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

It was the only thing keeping his fragmented, glitching mind from completely dissolving into the background radiation of the multiverse.

”You’re my compass, Seattle,” Sebastian whispered, using the nickname he usually reserved for Gwen. It was his weird, socially awkward way of showing affection. ”Keep pumping that Earth-mana into the tether. Whenever I get turned around, I’ll just follow your voice back home.”

There was a long pause on the line. He could hear the heavy, thudding machinery of the Sanctuary basement.

”You are an absolute lunatic,” Valerie finally said. Her voice was weak, but it carried a fierce, unyielding stubbornness. ”Go break their toys, Sebastian. But if you disconnect... if you let that tether snap, I will personally figure out how to navigate the Juncture just to kick your ass.”

”Deal,” Sebastian smiled beneath his mask.

He severed the two-way audio, keeping the connection open as a passive, glowing blue waypoint on his UI.

He turned his attention back to the massive, approaching energy signatures. The Star-Killers were moving fast. They were sweeping the sector, looking for the Anomaly. They expected to find a panicked, exhausted survivor clinging to a piece of floating debris.

They were about to be very disappointed.

”Alright, boys,” Sebastian cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing like shattering glass. ”Let’s see who’s hunting who.”

He didn’t cast a flight spell. Flight spells required localized atmospheric physics, and there was no atmosphere here. He simply accessed the [Concept of Mass] sitting in his Administrator interface. He dialed his physical weight down to absolute zero.

He felt lighter than a photon.

He bent his knees, his jagged green wireframe legs coiling tight against a floating chunk of a dead planet’s crust. With a single, explosive push, he launched himself into the dark.

He shot through the void like a bullet fired from a railgun. The sheer kinetic force of his Demigod-tier strength, combined with zero mass, propelled him forward at speeds that entirely broke the server’s rendering engine. To anyone watching, he wasn’t a man flying through space. He was a blurry, violently glitching streak of black and green light tearing across the cosmos.

The Juncture storms whipped past him. Swirling clouds of highly acidic purple smog tried to latch onto his avatar, but his [Thermal Immunity] and [Error] state simply batted the corruption away. He was a virus surfing through a hurricane.

He checked his UI.

[Target Distance: 50,000 miles... 40,000 miles... 30,000 miles...]

The distance was closing rapidly. The ambient light in the void began to shift. It wasn’t the pure, holy white light of the Vanguard’s original fleet. This light was a sickly, aggressive blood-red.

Sebastian squinted through his cracked visor.

As he closed the gap, the silhouettes of the Star-Killer dreadnoughts began to render in his vision. They were colossal, terrifying structures of black iron and jagged bone. But it was the light source that made Sebastian’s non-existent stomach churn with disgust.

Tethered to the rear of the massive ships were actual, literal suns.

The warlords had ripped dying stars out of their solar systems, bound them in glowing, runic chains, and were using their agonizing, superheated plasma to power their thrusters. It was a staggering display of cruelty and excess.

”Who puts a sun on a bumper?” Sebastian muttered, shaking his head. ”These guys have absolutely zero taste. It’s just tacky.”

He didn’t slow down. He didn’t try to flank them or hide in the debris fields. He aimed his trajectory directly at the lead flagship, a massive, continent-sized dreadnought that practically radiated arrogant authority.

”Time to introduce myself,” Sebastian whispered.

He adjusted his mass, preparing for impact. The hunt was officially over. The predator was at the door.

———

The bridge of the flagship ’The Eclipse’ was a marvel of dark, brutalist architecture. It was lit by the dim, red glow of tactical holographic displays and the blinding, violent light of the dying sun chained to the ship’s stern.

Saint Kaelen, the Level 95 Vanguard Knight commanding the Star-Killers, stood with his arms crossed over his diamond-weave armor. He stared out the reinforced viewport into the chaotic, purple smog of the Juncture.

”Lord Kaelen,” a navigation officer called out, his hands flying across a glowing console. ”We are entering Sector Alpha. The localized telemetry is a complete mess. The server logs show massive spatial collapse events, but we have no visual on the Anomaly.”

”He’s hiding,” Kaelen sneered, his voice a deep, grating rumble. ”He expended his Source Code to wipe out Grigori’s fleet and lock down his miserable little planet. He is out of energy. Scan the debris fields. Look for life signs.”

”Sir, wait,” the radar technician interrupted, his voice suddenly pitching upward in panic. ”I have a contact. It’s not in the debris field. It’s... it’s right in front of us.”

Kaelen frowned. He stepped closer to the glass. ”Define ’right in front of us’.”

”Trajectory is direct head-on! Speed is... speed is impossible! It’s breaking the rendering engine!” the technician shrieked. ”Impact in five seconds!”

Out in the dark void, a tiny, rapidly shifting streak of black and green static was hurtling directly toward the bow of the dreadnought. It was so small compared to the city-sized ship, but the energy signature it radiated was causing the ship’s internal alarms to scream in absolute terror.

[WARNING! CATASTROPHIC KINETIC IMPACT IMMINENT!]

”Raise the Absolute Aegis!” Kaelen roared, his combat instincts completely overriding his arrogance. ”Full power to the forward shields!”

The flagship responded instantly.

A massive, shimmering wall of pure, condensed hexagonal light erupted from the bow of the ship. It wasn’t just a physical barrier. The ’Absolute Aegis’ was a Tier-9 defensive law. It was pure math. It dictated that no physical object, no magical spell, and no kinetic force could pass through its coordinates without permission. It was a wall that simply told the universe ”No.”

Sebastian saw the shield flare to life.

He was moving at Mach 50, a perfectly compressed bullet of raw Error code heading straight for a brick wall of perfect logic.

”Oh, you want to play with firewalls?” Sebastian’s distorted voice buzzed with dark amusement.

If he had been in his old, human body, hitting that shield would have instantly pulverized every bone in his frame. Even with his [Concept of Mass] maxed out, trying to physically shatter the Absolute Aegis would result in a massive concussive rebound that would likely blow him backward into the void.

But Sebastian didn’t punch the shield. He didn’t summon his Earth Sword to cleave it. Hitting a wall of pure math just hurts your hand.

Instead, he opened his Administrator UI.

”Let’s see if we can slip through the cracks,” Sebastian whispered.

He didn’t decelerate. He maintained his terrifying speed. But as he closed the final hundred yards, he forcefully grabbed the rendering code of his own avatar.

He pushed his [Error Accumulation] up to forty percent.

His physical form violently lost cohesion. The solid black of his silhouette and the sharp red of his runes dissolved. He turned into a blurry, violently vibrating cloud of un-rendered polygons and raw, green binary code. He intentionally desynchronized his own physical state, existing as a completely unformatted file.

He hit the Absolute Aegis.

It didn’t make a loud crash. It didn’t explode.

It sounded like a massive piece of heavy fabric tearing down the middle.

”GAAAAH!” Sebastian screamed.

The pain was mind-breaking. The Absolute Aegis didn’t want to let him through. The shield’s pristine, holy code aggressively fought back against the chaotic malware trying to push into its network.

It felt like dragging his soul through a mile of broken glass covered in battery acid. The shield actively deleted chunks of his avatar. His left arm dissolved into static. A massive hole was chewed out of his chest, exposing the empty, black nothingness inside him. The firewall was literally burning away his data, desperately trying to reject the virus.

”I... am... the Admin!” Sebastian roared, his voice a horrifying screech of dial-up static and raw fury.

He pushed entirely out of spite. He leveraged the sheer, ungodly weight of the ten million units of Source Code he had swallowed and forced his way through the mathematical barrier.

On the bridge of the flagship, Kaelen and his officers watched in absolute, paralyzed horror.

The impenetrable, golden hexagons of the Absolute Aegis didn’t break. They turned a sickly, bruised purple. They rippled and warped, the perfect geometry glitching violently as a terrifying, shadowy mass simply squeezed itself through the solid light.