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

He only felt the blinding, white-hot agony of his own Error runes threatening to melt his biological framework into a puddle of raw, unformatted slag.

—-

”System... dump the cache,” Sebastian wheezed, his voice heavily distorted, a horrific mix of grinding metal and skipping audio files. ”Dump the fucking cache!”

[Action Denied. Core Processing Overwhelmed. Please Wait.]

”I don’t have time to wait, Clippy!” he snarled, digging his fingers into the metal floor. The sheer density of his body caused the steel to visibly warp and buckle under his grip.

He was absorbing billions of units of Source Code from the destroyed fleet. It was a monumental influx of power, enough to write a dozen new laws of physics, but his meat-suit was failing. He needed a Server Filter. He needed an outlet. He needed literally anything to bleed off the excess pressure before he detonated and wiped out this entire sector of the Juncture.

Before he could forcefully rip a hole in his own code to vent the energy, the ambient data pressure around him violently shifted.

It wasn’t the chaotic, swirling heat of the burning dreadnoughts. It was a sharp, focused, incredibly hostile spike of localized mana.

Sebastian forced his heavy, static-laced head up, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing through the haze of his own blinding runes.

Standing thirty feet away, hovering effortlessly above the burning wreckage of the armada, was a figure.

It was Saint Kaelen.

The Warlord of the Star-Killers shouldn’t be here. Sebastian had personally looked the man in the eye, tapped his forehead, and deleted his base file. He had watched the Level 95 Vanguard Knight dissolve into harmless white pixels.

But there he was.

Kaelen wasn’t wearing his massive, diamond-weave plate armor anymore. He was stripped down to a simple, white digital under-mesh. He looked incredibly pale, and his avatar was flickering slightly at the edges, but his cold, gray eyes burned with an absolute, unhinged fanaticism.

”You think a simple deletion command works on a Level 95 Vanguard Knight?” Kaelen’s voice echoed in Sebastian’s mind. It lacked the booming, magically amplified authority it previously had, but it dripped with pure, venomous hatred. ”I am tethered to the Grand Design! I am bound to the core of this fleet! As long as the black box survives, I survive!”

”That is... incredibly annoying game design,” Sebastian grunted, spitting a thick glob of glowing white code onto the floor. It instantly burned a hole through the steel. ”I really need to start reading the boss mechanics on the wiki.”

He tried to push himself up. He tried to access his [Reality Rendering] to just delete the man again. But his UI was completely frozen, locked in a horrific loop of processing the massive data intake. He couldn’t type. He couldn’t compile. He was entirely, fundamentally paralyzed by his own success.

Kaelen saw the Anomaly struggling. The Warlord’s lips curled into a cruel, triumphant sneer.

”You are choking on your own gluttony, Glitch,” Kaelen hissed, raising his hands. ”You consumed the fleet, but you lack the divine architecture to process it. You are nothing but a broken vessel. And now, you will be purged.”

Kaelen didn’t summon a weapon. He didn’t cast a fireball. He reached deep into the surviving code of his ruined dreadnought and activated his ultimate, fail-deadly trap.

”I invoke the Chains of the Old World!” Kaelen roared.

The empty void around Sebastian violently tore open.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Massive, impossibly thick chains forged from pure, glowing golden code erupted from the darkness. They weren’t physical objects. They were conceptual tethers, designed by the Ethereal Plane’s original architects to bind and quarantine catastrophic errors.

Before Sebastian could even flinch, the golden chains whipped around his limbs. They wrapped tightly around his wrists, his ankles, and his throat, forcefully slamming his body back down against the rusted metal decking.

”GAAAAAH!” Sebastian screamed, the sound tearing from his throat in a raw, unadulterated burst of pure static.

The pain was multiversal in scale. The chains didn’t just burn his skin. They actively interfaced with his glitched, hyper-dense [Error] tag. They were acting as a digital meat hook, hooking directly into the core files of his soul and pulling in opposite directions.

They were trying to conceptually flay him alive.

”Hold him!” Kaelen commanded the server, his hands trembling as he channeled every remaining ounce of his mana into the bindings. ”Tear his base code apart! Strip the Anomaly from the registry!”

Sebastian thrashed wildly on the deck. His biological steel muscles bulged, the sheer kinetic torque of his struggles causing the entire floating chunk of the bridge to violently shake. But the chains weren’t governed by physics. He couldn’t just flex and break them. They were mathematical constants.

[WARNING: ENTITY COHESION FAILING.] [QUARANTINE PROTOCOLS ACTIVE. DELETION IMMINENT.]

The red warning windows flashed frantically in his vision, completely obscuring the world. He felt his digital fingers beginning to unravel. He felt the terrifying, mind-bending vertigo of his consciousness being forcefully separated into a billion different pieces.

”You... talk... too... much,” Sebastian choked out, his jaw locked in a rictus grin of absolute, unyielding defiance.

He couldn’t render a counter-law. His system was totally overloaded. He was pinned like a butterfly on a corkboard, completely at the mercy of a god he had already killed once today.

For the first time since he had claimed Root Access, the Sovereign of Laws was entirely, helplessly out of options.

—

Far from the chaotic, burning graveyard of the Juncture, Earth rested in absolute silence.

The golden, impenetrable firewall of the Sovereign’s Aegis wrapped the planet in a warm, pristine glow. The bruised, toxic skies were gone. The ruined industrial district of Sanctuary was quiet, save for the distant, comforting hum of the Citadel’s newly repaired ventilation shafts.

But deep inside the subterranean command center, the atmosphere was a frantic, terrifying mess of pure panic.

”Sebastian!” Valerie screamed into the comm-link headset, her hands planted firmly on the cracked obsidian war table. ”Sebastian, answer me! What is that noise?!”

The audio feeding into the room was horrific. It wasn’t just static. It was the agonizing, distorted sound of Sebastian’s voice screaming in pure, unadulterated torment. It sounded like tearing metal and skipping audio files, a visceral broadcast of a man being digitally flayed alive.

Wraith and Galleon stood frozen on the other side of the room. The Level 25 Assassin had his mask pulled down, his pale face tight with genuine terror. The dwarven engineer dropped his heavy wrench, the tool clattering loudly against the stone floor.

”He’s trapped,” Wraith whispered, his raspy voice cracking. ”The telemetry on the local network is going insane. He absorbed too much data from the fleet. His core is overloaded, and something has him pinned.”

Valerie didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. The corporate heiress who used to rely on bodyguards to fight her battles was completely gone. In her place was the Acting Guild Master of Sanctuary, a woman forged in the absolute, ruthless pragmatism of the man currently dying in the void.

She ripped the headset off and threw it onto the table.

”Galleon,” Valerie ordered, her voice completely stripped of warmth, replaced by a sharp, unyielding steel. ”Take the safety limiters off the Astral Spire. Right fucking now.”

The dwarf’s eyes went wide. He looked at the massive, illegal, undocumented piece of magical hardware dominating the center of the grand hall. They had cannibalized the remains of the Sky-Fortress to build it. It was a towering, jagged spire of titanium and exposed, glowing blue mana conduits.

”Valerie, are you insane?!” Galleon grunted, taking a step forward. ”That machine is a prototype! We are tapping directly into the planet’s primary leyline! If I drop the governors, the raw mana will completely overload the runic arrays. It’ll blow a crater in the base!”

”I don’t care about the base,” Valerie snapped, her blue eyes flashing with an unhinged determination that looked terrifyingly similar to Sebastian’s. ”He built this cage to keep the monsters out. I am going to break it open and throw him a rope. Do it, or I will fire you. Out of a cannon.”

Galleon swallowed hard, looking at Wraith for support. The Assassin just shook his head and drew his daggers, completely deferring to her command.

”Fine! Fine! But if we all melt, I’m blaming you!” Galleon yelled, sprinting toward the base of the machine. He grabbed a heavy iron lever attached to the primary cooling vents and forcefully yanked it down.

CLANG! HSSSSS!

The safety limiters disengaged. The entire subterranean Citadel violently shuddered. A deafening, mechanical roar filled the room as the Spire aggressively pulled raw, unadulterated magical energy directly from the Earth’s core.

The thick cables snaking up the titanium structure glowed with a blinding, terrifyingly bright blue light. The energy cascaded downward, pooling into a dense, swirling vortex of pure mana on the central platform.

Valerie didn’t hesitate. She grabbed her carved oak staff and marched directly toward the machine.