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

They didn’t care about the respawn timers. They were deliberately soaking the aggro. They were throwing their fragile, naked bodies into the meat grinder entirely voluntarily, acting as a massive, flesh-and-bone meat shield for the Sovereign of Laws.

”They’re taking the hits for you!” Valerie yelled, her blue eyes wide in absolute disbelief as she watched the prisoners sacrifice themselves just to overwhelm the turrets’ targeting algorithms.

”Are you kidding me?” Sebastian whispered, a rare flicker of genuine shock piercing his cold, deadpan facade.

He watched a frail, heavily scarred dwarven merchant throw himself directly onto the glowing aperture of a turret. The dwarf took a blast straight to the stomach, completely vaporizing his torso, but the sheer physical mass of his body momentarily blocked the beam, buying the rioters behind him an extra second.

The mob crashed into the first line of turrets.

*CLANG! SMASH! CRUNCH!*

It was brutal, messy, and totally devoid of elegance. Millions of prisoners swarmed the sleek, white pillars. They brought their cheap iron swords, spiked maces, and even their bare fists down on the pristine, hard-light machinery.

The turrets weren’t built for close-quarters physical brawling. They were designed to sit back and shoot threats from a safe distance. Under the sheer, crushing weight of a million desperate, furious swings, the flawless white code began to buckle.

A turret sparked violently, let out a high-pitched mechanical whine, and exploded into a shower of white pixels as twenty players simultaneously hacked its base apart with rusted iron swords.

Sebastian didn’t waste the opening they had just bled to give him.

”Let’s move!” Sebastian roared, his voice booming over the chaos.

He tightened his grip on Valerie and sprinted forward, charging right through the massive gap the prisoners had violently hacked open in the defensive line.

As they ran past the mob, Sebastian didn’t stop to hand out high-fives. But he did drop his left hand slightly. He selectively leaked a tiny, highly concentrated trail of his ambient [Error] code. He let the dark, bruised-purple malware drip onto the shattered remains of the turrets as he passed them, completely corrupting the machinery so they couldn’t auto-repair.

They tore down the bridge. The vanguard of the damned army acted as an absolute, chaotic battering ram, swarming the remaining turrets, soaking the deletion beams with sheer numbers, and smashing the automated defenses into pixelated dust.

Sebastian and Valerie ran in their wake, the distance ticking down rapidly on his internal UI.

Eight miles. Five miles. Two miles.

Finally, the deafening sounds of the riot and the clanging of iron on hard-light began to fade slightly as Sebastian sprinted far ahead of the main pack.

He slowed to a halt, his chest heaving, his heavy combat boots skidding slightly on the smooth white light of the bridge. Valerie floated to a stop beside him, her blue Astral Avatar dimming significantly, her breathing ragged and shallow. She was coughing up a steady stream of red digital blood.

”We’re here,” Sebastian whispered, looking straight ahead.

They stood at the absolute end of the ten-mile bridge.

The road had officially run out. It was time to deal with the wall.

—-

The absolute end of the bridge of light was exactly as Prometheus had described it. It wasn’t a grand, imposing fortress. It wasn’t a massive set of highly detailed, intricately carved demonic doors like the Tartarus Gate.

It was just a wall.

Sebastian stood perfectly still, his chest rising and falling heavily beneath his torn, blood-stained black leather coat. He kept his left arm wrapped tightly around Valerie, holding her fading, glitching Astral Avatar securely against his side.

He stared straight ahead.

Looming before them, standing no more than ten feet away, was a barrier of pure, seamless, blinding white material. It stretched infinitely upward into the absolute, starless dark of the Core OS airspace, and it stretched endlessly downward into the lightless abyss below. It expanded perfectly to the left and to the right, completely cutting off the entire universe from whatever lay beyond.

There were no doors. There were no keyholes. There were no handles, no seams, no cracks, and absolutely no structural weaknesses. It was a perfect, flawless, infinite plane of unyielding logic.

It was the absolute firewall of the Core OS.

”Well,” Sebastian muttered, his voice a distorted, metallic hum through his cracked porcelain mask. ”This is incredibly anti-climactic. They couldn’t even spring for a doormat? Maybe a little ’Welcome’ sign? The minimalism is honestly offensive.”

”Seattle, it’s not a building,” Valerie wheezed. Her translucent blue hand clutched the lapel of his coat. She was trembling violently, her astral form struggling to hold its shape. Jagged lines of gray static tore across her face, mixing with the bright red digital blood dripping from her nose. ”It’s the gap between software and hardware. No unauthorized data has ever breached this wall since the dawn of the System.”

Sebastian narrowed his silver-tinged eyes. He engaged his [True Sight], attempting to read the foundational code of the massive white structure.

*BZZZZT!*

The moment his vision touched the wall, his green Administrator UI completely blanked out. It didn’t throw up a red warning prompt. It didn’t tell him his access was denied. It simply failed to register that the wall existed at all. To his internal tracking software, he was staring at empty space.

”It’s a blind spot,” Sebastian confirmed, remembering the 8-bit giant’s warning. ”Prometheus wasn’t kidding. If I try to just walk forward, I’ll probably end up on a digital treadmill forever.”

”Are you sure you have the key?” Valerie gasped, coughing a weak spray of red pixels onto his black armor. ”Because my physical body is officially redlining. Galleon is screaming in the comms... I can hear the generators melting.”

Sebastian felt a sharp, cold spike of sheer terror hit his chest. He could literally feel the immense, agonizing pressure crushing her brain through the astral tether. She was dying on that altar to keep the door open for him. The clock wasn’t just ticking anymore; it was actively tolling the final bell.

”I’ve got the key, Princess,” Sebastian said softly. He gently squeezed her shoulder. ”Just hold on for ten more seconds. I’m going to kick this stupid white fence down.”

He didn’t let go of her. He reached into his deep, bottomless inventory with his right hand. His fingers brushed past the massive piles of legendary loot, the millions of gold coins, and the heavy, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword.

He pulled out the orb.

It was [Prometheus’s Gift]. The raw, unadulterated chunk of the First Admin’s foundational code that the giant had ripped from his own chest. It pulsed with a brilliant, buzzing green light that cast eerie, shifting shadows across the sterile white surface of the infinite wall.

”Alright, let’s see if the old man gave me the right password,” Sebastian muttered.

He took a heavy, deliberate step forward, closing the final gap. He stood mere inches from the flawless white barrier. The sheer, oppressive aura of absolute perfection radiating from the wall was nauseating. It felt like standing next to a humming microwave that was the size of a planet.

He didn’t politely press the green orb against the wall. He was entirely out of patience, and he was running out of time.

Sebastian pulled his right arm back, his biological steel muscles coiling tight. He wrapped his black-gloved fingers tightly around the pulsing green code.

”System,” Sebastian growled, his voice vibrating with the absolute, apocalyptic authority of the Sovereign of Laws. ”Route override. Dynamic synchronization engaged.”

He didn’t just swing. He channeled his [Concept of Mass], cranking the density of his right fist to the absolute maximum threshold his physical rendering could handle without snapping his own arm off.

”Open sesame, you pretentious piece of drywall!”

*WHAM!*

He violently slammed the brilliant green orb directly into the seamless, infinite white wall.

The impact was utterly deafening. It didn’t sound like a physical crash. It sounded like a massive, high-voltage power line violently short-circuiting underwater.

*KRA-KZZZZZT!*

The flawless white material of the wall didn’t shatter like glass. It didn’t dent like metal. The moment the foundational, archaic green code of the First Admin collided with the sterile perfection of the Core OS firewall, the local reality aggressively panicked.

Bright, blinding green static exploded outward from Sebastian’s fist. The static violently chewed into the pure white light, acting like a highly corrosive acid eating through a plastic sheet.

”It’s working,” Valerie breathed, her blue eyes wide as she watched the perfect wall begin to violently bubble and warp around his hand.

”Keep pushing, Seattle,” Sebastian grunted, his teeth gritted behind the mask.

The system fought back. A massive, suffocating wave of heavy, oppressive gray energy pulsed outward from the wall, actively trying to scrub Sebastian’s glitched avatar from existence. The gray energy washed over his black leather coat, instantly vaporizing the outer layer of the fabric and searing his skin underneath.

He didn’t flinch. He just pushed the green orb deeper into the dissolving white light.

*BING! BING! BING!*