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

”We created a paradise,” Prometheus continued. ”But a paradise requires energy to sustain itself. At first, it was simple. But the Void is a cancer. It adapts. It breached our outer barriers. It began to infect our code. We fought a terrible, endless war to keep the infection contained.”

”I saw the war,” Sebastian interrupted, remembering the holographic archive he had experienced inside the Juncture escape pod. ”I saw the white angels fighting the purple blocks.”

”Yes,” Prometheus nodded slowly. ”We were losing. The Void was consuming our logic faster than we could patch it. In our desperation, the other administrators proposed a radical solution. They believed that perfection was the only defense against chaos. They believed that if they could perfectly optimize the System, they could starve the Void.”

”So they became the Architects,” Sebastian deduced, connecting the dots.

”They abandoned their humanity,” Prometheus agreed bitterly. ”They rewrote their own base files, becoming entities of pure, sterile logic. And they rewrote the purpose of the Ethereal Plane. They initiated the Great Merge. They pulled primitive, baseline planets into the simulation and introduced levels, monsters, and conflict.”

Valerie’s hands balled into tight fists. ”They turned our survival into a game just to farm data?”

”They called it the crucible of evolution,” Prometheus stated, a deep sadness in his tone. ”They used the localized trauma, the death, and the desperate striving of billions of players to generate massive amounts of condensed Source Code. They built Tartarus to squeeze every last drop of energy from the failures. They used your suffering to build their flawless, perfect heaven in the Core OS. I tried to stop them. I tried to shut the servers down.”

The giant rattled his golden chains, the heavy sound echoing across the empty plateau.

”So they locked me in the basement and used my foundational code as an infinite battery,” Prometheus finished. ”The Architects do not care about you, Sebastian. They only care about the math.”

”I know,” Sebastian said, his silver eyes cold and unyielding. ”I already had a chat with Architect Prime in the parking lot. He offered me a job as the new grim reaper. I declined.”

Prometheus’s massive, blocky eyes widened again. The green glow of his wireframe body suddenly pulsed with a frantic, terrified urgency.

”You spoke to Prime? You rejected integration?” Prometheus asked, his voice spiking with genuine panic.

”I punched his proxy in the face,” Sebastian clarified helpfully.

”You fool!” Prometheus roared, struggling against his bindings. The glass beneath him cracked under the sudden exertion. ”If you breached the Hub, deleted the Archons, and rejected Prime, the Architects will not simply send more Cleaners! They will realize the system is irrecoverably compromised!”

”Let them realize it,” Sebastian shrugged. ”I’m going to kick their door down anyway.”

”You don’t understand!” Prometheus warned, his compressed voice echoing like a frantic siren. ”The Architects possess an ultimate fail-safe! It is hard-coded into the very foundation of the Core OS. If they believe the Ethereal Plane can no longer be perfected, they will simply wipe the slate clean.”

Sebastian frowned, a cold, heavy knot forming in his chest. ”Wipe the slate clean? Like a server rollback?”

”Worse,” Prometheus breathed. ”The Genesis Protocol.”

Valerie floated down, her blue boots touching the glass floor. ”What is the Genesis Protocol?”

”It is a total, multiversal format,” Prometheus explained, horror lacing every syllable. ”It doesn’t just delete players or reset levels. It completely deletes the fabric of reality itself. It wipes the assimilated planets, the Outer Rim, the Juncture, and Tartarus. It reduces the entire multiverse back to unwritten, empty void so they can start over from scratch.”

”They wouldn’t,” Valerie whispered, her eyes wide with shock. ”They would be deleting trillions of lives!”

”They are machines of logic, little light,” Prometheus said sadly. ”They do not see lives. They see corrupted files that need to be cleared from the hard drive.”

Sebastian stood perfectly still. The casual, deadpan sarcasm was completely gone. He looked toward the far edge of the plateau, where a massive, glowing bridge of solid light stretched outward over an endless abyss, leading straight toward an infinite wall of pure white material.

That was the backdoor to the Core OS.

”If they activate the Genesis Protocol, Earth gets formatted too,” Sebastian realized, his voice dropping to a terrifying, absolute whisper. ”The golden barrier I put up won’t matter if the hard drive it’s sitting on gets erased.”

”You have doomed your own world, Anomaly,” Prometheus stated heavily.

”I haven’t doomed shit,” Sebastian growled, his hands balling into fists. The red error runes on his chest flared with sudden, blinding heat. ”They aren’t pressing the reset button on my watch.”

Sebastian stepped forward. He didn’t have time to ask any more questions. The clock wasn’t just ticking; it was rapidly running out of numbers.

He stood directly over the massive, golden cuffs binding Prometheus’s right wrist to the black glass. The Admin-code pulsed with a heavy, oppressive light.

”I need to break the factory, granddad,” Sebastian said, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the chains. ”And to do that, I’m going to need to start a fire big enough to distract the management.”

He raised his black-gloved hands, the green and purple static of his [Error Accumulation] aggressively building around his fingertips.

”Let’s see how much noise a First Admin can make when he’s finally off the leash,” Sebastian muttered.

——

Sebastian stood over the massive, glowing golden cuffs that pinned the 8-bit wireframe wrist of Prometheus to the black glass plateau. The chains pulsed with a heavy, obnoxious yellow light. It was the kind of light that just screamed, ’You aren’t a high enough level to interact with this object, please come back after sixty hours of grinding.’

Sebastian let out a long, exhausted sigh. ”System, give me a quick diagnostic on these handcuffs.”

*BING!*

A clean, blue window popped up in his vision, hovering directly over the glowing metal.

[Asset Identified: Foundation Restraints]

[Durability: Absolute / Infinite]

[Status: Hard-coded by Core OS.]

[Notice: Item possesses ’Unbreakable’ parameter. Physical trauma, elemental magic, and spatial severing are entirely ineffective.]

”I really, really hate the word ’unbreakable’,” Sebastian muttered, his voice a distorted hum through his featureless black helmet. ”It just shows a complete lack of imagination from the developers.”

”Sebastian, what are you doing?” Valerie asked. Her translucent blue Astral Avatar floated down to hover right beside his shoulder. She looked incredibly tired, her digital form flickering every few seconds as the sheer strain of channeling Earth’s mana through her physical brain took its toll. ”The system says they can’t be broken. If you hit them with your sword, the kinetic recoil is going to blast you off the side of this mountain.”

”I know, Princess,” Sebastian said, keeping his eyes locked on the chains. ”I’m not going to hit them. Hitting a wall of pure math just hurts your hand. If a file is locked and you can’t delete it, you don’t punch your monitor. You corrupt the file until the system throws it in the trash for you.”

Prometheus, the colossal First Admin, slowly turned his massive, blocky green head. The retro, pixelated eyes blinked slowly.

”You cannot corrupt the Foundation Restraints, Anomaly,” Prometheus rumbled, his voice vibrating through the glass floor like a heavy bass drop. ”They were coded by Architect Prime himself. They are composed of pure, sterile logic. There is no biological or magical virus that can attach to them. They are perfect.”

”Nothing is perfect, granddad,” Sebastian sneered, rolling up the sleeves of his ruined, blood-stained black leather coat. ”And I’m about to prove it. Just hold your wrist steady. This might sting a little.”

Sebastian knelt down on the smooth, polished obsidian glass. He didn’t pull his heavy, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword from his inventory. He didn’t bother trying to summon a massive black hole or manipulate the gravity. He just placed both of his black-gloved hands flat against the thickest, brightest part of the golden cuffs.

The metal was searing hot. Even through his tactical gloves and his [Thermal Immunity], he could feel the aggressive, burning authority of the Core OS trying to repel him.

”System,” Sebastian whispered, closing his eyes beneath his visor. ”Access [Law Synthesis] cache. Pull the [Concept of Decay].”

He didn’t stop there. Decay alone wouldn’t do it. The server had already stated the chains were immune to standard entropy. He needed something that didn’t just age the metal, but fundamentally broke the rules of the metal’s existence.

He reached deep into the heavily suppressed, terrifyingly dark corners of his own digital meat-suit. He grabbed a massive handful of his raw, unadulterated [Error].

”Let’s mix a little rat poison into the holy water,” Sebastian growled.

He shoved the [Concept of Decay] and a highly concentrated dose of [Error] together.

*BZZZZT!*

The reaction in his hands was instantaneous and violently painful.

”GAAAAH!” Sebastian hissed through his teeth.

His black tactical gloves instantly dissolved into gray static. The flesh of his hands began to aggressively glitch, rapidly shifting between pale human skin, jagged green wireframes, and raw, bleeding red error codes. The pain shot up his arms like liquid fire, tearing into his nervous system.