Having problems booting into the system, presuming a problem with pacman

[pebcak]

Perhaps you could try regenerating your mirrorlist before doing sudo pacman -Syyu again.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mirrors
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Reflector

Also have a look at the following post:

[FAQ] error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/…/{desc,files,mtree}: No such file or directory

Your local package database and/or metadata may become corrupted if an update process is interrupted, for example if you hard power off during an update. Metadata corruption will generally manifest in a message similar to: error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/$pkgname-$pkgver-$pkgrel/desc: No such file or directory error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/$pkgname-$pkgver-$pkgrel/files: No such file or directory error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/$pkgname-$pkg…