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

Sebastian stood in the frozen cockpit. He looked at the perfectly still, terrified face of Gwen sitting in the pilot’s chair. He felt the cold, frozen connection of Valerie’s tether in his mind.

He thought about the absolute, crushing agony of holding 99% Error inside his own body. He thought about the risk of permanent deletion.

Then, a slow, incredibly dark, utterly unhinged smile carved itself onto his face beneath the cracked porcelain mask.

”You guys really don’t get it, do you?” Sebastian laughed. It was a harsh, scraping sound of pure, unadulterated human spite. ”You build these perfect, mathematical systems. You calculate the odds. You look at the stats and assume you know exactly how the game ends.”

Sebastian raised his black-gloved hand, his fingers crackling with a sudden, violent burst of jagged green static.

”I don’t care if I melt,” Sebastian snarled, his voice aggressively pushing back against the telepathic presence in his mind. ”I don’t care if my code scatters into a billion pieces. I am going to walk through that gate, I am going to find the plug that runs this entire miserable simulation, and I am going to pull it out of the wall with my bare hands.”

The presence in his mind fell perfectly silent for a long, heavy moment.

”A truly irrational, emotional variable,” Architect Prime finally murmured, sounding almost disappointed. ”A pity. You would have made a fascinating data point. Very well. Let us conclude the experiment.”

The telepathic weight instantly vanished from his skull.

The universe forcefully hit ’Play’.

VROOOOM!

The absolute silence shattered. The deafening roar of the Rusthound’s dying engine violently returned. The heavy, shaking vibration of the ship threw Sebastian hard against the back of the pilot’s chair. Gwen gasped, her body jerking as time resumed, completely unaware that she had been frozen for the last three minutes.

”Hold on!” Gwen shrieked, hauling back on the flight stick.

The pitch-black void outside the viewport suddenly illuminated with a terrifying, blood-red glow.

They hadn’t just arrived at the boundary. They were right on top of it.

Looming in the dark, stretching endlessly up and down like an infinite wall across the universe, was the Tartarus Gate. It was a colossal, unimaginably massive door forged from dark, encrypted titanium. Bound across the metal, wrapped in thick, glowing chains, were the screaming, weeping faces of millions of corrupted, deleted souls.

”Brace for impact!” Sebastian yelled, his boots planting firmly onto the grated floor as the ship hurtled directly toward the incinerator of the gods.

——

The Rusthound tore through the absolute darkness of the Juncture, a battered, smoking hunk of scrap metal hurtling straight toward the incinerator of the gods.

”Pull up! Pull up, goddammit!” Gwen shrieked from the pilot’s chair. She hauled back on the heavy flight stick with every ounce of her strength, her boots braced furiously against the control console.

It didn’t matter. The over-taxed, sparking starboard engine of the smuggler skiff was completely dead, and their momentum was entirely hijacked by the localized gravity well of the monstrous structure looming ahead.

The Tartarus Gate wasn’t just a door. It was a wall that stretched into infinity, forged from dark, encrypted titanium that seemed to actively absorb any ambient light. But the metal wasn’t smooth. It was covered in thick, glowing chains, and bound beneath those chains were the faces of millions of corrupted, deleted souls. They wept, they screamed, and they writhed in a permanent state of digital agony.

”We’re gonna hit!” Corbin wailed from the lower cargo bay, curling into a pathetic ball beneath a rusted server rack. ”We’re going to turn into a smear on the windshield!”

Sebastian stood directly behind Gwen’s chair, his black leather coat whipping wildly as the ship violently shuddered. He didn’t brace for impact. He didn’t pull up his [Concept of Mass] to try and anchor the ship. He just stared at the colossal, terrifying gate, waiting for the crunch.

It never came.

VWOOOM!

Exactly two hundred feet from the jagged surface of the Tartarus Gate, the universe aggressively hit the pause button.

The Rusthound didn’t crash. There was no screeching of tearing metal, no whiplash, no concussive shockwave. A massive, perfectly cylindrical beam of blinding white hard-light shot out from the dark, completely enveloping the rusted skiff. The ship went from moving at Mach 2 to an absolute, dead halt in a fraction of a microsecond. The physics engine simply overrode their momentum, safely catching them like a toy in a giant, invisible hand.

”What the fuck?” Gwen gasped, her chest heaving as she let go of the flight stick. She looked around the cockpit, utterly bewildered. ”Did we just hit a tractor beam?”

”No,” Sebastian said, his voice dropping into a cold, metallic hum. ”Management is here.”

Down in the cargo bay, the heavy, rusted iron blast doors—the ones that had been violently ripped open by the System Cleaners earlier—suddenly shrieked. A flawless, geometric wall of white light manifested where the doors used to be, sealing the breach.

Then, the light parted.

A figure floated into the oil-stained, filthy interior of the ship. It wasn’t a towering, faceless Seraph. It wasn’t a heavily armored Saint. It was a humanoid avatar, perfectly proportioned, entirely composed of smooth, glowing white code. It had no facial features, no clothing, and no armor. It radiated an aura of pure, clinical apathy that made the temperature in the cargo bay plummet.

Sebastian slowly walked down the metal stairs from the cockpit, his boots clanking against the grating. Gwen followed close behind, both of her kinetic pistols drawn and leveled squarely at the glowing entity’s chest.

”Architect Prime,” Sebastian greeted, his tone completely deadpan. ”Nice of you to drop by in person. Or in proxy. Whatever this is.”

”Variant 001,” the entity replied. The voice didn’t echo in the room. It resonated perfectly inside their heads, a smooth, synthesized tone entirely devoid of emotion. ”Your destructive capacity has exceeded our initial projections. You have navigated the Dead Servers. You have destroyed three System Cleaners. You are currently standing at the threshold of the Core OS.”