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

You don’t just leave the keys to the most secure prison in the multiverse sitting on a table. You give the keys to the biggest, meanest, most obnoxiously overpowered guard dog in the entire company, and you make the player fight for it.

”Alright,” Sebastian sighed, rolling his shoulders and taking a few steps back from the pedestal. He cracked his knuckles, the heavy, dense sound of his biological steel joints popping loudly in the quiet cavern. ”If there’s a key, there’s a bouncer. Where are you hiding, ugly?”

He didn’t have to wait long for the answer.

The moment Sebastian recognized the requirement, the Ethereal Plane’s localized event scripting triggered. The server recognized that a hostile entity had reached the final checkpoint.

RUMBLE...

The perfectly smooth, polished black obsidian platform beneath his boots began to violently tremble. It wasn’t a minor tremor. It was a massive, localized earthquake that threatened to throw Sebastian flat on his face.

He immediately widened his stance, dropping his center of gravity and aggressively applying a fraction of his [Concept of Mass] to anchor his boots to the stone.

”Here we go,” Sebastian whispered, his hands dropping to his sides, ready to draw whatever raw, corrupted malware he needed.

The faint, sickly red ambient light of the abyss suddenly shifted, flaring into a blinding, violent crimson. The weeping faces bound to the Tartarus Gate behind him didn’t scream out loud, but their digital eyes widened in absolute, synchronized terror. They knew what was coming.

About two hundred yards away, the smooth obsidian floor didn’t just crack. It shattered like a massive pane of black glass.

KRA-DOOOOM!

A colossal geyser of superheated, glowing blue plasma erupted from the shattered floor, shooting hundreds of feet into the dark, lightless air. The ambient temperature in the cavern skyrocketed from freezing cold to the surface heat of a sun in a fraction of a microsecond.

Sebastian’s [Thermal Immunity] instantly engaged, a cool, invisible blanket wrapping around his physical rendering to bat away the apocalyptic heat wave.

From the center of the plasma eruption, a shape began to phase into existence. It wasn’t climbing out of a hole. It was downloading directly into physical space, its wireframes rapidly filling in with heavy, terrifying textures.

”Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” Sebastian deadpanned, staring up at the rendering monster. ”A three-headed dog? Really? You guys named the door Tartarus, so you literally just copy-pasted Cerberus? Zero points for originality, guys. Absolutely zero.”

But his sarcastic critique was entirely overshadowed by the sheer, unadulterated scale of the beast.

It wasn’t just a big dog. It was the size of a mountain range.

——

The superheated blue plasma cleared, revealing the absolute apex of the Core OS’s automated defense grid.

It was Cerberus-00X.

Sebastian tilted his head all the way back just to see the top of the monster. The beast was easily the size of a mountain range, its colossal paws resting heavily on the fractured obsidian platform. It was a three-headed biomechanical hound, but it possessed no organic flesh, no fur, and no blood.

Its entire body was forged from sleek, interlocking plates of dark, gunmetal-grey anti-virus algorithms given physical form. Thick, glowing blue mana conduits pulsed beneath the armor plating, acting as a highly pressurized circulatory system. Each of its three massive heads was sharp, angular, and completely devoid of eyes. Instead, they featured sleek, glowing red visors that scanned the platform with terrifying, robotic precision.

[Entity Identified: Cerberus-00X] [Class: Tartarus Warden (Apex Defense Program)] [Level: 100 (Hard Cap)] [Status: Absolute Defense Plating Active. Eradication Protocols Engaged.]

”Level one hundred,” Sebastian muttered, a cold knot forming in his chest. ”Okay. That’s a very big number.”

He didn’t have time to admire the craftsmanship.

Cerberus-00X didn’t roar. It didn’t posture or try to intimidate the tiny, speck-sized intruder standing on its platform. It was a machine designed for pure, mathematical deletion.

The center head snapped its red visor onto Sebastian’s coordinates.

WHOOSH!

The mountain-sized hound moved with a terrifying, stuttering speed that completely defied its massive bulk. It skipped frames of animation, crossing the two-hundred-yard gap in a literal microsecond. It raised its right paw, extending five massive, glowing purple claws that crackled with spatial-rending energy.

The claw came down, aiming to completely erase Sebastian and a massive chunk of the obsidian platform.

”Nope,” Sebastian grunted.

He didn’t try to block it with his hands. He engaged his 10,000x [Reality Rendering] and reached deep into his inventory. He didn’t pull out the standard Earth Sword. He poured raw Source Code into the rendering, summoning an impossibly thick, hyper-dense slab of pure Ethereal iron directly above his head. He spiked the mass of the shield to five hundred tons, bracing his boots against the floor to absorb the kinetic shock.

The spatial-rending claw hit the massive iron shield.

CRACK-SHATTER!

The sound was absolutely deafening. Sebastian’s hyper-dense, five-hundred-ton shield didn’t just dent. It didn’t just buckle. It violently, catastrophically shattered into a million useless gray pixels. The spatial energy of the claw completely ignored the physical mass of the iron, ripping straight through it like wet tissue paper.

”Shit!” Sebastian yelled, throwing himself backward.

He engaged his [Heavenly Steps], forcefully folding the space around him and teleporting fifty yards to the left just a millisecond before the massive claw slammed into the ground where he had been standing.

BOOM!

The impact cratered the indestructible obsidian floor, sending massive, jagged shards of black glass flying through the air like shrapnel.

Sebastian materialized, skidding across the smooth floor. ”Okay, so blocking is officially off the table.”

The left head of Cerberus-00X immediately snapped toward his new coordinates. The hound’s jaw unhinged, revealing a swirling, blindingly bright vortex of superheated blue plasma in the back of its mechanical throat.

”Bad dog! Sit!” Sebastian yelled, breaking into a dead sprint.

FWOOSH!

A torrent of liquid blue plasma erupted from the hound’s mouth. It was a continuous, sweeping beam of localized nuclear fusion. It tracked Sebastian across the platform, the beam moving faster than a human could physically run.