and laughed, a sound that cracked the clouds above.

"You step out of your cage, Anomaly?" Apollyon sneered, raising his hands. "You think a new toy will save you from the code?"

The Dragon King didn’t bother with incantations. He didn’t bother with charging his mana. He activated his SSS-Rank talent, [System Breaker]. The talent that had allowed him to survive the old era. The cheat code that eliminated all cooldowns and casting times.

"Let us see your fortress withstand the end of the world."

Apollyon unleashed hell.

Without a fraction of a second’s delay, the sky above Azureus ignited. A hundred [Meteor Swarms] spawned simultaneously. A thousand [Void Blasts] tore through the atmosphere. The space between Alvian and the Dragon King became a solid wall of catastrophic, overlapping magic. It was a localized apocalypse, a spamming of ultimate abilities that should have crashed the server with its sheer graphical output.

And hidden within that barrage, Apollyon drew upon the deepest reserves of his core, preparing his ultimate execution script: [End of Days]. A concentrated, hyper-dense beam of pure, server-wiping energy designed to permanently delete whatever it touched.

Alvian stood in the path of the incoming destruction. His face remained a mask of absolute, terrifying boredom.

"Spamming high-tier skills without a tactical rotation," Alvian critiqued, his voice carrying clearly through the roar of the incoming meteors. "Highly inefficient."

He didn’t try to dodge the barrage. He didn’t try to summon a [Void-Mirror Aegis] to reflect it. He simply raised the [Edge of Entropy].

As the first wave of meteors and void blasts reached him, Alvian swung the spear in a lazy, horizontal arc.

The weapon didn’t cut the magic. It didn’t deflect it. The [Edge of Entropy] simply deleted the concept of the spells. The moment the fiery boulders and destructive beams touched the colorless blade, they vanished. There was no explosion, no shockwave, no residual heat. The code dictating their existence was highlighted and backspaced out of reality.

Alvian carved a perfectly calm, silent tunnel through the apocalyptic barrage, walking forward at a steady pace.

Apollyon’s golden eyes widened. The smirk vanished from his face. He released the [End of Days] beam, a pillar of white-hot deletion energy that dwarfed the city itself. It roared toward Alvian, threatening to consume him and the entire horizon.

Alvian didn’t break stride. He pointed the tip of his spear directly at the incoming beam.

The ultimate attack of the Dragon King struck the [Edge of Entropy]. For a microsecond, the two forces wrestled. Then, the beam simply unraveled. It peeled apart like dead skin, the terrifying energy dissolving into harmless, grey static before fading entirely.

The sky cleared. The barrage was gone. Alvian stood completely untouched, less than fifty feet from the Dragon King.

Voice Four, watching from the skiff, dropped to his knees, his mind fracturing as he processed what he had just seen.

Apollyon stared at his hands, then at the human in the black coat. The reality of the situation finally pierced through his millennium of arrogance. He realized, with a sudden, suffocating dread, that he wasn’t fighting a player who had found a clever exploit.

He was fighting the Administrator.

—-

The silence that followed the erasure of the [End of Days] spell was heavier than the deepest ocean trench. Apollyon, the King of the Draconic Legion, the terror of the Old Era, hung suspended in the air, his liquid red armor shivering with a sudden, frantic instability.

He had thrown the absolute pinnacle of destructive coding at a single human, and the human had simply swiped it into the recycle bin.

"You..." Apollyon’s voice lost its booming resonance, dropping into a harsh, metallic rasp. "That weapon. It isn’t an item. It’s a developer tool."

"It is a highly optimized solution to a recurring problem," Alvian replied, his voice devoid of any inflection. He held the [Edge of Entropy] loosely at his side, the jagged void-tear showing no signs of durability loss. "And you are the problem."

Panic, an emotion Apollyon hadn’t felt since the first server wipes centuries ago, flared in his chest. If magic was useless, if the code itself was being rewritten around him, he had only one option left. Raw, unadulterated physical violence.

"I WILL CRUSH YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS!" Apollyon roared.