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

But that wasn’t enough. Sebastian didn’t just want to bleed. He needed the System to recognize the sheer, absolute reality of his physical presence. And the System only truly paid attention to one universal constant.

Pain.

”System!” Sebastian roared, his voice violently echoing in the pristine chamber. ”Access root directory! Target: Nociception Code! Reinstall!”

[Warning: Reinstalling Nociception protocols will result in immediate, catastrophic sensory feedback! Proceed?]

”Just hit accept, you stupid machine!”

BING!

The absolute, freezing numbness that had protected Sebastian’s mind for weeks violently vanished. The emotional safety net was forcefully yanked away.

The pain hit him like a freight train loaded with burning anvils.

”GAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

Sebastian’s scream was entirely human. It was raw, unadulterated, mind-breaking agony. The feeling of six jagged iron spikes wedged directly inside his bone marrow exploded across his newly reactivated nervous system. It felt like his arm had been plunged into a vat of boiling battery acid while simultaneously being crushed in an industrial vice.

His back arched so violently his spine popped. Tears of pure, absolute physical torment streamed down his face, completely ignoring his usual cold, deadpan demeanor.

But it worked.

The sheer, overwhelming volume of localized biological trauma acted like a massive, undeniable flare on the server’s radar. The System’s physics engine couldn’t ignore the catastrophic damage occurring exactly at the coordinates of the Inner Sanctum. The pain was so absolute, so undeniably real, that it forcefully anchored his digital soul to his physical meat-suit.

The Masquerade Protocol violently stuttered.

[Error: Target Entity Cohesion Spiking.] [Unable to process fragmentation. Biological tether too dense.] [Routing failed. Connection to Outer Servers terminated.]

The swirling, pixelated spaghetti of his limbs violently snapped back into existence. His right arm re-rendered with a sharp hiss of displaced air. His legs slammed back onto the starlight floor, completely solid and perfectly intact. The horrific sensation of being scattered across a billion worlds vanished, replaced entirely by the throbbing, blinding agony radiating from his heavily mutilated left wrist.

Sebastian lay on the floor, gasping for air, his chest heaving as a pool of dark red blood slowly expanded beneath his arm. The Spoofing Drive was completely lodged in his bone, sparking and humming as it forcefully tied his existence to the room.

He had survived the scatter. He was whole. He was in excruciating pain, but he was whole.

Up on the dais, the three pillars of light flickered in absolute, uncomprehending shock. The Grand Archons’ perfect, flawless execution protocol had just been entirely derailed because the glitch decided to staple itself to the floor.

”IMPOSSIBLE,” the Archons boomed, their voices losing that smooth, majestic edge, replaced by a frantic, buzzing static. ”THE MASQUERADE PROTOCOL IS ABSOLUTE. IT DOES NOT FAIL. HOW ARE YOU MAINTAINING COHESION?!”

Sebastian slowly pushed himself up. His left arm hung completely useless at his side, blood dripping steadily from his fingertips. His black leather coat was a ruined mess, and his pale face was covered in a sheen of cold sweat.

He didn’t look like an invincible Sovereign. He looked like a guy who had just barely survived a horrific car crash.

But as he raised his head, his silver-tinged eyes burned with a terrifying, unyielding fire. He looked at the towering pillars of light, a dark, utterly unhinged smile slowly spreading across his face.

”I told you,” Sebastian wheezed, spitting a glob of blood onto the pristine, sterilized floor. ”I’m a very stubborn stain. And if you want to wipe me away, you’re going to need a much bigger sponge.”

He slowly stood up to his full height, his heavy boots planting firmly on the ground. The pain in his arm was a constant, screaming siren in his brain, but he didn’t care. It was the ultimate tether to his humanity. It reminded him exactly why he was doing this. It reminded him of Valerie.

”Now,” Sebastian said, his voice dropping into that cold, metallic hum of a man who was entirely done playing defense. ”It’s my turn to run a diagnostic.”

——

The heavy, metallic hum of Sebastian’s voice lingered in the cavernous expanse of the Inner Sanctum. The pain radiating from his mangled left wrist was a constant, screaming fire in his brain, but he didn’t try to heal it. He needed that agony. It was the physical anchor keeping his digital soul firmly glued to the floorboards of the System Hub.

He stood up straight, his black leather coat dripping with his own blood, and stared down the three colossal pillars of white light hovering on the central dais.

The Grand Archons were completely silent. The sheer, mathematical impossibility of an entity surviving the Masquerade Protocol had clearly thrown their advanced logic gates into a frantic, internal reboot. They were the creators of the Ethereal Plane. They were used to deleting entire planets with a casual wave of a metaphorical hand. They were not used to the trash aggressively refusing to be taken out.

”ERROR. UNREGISTERED BYPASS DETECTED,” the Archons finally spoke, their overlapping, synthesized voices vibrating with genuine, unadulterated panic. ”CALCULATING THREAT LEVEL... CALCULATING... CALCULATING...”

”Don’t hurt your processors on my account,” Sebastian muttered, his right hand casually adjusting the collar of his ruined coat. ”I’ll make the math really simple for you. You tried to spread me across the multiverse. So now, I’m going to spread a little something across your living room.”

He didn’t draw the heavy, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword from his inventory. He didn’t summon the [Law of Rotting Gravity] to crush the pillars into dust. Those were offensive tools designed to bypass armor and health bars.

But the Archons didn’t have armor. They didn’t have health bars. They were pure, unadulterated administrative code. Hitting them with a sword would be like trying to stab a Wi-Fi signal. To kill the System, you had to infect the System.

Sebastian opened his green, highly corrupted Administrator UI. He completely ignored his massive, ten-million-unit mana pool. He navigated past his physical stats and locked onto the specialized mechanic he had looted from the Juncture Scavenger.

[Mechanic: Error Accumulation] [Current Status: 0%]

”Let’s see how much garbage data this pristine little server can handle before it chokes,” Sebastian whispered, his silver-tinged eyes glowing with a dark, predatory intent.

To generate Error, he had to force the server’s physics engine to process impossible biological paradoxes. He had to make mistakes so profoundly stupid that the foundational code of the Ethereal Plane would literally damage itself trying to understand them.

Sebastian closed his eyes. He didn’t just target his heartbeat this time. He targeted his entire, heavily synchronized biological rendering.

He purposefully grabbed the digital tethers of his own meat-suit and violently yanked them in opposite directions. He commanded his lungs to forcefully exhale carbon monoxide while simultaneously attempting to process liquid water. He forced his optical nerves to perceive the concept of sound, while commanding his eardrums to translate visual light. He took the hyper-dense, biological steel of his thirty-percent physical synchronization and explicitly ordered the server to render it as a gaseous state without changing its molecular mass.

It was a complete, unhinged symphony of biological impossibilities. It was the equivalent of opening ten thousand sketchy internet browsers and deliberately clicking on every single glowing ’Download Now’ button he could find.

The reaction was instantaneous and utterly catastrophic.

”GAAAAAH!” Sebastian roared, his body violently folding forward as the sheer, mind-breaking agony of the paradoxes tore through his nervous system.

The pain was infinitely worse than the iron spikes in his wrist. It felt like his internal organs were being put through a meat grinder and then stitched back together with rusty wire. His physical form could not handle the conflicting data.

[WARNING: CRITICAL BIOLOGICAL LOGIC FAILURE!] [WARNING: FATAL RENDERING CONFLICT DETECTED!] [Error Accumulated: 20%... 45%... 70%...]

His human disguise completely shattered.

The pale skin, the black leather coat, the heavy combat boots—it all violently dissolved. In its place, a swirling, terrifying mass of pure, corrupted data erupted. He became a towering, eight-foot-tall silhouette composed entirely of deep black static and jagged, bleeding green wireframes. Thick, oily digital blood wept freely from the spaces where his joints used to be.

He didn’t look like a player anymore. He didn’t even look like a Demigod. He looked like the absolute, physical embodiment of a catastrophic software crash.

”Holy shit,” Sebastian’s voice buzzed, the sound heavily distorted, echoing like three different audio files playing over each other at maximum volume. ”That actually hurts worse than the time I stepped on a digital Lego in the tutorial zone.”

He forced himself to stand upright, his massive, static-filled form towering in the center of the pristine room. The red meter in his vision continued to rapidly tick upward, fueled by his ongoing, purposeful biological torment.

[Error Accumulated: 85%... 90%. Limit Reached.]

”Ninety percent,” Sebastian hummed, his voice vibrating the glass of the room. ”That should be enough to void the warranty.”

He didn’t just hold the Error inside his own avatar. He weaponized it. He acted as a literal, walking cancer cell, completely opening his administrative floodgates and forcefully exhaling the corrupted data into the sterile atmosphere of the Inner Sanctum.