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

The delivery arrived at the heavy titanium gates of Sanctuary just past noon.

It wasn’t a caravan of grateful refugees seeking asylum, nor was it a heavily armed raid party looking for a fight. It was a single rusted beat-up pickup truck.

The engine sputtered and choked on the ambient mana before screeching to a halt right at the edge of the golden barrier.

A lone terrified soldier wearing the burnt and ash-stained insignia of Sector 7 stepped out. He didn’t say a word. He just dropped a crude wooden crate onto the pavement, scrambled back into the truck, and sped off into the wasteland like a monster was chasing him.

Sebastian and Valerie stood in the outer courtyard as two hulking Scrap Golems dragged the crate inside the walls.

”Did someone order takeout?” Sebastian asked dryly, leaning against the cold obsidian wall of the inner gate.

”I don’t think it’s pizza,” Valerie grimaced, covering her nose. The crate smelled awful. It smelled like raw meat and rotting waste.

With a simple lazy flick of his wrist, Sebastian utilized a micro-fraction of a telekinesis spell. The wooden lid of the crate was violently ripped off, clattering loudly against the cobblestones.

Valerie looked inside and instantly turned away, violently dry heaving. ”Oh, god!”

Sebastian didn’t flinch. His deadpan eyes stared into the box.

Resting on a bed of blood-soaked straw were the severed heads of three Sanctuary scouts. Their eyes were wide with frozen absolute agony. Their faces were heavily bruised and blistered with severe burn marks. The system hadn’t let their bodies despawn yet.

Pinned to the forehead of the center skull with a jagged iron combat knife was a piece of dirty parchment.

Sebastian calmly stepped forward, pulled the knife out with a wet SHLUCK, and unfolded the paper. He read the crude handwritten scrawl aloud.

”’To the false king of Sanctuary. Sector 7 is under the absolute jurisdiction of Imperator. Your scouts were trespassing on sovereign soil. You have three days to deliver fifty thousand units of clean water, ten tons of medical supplies, and your total submission. Pay the Protection Tax, or my army will turn your little glass castle into dust.’”

Sebastian finished reading. He didn’t scream in rage. He didn’t crush the paper in a display of overflowing magical power.

He just let out a slow deeply exhausted sigh.

”I really hate politicians,” Sebastian muttered, tossing the bloody note onto the ground. ”They always want to tax the middle class.”

Valerie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her blue eyes flashing with pure unadulterated fury. The Arcane Valkyrie was fully awake.

”He butchered our people!” Valerie snarled, gripping her oak staff so tightly the wood groaned. ”Sebastian, give the order! I will personally lead the Abyss Knights. We will fly the Sky-Fortress right over his pathetic little scrap camp and flatten the entire grid!”

”Calm down, Princess,” Sebastian said, his voice terrifyingly steady. He waved a dismissive hand.

”We aren’t wasting artillery shells on a tantrum. Imperator is a Warlord. His entire class mechanic is based on absorbing the kinetic energy of frontal assaults to buff his own stats. If you shoot a railgun at him, you just give him a free level-up.”

”So what do we do? Let him extort us?!”

”We starve him,” Sebastian corrected coldly.

He tapped his comm-link. ”Wraith. Courtyard. Now.”

A patch of shadow stretching from a nearby Scrap Golem suddenly detached itself and stood up. Wraith materialized, his twin daggers already resting loosely in his hands. He took one look at the severed heads in the box and his posture stiffened.

”Orders, Boss?” Wraith asked, his raspy voice completely devoid of emotion.

”Imperator has three thousand men,” Sebastian stated, pacing slowly around the crate. ”Three thousand heavily armed, highly aggressive soldiers. But they are sitting on the border of a Level 45 Fire Elemental zone.”

He paused as he glanced at Wraith.

”Do you know what three thousand men need in a desert of ash and magma, Wraith?”

”Water,” the Assassin replied instantly. ”And an uninterrupted supply of calories.”

”Exactly,” Sebastian smiled. It was a cold cruel expression that promised absolute ruin. ”An army marches on its stomach. If the stomach rots, the army dies. I don’t want you to assassinate the General. I want you to assassinate his logistics.”

Sebastian opened his inventory and pulled out a single glowing vial. The liquid inside wasn’t the bright restorative green of a healing potion. It was a sickly bubbling pitch-black sludge.

It looked like pure concentrated poison.

”Liquid Necrosis,” Sebastian explained, tossing the vial to Wraith. The Assassin caught it carefully.

”A Tier 4 alchemical poison I brewed using the corrupted bile from the Void Titan. It doesn’t deal immediate damage. It applies a severe highly contagious [Rot] debuff. It turns whatever it touches into biological waste.”

Sebastian leaned in closer, his silver eyes locking onto the Assassin.

”Sneak into Sector 7. Bypass their patrols. Find their primary water reservoirs and their food stores. Drop exactly three drops into their supply chain. And then, you come home and we wait.”

Wraith pocketed the vial with a sharp nod. ”Consider their pantry closed, Boss.”

He activated his [Shadow Step] and vanished into thin air.

Sebastian turned back to Valerie, who was staring at him with a mix of awe and horror.

”Clean up this mess,” Sebastian ordered, gesturing to the box of heads. ”We have a Warlord to conquer.”

One week later. Sector 7 Encampment.

The heat was suffocating, but it was the smell that truly broke the mind.

Imperator’s grand military encampment had devolved into a literal horrifying circle of hell. The crude scrap metal barricades were still standing, but the men defending them were completely broken.

The Liquid Necrosis had done its job with terrifying mathematical efficiency.

Within twenty-four hours of Wraith’s infiltration, the camp’s water supply had turned toxic. Within forty-eight hours, the dysentery began.

Now, on day seven, it was a slaughterhouse of disease.

Soldiers in heavy plate armor lay curled in the ash, groaning in absolute agony as they violently expelled black bloody sludge from their bodies. The medical tents were overflowing with men whose internal organs were slowly liquefying.

The stench of waste, vomit, and rotting flesh hung over the camp like a physical blanket.

They couldn’t fight. They couldn’t even stand up.

And because they were starving, the unthinkable happened.

In the dark corners of the camp, desperate maddened soldiers had turned on the weak. The horrifying sounds of wet tearing and crunching bone echoed through the tents as the healthy resorted to cannibalizing the dead and the dying just to stave off the [Extreme Starvation] debuff ticking their health bars down to zero.

In the center of the camp, sitting on a throne of melted cars, was Imperator.

The Warlord was a massive scarred man, but his eyes were sunken, and his skin was pale. His class mechanics couldn’t save him from biological failure.

He clutched his stomach, his hands trembling violently.

Footsteps echoed through the camp. Calm steady completely unbothered footsteps.

Imperator slowly raised his head.

Walking through the center of the diseased rotting army was Sebastian.

He didn’t wear a gas mask. He didn’t look disgusted. He wore his pristine black leather coat, his hands resting casually in his pockets as he navigated the puddles of biological waste with a bored expression.

He stopped ten feet from the Warlord’s throne.

”You look like shit, General,” Sebastian noted casually.

”You...” Imperator gurgled, blood leaking from his cracked lips. He tried to draw his heavy broadsword, but his arm simply refused to lift the weight. ”You poisoned us... you fought like a coward...”

”I fought like a man who doesn’t like paying taxes,” Sebastian corrected, his silver-tinged eyes glaring down at the broken commander.

Sebastian didn’t draw a weapon. He just looked at the horrifying cannibalistic reality of the camp around him.

”You have no food. You have no water. Your men are eating each other,” Sebastian said, his voice ringing with absolute crushing authority.

He placed his hands in his pockets and smiled.

”I have the cure. I have the sanctuary. You have exactly three seconds to transfer the administrative rights of Sector 7 to me, or I turn around and let you all shit yourselves to death.”

Imperator stared at the cold unyielding face of the Drifter. He looked at his dying army.

His pride finally shattered under the unbearable weight of the Ethereal Plane’s reality.

With a trembling weeping hand, the Warlord opened his digital interface and hit surrender.

Sebastian smiled. ”Pleasure doing business with you.”