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

And from that massive, gaping wound, a slow, steady stream of thick oil continued to spill into the flooded platform.

Sebastian stopped at the edge of the severed neck. He crossed his arms and looked at the glowing golden loot icon hovering directly above the center of the massive head.

[Loot Location: Warden’s Passkey]

”Of course it’s inside the brain,” Sebastian groaned, his voice a distorted, metallic sigh through his cracked porcelain mask. ”Why wouldn’t it be? It couldn’t just drop in a nice, neat little treasure chest. No, I have to go spelunking in a dead robot.”

He didn’t have time to complain further. Valerie’s faint, flickering astral tether pulsed weakly in the back of his mind, a constant, terrifying reminder that her physical body was burning up on the Resurrection Altar back on Earth.

Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He stepped out of the knee-deep fluid and hauled himself up onto the jagged, torn metal edge of the severed neck.

CLANG.

His heavy boots found purchase on a thick, exposed internal support strut. The inside of the Cerberus was an absolute labyrinth of massive, sparking wires, crushed hydraulic pipes, and thick, fleshy bundles of raw data that looked like giant, pulsing veins. It smelled strongly of burnt ozone and ozone.

He activated his [True Sight], his silver eyes piercing through the dark, smoke-filled interior of the beast’s skull cavity.

About fifty feet deep inside the mechanical brainpan, wedged between two massive, cooling processor cores, he saw it. A brilliant, pulsating red spike of data.

”Found it,” Sebastian muttered.

He started climbing. He didn’t use magic. He just relied on his thirty-percent physical synchronization, hauling his dense body up the inclined, slippery internal structures. He vaulted over a massive, leaking coolant pipe, his boots slipping slightly on the slick black oil.

HSSSSS.

A loose, severed mana-cable whipped through the air, sparking violently. Sebastian casually swatted it away with the back of his hand, the raw electricity harmlessly grounding out against his [Error] laced armor.

He finally reached the center of the brain cavity.

The two massive processor cores looked like giant, glowing blue monoliths, but they were currently dark and completely dead. Wedged tightly in the narrow gap between them was the loot.

It was the Warden’s Passkey.

It didn’t look like a standard key. It was a jagged, two-foot-long spike forged from pure, glowing crimson code. It radiated an intense, aggressive heat and hummed with a low, vibrating frequency that felt incredibly heavy.

Sebastian stepped up to the gap. He reached in with his right hand, wrapping his black leather glove tightly around the glowing red spike.

The heat flared, trying to burn his hand, but his [Thermal Immunity] batted it away.

”Come here, you stubborn piece of malware,” Sebastian grunted.

He planted his boots against the side of the dead processor core, tightened his grip, and pulled.

SKREEEECH!

The spike was wedged deep into the hardware, resisting with the stubborn friction of a hard-coded asset. Sebastian didn’t care. He engaged his [Concept of Mass], cranking his physical leverage to the absolute maximum.

With a loud, brutal tearing sound, the red spike popped free.

Sebastian stumbled backward a step, holding the glowing, heavy data-spike in his hand.

BING!

[Item Acquired: Warden’s Passkey (Mythic)] [Description: The master override code for the Tartarus Gate. Single use.]

”Gotcha,” Sebastian smirked behind his mask.

He didn’t waste another second inside the smelly, leaking skull. He turned around, navigating the jagged metal debris much faster on the way down. He hopped out of the severed neck cavity and landed back in the knee-deep, bubbling ocean of gore with a heavy SPLASH.

The massive Tartarus Gate loomed in the distance. The continent-sized door of encrypted titanium was completely silent, but the millions of faces bound to it were still shifting and writhing in permanent, digital agony.

Sebastian started the long, miserable trudge through the fluid toward the gate.

He held the glowing red passkey in his right hand, the crimson light casting eerie, shifting reflections across the slick, oily surface of the flooded platform.

As he got closer, the sheer, oppressive scale of the door became overwhelming. The faces carved into the metal weren’t just low-resolution textures. Through his [True Sight], he could see the actual, trapped lines of source code holding them there. They were aware. They were sentient. And they were suffering.

”Please...” a face near the bottom of the gate whispered. It was the face of an old man, his eyes weeping thick, gray static. ”Please... let us out. The fire... it never stops.”

Sebastian stopped a few feet away from the base of the colossal door. He looked at the old man’s face. He looked at the thousands of other faces crying silently around him.

He didn’t feel a heroic surge of pity. He didn’t promise to save them. He was a Sovereign, not a savior.

”Look, buddy,” Sebastian said flatly, his voice echoing against the massive wall of titanium. ”I’m not here to run a jailbreak for the entire server. I just need to use the backdoor. So keep the crying to a minimum while I work.”

The faces didn’t stop weeping, but they seemed to shrink back slightly from the cold, absolute apathy radiating from the black-clad figure.

Sebastian walked over to the small, four-foot-tall obsidian pedestal sitting a few yards away from the gate. The rectangular, glowing red slot on the top of the pedestal pulsed in perfect sync with the passkey in his hand.

He stood in front of the console. This was it. The absolute final barrier between the outer servers and the hidden, pristine realm of the Core OS. Once he opened this door, there was no going back. The Architects would know exactly where he was, and they would throw everything they had left at him.

He thought about Valerie’s fading, flickering tether. He thought about Earth, locked safely behind its golden shield.

”Time to see the manager,” Sebastian whispered.

He raised the glowing red Warden’s Passkey with both hands. He aligned the jagged, data-laced edges of the spike with the glowing slot on the pedestal.

He didn’t hesitate. He forcefully shoved the passkey straight down into the console.

CLUNK.

The heavy, physical sound of the passkey locking into place echoed like a gunshot in the silent cavern.

For one long, agonizing second, absolutely nothing happened. The glowing red light of the key simply faded, turning a dull, lifeless gray.

Then, the universe screamed.

BZZZZZZZT!

The pedestal violently sparked, a massive surge of green and purple energy shooting from the console and racing across the floor toward the base of the Tartarus Gate.

The millions of weeping faces bound to the door suddenly threw their mouths wide open. They didn’t cry silently anymore. A deafening, mechanical roar erupted from the continent-sized structure. It sounded like a million tortured souls screaming through a blown-out amplifier.

”Holy shit!” Sebastian winced, taking a quick step back and instinctively raising his hands to cover the sides of his helmet. The acoustic pressure was so intense it physically pushed the thick, oily fluid away from the gate, creating a dry semi-circle around the pedestal.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The massive, glowing purple chains wrapped around the encrypted titanium began to violently snap. The sheer, unadulterated administrative authority of the passkey commanded the lockdown bolts to disengage.

Massive, subterranean gears the size of cities groaned and shrieked deep within the bedrock of the Ethereal Plane. The floor violently shook, cracking the polished obsidian around Sebastian’s boots.

The Tartarus Gate was opening. Hell was officially unlocked.

——

The continent-sized doors of the Tartarus Gate didn’t swing open easily. They fought it every single inch of the way.

GROOOAAAN!

The sound of the colossal titanium slabs parting was absolutely deafening. It was a deep, agonizing screech of metal that vibrated straight through Sebastian’s heavy combat boots and rattled his dense, biological steel bones.

The thick, corrupted purple chains that had bound the gate for millennia violently snapped and shattered. Massive links the size of commercial buses rained down from the dark abyss above, crashing heavily into the flooded obsidian platform.

CRASH! SPLASH!

Sebastian didn’t flinch as a chunk of shattered chain slammed into the muck just twenty feet away, sending a wave of thick, black oil washing over his legs. He kept his silver-tinged void eyes locked perfectly on the slowly expanding vertical crack between the two massive doors.

As the gate ground open, the oppressive, suffocating darkness of the cavern was instantly banished.

A blinding, violent, blood-red light spilled out from the widening gap. It cut through the dark purple smog of the Juncture like a laser beam, casting long, sharp shadows across the ruined platform.

But it wasn’t just the light that hit him. It was the atmosphere.

FWOOSH!

A torrential, hurricane-force blast of superheated air erupted from the open crack. It blew outward like the exhaust of a colossal, cosmic furnace. The wind carried a smell so horrific, so incredibly vile, that even Sebastian’s deadpan demeanor momentarily cracked. It smelled of burnt sulfur, melted copper wire, and the unmistakable, sickening scent of billions of lines of roasting data.