Prime System Champion [A Multi-System Apocalypse LitRPG]

I used to love the silence before a fight.

It felt like holding your breath before jumping into a cold lake. A moment of anticipation, a giddy little thrill of "what's next?"

Now, silence just tasted like violet dust. It tasted like standing in a line of freezing, screaming people for an eternity, unable to move a finger while a machine ate my soul in slow sips.

I shook my head, hard, physically trying to dislodge the memory of the Tower from my skull. Focus, Anna. You are not a battery. You are a warrior.

The Temple of Displaced Sorrow loomed over us, a jagged scar of grey stone against the bruised, glitching sky of this chaotic world. Lightning didn't just strike here; it crawled across the stone like living veins. The air hummed with a sound that wasn't quite noise — it was the vibrational scream of reality trying to hold itself together.

Eren was a few steps behind me. I could feel his [Predator's Gaze] radiating off him like heat from a furnace. He was tense. I knew every micro-expression on my brother's face, even under his essence-enhanced control. He was worried. He wanted to wrap me in his Aegis shield and stick me in the Sanctum until I was ninety.

But he stayed back. Because I needed him to.

"You're crowding," I murmured, my voice low. I didn't turn around.

"I'm watching your six," Eren replied, his tone neutral, though I heard the strain in it.

"Rexxar has my six," I said, tightening my grip on [Final Word]. The material of the bow felt warm and grounding in my palm — a physical truth in a world of lies. "You just watch. Please. Let me handle this alone."

I stepped through the shattered remains of the barrier. The interior of the temple was vast, a cavernous hall of columns that stretched up into a darkness filled with floating debris. The gravity here was a suggestion at best. Massive chunks of masonry drifted lazily through the air, occasionally colliding with a dull, wet thud before glitching and reappearing somewhere else.

They detached themselves from the shadows of the pillars — four of them. They were fascinating things, golems roughly shaped like men but constructed from hovering shards of obsidian, held together by a core of crackling blue phase-energy. They didn't walk; they drifted, their forms blurring and stuttering as if the universe was having trouble rendering them.

"Mid-Tier 5," I whispered to myself. Stronger than me. Faster than me.

And utterly terrifying.

My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. A cold sweat prickled under my armor. The instinct to run, to curl up, to hide was a physical ache in my chest. The Tower had left a crack in my courage, a fracture that whispered insecurities.

I gritted my teeth until my jaw popped. Shut up.

I drew an arrow.

The lead Guardian didn't roar. It didn't pose. It simply vanished.

My instinct screamed Left!

I ducked, throwing myself into a roll. A beam of concentrated distortion energy carved through the air where my head had been a microsecond before. It didn't burn the stone pillar behind me; it erased a neat, spherical chunk of it.

I came up on one knee, breath hitching. They didn't just move fast; they moved instantaneously.

"Anna!" Eren took half a step forward, his hand drifting to his side.

"Don't!" I snapped, sharper than I intended. I locked my eyes on the shimmering space where the Guardian had appeared. "I have [Rewind]! If I need to, I will use it! Let me do this!"

I saw him freeze out of the corner of my eye. He hated it. He hated every second of it. But he held his ground.

I needed to stop reacting. Reacting was losing. In this temple, cause followed effect only if you forced it to.

I focused on the Guardian. It was charging a second shot, the blue light in its chest spiraling into a blinding white. But the other three were moving too, blinking around the room, setting up a kill box.

I couldn't track them visually. My eyes were too slow. So I stopped trying to.

I closed my eyes. Darkness swallowed the room. For a split second, the memory of the Void tried to grab me, panic flaring hot and bright. I shoved it down into the furnace of my mana.

I reached out with my spirit, feeling the weight of the air. I felt the probability ripples. Every time they blinked, they tore a tiny hole in the local spacetime. I could feel the drag of those holes.

One is flanking right. One is high. Two in the center.

The one up top first. He was the shooter.

I didn't open my eyes. I drew [Final Word] to full tension. The strain bit into my fingers, a lovely, sharp pain.

My Will is the Anchor.

I activated my heavy grey mana. It flooded my veins, not fiery and expansive like Eren's, but dense. Solid. Like lead poured into the framework of the world.

I spun and loosed blindly toward the ceiling.

The arrow screamed upwards. To anyone watching, it looked like a panicked miss. But I felt the moment the connection snapped into place.

The arrow passed through the empty air just as the Guardian blinked into existence, intending to fire down on me.

The impact vibrated through my soul-link with the weapon. The Guardian materialized around the arrow. The projectile, laden with the conceptual weight of End, didn't just pierce its stone plating; it shattered the phase-coherence holding it together. The golem exploded into a shower of inert gravel, its core rupturing with a pathetic fizzle.

I opened my eyes. One down. Three to go.

The other three hesitated. Constructs shouldn't feel fear, but these things seemed to run on probability logic. They had calculated a zero percent chance of being hit. I had just introduced an error into their code.

I moved.

"Grover!" I shouted mentally.

My Anima responded instantly. A silver seedling of light burst from the stone floor beneath the second Guardian. Thick, luminous roots erupted upwards, not trying to crush the golem, but simply trying to occupy the space.

The Guardian tried to blink away. But Grover's roots were tangled in the ley lines of the room. The teleport fizzled. The construct stuttered, flashing in and out of existence, trapped halfway between here and nowhere.

I didn't hesitate. I drew two arrows at once. A skill I'd practiced a thousand times until my fingers bled. [Twin Fates].

I fired.

Both arrows caught the glitching construct in the chest. Its core detonated, sending a shockwave of blue light across the room.

Two down.

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But I had gotten arrogant. I had forgotten the last two.

A sudden, oppressive weight slammed into my side. No teleport. No beam. Just raw kinetic force.

One of the Guardians had blinked directly into me, swinging a massive stone limb like a club. I flew. The world spun in a nauseating blur of grey and black. I slammed into a pillar hard enough to crack the stone.

The breath left my lungs in an agonized wheeze. My vision swam. The pain was blinding — ribs, definitely broken ribs.

Through the ringing in my ears, I heard Eren shout my name. I felt the heat of the [Phoenix Rebirth] flaring up, ready to come down to save me.

No.

I scrambled up, coughing, clutching my side. "Stay… back!" I wheezed, tasting blood.

I looked up. The Guardian that hit me was hovering ten feet away, its core pulsing. It raised both arms to crush me. The fourth one was flanking, charging a beam.

I was hurt. I was cornered. And for a second, that violet fear rose up like bile. You are going to die. You are weak. Just give up.

Shut. Up.

I reached deep, past the pain, past the fear, and touched the cold, silver thread of my Soul Ability.

[Rewind].

I didn't use the full charge. I didn't rewind the world. I didn't want to go back to before the fight.

I rewound myself. Just my body. Ten seconds. A feat I did not know was possible yet somehow instinctively felt it now.

The sensation was like being dunked in ice water. The pain in my ribs vanished instantly. The breath returned to my lungs. The bruises faded. My position in space snapped back to where I had been standing ten seconds ago — right in the center of the room.

The Guardians froze. Their target had just vanished from under their fist and reappeared twenty feet away, fully healed.

I grinned, spitting out the blood that was no longer in my mouth. "My turn."

I drew [Final Word] again. But this time, I poured everything I had into it. My mana poured into it, shaping the arrow. A lance of pure, solidified Decision.

I aimed at the space between the two remaining Guardians.

They looked at me, cores glowing, preparing to blink.

"I didn't say you could leave," I hissed.

The arrow didn't hit a target. It hit the concept of the space between them. It slammed into the air and stuck there, hanging suspended.

A grey ripple shock waved out from the projectile.

The Guardians tried to teleport. They flickered… and failed. They tried to move. They jerked, sluggish and heavy, like they were swimming through drying concrete.

I had shot Time. I had anchored the moment so hard that movement itself became a labor.

I drew two more arrows, casual now. Walking toward them as they struggled in my trap, easily finishing them off.

The heavy grey field dissipated. The stone debris crashed to the floor.

Silence returned to the temple. But it wasn't the heavy silence of the Void. It was the quiet of a room that had been cleansed.

I lowered my bow, my hands shaking. Not from fear this time. From the sheer, exhausting output of mana.

"You okay?" Eren's voice was careful.

I took a deep breath, savoring the ache in my muscles because it meant I was alive. I checked my ribs. Ghost pains, nothing more.

"I'm good," I said, turning to face him. I wiped sweat from my forehead, smearing soot across my face. I tried to summon up my usual cheeky grin, the one I used to use to deflect his worry, but it felt heavy on my face. It came out as a tired, thin line. "Mid-Tier 5s. They hit hard."

"You hit harder," Rexxar grumbled approvingly, stepping over the rubble.

We pressed deeper. The temple was a maze of impossible geometry. We fought through corridors that spiraled upside down, chambers filled with phase-shifting spikes that required me to map their patterns in my head like a complex dance step.

With every room, I felt something in me shifting. The "block" I had felt at Tier 4, that ceiling I couldn't break, was cracking.

I wasn't just shooting anymore. I was seeing the lines.

When a stone fell, I didn't just see it falling; I saw where it would land before it hit the ground. When Kaelen dodged a trap, I knew exactly where he would place his paws. It wasn't precognition like Eren's [Glimpse]. It was a calculation. Hyper-accelerated deductive reasoning fueled by an intuitive grasp of cause and effect.

I was seeing the script of the world. And I was learning how to edit it.

Finally, we reached the Inner Sanctum.

It was a circular chamber, open to the storm clouds above. In the center sat a stone basin, ancient and weathered. It was filled with a liquid that looked like liquid starlight — iridescent, shifting, unstable.

The air around it smelled of pure possibility.

"The Guardian?" I asked, scanning the shadows.

"None," Arthur's clone murmured, looking around with wide eyes. "The Sentinels outside were the guards. This place… nothing living could stand to be this close to the source for long. The mana density is… caustic."

He pointed at the pool. "Stabilized Flux. Chrono-Milk. Kasian wasn't lying. This is pure fuel for a Temporal soul."

I walked toward the basin. The liquid seemed to whisper to me. It didn't promise power. It promised certainty.

I holstered my bow and knelt on the cold stone. My reflection in the pool was fractured, showing me a dozen different versions of myself — one older, one scarred, one crying, one laughing.

I looked at Eren. He stood by the entrance, his arms crossed. He nodded, once. He wasn't looking at me like his little sister anymore. He was looking at me like a warrior looks at a peer.

I turned back to the pool. I cupped my hands and dipped them into the starlight. It was freezing cold and boiling hot at the same time.

I brought it to my lips and drank.

The sensation was immediate and violent.

It felt like I had swallowed a lightning storm. The energy crashed into my core, ripping through my mana veins. I gasped, arching my back, doubling over on the stone floor.

"Anna!" Eren stepped forward, but I held up a hand.

The pain wasn't damage. It was an expansion.

My mind, which had felt foggy and slow since Va'lour, suddenly snapped into razor-sharp focus. The fog burned away. The memories of the Violet Tower — the despair, the frozen time — surged up, trying to drown me.

But this time, I looked at them.

I saw the Tower not as a monster, but as a mechanism. A process. It was just a line of code in the universe.

And codes can be rewritten.

I felt my Spirit stat — the measure of my will, my mental resistance, my perception — scream as it hit the invisible wall of Tier 4.

The Chrono-milk pushed against it. The trauma pushed against it. My anger pushed against it.

There was a sound like a gong being struck deep inside my skull. A pure, resonant note of silver light.

My eyes snapped open.

The world looked… different.

The erratic shifting of the temple walls had stopped. Or rather, they were still shifting, but I could see the pause between the shifts. I could see the nanosecond of stillness where reality made its choice.

The dust motes in the air hung suspended. I could track every single one of them.

I stood up. I didn't stagger. I rose with a perfect, liquid grace. I felt… calm. A profound, deep-ocean calm that the Violet Tower's oppression could never touch again.

I looked at my hands. A faint, silver filigree was etched into my skin, glowing softly before fading beneath the surface.

[Spirit Threshold Breached.]
[Attribute Evolution Complete: Spirit -> Tier 5. Aura has evolved into a manifested Domain.]
[New Skill Unlocked: [Sovereign's Perception].]
[Description: You no longer just observe the flow of time; you perceive the anchor points. Illusion and Probability flux are rendered inert before your gaze. ]

I clenched my fist. The air crunched in my palm, thickening in response to my thought. I wasn't just existing in the world anymore. I was heavy. My soul had gravity.

I turned to face them.

Eren, Arthur, Rexxar, Kaelen. They were all staring.

"Well?" Eren asked softly.

I took a breath. It tasted clean. The metallic taste of ozone was gone, replaced by the scent of pure clarity.

"The noise," I said, my voice sounding different even to my own ears — deeper, more resonant. "It stopped. I can see the lines, Eren. I can see where things are."

I walked toward them, my steps echoing clearly on the stone. I stopped in front of Eren. He looked relieved, but also a little sad, like he knew the girl who used to ask him to fix her scraped knees was gone for good.

I realized I must look intense. Covered in dust, soot, monster blood, glowing with eldritch silver light, with a face made of stone.

I forced a smile. It was smaller than my old ones, less manic, but it was real.

"Well," I said, shrugging one shoulder, a crack of the old Anna trying to surface. "That definitely… lifted my spirits."

Eren blinked. Then he groaned, dragging a hand down his face. "Really? You evolve to a transcended state of being, and that's the first thing you say?"

"Gotta stay grounded somehow," I muttered. I looked past him, back toward the entrance of the dungeon, back toward the Spire.

"One down," I said, tapping my chest where my Spirit burned bright and cold. "Two stats to go. My Spirit is ready. Now… I need to make sure my Body and Mana can keep up with the checks my mind wants to write."

I looked at my brother, my eyes clear and dry.

"Let's find the next fight."