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

Sebastian shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his ruined black leather coat. The red error runes carved into his chest stopped their chaotic, aggressive flashing. They settled into a slow, steady, incredibly heavy pulse.

He felt a profound, terrifying shift in his own base code.

He wasn’t just a tyrant anymore. He wasn’t just a warlord who threw gravity around to bully other players. He was the Sovereign of Laws. And a Sovereign’s primary job wasn’t just to rule his territory. It was to protect it.

”Alright, let’s see how waterproof this code really is,” Sebastian muttered.

The white wall was fifty yards away. The pristine, blinding light washed over his black tactical suit, threatening to scrub away the bruised-purple malware that made up his body. The prisoners behind him were weeping, squeezing their eyes shut and waiting for the end.

Sebastian didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t brace for impact.

He took a slow, heavy step directly into the tide.

”System,” Sebastian commanded, his voice dropping into a cold, absolute resonance that defied the silent formatting wave. ”Disengage localized size constraints. Access raw Source Code reserves.”

He wasn’t going to let this wave touch Earth. He wasn’t going to let it touch the prisoners cowering behind his boots. If the Architects wanted to wipe the slate clean, they were going to have to wipe him first.

He stepped fully into the blinding white light, ready to expand.

—-

Stepping into the Genesis Protocol felt like walking face-first into a blizzard made of pure bleach.

The moment Sebastian’s twenty-foot-tall avatar breached the advancing wall of white light, his external audio receptors completely cut out. The comforting, chaotic noise of his own static and the weeping of the prisoners behind him vanished. The only sound left in the universe was a high-pitched, clinical ringing.

It was the sound of his outer polygons actively being scrubbed from existence.

”Okay, twenty feet tall is definitely not going to cut it,” Sebastian grunted, feeling the white light easily washing around his sides. Earth was a massive, golden globe floating millions of miles away. Trying to protect a planet with a body the size of a two-story building was like trying to stop a tsunami with a cocktail umbrella.

He needed to be bigger. Much, much bigger.

”System!” Sebastian’s voice roared, a heavily distorted, overlapping boom that violently pushed back against the sterile silence. ”Release the payload! Burn the Cores!”

Inside his glitched, bottomless inventory, the ten million units of raw Source Code he had harvested from the dead planets sat waiting. It was the foundational fuel of four entire realities.

He didn’t use it to synthesize a new law of physics. He forcefully routed the entire, unadulterated mass of data directly into his own physical rendering engine.

*BZZZZZT!*

The expansion was instantaneous and utterly terrifying.

Sebastian didn’t just grow. His digital biology exploded outward.

”GAAAAAH!” he roared, the pain of his own code stretching to impossible, cosmic proportions echoing across the void.

His heavy combat boots expanded, completely swallowing the floating obsidian island and the thousands of cowering prisoners, safely tucking them into a tiny, localized pocket of his [Gravity Domain] near his heel.

His black tactical suit stretched into the dark, becoming a sprawling, continent-sized expanse of bruised-purple malware and shifting black static. The red error runes carved into his chest grew so massive they looked like deeply glowing, bleeding tectonic fault lines viewed from space.

He blew past the size of a skyscraper in a fraction of a microsecond. He surpassed the size of the Vanguard dreadnoughts.

He kept growing.

The ten million units of Source Code burned like a localized sun inside his chest, fueling a body that defied all mathematical logic. He reached the size of a moon. Then, he expanded further, his mass matching the size of a small planet.

He stopped growing just as his massive, static-laced shoulders blocked out the entire visible horizon.

Sebastian hovered in the Juncture, a colossal, planetary-sized wall of pure, unadulterated software Error. His cracked porcelain mask was now large enough to eclipse a continent. The thick, oily black tears weeping from his empty eye sockets rained down into the void like massive, cosmic rivers of dark sludge.

”I have a sudden, overwhelming urge to orbit something,” Sebastian complained, his voice now vibrating at a frequency that physically rippled the fabric of space. ”This feels completely ridiculous. My dry cleaning bill is going to be astronomical.”

Despite the massive upgrade in scale, he still felt the agonizing, creeping chill of the Genesis Protocol.

The infinite wall of white light crashed directly into his planetary-sized chest.

It was the ultimate cosmic clash of opposites.

The Genesis Protocol was the pinnacle of the Architects’ design. It was a wave of pure, sterile, unfeeling logic. It wanted to wipe the universe clean. It wanted perfect, empty, white space.

Sebastian was the absolute antithesis of that perfection. He was a jagged, bleeding, wildly erratic mass of broken math, bad code, and stubborn human spite. He was a giant, dirty fingerprint smeared right in the middle of a freshly cleaned window.

When the white wave hit his black static, it didn’t bounce off. It aggressively tried to overwrite him.

*HSSSSS!*

Vast, continent-sized chunks of Sebastian’s black leather rendering instantly turned white and dissolved into empty void. The formatting command was deleting millions of his polygons every single second.

”You want my data?” Sebastian snarled, his planetary-sized hands curling into fists. ”Come and take it!”

He didn’t just stand there and take the damage. He fought back with the only tool he had left.

Sebastian forcefully cranked his 10,000x Nexus Glitch into maximum overdrive. He tied the multiplier directly to his avatar’s base rendering speed.

For every million polygons the white wave deleted, Sebastian’s glitched compiler instantly generated a million and ten brand new ones to replace them. He forcefully shoved raw, corrupted green wireframes and black static directly into the gaping holes the wave was eating out of his chest.

It wasn’t a physical push. It was a brutal, agonizing coding battle happening in real-time across the surface of a giant body.

”I’m basically bailing water out of a sinking boat with a shot glass,” Sebastian wheezed.

The pain was returning. Despite his nociception delete, the erasure was happening at the kernel level. It wasn’t a physical wound; it was the agonizing sensation of his digital soul being sanded down by a cosmic belt sander. His massive, red error runes flashed with blinding, desperate heat as they struggled to process the generation commands fast enough.

The white wave pushed hard, attempting to flow around his massive shoulders to reach the golden sphere of Earth hovering far behind him.

”Oh no you don’t!” Sebastian roared.

He spread his colossal arms out wide, physically blocking the path of the light. He acted as a literal, planetary meat shield. The formatting wave crashed against his arms, his chest, and his cracked mask.

The clash created a terrifying, beautiful visual in the dark void. A massive, infinite wall of pure white light pushing desperately against a jagged, bleeding, pitch-black digital god. Where the two forces met, the space violently sparked with localized explosions of green static and red error codes.

”Hold... the... line,” Sebastian gritted his teeth. His planetary jaw muscles bulged with the effort.

He could feel the ten million units of Source Code rapidly burning away inside him. His fuel was depleting. The 10,000x multiplier was chewing through his reserves just to keep him rendered in the face of the apocalypse.

He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to move a single inch.

He looked over his massive, glitching shoulder. Millions of miles away, the tiny, fragile golden marble of Earth hung peacefully in the dark. Inside that bubble, Valerie was lying on a marble slab. Sanctuary was quiet. The people he had sworn to protect were completely unaware that a giant, sarcastic IT guy was currently using his own body as a dam to hold back the end of the world.

”I told you I’d leave the light on, Seattle,” Sebastian whispered, his voice incredibly soft despite his massive size.

He turned his masked face back toward the blinding white light of the Architects.

”You want to format my planet?” Sebastian roared, his red runes burning brighter than a supernova. ”You’re gonna have to format me first! Bring it on!”

He braced his colossal boots against the void, leaned his massive shoulders forward, and pushed back against the apocalypse.

—

The collision was entirely silent, but it shook the very foundation of the multiverse.

Sebastian stood the size of a small planet, a colossal, terrifying wall of bruised-purple malware, shifting black static, and jagged green wireframes. He leaned his massive shoulders forward, throwing the impossible, ungodly weight of his digital body directly against the advancing tide of the Genesis Protocol.

*FWOOSH!*

The infinite wall of blinding, sterile white light crashed into his chest.

”GAAAAAAH! Fuck!” Sebastian roared.

The sound vibrated across the dying Juncture, a heavily distorted, overlapping chorus of grinding metal and raw television static.