Awakening a 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier in the Apocalypse

The roar didn’t just echo. It physically vibrated the marrow in Sebastian’s digital bones. The temperature in the canyon, already sitting at a miserable minus thirty degrees, violently plummeted.

It was a sudden, catastrophic freeze that made the air itself turn brittle!

”Boss!” Galleon screamed, pointing a stubby finger toward the far end of the valley. ”Big fucking bird! Really big fucking bird!”

Sebastian whipped his head around, abandoning the trapped General Iron.

From the deepest, darkest chasm of the icy canyon, a nightmare pulled itself into the grey sky.

Velkhana, the Frost Monarch!

She was a Level 50 World Boss, and she was breathtakingly terrifying. Her body was sleek and serpentine, spanning easily two hundred feet from her horned snout to the tip of her razor-sharp tail. She wasn’t covered in standard scales. Her entire physical form seemed to be composed of interlocking shards of pristine, glowing blue crystal and indestructible permafrost.

Every beat of her massive, crystalline wings sent localized blizzards tearing across the valley floor!

[Entity: Velkhana, Frost Monarch (Level 50)]

[Status: Awakened]

[Passive Aura: Absolute Zero: Mana Conduits Frozen]

”Alright,” Sebastian gritted his teeth, feeling the intense, unnatural cold biting right through his twenty-percent physical synchronization. ”Time to cook this oversized iguana. Valerie, Wraith, get behind me!”

Sebastian planted his boots firmly in the snow. He raised his right hand, extending his thumb and middle finger.

He didn’t need to play games. He didn’t need to whittle down her health bar. He had the ultimate cheat code! He just needed to drop a miniature sun on her head and be home in time to organize his warehouse.

He reached deep into his glitched mana pool, grasping for the conceptual law of nuclear fusion.

”Solar Flare,” Sebastian commanded, snapping his fingers.

Click.

Fzzzt...

A tiny, pathetic ember of orange light popped into existence above his thumb. It flickered weakly, let out a sad little hiss of steam, and instantly died.

Nothing happened! The sky didn’t ignite. The sun didn’t drop.

Sebastian blinked, staring at his empty hand. ”huh?”

He tried again. He channeled a massive surge of his infinite mana, forcing it down his arm. ”Solar Flare!”

Click.

Puff. A tiny ring of grey smoke drifted away on the wind.

”Uh, Sebastian?” Valerie yelled over the howling wind, her teeth chattering so hard they sounded like a rattlesnake. ”Why isn’t she turning into glass?!”

Sebastian looked at his UI. The glowing blue interface was covered in jagged, frosty warning signs.

[System Error: Spell Execution Failed.]

[Reason: Ambient Mana Frozen by Absolute Zero Aura.]

”Son of a bitch,” Sebastian cursed, realization dawning on him.

Velkhana wasn’t just a big monster with a lot of health. Her Level 50 passive aura didn’t just deal cold damage. It physically lowered the temperature of the server’s ambient mana to the point where kinetic and thermal energy could not ignite!

His fire magic was choked out. The environment simply wouldn’t allow the concept of a sun to render.

”My magic is frozen!” Sebastian yelled back. ”The aura is suppressing the rendering engine for thermal spells!”

”Well, un-freeze it!” Galleon shrieked, hiding behind a chunk of shattered glacier.

High above them, Velkhana banked sharply. Her glowing, sapphire eyes locked onto the four tiny specks of meat standing in her domain. She didn’t care about their glitches, nor did she care about the crushed Iron Covenant.

She just wanted them dead!

The Frost Monarch opened her massive jaws. A terrifying, blinding light of concentrated frost gathered in the back of her throat.

”She’s breathing! Cover!” Sebastian roared.

”Aegis!” Valerie screamed, slamming her oak staff into the snow.

The glowing blue dome of hard-light magic erupted around them just as Velkhana unleashed her breath weapon.

It wasn’t a stream of fire. It wasn’t even a stream of ice.

It was a localized, hyper-accelerated storm of jagged, microscopic glass shrapnel propelled by hurricane-force winds!

KRA-KRA-KRA-KRA!

The breath hit Valerie’s shield like a billion bullets firing simultaneously. The sound was deafening, a high-pitched screeching of tearing magic and shattering ice.

The sheer kinetic force of the blast pushed the entire group backward, their boots carving deep trenches into the snow.

”It’s too heavy!” Valerie screamed, dropping to one knee. Her arms were shaking violently as she poured every ounce of her maxed-out stamina into maintaining the shield. Blood dripped from her nose, instantly freezing on her upper lip. ”The durability is dropping too fast!”

Sebastian watched the blue hard-light dome begin to spiderweb with cracks.

Outside the shield, the landscape was being systematically erased. The ice storm sheared through solid boulders, turning them into dust. The frozen corpses of the Iron Covenant soldiers were caught in the blast and literally sanded down to nothing. General Iron’s invulnerability bubble finally shattered, and the man was ripped into a thousand bloody, frozen pieces before he could even scream.

”Wraith!” Sebastian barked, looking at the invisible patch of air next to him. ”Can you get us out of here?”

”Negative,” the Assassin’s tight voice echoed over the comms. ”The ambient cold is dealing continuous tick damage. If I drop Shadow Meld to carry someone, the freeze will instantly snap our health bars to zero.”

CRACK!

A massive fissure appeared right down the center of Valerie’s shield.

”Sebastian!” Valerie cried out, her digital muscles tearing under the strain. ”Do something!”

Sebastian didn’t panic. Panic was a luxury for the weak.

His fire magic was locked out. His gravity domain required an anchor point, and the dragon was flying too fast to trap.

He needed to see the code. He needed to find the flaw in the monster’s perfectly rendered design.

”Hold on, Princess,” Sebastian said, his voice entirely calm. ”I just need a look.”

He closed his eyes and channeled his mana directly into his optic nerves, bypassing the environmental freeze by keeping the spell entirely internal.

He activated his most dangerous utility skill.

[Conceptual Law: True Sight]

----

Sebastian opened his eyes. The agonizing spike of pain drove itself deep into his skull as his retinas were violently overwritten by the game’s raw source code.

The swirling blizzard, the blinding white snow, and the terrifying ice storm all vanished. The physical world melted away into a dark, empty void filled with glowing geometric lines of data and math.

He looked up at Velkhana.

Through the lens of True Sight, she wasn’t a majestic dragon of pristine blue crystal. She was a massive, incredibly complex wireframe of interconnected subroutines and health pools.

But perfection in The Ethereal Plane was a lie. Everything had a weak point!

Sebastian’s silver-tinged eyes scanned the massive, beating heart of the dragon’s code. He looked past her heavily armored chest, past the indestructible scales on her wings, and down to the soft, under-rendered geometry of her belly.

His breath hitched.

”Disgusting,” he whispered.

Clinging to the very center of the Frost Monarch’s underbelly was a parasite. It was a massive, rotting lump of jagged, corrupted black code that did not belong in the Ethereal Plane’s bestiary. It was a Void scar.

The parasite was roughly the size of a school bus. It pulsed with a sickly, neon-purple light, slowly siphoning the dragon’s mana. Thick, bubbling streams of black pus dripped from the open sore, severely degrading the armor values of the scales immediately surrounding it.

”She’s infected,” Sebastian said, his voice echoing with the metallic resonance of True Sight. ”The Void got to her before we did. There’s a massive armor breach on her lower abdomen. If I can hit that sore, I can bypass her elemental defenses and hit her physical core.”

”Great!” Valerie groaned, her knees buckling as another wave of ice shrapnel pounded against the fracturing shield. ”How do you plan on hitting a target moving at Mach two, three hundred feet in the air?!”

Sebastian toggled True Sight off, the blinding pain in his eyes receding as the snowy reality crashed back in.

”I need to get up there,” Sebastian said, his mind already rapidly calculating the physics. ”And I need her to hold still.”

Valerie looked up at him. The corporate heiress was gone. The terrified girl from the penthouse was gone. Her eyes were completely wild, burning with the raw, unyielding adrenaline of survival.

”I’ll get her attention,” Valerie growled, spitting a glob of frozen blood onto the snow.

Before Sebastian could stop her, Valerie forcefully dropped the Aegis shield!

SHATTER!

The blue dome exploded into harmless light. The howling, razor-sharp wind instantly slammed into them.

But Valerie didn’t freeze. She tapped deep into her class mechanics.

[Class Evolution Activated: Arcane Valkyrie]

A blinding flash of pure, kinetic white light erupted from her back. Two massive, translucent wings composed entirely of hard-light energy tore through her silk robes and unfurled with a majestic, resonant hum.

Valerie didn’t wait. She kicked off the ground, her new wings propelling her straight up into the freezing sky like a missile!

”Valerie, wait!” Sebastian yelled, his heart actually skipping a beat.

She ignored him. She soared directly into the path of the Frost Monarch!

”Hey, ugly!” Valerie screamed, raising her oak staff. She channeled her maxed-out stamina into raw, concussive force. ”Look at me!”

She swung her staff through the air.

BOOM!

A massive, invisible wave of kinetic energy slammed squarely into the side of Velkhana’s head.

It didn’t do much damage, but it carried enough blunt force trauma to snap the dragon’s massive head to the side.

Velkhana roared, her hellfire eyes locking onto the tiny, winged human who had just slapped her. The dragon completely ignored the men on the ground. She banked hard, her massive tail sweeping through the air like a lethal whip, aiming directly for Valerie.

”Dodge it!” Sebastian yelled, his hands balling into fists.

Valerie tried to pull up, but the Arcane Valkyrie class was new. Her flight mechanics were unrefined.

The tip of the dragon’s crystalline tail clipped her side.

CRACK!

The sickening sound of Valerie’s digital ribs snapping echoed over the wind. She was thrown through the air like a ragdoll, spinning out of control.

Sebastian’s eyes went completely, terrifyingly dead. The cold, calculating apathy vanished, replaced by an absolute, murderous void.

He watched Valerie arrest her spin. She didn’t fall. She coughed up a massive mouthful of blood, but she leveled out. She raised her staff again, her face twisted in pure agony, and fired another kinetic bolt at the dragon’s eye.

She was holding the line. She was keeping the beast hovering in one place.

”Galleon,” Sebastian said, his voice so quiet and cold it made the dwarf flinch. ”Give me your climbing rope.”

The dwarf scrambled, pulling a heavy coil of enchanted dwarven rope and a rusted iron piton from his pack. ”Here, boss!”

Sebastian didn’t cast an offensive spell. He used his [Expert Extraction] passive. He forcefully fused the iron piton to the end of the rope, channeling a tiny fraction of his mana to reinforce the structural integrity of the metal.

He created a crude, mathematically perfect grappling hook.

He didn’t wind up, nor did he aim carefully. His synchronized biological muscles knew exactly how to calculate the trajectory.

Sebastian threw the hook.

With his twenty percent physical synchronization, the heavy iron spike shot upward with the velocity of a sniper bullet!

SHLUCK!

The iron barb completely bypassed the dragon’s frozen scales and sank deep, directly into the soft, rotting flesh of the Void parasite on Velkhana’s underbelly.

The dragon shrieked in sudden pain, her massive body thrashing.

”Hang on, Princess,” Sebastian whispered.

He grabbed the end of the rope with both hands, planted his feet, and forcefully activated his [Gravity Domain], reversing the polarity on himself.

Sebastian was violently yanked into the sky, reeling himself up the rope at terrifying speed, flying straight toward the belly of the beast!