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

”The Spire...” Valerie gasped, coughing violently. Through the translucent blue light of her avatar, Sebastian could literally see the bright red, digitized blood pouring from her nose and ears. ”The core is overheating. Galleon can’t vent the mana pressure fast enough. The barrier... it’s pushing back too hard.”

”Cut the tether, Valerie!” Sebastian demanded, taking a step toward her flickering projection. ”Drop the call right now! I’m stable! I don’t need the anchor anymore!”

”No!” Valerie snapped, her blue eyes flashing with a desperate, unyielding stubbornness that made Sebastian’s chest physically ache. ”If I drop the tether, you lose your navigation beacon! The Core OS will isolate your coordinates, and you’ll be trapped in the Dead Servers forever! I am holding this door open until you walk through it!”

”Valerie, your physical body on Earth is going to have a stroke!” Sebastian yelled, his voice cracking with genuine, unfiltered panic.

”Then you better hurry the fuck up, Seattle!” she shot back, offering a weak, blood-stained smile before her entire avatar violently spasmed, dissolving into a blurry mess of low-resolution static.

The projection vanished. The room plunged back into the dim, oily light of the cargo bay.

The silence was deafening.

Sebastian stood perfectly still for exactly two seconds. The air around him suddenly grew incredibly heavy, tasting sharply of ozone and burning copper. The jagged, red error runes carved into his chest beneath the black tactical suit began to glow with a blinding, aggressive heat.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t smash anything. He just slowly turned his head to look at Corbin.

”Dissect the core, Corbin,” Sebastian whispered. It wasn’t a request. It was an absolute, terrifying command that promised apocalyptic violence if it wasn’t immediately followed. ”Find me the door.”

Corbin didn’t hesitate. He practically dove at his terminal, ripping a heavy bundle of glowing blue mana-cables from the wall.

Sebastian placed his left hand over the glowing white orb. He didn’t use a delicate touch. He forcefully injected a massive, concentrated burst of his raw, 99% accumulated Error directly into the pristine light. The orb violently shrieked, turning a bruised, sickly purple as the malware forcefully disabled its internal security algorithms.

”It’s suppressed! Plug it in!” Sebastian barked.

Corbin jammed the mana-cables directly into the corrupted orb.

BZZZT!

The multiple holographic monitors surrounding the terminal exploded into life. Thousands of lines of raw, uncompiled Ethereal Plane data scrolled across the screens at blinding speeds. Corbin’s fingers flew across the keyboard, his eyes darting frantically as he sifted through the digital garbage.

”I’m in the root directory!” Corbin shouted, sweat pouring down his face. ”Bypassing the execution logs... skipping the deletion cache... got it! I have its localized spatial history!”

A massive, three-dimensional holographic map projected itself into the center of the cargo bay. It showed the dark, swirling chaos of the Dead Servers, the glowing blue ocean of memories, and the absolute, pitch-black abyss that lay beyond it.

A single, glowing red pathway illuminated on the map, leading deep into the uncharted dark.

”It didn’t drop from the sky,” Corbin analyzed, his voice trembling as he read the data. ”The Core OS isn’t above us. It’s a completely isolated instance. The Cleaners used a designated backdoor administrative routing channel. It’s located at the absolute edge of the Dead Servers.”

”What’s it called?” Sebastian asked, his eyes locked on the red line.

Corbin swallowed hard, pulling up a deeply encrypted text file. ”The system registry calls it the ’Tartarus Gate’. Boss, it’s not a normal door. It’s an incinerator. It’s where the Architects dump the massive, corrupted world files that are too big for the memory ocean to dissolve.”

”Perfect,” Sebastian said flatly. ”Gwen. Set coordinates for Tartarus.”

Gwen was already halfway up the stairs to the cockpit. She didn’t argue. She didn’t complain about the broken engines. She had seen Valerie bleeding on the projection, and she knew exactly what was at stake.

”Strap in, boys,” Gwen yelled over her shoulder. ”I’m pushing the reactors into the red. We’re going to burn out the engines, but we’ll get there fast.”

The Rusthound violently violently lurched forward, throwing Sebastian hard against the metal table. The anti-gravity thrusters screamed in absolute agony as Gwen punched the throttle to maximum, driving the battered smuggler ship straight into the endless, dark abyss.

Sebastian held onto the table, his knuckles turning white beneath his leather gloves. He stared at the faint, flickering blue dot on his UI that represented Valerie’s fading tether.

The clock wasn’t just ticking. It was rapidly running out. And the Sovereign of Laws was about to kick the door of hell completely off its hinges.

——-

The flight toward the Tartarus Gate felt like plummeting down a bottomless, lightless elevator shaft.

The Rusthound tore through the absolute darkness of the Dead Servers, its single remaining starboard engine whining a high-pitched, terrifying song of imminent mechanical failure. Outside the reinforced viewport, the glowing, serene blue waves of the memory ocean had long since faded away, replaced by an oppressive, suffocating void that seemed to actively absorb the ship’s meager exterior lights.

”We are crossing the boundary line, Seattle,” Gwen called out from the helm, her voice tense. She wrestled with the heavy flight stick, her knuckles stark white. ”The ambient gravity out here is completely dead. I’m flying entirely on localized thruster momentum. If the engine pops, we’re just going to drift in the dark until the end of time.”

”Just keep the nose straight,” Sebastian grunted, standing directly behind her pilot’s chair. His pitch-black eyes were locked onto the endless expanse of nothingness ahead.

The air inside the cramped cockpit was growing incredibly cold. The ship’s internal heaters were failing, the metal walls frosting over with a thin, creeping layer of white ice. Sebastian’s [Thermal Immunity] kept his own digital meat-suit perfectly comfortable, but he could see Corbin shivering violently in the lower cargo bay, wrapped in a dirty canvas tarp.

More concerning than the cold was the silence.

The faint, comforting hum of Valerie’s astral tether in the back of his mind had grown terrifyingly quiet.