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

The beast didn’t scream. It just violently un-rendered. But the Void Locusts were full of corrupted, highly pressurized anti-virus fluid. The moment the creature’s skull split open, a massive geyser of fluorescent green, highly acidic blood exploded outward.

SSSSSS!

The glowing green sludge washed over Sebastian’s black, tattered cloak of shadows and splashed directly onto his glitching chest.

”FUCK!” Sebastian yelled, his silver-tinged void eyes widening.

The acid was entirely lethal. It wasn’t just burning his physical rendering; it was actively trying to delete his base code. The red error runes carved into his black silhouette violently flared, hissing and popping as the acid ate through his localized reality.

He forcefully pushed a burst of raw [Error] outward, blasting the green slime off his body before it could reach his core files.

”Great. Now I smell like bleach and rotting fish,” he grumbled, shaking the sizzling droplets off his hands. ”You bugs are absolutely disgusting.”

He didn’t have time to complain. The rest of the swarm was already on top of him.

Three more Locusts lunged from the dark purple smog. Their massive, hydraulic mandibles snapped open. Inside their mouths, Sebastian could see a terrifying, swirling vortex of absolute deletion energy. If those jaws clamped down on him, they wouldn’t just chew his avatar; they would send his data straight to the recycle bin.

”Not today,” Sebastian growled.

He launched himself forward, becoming a terrifying blur of liquid shadow and jagged red lightning. He bypassed the snapping jaws of the first Locust, completely ignoring the searing heat of its deletion field. He landed squarely on the beast’s back, his heavy boots cratering the rusted server-rack armor.

He reached down and grabbed one of the creature’s massive, scythe-like legs. With a brutal, full-body heave, he ripped the appendage clean out of its socket.

SNAP!

”Let’s play some baseball,” Sebastian said, his voice a horrifying chorus of static.

He swung the severed, fifty-foot-long spiked leg like a baseball bat. The raw, Demigod-tier physical synchronization backing the swing turned the makeshift weapon into a blur of destructive force.

WHAM!

The heavy spike collided perfectly with the side of the second Locust’s head. The massive, multi-faceted red eyes shattered into a million pieces of digital glass. The sheer kinetic shockwave caved the monster’s skull inward, turning its brainpan into a messy soup of sparking wires and glowing green viscera.

Before the third beast could react, Sebastian hurled the severed leg like a javelin.

FWOOSH!

The spike tore through the vacuum of space and impaled the third Locust directly through its open, screaming maw. The spike traveled down the creature’s throat and erupted out of its lower abdomen in an explosion of pixelated gore.

Both beasts violently dissolved into clouds of gray, untextured polygons.

But it wasn’t enough.

Sebastian landed back on a floating chunk of debris, his chest heaving as he looked up.

For every one he killed, fifty more took its place. The sky was literally made of teeth. The Juncture was an ocean of clicking, whirring, snapping mandibles, all entirely focused on the single anomaly standing in their way.

”Are you kidding me?” Sebastian wheezed, wiping a streak of digital black blood from his cracked porcelain mask. ”Who programmed this spawn rate? This is entirely unbalanced.”

He ducked under a sweeping tail attack from a passing Locust, driving his fist upward in a devastating uppercut that completely shattered the beast’s underbelly. A shower of green acid rained down, forcing Sebastian to aggressively teleport ten yards to the left to avoid being melted.

He reappeared, instantly grabbing the mandibles of another charging monster. He held the jaws open with his bare hands, his biological steel muscles bulging as the beast’s hydraulic engines whined, trying desperately to crush him.

”You know,” Sebastian grunted, his boots sliding backward against the floating rock as he wrestled the battleship-sized bug. ”I really thought deleting the creators of the universe would be the hard part of my day.”

He channeled a surge of raw [Error] into his palms. The corrupted data violently injected itself into the Locust’s jaws. The pristine, world-eating metal rapidly rusted, bubbled, and turned to gray ash. Sebastian shoved the crumbling mandibles aside and drove his knee directly into the creature’s face, pulverizing it into nothingness.

He didn’t pause. He spun around, catching a rogue plasma blast from a distant scavenger ship that the Locusts had accidentally triggered. He deflected it with a casual flick of his wrist, sending the super-heated energy right back into the swarm, vaporizing three bugs in a bright blue explosion.

But he was losing ground.

His highly optimized, digital brain rapidly processed the combat logistics. He was currently killing roughly fifteen Locusts every ten seconds. It was an incredibly impressive kill-to-death ratio. It was the kind of stat line that would put him at the top of any server leaderboard.

But math was math. And the math here was completely fucked.

He ran the numbers through his green Administrator UI. The Ethereal Plane’s tracking software was struggling to count the swarm, the numbers frantically ticking up in the corner of his vision.

[Entities Detected: 1,000,000+] [Entities Detected: 50,000,000+] [Entities Detected: 1,000,000,000+]

”A billion,” Sebastian muttered, his silver-tinged void eyes perfectly flat. ”There are a billion of them.”

He punched a diving Locust in the throat, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was currently submerged in a cosmic nightmare.

”Okay, let’s look at the timeline,” he reasoned with himself, dodging a spray of acidic blood. ”If I kill one hundred bugs a minute, which is generous considering the acid, it will take me... roughly nineteen years of non-stop, twenty-four-seven punching to clear the room.”

He kicked a severed head into the void.

”I don’t have nineteen years. And quite frankly, my knuckles already hurt.”

It was a battle of attrition, and he was fighting an enemy that didn’t have a stamina bar. The Void didn’t get tired. It didn’t get scared when it saw its brethren turned into digital paste. It just kept coming, a mindless algorithm of consumption.

If he stayed here and tried to punch them all, he would eventually slip up. A mandible would catch his arm. A splash of acid would melt his leg. The Void Toxicity would slowly creep back into his base files, and he would be permanently deleted.

And if he fell, the swarm would just keep moving forward. They would reach the golden, shimmering barrier protecting Earth. They would latch onto the hard-light construct and slowly, methodically chew their way through the firewall until they reached Valerie.

A cold, heavy spike of pure, unadulterated anger pierced through his pragmatic calculations.

”Absolutely not,” Sebastian growled.

The red runes carved into his pitch-black silhouette flared with a blinding, aggressive light. He was the Sovereign of Laws. He didn’t play by the rules of the meat grinder. If he couldn’t win a fistfight against a billion bugs, he wasn’t going to fight them.

He was just going to edit the arena.

——

Sebastian didn’t retreat. He simply stopped punching.

He stood perfectly still on a floating slab of ruined stone, completely surrounded by the deafening, clicking roar of the Void Locusts. The massive, rusted centipedes swarmed him from every conceivable angle. Above him, below him, and from all sides, the giant maws snapped open, ready to un-render him from existence.

He didn’t raise his hands to defend himself. He just closed his eyes beneath the cracked porcelain mask.

”System,” Sebastian commanded, his voice a low, terrifying hum of raw data. ”Open the [Law Synthesis] module.”

BING!

The glowing green and blue hybrid UI expanded across his vision, forcefully pushing the frantic red warning screens of the incoming swarm to the background. The Ethereal Plane’s server tried to warn him of his imminent death, but Sebastian simply ignored it.

He needed crowd control on a cosmic scale. He needed to delete a billion targets in a single, devastating action.

He looked at his available toolkit. He had the ten million units of raw Source Code he had harvested from the dead worlds, currently acting as the foundational fuel in his digital veins. He had the [Concept of Mass], which allowed him to manipulate weight and density. And he had a massive, ungodly reserve of [Error] that he was actively suppressing just to keep his humanoid form stable.

”Let’s get creative,” Sebastian whispered.

He mentally grabbed the [Concept of Mass] and dragged it into the primary slot of his [Code Compiler].

[Input 1: Conceptual Law - Concept of Mass]

But mass alone wasn’t enough. If he just made the bugs heavier, they would still exist. They would just fall. And in the Juncture, there was no ground to hit. He needed to pack them together. He needed to put them in a box.

He scrolled through his abilities, his highly optimized brain moving at a million miles an hour. He bypassed his elemental magic. He bypassed his stealth skills