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

Sebastian just let out a long, deeply exhausted sigh. ”I swear, trying to cancel a subscription with you guys is harder than going to the gym on a Monday. Always with the threats. Always with the drama.”

He stood perfectly still, his hands resting casually at his sides, fully expecting them to drop a meteor on his head or summon another invincible executioner. He had Root Access now. He felt confident he could just swipe away whatever flashy, endgame spell they decided to throw at him.

But the Grand Archons didn’t cast a fireball. They didn’t summon a massive sword of holy light. They were the supreme administrators of the Ethereal Plane. They didn’t play the game; they managed the servers. And when a file became too corrupted to exist, you didn’t fight it. You just sent it to the trash.

”INITIATING THE MASQUERADE PROTOCOL,” the Archons announced in perfect, terrifying unison.

Sebastian’s silver-tinged eyes narrowed. ”The what now?”

He didn’t get an answer. He got a system prompt that bypassed his green, corrupted Administrator UI entirely, rendering directly into the center of his visual field in glaring, unyielding red text.

[System Command: Masquerade Protocol Activated.] [Target Entity: Anomaly Zero.] [Executing Spatial Fragmentation. Re-routing Base Code.]

The transition wasn’t like a normal teleportation spell. It didn’t feel like being pulled through a portal or stepping through a tear in the Juncture. It felt like being forcefully shoved into a cosmic blender and having the puree violently mailed to a billion different zip codes.

Sebastian gasped, his hands flying up to his chest as the localized reality around him simply stopped recognizing his right to exist as a single, cohesive unit.

”What the... fuck is this?” Sebastian grunted, his voice heavily distorted, echoing back to him as if he were speaking through a broken fan.

His highly optimized, Demigod-tier biological meat-suit began to violently blur. He looked down at his left hand. The black leather glove and the pale skin beneath it were stretching, pulling apart into long, thin strings of pixelated spaghetti. He could literally see his own digital makeup separating.

The Archons weren’t trying to deal damage to his health bar. They were actively taking his avatar’s coordinates and scattering them across the entire multiverse.

To his right, a chunk of his shoulder suddenly vanished, instantly uploaded to a low-level goblin server in the Outer Rim. A fraction of a second later, he felt his left knee violently un-render, the data forcefully shipped off to a heavily irradiated survival server miles away.

He was being actively diluted. They were spreading his ten million units of raw Source Code so incredibly thin across the Ethereal Plane that he would simply fade into the ambient background radiation of the internet.

”Warning! Warning! Entity cohesion dropping below critical thresholds!” his green UI screamed, the holographic windows popping up by the dozens, completely obscuring his vision.

”Yeah, I noticed, Clippy!” Sebastian yelled, though half of his vocal cords had just been forcibly downloaded to a farming simulator on Server 314. His voice came out as a horrific, gurgling burst of static.

The pain wasn’t physical. He had deleted his nociception code weeks ago, perfectly separating his brain from the sensation of biological damage. But this wasn’t physical damage. This was existential erasure. It was the terrifying, mind-numbing vertigo of feeling your consciousness forcefully split into a billion different pieces. It was like trying to watch ten thousand different television channels at the exact same time at maximum volume.

He tried to take a step forward, intending to march up to the central dais and manually punch the command terminal to cancel the protocol. But his right leg didn’t exist anymore. He collapsed, his half-rendered torso hitting the starlight floor with a heavy, wet thud.

”YOU CANNOT FIGHT THE FOUNDATION OF REALITY, ANOMALY,” the Archons boomed, their pillars of light looming over his dissolving form. ”YOU ARE BEING REASSIGNED. YOU WILL BECOME THE RAIN ON A THOUSAND WORLDS. YOU WILL BECOME THE DUST IN THE WIND. YOU ARE NOTHING.”

”I... am going... to leave... such a bad review,” Sebastian wheezed, his remaining silver eye glaring up at them.

He needed to stop the fragmentation. He tried to access his [Code Compiler], desperately attempting to write a localized law that would forcefully glue his pixels back together. But he couldn’t concentrate. His processing power was actively being shredded. You couldn’t type on a keyboard when your fingers were currently existing in three different time zones.

He needed an anchor. He needed something to physically tie his digital soul to the specific, localized reality of the Inner Sanctum. He needed a tether that the system couldn’t just casually wave away.

His rapidly blurring eyes locked onto his left wrist.

Still bolted firmly into his flesh was the heavy, jagged iron block of the Server Spoofing Drive that Corbin had built. The device was sparking wildly, its green runes flashing in absolute panic as it tried to mask an identity that was currently being stretched across the universe.

The drive was hardware. It was physical matter that had been specifically designed to forcefully interface with the deepest, most foundational roots of a server’s security grid. It was meant to trick the Hub into thinking he belonged here.

Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He rolled onto his side, dragging his glitching, sparking left arm across his chest. He couldn’t use his right hand—it was currently acting as a decorative rock on a high-fantasy elf server.

He pressed his left forearm directly against the hard, unyielding starlight floor.

”Time to nail my foot to the floorboards,” Sebastian muttered, his voice a frantic hiss of raw static.

He raised his left knee—the only part of his lower body that hadn’t been fully deleted yet—and brought it down with every single ounce of his thirty-percent physical synchronization right on top of the heavy iron Spoofing Drive.

CRACK!

It was the distinct, horrible sound of dense metal violently meeting biological bone.

Driven by the sheer, ungodly force of his Demigod-tier muscles, the jagged metal spikes punched completely through the thick cartilage and tendons of his wrist, forcefully burying themselves deep into the solid bedrock of his digital radius bone.