SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors

Chapter 73: 73. 97% World Annihilation and He Chose This Moment to Give a TED Talk

The air didn’t just vibrate; it screamed. A new system notification tore through Lucian’s field of vision, a violent, jarring intrusion of color he had never seen in all his time since his rebirth.

It wasn’t the calm blue of a quest or the steady gold of a level up. It was a searing, bleeding crimson background with jagged, molten gold text, a visual alarm that signaled the system itself was in a state of high alert panic.

[ WARNING: CALAMITY TIER ENTITY EMERGING ]

[ MANIFESTATION PROGRESS: 15% ]

[TIME UNTIL FULL AWAKENING: 02:00:00]

[ IF COMPLETION REACHES 100%: WORLD ANNIHILATION PROBABILITY 97% ]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: TERMINATE CORVUS BLACKTHORN BEFORE COMPLETION]

Lucian stared at the timer, the seconds already beginning to bleed away. There was no time for a tactical briefing, no time to explain the sheer, existential terror of a ninety-seven percent extinction rate.

He didn’t need to. The atmosphere on the plateau had shifted from the adrenaline of combat to the cold, suffocating weight of a countdown to the end of all things.

"We have two hours," Lucian said, his voice cutting through the roar of the ritual like a blade. "We stop Corvus before that circle finishes."

"No distractions. No hesitation."

"Then we don’t waste a single heartbeat, sweet boy," Serenia replied. Her usual playful lilt was gone, replaced by a razor-sharp focus.

The golden dome of the Divine Sanctuary flared, brightening with a sudden, intense luminescence as she redirected her mana, hardening the barrier to withstand the coming apocalypse.

"Focus on him. I’ll hold the line against the sky."

Beside him, Glacielle, the woman who had faced down frost giants and elder dragons without a tremor in her hands, was staring at the ritual circle with a look of raw, unmasked dread. It was the closest thing to true fear Lucian had ever seen in her eyes.

"Master..." she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "It’s not just a ritual."

"It’s a wound in reality... How do we fight something that large? How do you kill a god in its crib?"

"We don’t fight the god," Marshal interjected, her voice flat, cold, and terrifyingly certain.

She stood like a statue of war, her eyes already calculating the distance to the enemy. "We kill the man holding the leash."

"Corvus is the anchor. We tear him away, and the god starves."

Octavia’s tentacles swayed in slow, restless arcs, lashing at the air as if sensing the invisible threads of the Calamity.

"Two hours to save the world," she mused, her tone uncharacteristically heavy, stripped of its usual whimsical detachment. "How delightfully... urgent."

Serenia glanced from the darkening sky to the madness in Corvus’s eyes, and for a moment, the smug, untouchable goddess vanished. In her place was a warrior who understood the stakes.

She looked at Lucian and gave a singular, sharp nod. "Two hours is a lifetime if you know how to spend it. We’re that good. Remember that."

Lucian didn’t wait for another word. He began to walk, his boots heavy on the blood-soaked stone, heading straight toward the heart of the storm.

Corvus watched his approach with the terrifying patience of a man who knew he held the clock in his hands. He stepped out from the center of the ritual, meeting them at the outer ring of the obsidian stones.

Up close, the corruption was sickeningly visible. The purple light wasn’t just etched into his black plate armor; it was pulsing through the gaps like glowing, necrotic veins.

The energy had begun to fuse with his very biology; his eyes were no longer human but swirling pools of violet madness, and the air around his fingertips distorted with a heat that smelled of ozone and burnt copper.

As he looked at the party lined up behind Lucian, a wall of the world’s most powerful legends, something in his expression shifted from manic glee to a condescending, dark pity.

"You know what your problem is, rookie?" Corvus asked, stopping twenty feet away.

The distance was a calculated insult, a space he could close in a heartbeat if he chose to strike. "You think this is a story."

"You think this is about winning. About saving the weak. About being the grand hero of a legend." He let the silence hang, heavy and suffocating. "It’s not."

Lucian tightened his grip on his weapon, his muscles coiled, his eyes burning with a defiance that refused to be cowed by the god-sized shadow looming above them.

"Then what is it about, Corvus?" he demanded, his voice steady despite the world shaking beneath his feet. "If it’s not about saving us, then what are you actually dying for?"

What spilled from Corvus’s lips was not the rehearsed monologue of a villain explaining his grand design. It wasn’t a lecture on power or a boast of supremacy.

Instead, it was a raw, bleeding confession, the sound of a man who had spent lifetimes compressing a mountain of agony into a small, tight space, only to have the structural integrity of his soul finally fail.

The manic grin didn’t vanish, but it cracked, revealing a hollow, terrifying void beneath.

"It’s about the ceiling, Lucian," Corvus said, his voice dropping into a register that was quiet, damaged, and hauntingly intimate. "It’s about the lie of progress."

He took a step forward, the violet veins in his armor pulsing in time with his heavy, ragged breathing. "You think you’re special because you’ve climbed the ladder?"

"You think because you’ve conquered dungeons and reached the heights of synchronization, you’re infinite? You’re not."

He let out a short, bitter laugh that sounded like grinding stones. "I was a Gacha master once."

"Just like you. I had a party. I had warriors who would have died for me, bonds that were as visceral and real as the blood currently pumping through your veins."

"I had a soulmate, Lucian."

"A woman who loved me with a completeness that made the very concept of the system seem trivial."

"When we synchronized, it wasn’t just a combat buff; it was a fusion of two entire existences."

His eyes flickered toward Glacielle for a fraction of a second, a look of such profound, ancient grief that it made the air around them feel cold.

"And then," he whispered, his voice trembling with a sudden, violent intensity, "we hit the wall."

The ground groaned beneath him, a low, mournful sound. "Level one hundred."

"The System’s great, cruel joke..."

"It doesn’t tell you when the journey ends; it just slams you into the ceiling without warning. Maximum capacity."

"Synchronization maxes out."

"You reach the pinnacle of what a human can be, and then... you just stop."

"You plateau. You become a static thing in a world that refuses to stand still."

He slammed a fist against his chest plate, the sound a dull, metallic thud that echoed the finality of his words. "The world doesn’t care that you’ve reached your limit."

"The monsters keep getting bigger."

"The disasters keep getting deadlier."

"The ’calamity’ doesn’t wait for you to level up."

"It just comes to harvest the stagnant."

The violet light in his eyes flared, turning from a glow to a roar. "I tried everything to break it."

"I tried to force synchronization past the designed capacity; it was a nightmare of agony."

"I felt my warriors’ bones splintering and their minds fracturing under the pressure, the feedback tearing through our nerves like serrated blades, but the System’s documentation never mentioned that ’progress’ meant literal, physical mutilation."

"It never told us that to grow, we had to break."

He gestured wildly to the ritual circle, to the screaming captives, and to the darkening sky. "I turned to the ancient rituals, the ones the texts describe in such sterile, technical terms that they hide the true cost."

"They don’t tell you that ’expanding the bond network’ requires a tithe of blood and the systematic sacrifice of everything you hold dear."

"They don’t tell you that the ’energy’ required is the life force of a thousand souls."

His voice rose to a crescendo of desperate, holy madness. "I turned to the forbidden summons."

"Things outside the Gacha parameters."

"Entities that can be called from the void but can never be safely contained."

"I have spent years dancing on the edge of madness, tearing at the seams of reality just to find one more inch of growth, one more ounce of power, just to prove that the ceiling... the ceiling is a lie!"