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

Valerie, your real body is going to have a fucking stroke!” Sebastian shouted, stepping closer, the red error runes on his chest flaring brightly as his stress levels spiked. ”Your brain is going to melt inside your skull! Log off! That is a direct order from your landlord!”

”I don’t... take orders from you,” Valerie wheezed.

She forced herself to look up. Her blue eyes were snapping wildly between brilliant, blinding light and dead, dull static. The jagged scar on her cheek pulsed with a desperate, painful rhythm.

”If I drop the tether...” she continued, her voice trembling, ”you lose your navigation beacon. The Core OS will isolate your coordinates the second you step inside that gate. They will scramble your routing history, Sebastian. You’ll be trapped in the Dead Servers forever. You’ll never find the way back to Earth.”

”I don’t care!” Sebastian yelled, his voice cracking with raw emotion. ”I’ll figure it out! I’ll build another door! I’ll punch a hole through the universe until I find you! Just stop burning yourself alive for me!”

He reached out, his black-gloved hands hovering just an inch from her glitching, static-laced shoulders. The heat radiating off her projection wasn’t the warmth of Earth; it was the searing, dangerous heat of a failing electrical system.

”I am holding this door open,” Valerie said, her jaw clenched tightly. ”I am holding it until you walk through it and finish the job.”

BZZZZT!

Another massive wave of static ripped through her avatar. Her legs completely un-rendered, turning into a cloud of fuzzy, low-resolution blue squares before violently snapping back into shape. She cried out, her back arching in pain as the feedback loop struck her physical body millions of miles away.

”Stop being an idiot!” Sebastian pleaded, his pitch-black, featureless helmet staring down at her. ”You are literally tearing yourself apart! What good is saving the planet if you aren’t there when I get back?!”

Valerie slowly pushed herself up. She didn’t float gracefully anymore. She moved like someone carrying a boulder on their back. She hovered right in front of him, her translucent face just inches from his cracked porcelain mask.

She offered him a smile. It wasn’t a confident, corporate smirk. It was a strained, exhausted, incredibly fragile expression of pure, unbreakable defiance.

”We are walking into hell, Sebastian,” Valerie whispered, her voice suddenly cutting through the static with perfect, crystal clarity. ”I promised I wouldn’t leave you alone in the dark. And I keep my promises.”

Sebastian stared at her. The howling wind of the furnace ripped past them, carrying the distant, agonizing screams of a trillion crucified souls, but he didn’t hear it. He only heard her voice.

He looked at the digital blood leaking from her nose. He saw the sheer, terrifying toll this was taking on her. She wasn’t an Admin. She wasn’t a Demigod packing ten million units of Source Code. She was just a human being with a very large mana pool and an absolute, terrifying capacity for stubbornness.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to use his Root Access to forcefully sever her connection and boot her back to safety.

But he knew her. If he cut the line, she would just tell Galleon to overload the generators and blast another hole through the universe to find him again, even if it killed her. You couldn’t stop Valerie once she decided a project was getting finished.

Sebastian let out a long, heavy, shuddering breath. The panic slowly drained from his posture, replaced by a dark, heavy resignation.

”You are the most stubborn, infuriating, highest-maintenance employee I have ever had,” Sebastian murmured, his voice dropping to a low, metallic hum.

”I’m the boss, Seattle,” Valerie corrected weakly, her blue eyes locking onto his. ”You’re just the hired muscle.”

”Right. My mistake.”

Sebastian didn’t argue anymore. He didn’t ask her to leave. He knew that the only way to save her now was to walk into that burning prison, find the absolute core of the operating system, and break the entire game as fast as humanly possible.

He had to pull the plug before the tether snapped.

”Stay close to me,” Sebastian commanded softly. ”The ambient code inside the gate is going to be infinitely worse. If you fall behind, the lag will tear your signal to shreds.”

”I’m right beside you,” Valerie promised, though her projection violently flickered again, a testament to the lie.

Sebastian slowly turned his head, facing the massive, expanding vertical crack between the continent-sized titanium doors. The blood-red light of Tartarus spilled over his black leather coat, casting a long, jagged shadow across the obsidian platform.

The heat was waiting. The gods were waiting.

”Alright,” Sebastian whispered, his silver-tinged eyes flaring with an unhinged, apocalyptic fury. ”Let’s go file a noise complaint.”

—-

The gap between the continent-sized titanium doors was wide enough to accommodate a dreadnought, but to Sebastian, it felt like staring down the barrel of a loaded shotgun.

The blood-red light spilling out of Tartarus was blinding. The heat was apocalyptic. And the sheer, oppressive weight of the ambient data inside the prison dimension was aggressively pushing back against them, trying to forcefully evict their unauthorized code.

Sebastian stood at the threshold, his heavy combat boots planted firmly on the cool black obsidian of the antechamber. He looked at Valerie’s Astral Avatar hovering beside him. She was violently glitching, her translucent azure robes tearing into raw polygons as the system’s environmental hazards chewed on her fragile signal.

He couldn’t just let her float next to him. If they stepped across the boundary line separated, the localized physics engine of Tartarus would instantly target her as a foreign, unprotected data stream. It would shred her projection in seconds.

Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He took a heavy step toward her.

He raised his left hand. His glove was a sleek, matte-black polymer, completely hiding the chaotic, corrupted biology beneath. He had specifically edited the collision physics of his own hands earlier, wrapping his raw, 99% Error Accumulation in a frictionless hard-light construct just so he could touch her without his malware deleting her.

”Give me your hand, Princess,” Sebastian ordered softly, his distorted, metallic voice cutting through the howling, superheated wind.

Valerie looked at his outstretched hand. She didn’t argue. She didn’t hesitate. She reached out with her trembling, translucent blue hand and placed it firmly into his black-gloved grip.

The moment their digital flesh made contact, the visual contrast was staggering.

Sebastian was a towering, eight-foot-tall nightmare. His physical rendering was composed of shifting black static, weeping red runes, and dark, bruised-purple error codes. He looked like the physical embodiment of a fatal software crash. Valerie was a projection of pure, brilliant Earth-mana, glowing with a soft, pristine blue starlight.

When he closed his fingers around hers, a localized, chaotic aura erupted around them. The dark, aggressive static of his Sovereign authority wrapped entirely around her fragile blue light, acting as a massive, corrupted hazmat suit. His [Thermal Immunity] and his absurd, Demigod-tier defense stats aggressively extended outward, shielding her astral form from the blistering heat of the open gate.

”Gotcha,” Sebastian grunted, his biological steel muscles coiling tight as he felt the immediate, heavy drain on his processing power.

”It’s cold,” Valerie gasped, her eyes widening in surprise as the searing, burning pain of the Tartarus environment instantly vanished from her skin. The violent glitching of her avatar smoothed out, her pixels stabilizing perfectly under his protection. ”You feel like a refrigerator.”

”I’m highly insulated,” Sebastian deadpanned, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the blood-red abyss ahead. ”Hold on tight. The Wi-Fi in here is terrible.”

Together, the Sovereign of Laws and the Queen of Earth took a synchronized step forward.

CRUNCH.

Their boots crossed the absolute boundary line. They stepped off the polished obsidian platform and brought their weight down onto the burning, blood-red stone of the inner dimension.

The reaction from the Core OS was instantaneous, absolute, and universally deafening.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

It wasn’t just a localized alarm. It was a multiversal panic attack. The very fabric of the Ethereal Plane began to violently screech. Massive, blinding red error windows exploded across the sky of the Juncture outside, flashing with frantic, desperate text.

[CRITICAL SECURITY BREACH DETECTED!] [TARTARUS GATE COMPROMISED. UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY ENTRY.] [THREAT LEVEL: OMNIVERSAL.] [INITIATING MAXIMUM QUARANTINE. DEPLOYING ALL AVAILABLE COUNTERMEASURES.]

The system was completely losing its mind. The ultimate, unbreakable prison had just been casually walked into by a man holding a hologram’s hand.

But the alarms weren’t the most terrifying part of stepping into Tartarus.

As Sebastian and Valerie moved ten feet into the burning dimension, the howling wind suddenly seemed to quiet down. The low, resonant, multi-layered hum of a trillion agonizing screams abruptly shifted in pitch.

Sebastian stopped walking. He looked out across the sprawling, endless landscape of fire and black iron.

Stretching out to the absolute horizon were millions of towering, jagged spires. And crucified upon those spires were the digital souls of the damned. Trillions of them. Rogue NPCs, deleted players, corrupted code-smiths. They had been screaming in an infinite cycle of flaying and regeneration for millennia, entirely consumed by their own personalized torment.