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

A squad of ten Sanitizers flying through the air was caught in a massive crossfire. The sheer density of the incoming lead chewed through their glowing white bodies, popping them like over-inflated balloons.

”It’s like Black Friday, but with significantly more stabbing,” Sebastian noted from his perch on the black glass mountain. He casually leaned against a jagged obsidian spire, crossing his arms and watching the absolute carnage unfold below.

”It’s horrifying,” Valerie murmured, though her blue eyes were tracking the tactical shifts in the battlefield with corporate precision. ”They’re throwing their lives away. They’re dying by the millions.”

”They’re respawning,” Sebastian corrected, pointing a black-gloved finger at the base of the iron spires.

Tartarus was a prison designed for eternal torture. To ensure the prisoners could be flayed forever, the dimension was hard-coded with an instant-respawn mechanic. When a player was deleted by a Sanitizer’s blade, their gray pixels drifted for exactly ten seconds before violently snapping back into a physical body near the base of the spires.

”The Architects built a machine that doesn’t let them die,” Sebastian smirked, the dark humor bleeding through his distorted voice. ”And now they have to fight an army that literally has infinite lives and an endless supply of heavy blunt objects. It’s poetic, really.”

Down in the valley, the sheer scale of the riot was beginning to break the Ethereal Plane’s physics engine.

The server wasn’t designed to process a trillion simultaneous melee swings, bullet trajectories, and collision checks in a single localized zone. The sky above Tartarus—already a churning, bloody mess of fire and torn clouds—began to aggressively glitch.

*BZZZZZT!*

Massive, jagged squares of the skybox un-rendered, revealing the pitch-black void of the Core OS beneath. The framerate of the dimension visibly plummeted. The fluid, graceful movements of the Sanitizers suddenly became jerky and robotic. They started lagging.

”Look at the angels,” Prometheus rumbled, his massive 8-bit wireframe body stepping up beside Sebastian. The giant’s green pixels flared with awe. ”Their combat algorithms are stuttering. The server is prioritizing the sheer mass of the physical inputs over their advanced logic commands. You are drowning the system in garbage data.”

”That was the whole point of the weapon drop, granddad,” Sebastian said flatly, pushing himself off the obsidian pillar. ”I didn’t give them guns to win the war. I gave them guns to lag the server.”

Sebastian pulled up his green Administrator UI.

He didn’t look at the kill feed. He looked at the localized system performance metrics. The CPU usage of the Tartarus dimension was sitting at a catastrophic 99.8%. The Core OS was dumping every single available ounce of its processing power into rendering the massive, impossible war raging in the valley.

Which meant it wasn’t paying attention to the backdoor.

Sebastian turned his head, his silver-tinged void eyes locking onto the massive, glowing bridge of solid white light extending from the peak of the mountain. It stretched ten miles over an endless, lightless abyss, leading directly to the infinite, seamless white wall that separated Tartarus from the true Core OS.

”The security grid on the bridge is running on backup power,” Sebastian noted, rolling his broad shoulders. ”The turrets are offline. The sentries are lagging. It’s time to go.”

Valerie floated up beside him, her blue Astral Avatar stabilizing as Sebastian funneled a steady, ambient stream of Source Code into her tether. She gripped her carved oak staff, her expression hardening.

”Are you ready, Seattle?” Valerie asked softly.

”I’ve been ready since I woke up in that cramped apartment a year ago,” Sebastian replied, his voice dropping the sarcasm, settling into a cold, absolute resolve.

He looked at Prometheus. The giant First Admin stood tall, his archaic green wireframes casting a long shadow over the black glass.

”You staying here, big guy?” Sebastian asked.

”I cannot follow you onto the bridge, Anomaly,” Prometheus rumbled slowly, his blocky eyes filled with a heavy, ancient sorrow. ”My base code is tethered to the bedrock of this dimension. But know this... what lies beyond that wall is not a simulated reality. It is the Hardware Level. Your rules, your glitches, your 10,000x multipliers... they may not function where the code has not yet been written.”

Sebastian paused. He stared at the giant for a long, quiet second.

”Hardware Level,” Sebastian repeated, tasting the words. It didn’t scare him. It just meant he was finally getting to the root of the problem. ”Good. I’m tired of fighting software. I want to break the physical machine.”

He turned back toward the glowing white bridge.

He didn’t say goodbye to the giant. He just reached out, his black-gloved hand gently wrapping around Valerie’s translucent, glowing blue fingers. The dark, static-filled aura of his Sovereign status immediately wrapped around her, shielding her fragile astral form from the ambient heat.

”Stay close,” Sebastian murmured.

”I’m right beside you,” Valerie promised, her grip tightening on his hand.

Together, the towering, glitching monster of black code and the glowing blue ghost stepped off the black glass mountain. Their boots hit the smooth, solid light of the bridge.

*VWOOOM.*

The bridge hummed softly beneath their feet, a pristine, sterile sound that contrasted wildly with the deafening, bloody roar of the prison riot echoing behind them.

Sebastian didn’t look back. He kept his eyes locked on the infinite white wall ahead.

The ultimate jailbreak was complete. Now, it was time to meet the creators, and show them exactly what happened when you pushed a localized variable past the absolute breaking point.

—-

The bridge of solid white light felt incredibly strange beneath Sebastian’s heavy combat boots. It didn’t crunch like the ash-covered dirt of the dead servers, and it didn’t click like the polished obsidian of the Tartarus plateau. It felt like walking on a dense, vibrating sheet of pure electrical current.

*HUMMMMMM.*

The low, resonant sound of the bridge vibrated straight through the thick rubber soles of his boots, traveling up his biological steel legs and settling right in his jaw. It set his teeth on edge.

”I already hate this bridge,” Sebastian grumbled, keeping his grip firm on Valerie’s glowing, translucent blue hand. ”It feels like I’m standing on a giant, vibrating smartphone screen. Five minutes on this thing and my feet are going to go numb.”

”Just keep walking, Seattle,” Valerie wheezed, her Astral Avatar flickering slightly as the intense ambient data of the bridge washed over them. ”You can soak your feet in a nice, warm bath of Epsom salts when we get home. If we get home.”

Sebastian cracked a tired, half-smile beneath his featureless black helmet. ”Don’t tempt me. I might actually take a day off for once.”

They had only taken about twenty steps out over the terrifying, lightless abyss when a massive, heavy vibration shook the very foundation of the light bridge.

*THOOM.*

Sebastian stopped and turned around.

Standing right at the edge of the shattered black glass plateau was Prometheus. The colossal, fifty-foot-tall First Admin looked like a towering monument of retro technology. His 8-bit, glowing green wireframe body cast a massive, blocky shadow that stretched out toward the bridge.

”Hold, Anomaly,” Prometheus rumbled. His voice didn’t echo through the air; it compressed directly into Sebastian’s digital consciousness, sounding like a heavily distorted synthesizer. ”You cannot simply walk up to the Core OS and knock on the front door. The white wall you see at the end of this path is not a physical barrier. It is a blind spot.”

Sebastian let out a long, deeply exhausted sigh. He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand.

”Granddad, please,” Sebastian groaned. ”I just beat a Level 100 radioactive dog to death with my bare hands. I am covered in motor oil, my girlfriend is actively melting her own brain to stay on a Zoom call with me, and I am really, really tired of riddles. What do you mean it’s a blind spot?”

Prometheus slowly knelt down at the edge of the cliff. The sheer size of the giant meant that even on his knees, his blocky face was level with Sebastian and Valerie on the bridge.

”The infinite white wall at the end of this bridge is the absolute firewall of the Core OS,” Prometheus explained, his massive pixelated eyes blinking slowly. ”It possesses no physical coordinates. It has no keyhole, no console, and no access port. If you walk into it, you will simply walk forever. It is an endless loop of empty data designed to trap intruders until their code degrades.”

Valerie’s blue eyes went wide. She squeezed Sebastian’s hand tightly. ”A treadmill,” she whispered. ”They built a digital treadmill. You’d just keep walking forward, but you’d never actually cover any distance.”

”Exactly, little light,” Prometheus nodded, a few loose green pixels shedding from his chin like dust. ”To breach the Core OS, you do not walk through the wall. You must input the exact, specific routing coordinates of the Architects’ command terminal. You must tell the universe exactly where you intend to render.”