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

Dozens of the Daemons hauled themselves out of the lava, their glowing yellow eyes locking instantly onto Sebastian and Valerie.

”Okay, the welcoming committee is here,” Sebastian muttered, casually stepping slightly in front of Valerie to ensure she remained perfectly within his protective aura.

”There are too many of them, Seattle,” Valerie warned, her translucent form tensing. ”Your physical sync is dropping. You can’t just punch your way through a Level 85 army in a hostile environment while protecting my tether.”

”I don’t have to,” Sebastian smirked, a dark, terrifying confidence bleeding through his voice.

He looked around at the towering spires. He looked at the trillions of armed, traumatized souls currently chained to the iron, watching the Daemons approach.

Sebastian didn’t draw his Earth Sword. He didn’t summon the [Law of Rotting Gravity].

He just opened his green, corrupted Administrator UI. He accessed his [Code Compiler], selected a basic, low-tier item from his memory cache, and forcefully pushed his 10,000x multiplier into the crafting menu.

”Hey, guys!” Sebastian roared, his voice magically amplified to boom across the entire burning dimension. ”Who wants to file a grievance with management?!”

He didn’t cast a damage spell. He synthesized raw matter.

[Action Registered: Compile Basic Iron Sword.] [Nexus Glitch Activated: Quantity Multiplier x10,000... x1,000,000... x1,000,000,000.]

The sky above Tartarus violently warped. The blood-red clouds of fire parted, and the system aggressively processed the most ridiculous, overpowered item-generation command in the history of the Ethereal Plane.

It started raining steel.

Trillions of heavy, perfectly balanced iron swords, kinetic rifles, and spiked maces fell from the sky, clattering loudly against the red stone and landing perfectly at the bases of the black iron spires.

Sebastian had just armed hell.

”Let’s start a riot,” Sebastian whispered, snapping his fingers to universally disable the locking mechanisms on every single chain in the dimension.

—-

SNAP!

The sound was absolutely deafening. It wasn’t just a single piece of metal breaking; it was the simultaneous, synchronized unlatching of trillions of heavy, encrypted iron chains across an entire dimension. The noise echoed off the blood-red, fiery sky like a thunderclap from an angry god.

For thousands of years, the damned souls of Tartarus had been pinned to the jagged black spires, enduring an infinite loop of being flayed alive by invisible algorithms to power the Ethereal Plane’s pristine utopia.

Not anymore.

Gravity violently reasserted its claim on the prisoners. Trillions of naked, mutilated, heavily pixelated bodies plummeted from the spires all at once.

THUD! CRUNCH! SPLAT!

It rained human and NPC bodies. They hit the hot, porous red stone of the canyon floor in a gruesome, writhing ocean of raw digital meat. Some groaned in fresh agony as their brittle bones snapped upon impact, while others just lay there, staring up at the empty hooks on the spires in absolute, uncomprehending shock.

They weren’t alone on the ground. Intermixed with the sea of fallen prisoners were the weapons Sebastian had just blindly generated. A billion heavy, perfectly balanced iron swords, kinetic rifles, and spiked maces lay scattered among the bodies, glinting in the harsh, flickering light of the magma rivers.

”What... what just happened?” a nearby soul gasped, dragging his flayed, bleeding avatar across the hot stone toward an iron broadsword.

Before the prisoners could even fully process their sudden freedom, the Core OS reacted.

”RRAAAAWWRR!”

The Tartarus Daemons—the massive, twelve-foot-tall brutes forged from cooling black slag and molten rock—let out a collective, furious roar. There were dozens of them wading onto the shoreline, their yellow eyes burning with mechanical rage. The Level 85 sub-routine guards didn’t care that the chains had fallen. Their programming was absolute: suppress the prisoners.

A Daemon charged into the thickest cluster of fallen souls, raising a massive executioner’s axe made of jagged iron.

SWISH! SQUELCH!

The axe came down, cleaving three helpless, low-level players cleanly in half. Their avatars burst into floating gray pixels, screaming as they were temporarily deleted before the server’s cruel resurrection cycle could stitch them back together.

But the Daemons weren’t the only threat waking up.

Sebastian stood tall, holding Valerie’s translucent, glowing blue hand tightly in his black-gloved grip. His thirty-percent physical synchronization was humming, his muscles coiled tight as he watched the Daemons charge.

Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

[CRITICAL WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY DETECTED.] [RE-ROUTING AUTOMATED ENERGY HARVESTING SUBROUTINES.] [TARGET: ANOMALY ZERO. TARGET: ASTRAL CONDUIT.]

”Oh, you motherfuckers,” Sebastian hissed, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing.

The System wasn’t stupid. The localized artificial intelligence running Tartarus realized that its prisoners had dropped, so it immediately redirected the invisible, automated skinning algorithms straight toward the source of the jailbreak.

Sebastian didn’t see the blades. He felt them.

SHHHK!

An invisible, razor-sharp line of pure, malicious code dragged itself aggressively across the back of his black leather coat. The kinetic-dampening polymer hissed, a shallow cut opening in the fabric, exposing the dark, bruised-purple static of his glitched flesh underneath.

”Gah!” Valerie cried out next to him.

Her Astral Avatar violently flickered. An invisible blade of code had just scraped across her translucent blue arm. Because she wasn’t physically there, it didn’t cut meat—it cut her raw soul-data. Red digital blood instantly leaked from the glowing wound, her face twisting in pure agony.

Sebastian’s deadpan, calculating demeanor instantly evaporated. Seeing Valerie hurt triggered a cold, terrifying rage that completely bypassed his usual sarcasm.

”Back the fuck off my girlfriend, you creepy invisible peelers,” Sebastian snarled, his voice a distorted, metallic hum that physically shook the ground.

He didn’t draw a sword to parry invisible attacks. You can’t block an algorithm with a piece of metal. To kill software, you use malware.

Sebastian let go of Valerie’s hand for a fraction of a second. He slammed both of his black-gloved hands flat against the burning red stone beneath his boots.

He opened his heavily corrupted Administrator UI and forcefully engaged the [Error Accumulation] mechanic. He didn’t build it up slowly. He purposefully short-circuited his own digital respiratory system, demanding his lungs to process molten lava as oxygen. The biological paradox was catastrophic.

[WARNING: FATAL LOGIC CONFLICT!] [Error Accumulated: 40%... 70%... 85%!]

”Eat static, you piece of shit server!” Sebastian roared.

He didn’t hold the Error inside his body. He forcefully violently expelled it.

BZZZZZZT!

A massive, localized Electromagnetic Pulse of pure, unadulterated garbage data exploded outward from his body. It was a visible, expanding dome of bright green and pitch-black static that washed over a ten-mile radius in a microsecond.

The EMP of Error didn’t hurt the organic players or the NPCs. It completely ignored biology. But when it hit the invisible, automated skinning algorithms floating in the air, the pristine code catastrophically crashed.

POP! CRACKLE! POP!

All around them, invisible sparks of dying white light popped in the air like short-circuiting fireflies. The oppressive, heavy feeling of the harvesting sub-routines simply ceased to exist. The system’s torture tools had been completely, violently fried.

Valerie gasped, her astral projection stabilizing as the invisible blades vanished. The red cut on her arm slowly began to mend itself with soft blue Earth-mana.

”You okay, Seattle?” Sebastian asked, offering his hand back to her.

”I’m fine,” she grunted, taking his hand tightly. She offered a strained, fierce smile. ”Just a scratch. Keep moving.”

Sebastian stood back up, dusting a layer of ash off his knees.

He looked out over the sea of millions of naked, battered, and utterly confused souls. The EMP had temporarily stunned the Daemons, giving the prisoners a moment to breathe. They were staring at Sebastian, staring at the massive, glitched monster who had just shattered their chains and broken the torture machines.

”Hey!” Sebastian yelled, his voice magically amplified to boom across the fiery canyon.

Millions of eyes locked onto him.

”I am not your savior!” Sebastian declared bluntly, pacing slightly. ”I am not here to hold your hands! The front door is closed, and the system is actively trying to delete all of us! Look at the ground!”

The souls looked down. They saw the trillions of iron swords, the spiked maces, and the kinetic rifles Sebastian had generated moments before.

”You have weapons! They have faces!” Sebastian roared, pointing a black-gloved finger at the towering, recovering magma Daemons. ”You outnumber them a million to one! Do the fucking math! Pick up the steel and start swinging, or lay down and wait for the server to reboot!”

For a long, heavy second, nobody moved. The trauma of millennia of torture had deeply conditioned them to submit.

Then, a massive, muscular Orc player missing half his jaw reached down. His thick, pixelated fingers wrapped around the hilt of a heavy iron broadsword. He slowly stood up, turning his bloodshot eyes toward the nearest Level 85 Daemon.

The Orc didn’t yell a battle cry. He just let out a guttural, wet scream of pure, unfiltered hatred.

He charged.

”KILL THE GUARDS!” a human Mage shrieked, snatching a kinetic rifle from the dirt.