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

”Okay,” Sebastian said, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing behind his cracked visor. ”So give me the coordinates.”

Prometheus shook his massive head. ”I cannot simply speak them. The Architects encrypted the routing data with a dynamic cipher. It changes every single microsecond. To bypass it, you need a live, synchronized decryption key. You need a piece of my original foundational code.”

Before Sebastian could argue or ask how much that was going to hurt, Prometheus reached his massive, blocky green hand directly into his own chest.

*SHHHK!*

It was the exact same sickening, tearing sound the metal vultures had made when they were harvesting the giant’s code. Prometheus let out a deep, agonizing groan that shook the abyss, his wireframe body violently flickering as he physically ripped a chunk of his own digital soul out of his chest cavity.

He pulled his hand out. Resting in his massive palm was a small, perfectly spherical orb of pure, violently buzzing green code.

”Take it,” Prometheus urged, extending his massive hand toward the bridge. The green orb hovered just a few feet away from Sebastian’s chest. ”It is the root directory key. It will synchronize with your [Code Compiler] and guide you directly through the blind spot.”

Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He let go of Valerie’s hand for a split second, reaching out and grabbing the buzzing green orb.

*BZZZZT!*

”FUCK!” Sebastian yelled, his knees buckling as the raw, unadulterated admin-code hit his system.

It felt like grabbing a live, high-voltage power line with bare, wet hands. The pure, foundational logic of the First Admin violently clashed with the chaotic, bruised-purple malware running through Sebastian’s digital veins.

*BING! BING!*

His green, corrupted Administrator UI exploded with frantic alerts.

[FOREIGN ROOT DATA DETECTED.]

[WARNING: Incompatible Syntax. Attempting to format...]

[Override Initiated by User. Integrating Code.]

Sebastian gritted his teeth, forcing his 10,000x multiplier to forcefully violently smash the pristine code into a shape his glitched avatar could actually digest. The green orb melted into his black leather glove, sinking directly into his skin.

[Item Acquired: Prometheus’s Gift (Unique)]

[Status: Core OS Routing Cipher Active. Dynamic Synchronization achieved.]

Sebastian stood up straight, panting heavily. He wiped a fresh streak of black, oily digital blood from his cracked porcelain mask. ”Alright. I’ve got the GPS. Thanks for the donation, big guy.”

”You must hurry, Sebastian,” Prometheus warned, his voice dropping an octave, losing any trace of its previous calm. The giant looked genuinely, fundamentally terrified. ”The Core OS is lagging from the prison riot you initiated. The Architects are currently dedicating all their processing power to rendering the combat logs. But they are not stupid. They know you are coming.”

”Let them know,” Sebastian sneered, cracking his knuckles. ”I brought enough Source Code to buy them out and fire them.”

”You do not understand the depth of their panic,” Prometheus rumbled, his massive green hands gripping the edge of the black glass plateau. ”The Architects are machines of absolute logic. They have calculated the odds of your success. They have realized that the Ethereal Plane is irrecoverably compromised by your malware.”

Valerie floated slightly closer, her blue light casting a soft glow against the harsh green pixels of the giant. ”You mentioned the Genesis Protocol earlier. You said they would wipe the slate clean.”

”Yes,” Prometheus said, his voice a heavy, sorrowful dirge. ”They are going to push the button. The Genesis Protocol is not a localized rollback. It is not a targeted deletion command. It is a total, multiversal factory reset.”

Sebastian’s blood ran cold. The sarcastic, deadpan humor completely evaporated from his mind.

”A factory reset,” Sebastian repeated, his voice dangerously low.

”It will release a wave of absolute, unformatted white light from the Core OS,” Prometheus explained. ”It will wash over Tartarus. It will wash over the Juncture. It will consume the Outer Servers, the assimilated planets, and the Dead Zones. Everything that has been written into the Ethereal Plane will be reverted to raw, empty [NULL] space. Trillions of lives, gone in a single, sweeping instant. They will burn down the entire house just to ensure the spider inside it dies.”

”But Earth is isolated,” Valerie argued, her voice trembling with rising panic. ”Sebastian put the golden barrier up! He severed Server 894 from the multiversal grid! It’s offline!”

Prometheus looked at her with deep, profound sadness.

”A firewall only protects the software, little light,” the giant murmured gently. ”If you take a hammer and smash the physical hard drive, the firewall means absolutely nothing. The Genesis Protocol destroys the foundational hardware of reality. When the wave hits the coordinates where Server 894 is hosted, the golden barrier will simply cease to exist, and your world will be formatted into empty space.”

The silence on the bridge of light was deafening.

Sebastian stared at the giant. His highly optimized, Demigod-tier brain rapidly ran the math. All the blood he had spilled. The ten million units of Source Code he had nearly died to consume. The agonizing, mind-breaking pain of pushing his Error accumulation to ninety-nine percent just to pull Valerie out of her coma.

All of it, every single brutal, agonizing step, would mean absolutely nothing if the Architects pressed that button.

”They’re going to delete my warehouse,” Sebastian whispered.

It was a stupid, trivial thought, but it anchored the sheer, cosmic horror of the situation. They were going to delete Sanctuary. They were going to delete Galleon, Wraith, and the terrified refugees who had just finally seen a blue sky for the first time in years.

A cold, heavy, and utterly terrifying fury ignited in the very center of Sebastian’s chest. It wasn’t the chaotic, wild rage of a berserker. It was the freezing, absolute certainty of a man who was about to commit an atrocity.

”How long?” Sebastian asked. His voice didn’t shake. It hummed with a metallic resonance that made the solid light of the bridge beneath his boots visibly ripple.

”The protocol is massive. It requires time to compile,” Prometheus answered. ”But they are terrified of you. They are rushing the sequence. You have minutes, Anomaly. Perhaps less. If that white wave breaches the wall before you shatter the Mainframe, the universe ends.”

”Understood,” Sebastian stated.

He didn’t say goodbye to the giant. He didn’t offer any dramatic, heroic promises.

Sebastian reached out and grabbed Valerie’s hand, his black-gloved fingers wrapping tightly around her translucent blue ones. The protective, dark static of his aura enveloped her instantly.

”Hold on tight, Seattle,” Sebastian growled, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the infinite white wall looming miles away at the end of the bridge. ”We’re going to have to sprint.”

”I’m right with you,” Valerie said, her jaw set, her blue eyes burning with defiant light.

Sebastian turned his back on the shattered black glass mountain. He didn’t look down at the chaotic, bloody prison riot raging in the fiery valleys of Tartarus below. He set his sights entirely on the Core OS.

He broke into a run.

His heavy combat boots slammed against the vibrating light of the bridge. *THUD-THUD-THUD*. The Sovereign of Laws charged down the glowing highway, racing against the literal end of the world. He had a delivery to make, and he was absolutely not going to be late.

—-

Sprinting down a ten-mile bridge made entirely of solid, blinding white light was a uniquely terrible experience.

It was like running on a glowing treadmill suspended over an infinite, lightless abyss. The air was unnaturally still, completely devoid of the suffocating, sulfurous heat of the Tartarus dimension behind them.

*THUD. THUD. THUD.*

Sebastian’s heavy combat boots pounded against the hard-light surface. He wasn’t using his [Heavenly Steps] to teleport. The spatial density around the bridge was incredibly hostile; if he tried to fold space here, the Core OS’s foundational logic would instantly snap the spatial tear shut and likely sever him in half.

He had to do it the old-fashioned way. He had to run.

”This bridge is fucking weird,” Sebastian grunted, his breathing heavy but controlled. He kept a firm, unbroken grip on Valerie’s glowing blue hand, pulling her along beside him. ”It feels like my boots are sinking into wet sand.”

”It’s siphoning you,” Valerie yelled over the rushing wind of their sprint. Her Astral Avatar flickered, struggling to maintain its crisp resolution. ”This is the mainline conduit the Architects use to drain the suffering from Tartarus into the Core OS! It’s an energy vacuum, Seattle! It’s actively trying to pull the Source Code right out of your veins!”

Sebastian gritted his teeth. She was right.

With every step he took, he felt a faint, nauseating tug in his chest. The ten million units of raw Source Code he had assimilated from the dead planets felt like it was shifting, trying to bleed out of his digital pores and soak into the glowing bridge beneath his feet.

”System,” Sebastian muttered, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing behind his cracked mask. ”Lock foundational files. Reroute excess Error to surface rendering.”