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

The Architects had completely given up. They had looked at the prison riot in Tartarus, they had looked at the Anomaly breaching their firewall, and they had decided the Ethereal Plane was no longer worth saving. They were pulling the plug.

In exactly nine minutes and fifty-something seconds, a wave of absolute, unformatted white light was going to erupt from the Core OS. It would wash over Tartarus, instantly deleting the trillions of newly freed souls fighting the Sanitizers. It would flood the Juncture, wiping out the floating debris and the Dead Servers.

And then, it would hit Earth.

Prometheus had warned him. A firewall only protects the software. If they wipe the physical hard drive, the golden barrier of the Sovereign’s Aegis would just pop like a soap bubble. Earth, the refugees, Sanctuary, Galleon, Wraith... and Valerie. They would all be reduced to empty, unwritten void.

”Not on my watch,” Sebastian snarled, his hands balling into fists.

He didn’t have time to plan. He didn’t have time to sneak around. He broke into a dead sprint.

*THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!*

His heavy combat boots pounded against the dark stone floor as he tore down the massive, brass-lined corridor. Without the Ethereal Plane’s physics engine to assist his movement, he felt the true, agonizing weight of his own hyper-dense body. He weighed thousands of pounds. Running at top speed felt like dragging a commercial anchor behind him.

His lungs burned. His thighs screamed in protest.

”Don’t die on me, Seattle,” Sebastian chanted under his breath, using the mantra to keep his legs moving. ”I’m hurrying. I’m coming.”

[08:45]

He rounded a massive corner, dodging a colossal, swinging iron pendulum that seemed to serve no purpose other than to crush anything walking down the hall.

*SWOOSH!*

The wind from the pendulum nearly knocked him off his feet, but he dove under it, rolling awkwardly across the rough stone. He popped back up, ignoring the fresh scrapes on his elbows, and kept running.

The sterile white light pulsing from the walls was getting brighter. The rhythmic thumping of the Genesis Protocol booting up felt like an earthquake. The center of the Motherboard was gearing up to unleash an apocalyptic reset, and the energy output was generating massive amounts of localized heat.

[07:12]

Sebastian sprinted down a long, narrow catwalk suspended over a terrifying, lightless abyss of grinding gears. The metal grating shook violently under his heavy boots.

Suddenly, the heavy brass doors at the end of the catwalk slid open.

Three figures stepped out. They weren’t digital Cleaners. They were Hardware Sentinels. They looked like towering, blocky knights forged entirely from rusted iron and spinning brass gears. They held heavy, physical halberds that leaked thick black oil.

”INTRUDER DETECTED,” the lead Sentinel buzzed, its mechanical jaw snapping open and shut.

”Get out of my way!” Sebastian roared.

He didn’t slow down. He didn’t try to use magic. He just lowered his shoulder and channeled every single ounce of his thirty-percent physical sync into his momentum.

He collided with the lead Sentinel like a runaway freight train.

*CRASH!*

The sound of shattering iron and tearing gears echoed over the abyss. The Sentinel’s chest plate completely caved inward. Sebastian didn’t stop to fight the other two. He just kept his legs churning, using the ruined chassis of the first Sentinel as a battering ram to plow straight through the remaining guards.

The two Sentinels were thrown off the narrow catwalk, their heavy metal bodies plummeting into the grinding gears below with a series of horrific, crunching snaps.

Sebastian burst through the brass doors, tearing them completely off their hinges.

[05:30]

His chest was heaving. He was sweating profusely, the black tactical suit clinging to his skin. He coughed, a splatter of blood hitting the inside of his porcelain mask. The sheer physical toll of running at maximum capacity without the game engine’s stamina buffers was literally tearing his muscle fibers apart.

But he couldn’t stop.

He navigated the twisting, brutalist labyrinth, following the blinding intensity of the pulsing white light. It was growing so bright it actually hurt his silver-tinged eyes to look directly at it.

”Almost there,” Sebastian gasped, his vision blurring slightly at the edges.

[03:15]

He reached the end of the corridor.

Standing before him was a massive, arching gateway carved from solid, dark stone. Beyond the archway, the air was practically vibrating with unstable, apocalyptic energy. The white light pouring out of the room was absolute. It looked like looking directly into the core of an exploding star.

Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He wiped the blood from his chin, tightened his fists, and stepped through the archway into the final chamber.

It was time to pull the plug on the universe.

—

The central chamber of the Hardware Level was completely, utterly devoid of the messy, grinding gears and rusted brass of the outer corridors.

Sebastian stepped through the massive stone archway, holding his arm up to shield his eyes from the blinding, oppressive glare. His heavy boots hit a floor made of perfectly smooth, flawless white material.

The scale of the room was impossible. It felt like standing inside the hollowed-out center of a moon.

But there was only one thing to look at.

Looming in the absolute center of the colossal chamber was the source of the light. It wasn’t a computer terminal. It wasn’t a glowing orb or a server rack.

It was a wall.

A towering, infinite, seamless wall of pure, blinding white light. It stretched up into the unseen ceiling and down into the floor. It hummed with a terrifying, absolute frequency that vibrated straight through Sebastian’s bones and rattled his teeth.

It wasn’t just a wall. It was a wave.

Sebastian could see the edges of the white light slowly, methodically shifting forward. The Genesis Protocol wasn’t an explosion; it was an advancing tide of absolute deletion. It was actively rendering the physical space of the chamber into nothingness, slowly preparing to breach the outer doors and wash over the entire multiverse.

A glowing, hard-light timer hovered directly above the advancing wall.

[01:45]

”A minute and forty-five seconds,” Sebastian whispered, his voice cracking. He lowered his arm, forcing his eyes to adjust to the blinding light.

He walked forward. Every step felt like walking against hurricane-force winds. The sheer, physical pressure radiating from the formatting wave was actively trying to push him backward, treating his biological presence like an annoying speck of dust.

Sebastian stopped about twenty feet away from the advancing wall of light.

He stood there, panting heavily, his black leather coat torn and smoking. He looked incredibly small.

He ran the math in his head.

He was a 6-foot-2 human being. He had a thirty-percent physical synchronization. His muscles were dense, and his bones were like steel. But he was standing in front of a multiversal reset button that spanned the height of a planet.

He couldn’t just punch it. He couldn’t just kick it. Physical force, even Demigod-tier physical force, was completely meaningless against an advancing wall of pure, unadulterated software formatting.

If that wave breached the chamber, it would wash over Tartarus. The trillions of souls who had just picked up swords to fight for their freedom would be erased before they even knew what hit them. The wave would hit the Juncture.

And then, it would hit Earth.

Sebastian closed his eyes. He pictured the Sanctuary basement. He pictured Valerie lying on the cold marble of the Resurrection Altar, her blue eyes wide, her nose bleeding as she desperately kept the lights on for him. She had burned her own mind to keep his tether stable. She had refused to let him die in the dark.

He was absolutely not going to let a glorified loading screen delete her.

”You guys want to wipe the slate clean?” Sebastian said softly, opening his silver-tinged eyes. They burned with a dark, unhinged, apocalyptic fury. ”You want to format the hard drive?”

[01:10]

Sebastian reached up and unclasped the heavy, black leather tactical coat. He let it slip off his shoulders. It hit the white floor with a soft thud.

He couldn’t fight this as a human. The human meat-suit was too fragile. It was too small. If the Hardware Level rejected the Ethereal Plane’s magic, then he was going to have to forcefully shove the magic down the hardware’s throat.

He didn’t need to be a player anymore. He didn’t need to be the quiet, deadpan survivor.

”System,” Sebastian growled, his voice dropping into a dark, metallic resonance that aggressively fought back against the humming of the room. ”Suppress human rendering.”

*BZZZZT!*

The system didn’t want to obey. He was standing in a dead zone, cut off from the software. But Sebastian still held the ten million units of Source Code inside his chest. He was a walking server.

”I said, suppress the rendering!” Sebastian roared.

He forcefully grabbed the 99% Error Accumulation that he had been desperately holding back to keep his sanity intact. He took the leash off the malware.

The transformation was visceral, bloody, and completely horrifying.