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

”He’s phasing through the Aegis!” the radar technician sobbed, backing away from his console. ”The math isn’t stopping him! He’s ignoring the code!”

”Draw weapons!” Kaelen bellowed, ripping his massive broadsword from the deck. ”Defend the bridge!”

The dozen elite Saints on the command deck instantly summoned their divine weapons. Plasma halberds, holy spears, and gravity-hammers flared to life, illuminating the dark room in a terrifying display of endgame power.

But it was too late.

The shadowy mass burst through the reinforced viewport glass as if it weren’t even there.

—-

Sebastian hit the metal floor of the bridge.

He didn’t land gracefully. He crashed, tumbling across the polished steel, leaving a thick, smoking trail of black digital blood and green static in his wake.

He came to a halt near the central command table.

For a long, heavy second, the bridge was entirely silent. The Saints stood with their weapons raised, staring at the ruined, glitching mess of a man lying on the floor.

Sebastian’s avatar was a wreck. His left arm was completely missing. The red runes on his chest were flickering weakly. He looked like a video game character model that had failed to load properly.

”He’s dying,” Kaelen sneered, a wave of immense relief washing over him. The Warlord stepped forward, raising his heavy broadsword. ”The Aegis stripped his base code! He’s corrupted! Finish him!”

Sebastian let out a slow, distorted sigh.

The green wireframes of his missing arm suddenly violently snapped back into existence. The missing chunks of his chest instantly re-rendered, his pitch-black silhouette solidifying in a fraction of a second.

He slowly pushed himself up off the floor, his joints popping with the heavy, terrifying sound of biological steel. He stood up to his full, eight-foot height, the tattered shadows of his cloak billowing out around him.

He reached up with a black-gloved hand and casually adjusted his cracked porcelain mask.

”You guys really need to organize your files better,” Sebastian said, his voice dropping into a cold, metallic hum that vibrated the weapons in the Saints’ hands. ”Your firewall is full of holes. And your lobby is way too crowded.”

The boogeyman had entered the room. And the doors were locked from the inside.

——-

The command bridge of ’The Eclipse’ was packed with a dozen of the most lethal, highly optimized players in the Ethereal Plane. They were Level 90+ Saints. They wore armor forged from dying stars and wielded weapons that could cleave continents. They were the absolute apex predators of the game.

And they were currently terrified of a guy who looked like a walking software crash.

”Kill the Anomaly!” Saint Kaelen roared, his voice cracking slightly with completely un-managed panic. ”Eradicate him before he can cast a spell!”

The Saints surged forward. It was a terrifying display of coordinated, high-tier combat. A Paladin charged from the left, his heavy shield glowing with a blinding, absolute-defense aura. A dual-wielding Assassin blinked out of existence, using [Shadow Step] to flank the target. At the back of the room, a high-level Mage began rapidly chanting, her hands conjuring a massive, swirling vortex of superheated plasma.

Sebastian stood in the center of the room. He didn’t move. He didn’t draw a weapon. He just watched them with the flat, unfeeling apathy of a man staring at a broken vending machine.

”You guys still think we’re playing an RPG,” Sebastian muttered, his voice echoing with overlapping static.

He didn’t want to fight them. Fighting twelve Level 90s with standard physical combat would take time. It would drain his stamina. And quite frankly, he just didn’t want to exert the effort.

He pulled up his green Administrator UI. He completely ignored his combat skills and accessed the raw, foundational developer tools he had unlocked.

”Let’s try a little biological inversion,” Sebastian whispered.

[Mechanic Activated: Reality Rendering - Biological Edit.]

He didn’t cast a fireball at the charging Paladin. He didn’t raise a shield. He just looked at the massive, heavily armored man and forcefully highlighted the code governing the player’s respiratory system.

The Ethereal Plane relied on a base physical rendering for its players. Even if you were a god, you still had lungs. You still needed oxygen to breathe, even if your stats made you immune to poison.

Sebastian grabbed the data value for the Paladin’s lung capacity. He dragged the slider from ’Normal’ to ’Absolute Maximum.’ Then, he deleted the code that told the lungs they had to stay inside the ribcage.

”Breathe deep,” Sebastian commanded.

The Paladin froze mid-charge. His eyes went wide behind his golden visor.

”GHK—!” the man choked.

It was horrific. The biological code is just another file to edit, and Sebastian had just introduced a catastrophic typo. The Paladin’s lungs violently inflated with the pressure of a hot air balloon. But because the spatial restrictions had been removed, the organs didn’t stay in his chest.

With a sickening, wet tearing sound, two massive, pink, fleshy sacs erupted straight out of the man’s throat and collarbone. They rapidly expanded outside of his armor, inflating to the size of beach balls in a fraction of a second.

The Paladin didn’t even have time to scream. The sheer pressure was too much for the biological rendering to sustain.

POP!

The lungs burst like bloody balloons. A massive spray of red pixels, bone fragments, and thick blood painted the polished steel floor of the bridge. The Paladin’s health bar instantly zeroed out, his heavy armor crashing to the deck as his body suffered complete, unrecoverable organ failure.

The rest of the Saints stopped dead in their tracks. The Assassin dropped out of stealth, staring at the headless, lungless corpse of his comrade in absolute horror.

”What... what did he do?” the Mage at the back of the room shrieked, dropping her plasma spell. ”He didn’t even hit him!”

”My turn,” Sebastian said, turning his cracked mask toward the Mage.

He accessed the UI again. This time, he targeted the Mage’s cardiovascular system.

”You like plasma so much? Have some more,” Sebastian hummed.

He grabbed the base temperature value of the Mage’s blood and forcefully cranked it up by five thousand degrees.

The Mage gasped. Her hands flew to her throat.

”Hot... so hot!” she screamed, dropping to her knees.

Her pristine silk robes began to smoke. Her skin turned a violent, bright red, then rapidly blackened. The blood inside her veins didn’t just boil; it instantly converted into superheated plasma.

She melted from the inside out. A horrific geyser of glowing, blue-white plasma and vaporized meat erupted from her mouth and eyes. Her entire avatar liquefied in less than two seconds, leaving nothing but a scorch mark on the floor and a puddle of bubbling, foul-smelling gray sludge.

”Oh God! He’s hacking our files!” the Assassin screamed, dropping his weapons entirely and turning to run toward the blast doors. ”He’s not using magic! He’s just turning us off!”

”No running in the halls,” Sebastian deadpanned.

He snapped his fingers.

He didn’t use a biological hack on the Assassin. He just used a localized [Gravity Inversion] directly on the man’s boots. The Level 90 killer was violently yanked upward, slamming head-first into the heavy steel ceiling of the bridge. The impact snapped his neck with a loud crack, his body hanging suspended like a gruesome chandelier.

Saint Kaelen, the Warlord of the fleet, was the only one left standing.

The giant man was shaking. His massive broadsword felt incredibly heavy in his hands. He looked at the popped Paladin, the melted Mage, and the inverted Assassin. The sheer, terrifying reality of the Sovereign of Laws had finally broken his fanatical devotion.

”You... you are a demon,” Kaelen whispered, backing away slowly.

”I’m a systems administrator,” Sebastian corrected, walking slowly across the room. He stepped casually through the puddles of blood and plasma, entirely unbothered by the carnage.

”You guys really need to organize your files better,” Sebastian complained, looking down at the mess on his boots. ”Your blood is everywhere. It’s incredibly unprofessional.”

He stopped right in front of Kaelen.

The Warlord didn’t swing his sword. He just dropped to his knees, his massive armor clanking against the deck. ”Please. I surrender the fleet. Take the codes. Take the ships.”

”I don’t need your permission to take your ship, Kaelen,” Sebastian said softly, looking down at the broken god. ”I already have Root Access.”

Sebastian reached out and casually tapped the center of Kaelen’s forehead with a single, black-gloved finger.

[Command: Delete Entity.]

Kaelen didn’t scream. He didn’t explode. His entire character model simply un-rendered, dissolving into a cloud of harmless white pixels that drifted away into the ventilation shafts.

Sebastian stood alone on the bridge. He let out a tired sigh, rolling his neck.

He walked over to the primary command console at the front of the room. He wiped a smear of the Mage’s ash off the holographic keyboard and took the helm.

He had a whole fleet of dreadnoughts to salvage, and he needed to get back to Earth. Valerie was waiting.