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

He placed himself perfectly in the center of their trajectory. He was just a single, six-foot-two humanoid glitch standing in front of an apocalyptic tidal wave of cosmic destruction.

”I really hate bugs,” Sebastian whispered.

He rolled his shoulders. The jagged, red error runes carved into his black silhouette flared with a blinding, aggressive light. He let the digital ash freely bleed off his form, entirely unsuppressing the catastrophic, unhinged power of his 99% Error Accumulation.

He wasn’t going to hide. He wasn’t going to run.

He was the Sovereign of Laws. He was the eternal guard dog.

And the mailman had just stepped onto the porch.

——

The Juncture was normally a place of absolute, suffocating silence.

Not anymore.

The vibration was so intense it felt like standing inside the engine block of a crashing airplane. The sheer, collective mass of the approaching Locust swarm was physically displacing the dark purple smog of the void, pushing a massive, localized shockwave of corrupted static directly toward Sebastian.

SKREEECH! CLICK-CLICK-CLICK!

The sound of billions of data-eating mandibles snapping together was deafening. It was a horrific symphony of mechanical hunger.

Sebastian stood perfectly still on the floating chunk of bone. His pitch-black, featureless silhouette absorbed the dim light of the Juncture, the jagged red runes on his chest and arms pulsing in time with the approaching vibration. Thick streams of oily, black digital blood continued to weep from the empty eye sockets of his cracked porcelain mask.

He looked incredibly small. Against the backdrop of a swarm that literally blotted out the horizon, he was nothing more than a microscopic speck of dust.

”This is going to require a lot of pest control,” Sebastian muttered, his voice a calm, heavily distorted buzz of overlapping audio files.

He didn’t bother pulling up his green Administrator UI to check their stats. He already knew they didn’t have any. The Locusts were the ultimate manifestation of the Void. They were the terrifying, unthinking erasure algorithms that the Ethereal Plane had spent millennia trying to keep contained.

Each individual beast in the vanguard was an absolute nightmare of scale. Up close, Sebastian could see the grotesque details of their architecture. Their carapaces weren’t made of organic chitin; they were forged from highly compressed, rusted server racks and jagged metal beams looted from deleted worlds. Their dozens of segmented legs ended in sharp, glowing purple spikes that effortlessly gripped the empty vacuum of space.

But it was the jaws that truly demanded respect.

The mandibles weren’t meant for tearing flesh. They were lined with microscopic, rapidly vibrating fields of white-hot anti-virus static. When they snapped shut, the air itself violently pixelated, the localized reality simply un-rendering into gray ash.

If even one of those bugs reached the golden barrier of Earth, it would be a disaster. If a billion of them reached it, the planet would be digested in hours.

Sebastian didn’t look back at the golden globe. He didn’t need to. He knew what was behind him. He knew exactly what he was defending.

Valerie. Wraith. Galleon. Sanctuary.

He had sacrificed his humanity, his physical body, and his peace of mind to lock them away in a safe, pristine world. He wasn’t about to let a bunch of overgrown digital cockroaches ruin his retirement plan.

”Alright, you ugly bastards,” Sebastian growled, his silver-tinged eyes flaring with a brilliant, aggressive light. ”The buffet is closed. You’re going to have to go through me.”

He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t use his [Reality Rendering] to conjure a massive shield or a hyper-dense wall of iron. He knew that physical matter was utterly useless against an enemy designed specifically to eat data. If he threw a mountain at them, they would just chew through it.

To fight a virus that deleted code, you couldn’t use structure. You had to use absolute, unadulterated chaos.

Sebastian raised both of his static-laced hands.

He forcefully reached into his own internal architecture, gripping the heavy, agonizing weight of the 99% Error Accumulation that he was actively suppressing just to maintain his humanoid form.

”System,” Sebastian commanded, his voice vibrating with absolute, unyielding authority. ”Disengage safety limiters. Vent the Error.”

The reaction was instantaneous.

BZZZZT!

A blinding, catastrophic aura of jagged green and black static exploded outward from Sebastian’s body. He didn’t cast a spell. He simply weaponized his own instability.

He became a localized, walking computer crash.

The vanguard of the Locust swarm hit his airspace.

The first massive, battleship-sized beast lunged forward. Its terrifying mandibles snapped open, aiming directly for Sebastian’s tiny, floating form. It fully intended to un-render the glitch and continue its march toward the golden planet.

Sebastian didn’t dodge. He just stepped forward and punched the beast directly in its glowing red optical cluster.

CRACK!

He didn’t use physical strength. The moment his static-covered fist touched the Locust’s rusted carapace, the raw, weaponized Error violently injected itself into the monster’s base code.

The massive beast instantly froze. The white-hot static vibrating on its mandibles sputtered and died. The red lights of its eyes rapidly flashed a sickly, confused yellow.

The absolute logic of the Void clashed with the absolute chaos of the Glitch.

The Locust didn’t bleed. It didn’t scream. Its massive, armored body violently bloated, the rusted steel plates warping outward as the infected code forced the beast to attempt to render impossible, contradictory geometry.

POP!

The battleship-sized monster violently exploded into a harmless cloud of grey, untextured polygons and floating ash.

Sebastian didn’t stop to admire the kill.

”Next,” he snarled.

He threw himself directly into the churning, clicking ocean of the swarm.

He became a blur of liquid shadow and green lightning. He didn’t fight with the elegant, practiced martial arts of a Vanguard Elite. He fought like an absolute brawler, using the sheer, terrifying speed of his unrestricted processing power.

He grabbed the incoming mandible of a second Locust, entirely ignoring the searing heat of its deletion field, and forcefully ripped the massive jaw completely off its hinges. He used the severed, sparking metal pincer as a club, swinging it with enough torque to completely cave in the skull of a third beast charging from his left.

CRASH! SQUELCH!

The air was filled with the sickening sounds of shattering metal and violently dissolving code. Green acidic blood and gray pixelated ash sprayed across the void in massive, explosive arcs.

Sebastian waded through the nightmare. He tore carapaces apart with his bare hands. He drove his boots through the armored joints of their legs, injecting fatal Error routines with every single strike. He was a singular, unyielding point of absolute violence in a sea of monsters.

But for every Locust he turned to dust, ten more took its place.

The sheer volume of the swarm was incomprehensible. They crashed over him like a terrifying, mechanical wave, completely burying his small, black silhouette beneath thousands of tons of rusted metal and snapping jaws.

The dark purple sky of the Juncture was entirely blotted out.

—-

Sebastian was completely surrounded. He was entirely alone.

And he had absolutely no intention of taking a single step backward.

The Juncture was supposed to be empty. It was the cosmic trash can of the multiverse, a place where deleted files and broken server code went to quietly rot away. It was not supposed to be a bustling highway for an apocalypse.

But right now, Sebastian was staring down a literal ocean of biomechanical nightmares.

The Locusts of the Void didn’t fly; they simply overwrote the empty space in front of them, advancing like a horrific, writhing carpet of rusted server racks and jagged steel. They were the size of battleships, their multi-faceted red eyes glowing with the singular, unyielding desire to consume raw data.

And right now, Sebastian was the most data-dense object in the entire sector.

”You guys really don’t know personal space,” Sebastian muttered. His voice was a distorted, overlapping hum of static that vibrated through the absolute zero-gravity of the void.

He didn’t have time to draw a weapon. He didn’t even have time to brace himself.

The vanguard of the swarm hit him like a freight train loaded with chainsaws.

CRASH!

A massive, rusted centipede-like beast slammed its armored head directly into Sebastian’s chest. The sheer kinetic force of a creature that weighed thousands of tons colliding with a human-sized target should have turned him into a fine, bloody mist.

But Sebastian wasn’t exactly human anymore. He was a compressed, walking glitch. His body was composed of violently churning black static and deep, bruised-purple error codes.

He didn’t budge an inch.

”My turn,” Sebastian snarled.

He didn’t cast a spell. He just grabbed the massive, jagged edge of the Locust’s rusted carapace with both of his static-laced hands. His fingers, glowing with raw, bright green wireframes, dug effortlessly into the metal.

He roared, ripping his arms in opposite directions.

SKREEECH!

The sound of tearing metal and failing digital logic echoed through the foundational fabric of the server. Sebastian physically tore the battleship-sized monster’s head perfectly in half.