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

”Come on, come on, open the damn door,” Grigori pleaded, his eyes darting around the falling debris as a swirling, golden portal slowly began to tear open in the air in front of him.

He had nine seconds left.

Down on the rusted docking bay, Sebastian stood with his hands casually stuffed into the pockets of his black leather coat. He watched the glowing white speck of the Paladin hovering in the sky. He watched the golden portal slowly rendering into existence.

”He’s trying to log out,” Sebastian sighed, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing in pure annoyance. ”People have zero gaming etiquette these days. You don’t rage-quit in the middle of a boss fight.”

Sebastian didn’t bother shouting. He didn’t bother pulling out a sniper rifle.

He just tapped into his localized Ethereal mana pool.

[Skill Activated: Heavenly Steps]

Fzzt.

Up in the air, Grigori watched the countdown timer on his portal. Three seconds. Two seconds. He could see the pristine, sterile white marble of the Senate halls through the golden tear. He was going to make it. He was going to survive.

A shadow completely blotted out the light of his portal.

Grigori gasped, his heart slamming against his ribs.

Sebastian had instantly materialized directly in front of the Paladin, completely bypassing the physical distance. The Drifter hovered in the air, entirely unsupported by wings or magic, his boots just resting casually on the invisible bedrock of his own physics edits.

”Hey there,” Sebastian said, his voice a flat, deadpan hum. ”Leaving so soon? We haven’t even talked about your extended car warranty.”

”You!” Grigori shrieked, stumbling backward in mid-air. He instinctively reached for his massive diamond warhammer, only to realize he had dropped it during the fall.

Grigori raised his hands, his holy aura flaring with desperate, blinding intensity. ”Get away from me, you corrupted virus! I am a Saint of the Void! I am backed by the Grand Design! If you strike me down—”

”If I strike you down, you die. That’s how health bars work, genius,” Sebastian interrupted, completely unimpressed by the glowing light show.

Sebastian didn’t draw his heavy, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword. He didn’t want to use his [Concept of Decay]. He had just watched a whole fleet rust to death, and honestly, the sheer amount of dust in the air was making his nose itch. He wanted something a little more personal.

Sebastian reached out with a terrifying, frictionless speed. Before Grigori could even fire off a basic smite, Sebastian’s right hand clamped directly over the Paladin’s face.

His black leather glove completely covered Grigori’s eyes and nose. His steel-dense fingers dug into the sides of the man’s pristine white helmet, gripping the holy armor like a bowling ball.

”Mmph! Get off!” Grigori muffled, thrashing wildly. He grabbed Sebastian’s wrist with both hands, trying to pry the Anomaly off.

It was like trying to pry a steel beam off a welded joint. Sebastian’s thirty-percent physical synchronization made him an immovable object.

”You guys love talking about the code,” Sebastian whispered, his silver eyes completely devoid of warmth or empathy.

”You love the System. So let me give you a little piece of my mind.”

Sebastian opened his green Admin UI. He didn’t pull a weapon. He pulled a localized system glitch.

He accessed the [Error Accumulation] mechanic he had unlocked from the Juncture Scavenger. He didn’t need to force his own heart to beat backward this time to generate the corrupted data. He had plenty of residual garbage code sitting in his temporary cache from deleting an entire armada.

He highlighted exactly fifty percent of that pure, unadulterated software Error.

”Transfer,” Sebastian commanded.

[Action Registered: Error Transfer.] [Target: Saint Grigori.] [Payload: 50% Critical Error Code.]

He forcefully shoved the corrupted binary directly through his palm, injecting the malware straight into the Paladin’s brain.

The reaction was instantaneous and entirely horrific.

”GRRRRRAAAAGH!” Grigori’s muffled scream tore through Sebastian’s fingers.

It wasn’t a scream of physical pain. It was the agonizing, mind-breaking shriek of a digital entity experiencing catastrophic software failure.

The pristine, white holy armor encasing the Saint instantly began to violently bubble and warp. The flawless durasteel turned a sickly, bruised purple, covered in jagged, flashing red warning prompts.

Error was the absolute predator of Admin-code. And Grigori had just been pumped full of it.

The Paladin’s body ballooned. His muscles hypertrophied at a terrifying, illogical rate.

Thick, pulsating black veins erupted across his neck, entirely replacing his biological tissue with grotesque, tumorous chunks of raw data. The holy wings of light behind his back violently sputtered, turning into jagged spikes of green static before snapping completely off.

”The math... it hurts!” Grigori gurgled, his eyes bulging against Sebastian’s palm. Blood—thick, black, and completely pixelated—began to violently pour from the gaps in his armor.

”Yeah, bad code will do that to a guy,” Sebastian said casually.

Sebastian let go of the Paladin’s face and took a casual step backward onto his invisible platform.

He didn’t need to finish the job. The virus was already doing the heavy lifting.

Grigori floated in the air, his body expanding and contorting into a horrifying, asymmetrical mass of mutated flesh and broken polygons.

He reached a trembling, distorted hand out toward the open golden portal leading to the Senate.

”Save... me...” Grigori wheezed, his voice sounding like a skipping audio file played through a blown-out speaker.

He never reached the portal.

The Level 95 Warlord’s digital biology finally reached critical mass. The server could not mathematically sustain the conflicting data of his holy class and the aggressive, terminal Error injected into his core files.

POP.

It started as a small rupture in his chest plate.

And then he violently, catastrophically exploded.

KRA-SQUELCH!

It was a literal bomb of pixelated gore. A massive shower of black blood, thick chunks of corrupted meat, and jagged red error strings blasted outward in every direction.

Grigori didn’t just die; his entire character model was violently evicted from the Ethereal Plane.

Sebastian calmly raised a single hand, summoning a microscopic [Micro-Deflection] shield just in time to stop a massive, flying chunk of the Paladin’s mutated ribcage from hitting him in the face.