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

”Okay,” Sebastian hissed, his voice trembling with sheer, unhinged adrenaline. ”Note to self. Turn the safety settings back on.”

The Leviathan was right on top of him. Its massive, spinning hydraulic teeth blotted out the distant stars, the sickening stench of rotting data washing over him. The beast’s jaws snapped shut, fully intending to swallow Sebastian and the space he occupied in one massive bite.

Sebastian didn’t dodge. He just grabbed the hovering, hyper-dense iron spear with his left hand.

He didn’t need to throw it with good form. The weapon weighed more than a continent.

He planted his boots in the empty void, anchored himself with a localized gravity edit, and thrust the spear directly upward into the roof of the Leviathan’s descending mouth.

SHLUCK!

The sound was nauseatingly wet and incredibly loud.

The hyper-dense iron spike didn’t just pierce the beast’s corrupted flesh. The sheer, unstoppable kinetic force of the 10,000x multiplied mass treated the city-sized monster like a water balloon.

The spear punched cleanly through the roof of the Leviathan’s mouth, tore through the massive, armored plates of its skull, and erupted out the top of its head in an absolute explosion of digital gore.

”GURK—!” The Leviathan’s mechanical roar was instantly silenced.

The beast’s forward momentum carried it directly into Sebastian.

CRASH!

The Leviathan’s lower jaw slammed into his localized gravity shield, the sheer kinetic impact shattering the monster’s front teeth. The beast’s massive body violently crumpled inward around the impossible density of the iron spear.

Sebastian didn’t step back. He held his ground as the dead, city-sized horror collapsed around him.

SPLOOSH!

The top of the Leviathan’s skull split wide open. A literal tsunami of thick, gray brain matter, shattered bone fragments, and glowing, acidic spinal fluid washed over Sebastian like a horrific waterfall.

He was instantly buried waist-deep in the steaming, foul-smelling soup of the dead monster’s internal organs. The gray sludge splattered against his cracked porcelain mask, dripping down his chest and soaking into the shifting static of his legs.

Sebastian stood there for a long, heavy moment. He slowly lowered his left hand, dropping the massive iron spear. It plummeted into the void below, pulling the ruined corpse of the Leviathan down with it.

He wiped a thick, gooey chunk of gray brain matter off his visor.

”Disgusting,” Sebastian muttered, his right arm finally finishing its painful, sparking reconstruction. He flexed his newly rendered fingers, wincing at the phantom ache. ”I am going to need so much digital soap to get this smell out of my code.”

He had survived his first real test. He had successfully rendered a physical object without the server, and he had killed a Juncture horror with a single, brutal strike.

But as he stood there, wiping the gore from his boots, the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood up.

The Juncture wasn’t silent anymore.

A low, sickening vibration began to echo through the dark. It wasn’t the sound of another scavenger. It was something infinitely worse.

——-

Sebastian stood on a small, floating chunk of the Leviathan’s shattered skull, actively trying to scrape a thick layer of congealed gray brain matter off his left boot.

”I literally just got this body rendered,” Sebastian complained to the empty void, aggressively kicking his foot to shake loose a stubborn piece of digital intestine. ”First day wearing it, and I’m already covered in space-worm guts. You’d think being a Sovereign of Laws came with a passive self-cleaning buff.”

He wiped his hands on his static-laced thighs, his cracked porcelain mask tilted downward in sheer annoyance. His right arm, which had just violently exploded a few minutes ago, was fully reconstructed, the silver runic scars pulsing with a steady, rhythmic glow.

He had successfully tested the [Reality Rendering]. He knew the limits of his new hardware. Generating objects without a physics engine to buffer the math meant paying the cost with his own biological integrity. It was a painful, messy process, but it worked.

He was just about to pull up his Administrator UI to see if he could render a cosmic towel when the air around him shifted.

It wasn’t a breeze. The Juncture didn’t have a climate.

It was a profound, terrifying change in the ambient data pressure.

Sebastian paused. He slowly stood up straight, his posture shifting from annoyed janitor back to the unyielding, rigid stance of a predator.

The scent of the Leviathan’s blood—a sharp, acidic mix of rotting data and ionized copper—was rippling outward. In the absolute vacuum of the Juncture, smells didn’t travel on the wind. They traveled through the foundational code, broadcasting a massive, neon sign to anything hungry enough to read it.

And something had definitely read it.

”Okay. Who’s next?” Sebastian muttered, cracking his knuckles.

He turned his masked face toward the deep, unexplored regions of the dark purple smog. He expected to see another scavenger skiff. He expected to see a desperate, surviving Saint from the Vanguard fleet looking for revenge.

He didn’t see players.

Sebastian activated his glitched [True Sight], the silver light bleeding out from the cracks in his porcelain mask as his vision pierced through the cosmic fog. He bypassed the physical rendering of the Juncture and looked directly at the raw, underlying server data.

What he saw made his completely non-existent biological stomach drop.

”Oh, shit,” Sebastian whispered, his voice losing all its sarcastic humor.

Deep in the void, thousands of miles away, the darkness was moving. It wasn’t a fleet of ships. It wasn’t a localized spawn of monsters. It was a sprawling, endless carpet of absolute, unadulterated corruption.

They were the Locusts of the Void.

Sebastian had read the lore files on the Ethereal Plane’s terminal back on Earth. He had interrogated the digital ghosts of the original Admins. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

These things didn’t have level tags. They didn’t have health bars, and they didn’t drop loot. They were the original, primordial malware that existed long before the Architects had built the System Hub. They were the cancer that the game was designed to fight.

They were mindless, world-eating anomalies that consumed raw reality to sustain their own chaotic existence.

Through his [True Sight], Sebastian analyzed the vanguard of the approaching swarm.

Each Locust was the size of a Vanguard battleship. They were horrifying, biomechanical abominations, resembling heavily armored centipedes fused with the rusted, jagged architecture of collapsed skyscrapers. They had dozens of glowing, multi-faceted red eyes that leaked pure static.

But the most terrifying feature was their mouths.

They possessed massive, hydraulic mandibles that didn’t just bite through steel. The mandibles vibrated at a frequency that actively un-rendered matter. When a Locust bit down, it didn’t chew; it deleted the local data, converting physical objects into raw, consumable Source Code.

”That’s a lot of bugs,” Sebastian noted, his hands slowly curling into tight fists.

There weren’t just a few hundred of them. There were billions. The swarm stretched across the entire visible horizon of the Juncture, a literal ocean of writhing, clicking, mechanical death. They were completely silent, moving through the void with terrifying, coordinated precision.

And they weren’t looking at the dead Leviathan.

Sebastian traced the trajectory of the massive swarm. The scent of the Leviathan’s blood had woken them up, drawing them out of the Deep Void. But now that they were here, their millions of glowing red eyes had locked onto something infinitely more appetizing than a dead space-worm.

They were looking past Sebastian.

They were looking directly at the blindingly bright, golden sphere of Earth hovering in the distance.

”No,” Sebastian’s voice dropped into a dark, metallic hum of absolute fury. ”You don’t get to look at my house.”

Earth was isolated. Sebastian had successfully severed its connection to the multiversal network. The Grand Archons couldn’t touch it. The Vanguard Syndicate couldn’t touch it. The golden barrier was an impenetrable firewall designed to keep out any unauthorized player or Admin.

But the Locusts weren’t players. They were a virus.

If that swarm reached the golden dome, they wouldn’t bounce off. They would latch onto the hard-light construct. Their un-rendering mandibles would slowly, methodically chew through the isolation code. It might take them a month, or it might take them a year, but eventually, they would break the firewall.

And if the barrier fell, Earth—with its billions of un-leveled survivors and one comatose Princess—would be entirely defenseless against a sea of battleship-sized horrors.

A low, sickening vibration began to fill the void.

BZZZZZZZZZT.

It was the collective, synchronized humming of billions of data-eating mandibles rapidly opening and closing. The sound physically warped the space around Sebastian, shaking the chunks of the dead Leviathan beneath his boots.

The vanguard of the swarm accelerated, abandoning the slow, creeping crawl for a terrifying, completely frictionless sprint toward the golden planet.

Sebastian didn’t panic. He didn’t look for an escape route. He didn’t check his UI for a massive area-of-effect spell.

He just took a slow, heavy step forward.