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

HUMMMMMM.

The low, resonant frequency of the hard-light bridge vibrated straight up through his legs and settled painfully right in the base of his jaw. It was the kind of noise that made your teeth itch.

”I am going to leave the nastiest zero-star review on Yelp when this is over,” Sebastian grunted, his breathing heavy but controlled.

He held Valerie tightly against his chest, his left arm hooked securely under where her knees used to be before the gray static had eaten them away. His right arm was wrapped protectively around her back. She weighed absolutely nothing in the digital sense, feeling like a fragile, glowing balloon of blue light. But the emotional weight of carrying her flickering, dying soul across a ten-mile abyss was heavier than any dreadnought he had ever suplexed.

”Focus on your cardio, Seattle,” Valerie wheezed, her head resting against his black leather coat. The audio tether connecting them was popping with harsh bursts of white noise. ”Save the Yelp review for when we aren’t actively running from the literal gods of the universe.”

”I can multitask,” Sebastian deadpanned.

He pumped his legs harder, his thirty-percent synchronized biological steel muscles burning with a fierce, agonizing heat. He didn’t dare use his [Heavenly Steps]. The spatial density around the bridge was a hostile, suffocating mess of encrypted Admin-code. If he tried to fold space and teleport here, the Core OS’s foundational logic would violently snap the spatial tear shut and likely sever them both in half.

He just had to run.

They had covered roughly two miles of the massive bridge when the Ethereal Plane decided it had officially had enough of their unauthorized cardio session.

*BEEEEEEP!*

A sharp, piercing tone rang out from the very structure of the bridge itself. It wasn’t a localized alarm; it felt like the entire universe was screaming a warning.

About five hundred yards ahead of Sebastian, the smooth, flawless white light of the pathway began to bubble and warp. It looked like boiling milk. Geometric, rectangular pillars of dense, hard-light code violently erupted from the surface of the bridge, sliding upward like express elevator shafts.

In a matter of seconds, millions of massive, sleek white pillars rendered into existence, stretching across the entire width of the glowing highway and stacking dozens of rows deep. They didn’t have gun barrels or ammunition belts. They just had smooth, glowing apertures that hummed with a terrifying, absolute-zero white light.

[Asset Identified: Heavenly Turret (Deletion Variant)]

[Status: Active. Target Lock Engaged.]

”Turrets,” Sebastian muttered, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing behind his cracked porcelain mask. ”Because of course there are turrets. You reach the final hallway to the boss room, and management always spams the automated defenses. So incredibly lazy.”

”Sebastian, those aren’t normal guns,” Valerie warned, her translucent blue fingers gripping his coat weakly. She coughed, a spray of red digital blood splashing against his dark armor. ”They fire pure deletion beams. If they hit you, they don’t do damage. They just erase your base code.”

”Good to know. I’ll make sure not to catch them with my teeth,” Sebastian growled.

He didn’t slow down. He couldn’t. If he stopped to play defense, Valerie’s tether would burn out. He planted his boots, shifting his grip on her, and raised his left shoulder. He tapped deep into his glitched Administrator UI, preparing to summon a massive, heavy wall of [Concept of Mass] and pure, jagged [Error] to tank the incoming fire.

He braced himself for the apocalyptic impact.

But before the first turret could even fully charge its beam, a deafening, chaotic sound tore through the quiet air behind them.

*RRROOOAAARRR!*

It wasn’t the mechanical shriek of a System Cleaner. It wasn’t the booming, arrogant command of an Archon. It was a raw, unhinged, incredibly violent battle cry from a million different throats.

Sebastian didn’t stop running, but he glanced over his shoulder.

Pouring onto the beginning of the light bridge, perfectly silhouetted against the fiery, blood-red sky of the Tartarus prison dimension, was a massive horde of people.

It was the vanguard of the damned army.

Millions of naked, heavily scarred, half-flayed prisoners were charging onto the bridge. They wielded the cheap, rusted iron broadswords, dark metal kinetic rifles, and jagged spiked maces that Sebastian had literally rained down upon them earlier. They were completely covered in the black slag, soot, and blue blood of the Tartarus Daemons they had just finished hacking to pieces.

Leading the frantic charge was the massive, muscle-bound Orc who had initiated the riot. The guy was missing half his jaw, but he held a jagged iron sword in each hand, his bloodshot eyes fixed dead ahead.

”WE FOLLOW THE GLITCH!” the Orc bellowed, his voice echoing across the endless abyss like a clap of thunder.

”BURN THE HEAVENS!” a chorus of human, elven, and dwarven voices screamed in absolute, fanatical response.

Valerie looked back, her glowing blue eyes wide with pure shock. ”Seattle... they’re following us. They actually left the valley. They’re coming to the Core OS!”

Sebastian let out a long, heavy groan that vibrated the cracked porcelain of his mask.

”Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” Sebastian complained, actually rolling his eyes in genuine annoyance. ”I am not a raid leader! I don’t have a guild invite for these people! Do you know how hard it is to carry an aggro-pulling mob of naked prisoners through an endgame boss door?!”

”They want revenge, Seattle!” Valerie shouted back, a fierce, triumphant smile breaking through her exhaustion and the static. ”You gave them the weapons! You literally pointed at the management!”

”I told them to cause a distraction!” Sebastian yelled, picking up his pace as the bridge hummed beneath him. ”I didn’t tell them to follow me up the driveway! I don’t offer health insurance!”

But it was too late to send them home. The vanguard of the riot was already charging down the bridge behind them, an unyielding tsunami of raw, unadulterated human and NPC spite.

And the Core OS was absolutely not going to ignore a million unauthorized entities marching up its pristine front steps.

*ZAAAAAP!*

The millions of Heavenly Turrets simultaneously fired.

It was a blinding, terrifying wall of absolute white light. The deletion beams tore down the bridge, entirely silent but carrying the horrifying weight of pure software formatting.

Sebastian threw his shoulder forward, forcefully projecting his massive, invisible shield of [Error] to protect himself and Valerie.

*CRACK-HSSSSS!*

The white beams slammed into his shield. The sheer, terrifying density of his corrupted malware violently scattered the pristine beams of light, refracting them off his barrier like a broken prism. The stray deletion beams shot off into the dark abyss, harmlessly dissipating into the void.

But the turrets didn’t stop. They locked into an endless, strobe-light barrage of suppression fire.

Sebastian gritted his teeth, his biological steel muscles straining and burning under the sheer, astronomical volume of incoming fire. His shield was holding, but the kinetic pushback was massive. He was losing his forward momentum, his boots skidding backward against the hard-light bridge.

”I can’t push forward and block this much volume at the same time!” Sebastian grunted, thick beads of sweat pouring down his face beneath the mask.

”GLITCH!”

A thunderous roar echoed from right behind him.

Sebastian glanced back just in time to see the massive Orc player sprint right past him. The Orc didn’t have armor. He didn’t have a magical shield. He didn’t even have a basic health potion. He just had pure, unadulterated fury.

”FOR THE FLAYED!” the Orc screamed, hurling his massive, heavy body completely out of Sebastian’s protective shadow and charging headlong into the blinding white fire.

*ZAAAAP!*

Three deletion beams hit the Orc simultaneously right in his broad, scarred chest.

The Orc’s health bar didn’t drop; it was instantly erased. The massive player let out a gargling gasp as his physical rendering violently stuttered. His avatar began to turn into gray, un-rendered pixels. He stumbled forward, his sheer physical momentum carrying his dissolving body a few more feet before he collapsed heavily onto the bridge, turning into a pile of ash.

But he wasn’t alone.

”CHARGE!” a human warrior yelled, raising a rusted iron mace.

”TEAR THEIR SHIT DOWN!” an Elven rogue shrieked.

Millions of prisoners poured past Sebastian and Valerie. They were a tidal wave of ragged, scarred bodies charging directly into the turret fire.

The Heavenly Turrets fired as fast as their automated logic gates would allow. Blinding beams of white light cut through the horde like scythes through wheat. Thousands of prisoners were instantly deleted, their bodies turning to gray ash and blowing away in the wind.

But the turrets couldn’t shoot fast enough.

For every prisoner that got deleted, ten more trampled over their ashes, aggressively closing the distance to the defensive line. They didn’t care that they were dying.