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

He moved with a terrifying, frictionless speed, bypassing the two Archons entirely. He didn’t even bother swinging his fists at them. The sheer kinetic shockwave of his passage caught the two pale gods, instantly pulverizing their physical forms into fine, gray mist.

Sebastian launched himself into the air, his entire body rotating into a devastating, full-body slam aimed directly at the center of the glowing blue Mainframe casing.

He became a living, breathing meteor of absolute software error.

”Strike eight,” Sebastian whispered.

He hit the crystal.

KRA-DOOOOM!

The sound defied description. It wasn’t an explosion. It was the sound of reality itself violently snapping in half. The impact generated a shockwave of displaced code that ripped through the Inner Sanctum, entirely vaporizing the remaining marble floor and blowing the walls of the dome outward into the infinite vacuum of space.

The unbreakable crystal casing, designed to withstand the heat of a dying sun and the impact of a planetary collision, could not process the ninety-five percent Error.

A single, hairline fracture appeared at the exact point of Sebastian’s shoulder.

Then, the fracture spider-webbed.

With a deafening, high-pitched screech of failing logic gates, the colossal diamond wall shattered. Billions of jagged, glowing blue shards exploded outward like a beautiful, deadly rain of glass. The emergency reboot sequence instantly died, the aggressive blue light sputtering out into complete darkness.

Sebastian crashed through the barrier, tumbling head over heels into the dark abyss beyond the casing.

He hit the ground—or what felt like the ground—rolling several times before finally coming to a halt. The red, glowing code ripping through his muscles slowly began to recede, the agonizing ninety-five percent Error violently dropping back down to zero as the localized system crashed.

His green wireframes slowly stitched his black tactical suit back together, piece by piece.

Sebastian lay on his back for a long, heavy moment. He stared up into a completely empty, pitch-black void. He let out a long, shaky breath, feeling the phantom aches of his physical rendering settling back into place.

”Well,” Sebastian muttered, slowly pushing himself up onto his elbows. ”I’m definitely keeping their deposit.”

He looked around. The Archons were gone. The Spire was broken. The unstoppable Hub of the Ethereal Plane had been reduced to a pile of shattered glass and gray ash.

Sebastian stood up, brushing a piece of digital glass off his knee. He turned around, looking deeper into the space he had just violently forcefully breached.

He had broken the casing. Now, it was time to look at the hard drive.

—

Stepping past the shattered remains of the crystal casing felt like walking out of a crowded, noisy stadium and into an entirely different dimension.

The violent chaos of the Inner Sanctum—the smell of burning ozone, the puddles of toxic sludge, the echoing shrieks of dying Archons—abruptly vanished. It was replaced by a profound, breathtaking silence that felt incredibly heavy, yet entirely peaceful.

Sebastian stood on the precipice of the Mainframe.

There was no floor here. There were no walls, no ceiling, and no sky. Before him stretched an infinite, glowing ocean. But it wasn’t made of water, and it wasn’t the thick, agonizingly corrosive blood of a World Core.

It was a sea of pure, liquid starlight.

Millions of soft, glowing tendrils of data drifted through the vast expanse like luminescent jellyfish. Brilliant streams of silver and gold code flowed in complex, intersecting currents, creating a mesmerizing, three-dimensional tapestry of raw information.

This was the absolute core of the Ethereal Plane. It was the physical manifestation of the multiverse’s database. Every single blade of grass, every dropped piece of copper loot, every NPC, and every player’s soul was stored within this tranquil, glowing ocean.

Sebastian slowly walked forward. When his heavy combat boot touched the surface of the sea, he didn’t sink. The liquid data rippled outward in perfect, concentric circles, easily supporting his weight.

”Okay. This is actually pretty cool,” Sebastian admitted, his voice barely a whisper. He didn’t want to speak too loudly. It felt like talking in a cathedral.

He waded into the Mainframe. The data felt pleasantly warm against his boots, a stark contrast to the freezing vacuum of the Juncture outside. As he walked deeper into the ocean, the glowing tendrils of code brushed against his black leather coat, harmlessly passing through his avatar.

Every time a tendril touched him, a tiny whisper of a world brushed against his mind.

He felt the fleeting sensation of a cold wind on a mountaintop. He heard the faint, distant laughter of players in a tavern. He saw the brief, flashing image of a dragon soaring over a dense, green forest. He was physically walking through the stored memories of billions of active servers.

”It’s a giant, cosmic filing cabinet,” Sebastian mused, his highly optimized digital brain easily parsing the sheer scale of the environment.

But he wasn’t here to sightsee. He wasn’t here to admire the majestic beauty of the Grand Design. He had a very specific job to do, and he was on a tight schedule.

Sebastian stopped. He looked out over the endless, glowing horizon.

”Right. Let’s find home,” he muttered.

He opened his green Administrator UI. The interface felt incredibly smooth here, perfectly syncing with the raw data of the Mainframe. He didn’t need to hack anything. By destroying the Archons and breaking the casing, he possessed the absolute highest security clearance in the multiverse.

He brought up a search query window.

”You’d think a system this advanced would have a better interface,” Sebastian complained, tapping his gloved fingers in the air. ”I’m basically using a cosmic Windows search bar. Let’s hope it doesn’t take ten thousand years to index.”

He mentally typed into the prompt: [Search Directory: Server 894].

He hit execute.

The ocean of data reacted instantly. The gentle, lazy currents of silver and gold violently shifted. Millions of glowing tendrils darted past him, parting like the Red Sea to create a clear, illuminated pathway through the digital fluid.