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

[WARNING: CRITICAL SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED.]

[BIOLOGICAL VESSEL UNSTABLE. FORCED SYNCHRONIZATION AT 50% IMMINENT.]

[PROCEED?]

”Yes, you stupid machine! Do it!” Sebastian roared into the freezing air.

The moment he confirmed the prompt the world stopped making sense.

The pain didn’t hit him like a physical blow. It hit him like a nuclear detonation inside his nervous system.

”AGGGHHHH!” Sebastian screamed as his voice tore his vocal cords. He fell to his knees on the frozen asphalt and clutched his head as his physical reality violently collided with the game’s raw source code.

His body began to glitch.

It was horrifying to witness. One second his arm was covered in black leather and pale human skin. The next microsecond the flesh dissolved entirely into a translucent wireframe mesh of green and black digital polygons.

His biological meat and the server data were fighting a brutal tug-of-war for dominance over his existence.

Blood poured from his nose and his mouth and his eyes. But it wasn’t just red liquid. It flickered rapidly between human blood and glowing blue Ethereal mana and jagged strings of error code.

He spat a mouthful of the corrupted sludge onto the ice. It instantly vaporized into static.

His physical brain was quite literally cooking. Smoke poured from his ears as his synapses fired at ten thousand times their normal capacity. He felt every single atom in his body being torn apart and brutally stitched back together. It was needed to accommodate the sheer crushing mass of a Level 10,000 multiplied demigod.

[Synchronization Rate: 50%]

[Physical Limiters Disabled. Conceptual Anchors Established.]

Sebastian slowly forced himself to stand. His legs trembled wildly. His avatar flickered in and out of the visual spectrum. He left trailing afterimages of himself whenever he moved.

He looked up at the Void Titan.

Through the lens of his now permanently active True Sight the skyscraper-sized mound of flesh and geometry wasn’t just a monster. It was a complex interlocking fortress of conceptual armor.

The Titan was shielded by layers of mathematical paradoxes. Fire wouldn’t burn it because it negated the concept of heat. Swords wouldn’t cut it because it negated the concept of physical separation.

Standard magic was utterly useless.

”You think your math is perfect,” Sebastian wheezed. His voice sounded like two distinct entities speaking at once. One human and one entirely digital. ”You forgot about the trash bin.”

He didn’t reach for an epic spell. He opened his violently glitching UI and found a basic administrative tool he had looted from a low-level Ethereal scribe.

[Basic Spatial Deletion]

[Tier: 0 Utility]

[Effect: Removes minor unwanted items from a player’s personal housing plot.]

It was a spell designed to delete ugly chairs and misplaced rugs from a virtual living room.

Sebastian crushed the concept in his mind. He forced the raw unadulterated power of his 50 percent synchronized body and his 10,000x Nexus Glitch into the pathetic string of code.

[Action Registered: Cast Basic Spatial Deletion.]

[Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.]

[WARNING: FATAL ARCHITECTURE ERROR.]

[Basic Spatial Deletion evolves to Conceptual Law: Reality Overwrite.]

The throbbing agonizing pain in his head suddenly vanished. It was replaced by a cold absolute clarity.

He didn’t just understand space. He owned it. He possessed the administrative authority to highlight a section of the universe and simply tell it to stop existing.

The Void Titan was charging up its second pulse. The low-frequency hum grew to a deafening pitch.

WUB-WUB-WUB.

The space around the monster vibrated so violently that the surrounding skyscrapers began to peel apart like wet paper.

Sebastian didn’t point a weapon. He simply raised his glitching translucent right hand and extended his index finger. He aimed it directly at the exact center of the Void Titan’s massive fleshy bulk.

He didn’t cast a projectile. He targeted the absolute X, Y, and Z coordinates of the space the Titan currently occupied.

”Delete,” Sebastian commanded softly.

He mentally clicked the button.

There was no explosion. There was no epic flash of elemental magic. There was just a sudden absence.

A perfectly spherical void of absolute nothingness appeared directly in the middle of the Titan’s torso. It was a hundred feet in diameter.

Inside that sphere there was no air and no light and no code and no flesh. It was a flawless erasure of reality.

The Void Titan’s hum cut off instantly.

The monster’s advanced AI didn’t even have time to process the damage. The spatial erasure completely ignored its conceptual armor and its massive health pool and its Void Shields.

The sphere of nothingness had perfectly bisected the monster.

For a fraction of a second the skyscraper-sized abomination hung suspended in the air. The top half of its massive body rested perfectly above the lower half. It was separated only by the invisible plane of deleted space.

Then gravity remembered how to work.

SQUELCH.

The top half of the Titan slowly slid off the bottom half.

”Timber,” Sebastian whispered. His avatar flickered wildly.

The upper torso of the beast plummeted toward the city below. It weighed tens of thousands of tons. It hit the financial district with the force of a localized asteroid strike.

BOOM!

The impact was cataclysmic. Entire city blocks of glass and steel were instantly crushed into fine powder. The ground violently bucked and sent a massive shockwave tearing through the streets.

But the real horror was the blood.

Without the conceptual armor to hold the monster’s biology together the severed halves of the Titan violently depressurized. A literal tidal wave of thick blue blood erupted from the bisected torso.

Millions of gallons of the corrosive sludge washed over Downtown Metropolis. It flooded the streets and melted the remaining abandoned cars into slag. It completely dissolved the corpses of the Void Crawlers Sebastian had frozen earlier.

The blue tsunami tore through the financial district and wiped away the remnants of the old world in an acidic wash.

High above the Abyssal Gate shrieked. Without the massive anchor of the Titan to hold the spatial tear open the black wound in the sky began to violently collapse in on itself. It shrank rapidly before snapping shut with a deafening CRACK.

The invasion was over.

Down in the ruined streets Sebastian lowered his glitching hand. The 50 percent synchronization began to forcefully dial itself back to 20 percent. The safety limiters slammed back into place to prevent his heart from exploding.

”Ugh,” Sebastian groaned and dropped to his hands and knees. The adrenaline evaporated and left behind a crushing unbearable wave of physical exhaustion. He vomited another mouthful of black sludge onto the asphalt.

He looked up at the sky. The red clouds were slowly beginning to thin and revealed the faint natural darkness of the night sky behind them.

He had done it. He had hit the delete key on a god. But as he wiped his chin he knew this was just the prologue. The system was about to hand out the real patch notes.