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

He watched the slaughter with the cold, detached interest of a scientist observing a mildly successful experiment in a petri dish.

A massive, rusted chunk of a dreadnought’s hull, easily the size of a shopping mall, plummeted from the sky directly toward him.

Sebastian didn’t move. He didn’t cast a shield.

The moment the massive piece of debris entered his immediate, personal airspace, the [Law of Rotting Gravity] hit its maximum threshold. The falling steel instantly turned into a cloud of fine, harmless red ash that washed over him like a warm breeze, briefly dusting his black leather coat before blowing away into the Juncture.

”Fascinating,” Sebastian murmured, watching a Level 90 Paladin plummet past him, screaming wildly as his rotting armor dragged him down into the endless void below. ”The math holds up perfectly.”

High above, the Righteous Dawn finally gave way. The flagship’s massive central spine snapped with a sound like thunder. The front half of the dreadnought tilted downward, spilling hundreds of screaming, rusted Saints off the deck.

Grigori clung desperately to the railing of the observation deck, his holy armor heavily pitted and flaking away. He stared down through the falling debris, his wide, terrified eyes locking onto the lone figure standing on the dock.

The Warlord of the Heavens finally understood. He hadn’t brought an army to execute a glitch. He had brought a buffet to feed a monster.

Sebastian casually raised his right hand, extending two fingers in a lazy, mocking salute to the falling commander.

”Safe travels,” Sebastian whispered.

The flagship crumbled into ash, and the sky of steel was entirely, absolutely deleted.

The sky above Outpost Rust had completely stopped being a sky. It was no longer a swirling, toxic purple void of forgotten server data and cosmic smog. It had become a horrifying, chaotic ceiling of collapsing white steel, violently flashing red error codes, and the screaming remnants of a holy armada.

When the flagship Righteous Dawn snapped its massive, city-sized spine, it was the final domino in a catastrophic chain reaction. The Law of Rotting Gravity did not care about the grand, majestic history of the Outer Servers. It did not care that these were the elite colonizers of the Ethereal Plane, players who had spent decades grinding their levels, maxing out their stats, and hoarding the most expensive armor in the multiverse.

The math of Sebastian’s newly authored patch note was brutal, absolute, and entirely unbiased. Mass multiplied by entropy equaled accelerated chronological decay.

And the Saints were incredibly, foolishly heavy.

As the colossal dreadnoughts buckled and tore apart, tilting their shattered decks toward the endless abyss of the Juncture, they spilled their cargo. Tens of thousands of elite, Level 80 and Level 90 players lost their footing. They slid across the rapidly rusting durasteel hulls, their frantic, clawing hands failing to find purchase on metal that was flaking away like dead skin.

Then, they fell.

It was a literal rain of heavily armored men and women plummeting from the heavens.

Down on the rusted, jagged docking bay of the dead space leviathan, Sebastian stood with his hands casually stuffed into the pockets of his black leather coat. He tilted his head back, his featureless silver eyes tracking the descending swarm.

”You know, you’d think guys who fly around in space castles would pack a parachute,” Sebastian muttered to himself, his voice a calm, deadpan hum amidst the deafening roar of the apocalypse. ”Or at least a bungee cord. But no. Just pure, unadulterated hubris.”

The falling Saints didn’t just plummet in silence. They shrieked. It was a chaotic, overlapping chorus of pure human terror, entirely stripped of the arrogant, divine filters they usually spoke through. They were dropping like heavily armored stones, thousands of feet above the slums of Outpost Rust.

Normally, players of their caliber wouldn’t panic over a simple fall. A Level 80 Paladin could easily cast a localized anti-gravity ward. A high-tier Mage could summon a cloud of condensed air to catch themselves. They had wings made of hard-light and boots enchanted with the ability to walk on the wind.

But the moment they crossed the invisible, ten-mile threshold of Sebastian’s localized domain, their fancy tricks violently short-circuited.

High above, a Level 82 Vanguard Knight named Kaelen was tumbling head over heels through the dark air. He was clad in a massive, interlocking suit of pristine diamond-weave plate armor. It was a masterpiece of digital blacksmithing, granting him near-absolute immunity to physical and magical damage. It weighed over eight hundred pounds.

”Flight! Activate Flight!” Kaelen screamed, desperately tapping the glowing blue runic array on his gauntlet.

The runes sparked, sputtered, and died.

The Law of Rotting Gravity recognized the massive weight of Kaelen’s armor. And the server’s newly updated physics engine immediately applied the penalty.

Kaelen’s pristine diamond-weave plates didn’t just tarnish. They aggressively oxidized. The brilliant, shining metal instantly turned a sickly, bruised brown, then rapidly shifted to a deep, flaky orange rust. But the destruction of his expensive gear was the absolute least of his problems.

Because the heavy armor was directly touching his digital avatar, the chronological rot transferred directly into his biology.

”My skin! Oh God, my skin!” Kaelen shrieked.

The aging effect was so fast it was visually nauseating. In the span of a single heartbeat, the young, muscular face of the Vanguard Knight wrinkled and sagged. The moisture in his body evaporated. His healthy, pink flesh turned a sickly, mottled gray.

The sheer weight of his rusting armor pressed down on his rapidly decaying bones. His internal organs, aged centuries in a fraction of a second, simply liquefied into a foul, black sludge. Kaelen’s screaming turned into a wet, gurgling wheeze as his lungs collapsed like dry tissue paper.

He didn’t even make it halfway to the ground.

With a sickening, muffled crunch, the heavy, rusted armor crushed the mummified corpse inside it into fine, gray powder. The rusted metal suit then lost its own structural integrity, blowing apart in the howling wind and scattering the player’s ashes across the sky.

Kaelen’s health bar didn’t tick down. It just vanished from the server’s registry.

This exact, horrifying process was happening to tens of thousands of players simultaneously.

The sky above Outpost Rust became a massive, churning meat grinder. The heaviest tanks and frontline fighters died the fastest, their massive shields and thick breastplates acting as instant executioners. They aged, rotted, and crumbled into dust in the blink of an eye.

The lighter classes—the rogues and the mages wearing silk robes and leather—lasted a few seconds longer. But the ambient gravity of the domain was still pulling them down, and their bodies still possessed baseline mass. They fell, their skin violently blistering, their hair turning white and blowing away, their bones turning brittle.

They became bloated corpses, then screaming skeletons, and finally, just clouds of gray, pixelated ash raining down on the dark void.

It was a terrifying, beautiful display of raw administrative power.

”It’s like a really bad weather forecast,” Sebastian sighed, wiping a tiny speck of gray dust off the shoulder of his coat. ”Today’s weather: heavy showers of angry gamers with a hundred percent chance of osteoporosis. I should have brought an umbrella.”

He watched as the massive, rusted chunks of the dreadnoughts hit the invisible boundary of the Juncture’s underlying bedrock, far below the floating slums. The impact was entirely silent in the vacuum of the void, but the visual was stunning. Massive, city-sized pieces of space-faring architecture simply shattered into harmless, rusted sand.

The golden, divine auras that had illuminated the sky just a minute ago were completely extinguished. The oppressive, arrogant pressure of the Holy Crusade was gone.

All that remained was the snow.

It wasn’t real snow. It was the combined, pulverized remains of ten thousand elite players and their indestructible armor. A thick, suffocating blanket of gray ash and bone dust began to drift down over the neon-lit, rusted roofs of Outpost Rust.

The scavengers and thugs hiding in the slums below peeked out from their reinforced bunkers and dirty alleyways. They held out their hands, catching the gray flakes, entirely unable to comprehend the scale of the violence they had just witnessed. They had seen warlords fight. They had seen guilds clash.

But they had never seen a man stand with his hands in his pockets and simply tell an entire army to expire.

Sebastian stood near the edge of the docking bay, his boots slowly getting covered in the fine, gray powder. He let out a long, slow breath. His thirty percent physical synchronization was humming smoothly, his body completely unfazed by the apocalyptic spell he was currently maintaining.

”Well,” Sebastian said to the empty, quiet dock. ”I guess they won’t be sending another collection notice.”

He pulled up his green-and-blue hybrid UI. The system was frantically updating, trying to process the sheer volume of targets that had just been permanently deleted from the active registry. The experience point notifications were completely disabled; he couldn’t level up past the Demigod tier without another specific trigger, but the kill feed was staggering.