SSS Ranked Talent: I Can Upgrade My Skills Infinitely-Chapter 182: Null Pointer Exception, Deleting the Dragon King

Chapter 182: Null Pointer Exception, Deleting the Dragon King

He abandoned his spellcasting posture. The liquid metal armor shifted, hardening into jagged, muscular plates. He kicked off the air, breaking the sound barrier instantly. He crossed the fifty feet between them in a microsecond, his massive fist drawn back for a blow that carried the kinetic weight of a falling moon. He was Level 70. His base stats alone were enough to shatter continents.

Alvian didn’t use his spear. He didn’t want to just kill the King; he wanted to break his spirit completely.

Alvian caught the punch.

The impact created a concussive shockwave that rippled out for miles, shattering the remaining clouds and flattening the ocean below them into a perfect mirror. But Alvian didn’t move an inch. His [Chaos Body], fueled by the [Star-Core Pill] and his Limit Breaker physique, absorbed the Level 70 strike effortlessly. His feet remained planted in the empty air.

Apollyon’s golden eyes bulged. His fist was caught in Alvian’s pale, seemingly fragile grip, held as securely as if it were encased in hardened steel.

Watching from the safety of the balcony, Valeria’s heart hammered frantically against her ribs, her protective instincts screaming at her to leap into the sky and join him. She gripped the hilt of her sword so hard her knuckles ached, her eyes never leaving his solitary form, silently swearing to tear the heavens apart if the Dragon King managed to land a fatal blow.

"Your physical parameters are impressive," Alvian said calmly, slowly twisting Apollyon’s massive fist. The sound of adamantine bones groaning under the pressure filled the air. "But my stats are no longer bound by integers."

Apollyon howled in pain, ripping his arm back with a violent jerk that tore the armor from his own knuckles. He retreated, hovering unsteadily. The physical assault had failed. The magical assault had failed. He was cornered.

Desperation drove the King to his final, forbidden protocol. If he couldn’t beat the stats, he would manipulate the server architecture. He still retained his Beta-Tester authority, a hidden string of code that allowed him to modify player statuses.

Apollyon’s eyes glowed with a sickly, corrupt green light. He raised his hand, pointing two fingers at Alvian.

"Command Line Override!" Apollyon screamed, blood leaking from his nose as he forced the system to obey his antiquated authority. "Target: Alvian. Action: Strip Buffs. Action: Paralyze. Action: Force Log Out!"

The air between them flickered with lines of green binary code. The System interface manifested physically, a glowing terminal attempting to execute the commands on Alvian’s character file. For a fraction of a second, Alvian’s [Vestments of the Void Monarch] dimmed.

Then, Alvian blinked.

His eyes turned into swirling galaxies of violent, infinite white light. The [Void Sovereign] class did not just grant him power; it granted him ownership. He reached out with his free hand and physically grabbed the string of green code hovering in the air.

"Access Denied," Alvian stated.

He crushed the code in his fist. The green light shattered into useless sparks.

Apollyon gasped, clutching his head as the backlash of the failed command shocked his nervous system. He looked at his own interface. It was turning red. Padlocks were appearing over his skill trees, his passives, his inventory.

"What are you doing?!" Apollyon shrieked, his voice high and terrified. "My skills! They’re greyed out!"

"You tried to hack an Administrator," Alvian said, stepping forward. He raised the [Edge of Entropy]. The jagged tear in reality hummed, eager for the execution. "Your permissions have been revoked."

Apollyon tried to flee. He turned to dive back toward the safety of his stunned army, back toward the rift. But without his skills, without his [System Breaker] talent, he was just a slow, heavy lizard in a metal suit.

Alvian used [Void Step], appearing directly in front of the fleeing King.

There was no grand swing. No dramatic shout. Efficiency dictated a clean, central strike.

Alvian thrust the [Edge of Entropy] directly into the center of Apollyon’s chest plate.

There was no sound of metal piercing flesh. There was no explosion of blood or mana. The colorless spear slid into the Dragon King’s torso as easily as a shadow crossing a wall.

Apollyon froze. His hands reached up, hovering inches from the spear shaft, afraid to touch it. He looked down at the wound. There was no damage number floating above his head. His health bar didn’t deplete.

Instead, a cascade of red error text began to bleed out of his physical form.

[Null Pointer Exception.]

[Entity Data Corrupted.]

[Initiating Deletion Protocol.]

"No," Apollyon whispered, his form beginning to lose cohesion. His legs turned into floating pixels. "I am... the King. I am the... old world..."

"The old world is archived," Alvian said, his eyes cold and empty. "Goodbye."

Alvian pulled the spear out.

Apollyon’s face froze in a mask of silent screaming. His entire body broke apart into a trillion fragments of red data, dissolving into the wind. He didn’t leave a corpse. He didn’t drop loot. The boss of the expansion pack was simply and permanently deleted from the server.

Alvian stood alone in the sky, the red rain finally ceasing as the source of the corruption vanished. He lowered his weapon, the crushing weight of his Admin status settling comfortably into his bones. The war was over. The board was clear.

—-

The sky above the Azureus server was empty. There was no corpse. There was no grandiose explosion of light or raining loot. Apollyon, the Dragon King who had terrorized the beta cycles and dominated the expansion pack, had simply ceased to exist.

Miles away from the epicenter of the deletion, hovering in a stealth-skiff cloaked in shifting optical polygons, Voice Four collapsed to his knees. The Syndicate Handler stared at his central command console. The holographic displays were vomiting a cascade of fatal error messages. Red text bled across his visor, the system failing to comprehend the absence of an entity that was hardcoded into the server’s foundation.

"No," Voice Four stammered, his hands trembling violently as he clawed at the console. "No, no, no. The baseline code. The armor. He had absolute nullification. He was a Level 70 administrator asset!"

[Error: Entity ID ’Apollyon’ Not Found.]

[Error: Faction ’Draconic Legion’ Command Structure Missing.]

Voice Four ripped his helmet off, gasping for the synthetic air of the skiff. He looked out through the viewport at the lone, black-robed figure hovering in the distant sky. Alvian Cross. The Anomaly.

It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t a glitch. It was a fundamental overwrite of reality.

"We can’t fight him here," Voice Four breathed, his mind fracturing under the weight of the realization. "He owns the database. He owns the physics. If we stay in Gods Domain, he will delete us all."

He slammed his fist onto the emergency extraction protocol. A jagged, swirling portal of green energy tore open in the back of the skiff—a tether directly to the physical servers in the real world. Earth.

"All Syndicate personnel, evacuate!" Voice Four screamed into the wide-band comms. "Abandon the server! Retreat to the physical plane!"

Down on the battlefield, the remaining thousands of Draconic Legionnaires, suddenly stripped of their King’s buffs and the Syndicate’s command structure, broke into a panicked frenzy. But Voice Four couldn’t leave loose ends. He couldn’t let Alvian harvest the remaining dragons to further fortify the city.

"Engage Scorched Earth," the Handler whispered, his finger hovering over a glowing red terminal key. "Burn the assets."

He pressed it.

Across the sprawling coral plains and the ruined trenches, the heavy, adamantine collars clamped around the necks of the Draconic Legion began to glow with an unstable, blinding white light.

High above, Alvian’s newly acquired Admin-level perception picked up the massive spike in thermal and kinetic potential. He looked down. Fifty thousand dragons, from the lowliest wyverns to the towering siege behemoths, were convulsing.

"They triggered a self-destruct sequence," Alvian stated, his voice a cold, metallic echo in the silent sky. "Inefficient losers. If they can’t win, they flip the board."

[Warning: Mass Detonation Imminent.]

[Estimated Blast Radius: 500 Kilometers.]

[City of Azureus Destruction Probability: 100%.]

The combined explosive force of fifty thousand high-level mobs detonating simultaneously wasn’t an attack. It was a localized supernova. The city’s newly upgraded Mythical wards were strong, but they were designed to weather a siege, not a point-blank planetary cracking event.

"Valeria!" Alvian’s voice boomed through the comms. "Brace the core! Divert all city power to structural integrity!"

He didn’t wait for her confirmation. Alvian dropped from the sky, plummeting toward the center of the draconic army. He couldn’t freeze them. He couldn’t kill them fast enough. He had to contain the blast.

He raised his left hand, the [Heart of Azureus] fusing with his [Void Sovereign] authority.

"System," Alvian commanded, his eyes turning into swirling galaxies of white light.