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

But the moment Sebastian’s boots hit the red stone, the screaming stopped.

The silence that fell over Tartarus was heavier than gravity. It was the suffocating, profound quiet of a trillion entities suddenly realizing that the door to their cage had just been kicked open.

Slowly, in eerie, horrifying unison, a trillion pairs of eyes turned.

From the closest iron spires just a hundred yards away, to the massive, mountain-sized needles miles in the distance, every single crucified soul stopped writhing. They lifted their skinned, bleeding, pixelated heads, and they looked directly at the entrance.

They looked at the towering monster of black static and the woman of blue light.

The sheer, unadulterated weight of a trillion desperate, agonizing stares pressing against his avatar made even Sebastian’s optimized brain stutter for a microsecond. It was a suffocating ocean of attention. They weren’t looking at him with anger. They were looking at him with absolute, starving disbelief.

”They stopped screaming,” Valerie whispered, her grip tightening painfully around Sebastian’s hand. Her voice echoed loudly in the sudden, dead silence of the dimension. ”Sebastian... they’re all looking at us.”

Sebastian didn’t flinch. He didn’t break eye contact with the endless sea of the damned. He stood perfectly straight, his black leather coat billowing slightly in the ambient heat waves rising from the stone floor.

He didn’t feel pity. He didn’t feel a heroic surge of righteous salvation. He felt a deep, cold, absolute disgust for the architects who had built this place.

The Core OS was screaming its alarms. The sky above them churned with blood-red fire, and the system was undoubtedly rapidly compiling every single available Warden and executioner daemon to rush their coordinates. The entire might of the Ethereal Plane was currently converging on this exact spot to delete them from existence.

Sebastian squeezed Valerie’s hand reassuringly. He reached up with his free hand and casually adjusted the collar of his coat.

A dark, terrifyingly unhinged smile carved itself onto his face beneath the cracked porcelain mask. The weeping black blood leaking from his eye sockets sizzled as it hit the hot stone.

”They’ve been stuck in here a long time,” Sebastian muttered, his voice a low, mechanical hum that vibrated the very bedrock of hell.

He looked up at the churning, fiery sky, his silver-tinged eyes burning with the absolute, apocalyptic authority of a Sovereign. The ultimate jailbreak had officially begun.

”Let’s burn this prison down.”

——

Stepping deeper into Tartarus felt like walking through the open mouth of an active volcano that also happened to be a server farm.

Sebastian’s heavy combat boots crunched against the blood-red, porous stone of the landscape. With every step, small plumes of superheated gray ash puffed into the air. He kept a firm, unyielding grip on Valerie’s translucent hand, his dark, static-laced aura acting as a flawless, localized umbrella against the apocalyptic environment.

”The ambient temperature here is literally rendering as ’Incalculable’,” Sebastian noted, swiping a frantic yellow warning prompt out of his vision. ”If you drop a marshmallow in here, it wouldn’t toast. It would just instantly turn into plasma.”

Valerie didn’t laugh at the joke. She was staring out at the horizon, her glowing blue eyes wide with absolute, unfiltered horror.

”Sebastian, look at them,” she whispered, her voice trembling.

The silence that had gripped the dimension upon their entry was slowly beginning to fracture. As the initial shock wore off, the trillions of crucified souls realized the door wasn’t just a glitch. The excruciating, low, resonant hum of suffering slowly began to build again, vibrating up through the hot stone and directly into their digital bones.

The landscape was entirely dominated by the spires.

They were massive, jagged needles of pitch-black, encrypted iron jutting violently out of the ground. Some were fifty feet tall, holding dozens of bodies. Others were the size of skyscrapers, packed with thousands of squirming, pixelated forms. Rivers of what looked like actual, flowing magma wound their way between the bases of the spires, casting harsh, flickering shadows across the damned.

Sebastian engaged his [True Sight], his silver eyes piercing the oppressive red haze to look closely at the nearest spire, roughly a hundred yards away.

What he saw made the cynical, pragmatic landlord of Sanctuary physically clench his jaw in disgust.

The souls weren’t just hanging there to rot. They were being actively processed.

”System,” Sebastian muttered, narrowing his eyes. ”Analyze local environmental algorithms. What am I looking at?”

[Scanning Localized Architecture...] [Asset Identified: Automated Energy Harvesting Subroutine.] [Status: Optimal Efficiency.]

Sebastian watched a horrific, invisible process unfold on the body of an old, bearded NPC chained to the iron.

There were no demons with whips. There were no torturers holding knives. The torment was entirely automated by the server’s physics engine. A localized, geometric field of rapidly spinning, invisible code passed over the old man’s avatar.

SHHHHK.

It was the sound of digital flesh being cleanly, violently separated from bone. The old man shrieked, his back arching in absolute agony as his entire outer layer of rendering—his skin, his clothes, his surface pixels—was flawlessly flayed from his body.

The raw, agonizing data generated by that extreme pain didn’t dissipate. It was instantly captured by the black iron spire. The spire glowed with a faint, pulsing purple light as it sucked the pain-data into its core, sending it shooting downward into the bedrock like electricity through a wire.

Then, the true cruelty of the system activated.

A brief flash of healing green light washed over the flayed old man. The system forcefully regenerated his skin, patching his avatar back to full health in a fraction of a second.

And then, the invisible flaying code passed over him again.

SHHHHK.

”They’re skinning them,” Valerie gasped, her free hand covering her mouth. She could see the process too, even without his True Sight. The raw visual was unavoidable. ”They strip the data, heal them, and do it again. Over and over.”

”It’s a power plant,” Sebastian stated, his voice a cold, deadpan hum of absolute clarity.

He finally understood the entire architectural layout of the Ethereal Plane. The beautiful, flowing blue rivers of mana in the System Hub. The pristine, floating crystal gardens of the Grand Archons. The infinite, flawless white light of the Core OS that he had just barely survived.

None of it was natural. None of it was free.

The Architects had built a perfect, sterile heaven. But heaven required an astronomical amount of processing power to maintain. So, they built a basement. They took every failed player, every buggy NPC, and every line of rogue code that didn’t fit their aesthetic, and they threw them into Tartarus.

They weaponized pain. They used the infinite, regenerating agony of trillions of discarded souls to turn a turbine.

”They are literally powering their utopia with an engine made of suffering,” Sebastian gritted his teeth, a dark, heavy rage coiling tightly in his chest. It wasn’t the explosive anger of a berserker. It was the terrifying, calculating fury of an IT guy who had just found a massive, malicious cryptominer running on his favorite server.

”This is efficient,” Sebastian sneered, echoing the word the Architect Prime had used to justify the apocalypse. ”It’s the most mathematically perfect exploitation of assets I’ve ever seen. It’s disgusting.”

”Sebastian, we can’t just leave them here,” Valerie pleaded, looking up at his featureless black helmet. The corporate pragmatist who usually calculated risk-reward ratios was completely gone, replaced entirely by pure human empathy. ”We have to let them down.”

”If I start breaking chains one by one, we’ll be here until the heat death of the universe, Princess,” Sebastian replied, turning his gaze toward the absolute center of the burning dimension.

Far in the distance, looming over the millions of smaller spires, was a colossal mountain made entirely of jagged, black glass. It pulsed with an intense, concentrated aura of raw data, acting like a central hub for all the purple energy being siphoned from the spires.

”You don’t stop a factory by unplugging the machines one at a time,” Sebastian explained, adjusting his grip on her hand. He cracked his neck, the satisfying pop sounding like a gunshot in the hot air. ”You go to the main breaker box, and you smash it with a hammer.”

Before he could take a step toward the glass mountain, the ground beneath their boots violently trembled.

The Core OS wasn’t just sitting back and watching them take a tour of the facility. The multiversal alarms were still blaring, and the automated defense systems of Tartarus were finally rendering into physical space.

RUMBLE... CRUNCH.

From the rivers of glowing magma winding between the spires, figures began to slowly drag themselves onto the red stone banks.

They weren’t faceless Cleaners or chrome-plated Void Wardens. They were massive, hulking brutes forged entirely from the cooling, blackened slag of the magma rivers. They stood twelve feet tall, their bodies radiating intense, blistering heat. They carried massive, crude executioner’s axes made of jagged, encrypted iron.

[Entity Identified: Tartarus Daemon (Sub-Routine Guard)] [Level: 85] [Status: Suppressing Intruders.]