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

He was shrinking. The formatting wave was creeping dangerously close to slipping past his guard and continuing its march toward Earth.

And then, he felt it.

*WHAM!*

A massive, kinetic force slammed into his back. It didn’t feel like an attack. It didn’t feel like the sterile, clinical deletion of the Architects.

It felt incredibly, profoundly human.

A sudden, blinding wave of absolute, uncorrupted golden heat flooded into his spine. It shot through his digital veins, completely bypassing the localized crash in his rendering engine.

*BING! BING! BING!*

His green, corrupted Administrator UI suddenly exploded with massive, golden holographic windows. They weren’t warning prompts. They were notifications of sheer, unprecedented data intake.

[MASSIVE SOURCE CODE INTEGRATION DETECTED.]

[Origin: Sanctuary Core (Server 894).]

[Data Volume: INFINITE.]

[Status: Fuel Reserves Restored to 100%.]

”What the fuck?!” Sebastian gasped, his distorted, metallic voice cracking.

He didn’t need to turn his massive head to know what had just hit him. He could feel the familiar, stubborn, corporate warmth of her mana. He could feel the desperate, bloody grip of her hands physically digging into the wireframes of his back.

”Valerie?!” Sebastian’s mind roared, raw panic instantly flooding his systems. ”What are you doing here?! I told you to stay on the server!”

Her voice didn’t come through the standard audio comms. The connection was far too intimate for that. Her fading, glitching thoughts bled directly into his localized consciousness through the physical transfer of the Core.

*I told you... I wouldn’t leave you alone in the dark,* her thoughts echoed weakly, laced with intense agony. *I brought you a battery, Seattle. Now finish the job.*

”You’re an absolute idiot!” Sebastian yelled, his silver-tinged void eyes widening in sheer terror.

He could feel her physical body actively dying against his back. He could feel her health bar plummeting into the decimals. The transfer of the planetary core wasn’t a clean process. It was violently tearing her fragile, human meat-suit apart at the seams.

*Yeah, well,* her mental voice slurred, the sharp, cynical edge completely dissolving into a soft, tired whisper. *You owe me a steak. Medium rare. Don’t forget.*

The golden light pouring from her hands began to dim.

The last ounce of the Sanctuary Core emptied from her chest, flowing completely into Sebastian’s digital reservoir.

With a soft, incredibly quiet sigh, the lights in Valerie’s mind simply went out.

Her grip on his wireframe spine failed. Her hands went entirely slack. Her broken, bleeding, legless body slowly began to peel away from his massive back, drifting backward into the cold, empty vacuum of the Juncture.

[WARNING: Biological Host Valerie - Life Signs Terminated.]

Sebastian froze.

The roaring, chaotic noise of the Genesis Protocol chewing on his hands completely faded into background static. The blinding white light of the formatting wave didn’t matter. The entire multiverse could have shattered into a trillion pieces right then, and he wouldn’t have noticed.

He forcefully disengaged his arms from the white wall.

Sebastian spun his massive, planetary-sized avatar around, entirely ignoring the apocalyptic wave advancing behind him.

He reached out with a colossal, static-filled hand. He moved with a terrified, frantic gentleness that completely defied his monstrous size. He caught Valerie’s tiny, broken body before she could drift away into the dark.

He brought her up to his cracked porcelain mask.

She looked horrifying. Her overalls were charred and soaked in her own frozen blood. Her legs were missing from the knees down. Her pale face was completely slack, her eyes closed, her skin devoid of any golden glow or human warmth. She was just a broken, empty vessel.

”No. No, no, no,” Sebastian whispered, his voice shaking violently.

He cradled her tiny body inside the palm of his massive black glove. He stared at her, the reality of what she had just done crashing over him like a physical blow. She had sacrificed her own life, ripped the core out of their home planet, and thrown herself into the vacuum of space just to give him the fuel to keep fighting.

A profound, suffocating grief opened up in the absolute center of his chest.

But the grief didn’t last long. It was instantly, violently consumed by an emotion that was infinitely more destructive.

Rage.

It wasn’t the cold, calculating, deadpan annoyance he usually felt when dealing with arrogant Saints or stupid Warlords. It was a dark, bottomless, apocalyptic fury. It was the kind of rage that wanted to grab the very fabric of reality by the throat and strangle it until it stopped moving.

*BZZZZZT!*

The red error runes carved into Sebastian’s chest didn’t just flare; they detonated.

The bruised-purple malware making up his physical rendering turned a blinding, pitch-black. The green wireframes aggressively thickened, turning into heavy, solid bars of corrupted biological steel.

His Administrator UI violently glitched, the green screens shattering and reforming in deep, angry crimson.

[ANOMALY CRITICAL: Concept of Error synthesizing with Concept of Life...]

[Warning: System architecture cannot process localized emotional variable.]

[OVERRIDE. OVERRIDE. OVERRIDE.]

Sebastian gently tucked Valerie’s lifeless body into a small, localized pocket of safe space near his chest, shielding her from the violent static of his own rendering.

He slowly turned his masked face back toward the advancing wall of the Genesis Protocol.

The white light was creeping closer, ready to wash over him and consume the isolated sphere of Earth in the distance. The Architects thought they had won. They thought they were just dealing with a stubborn virus.

They didn’t realize they had just murdered the only thing keeping the monster on a leash.

”You sterile, soulless pieces of shit,” Sebastian snarled. His voice was no longer a mix of static and grinding metal. It was a booming, singular roar of absolute, unhinged human hatred that physically cracked the empty space of the Juncture.

He didn’t just brace himself to hold the wall anymore. He wasn’t playing defense.

Fueled by the infinite, unlimited mana of a literal planet, and driven by a grief so profound it mutated his base code, Sebastian raised his massive, black-gloved hands.

”I’m going to format your entire fucking existence.”

—

The transfer of a planet’s beating heart is not a quiet process. It is violent, raw, and completely ignores the polite boundaries of physics. But the moment the absolute last drop of golden Earth-mana left Valerie’s broken body and flooded into Sebastian’s massive, glitching form, the chaotic noise of the universe simply ceased to exist.

The deafening, grinding roar of his own digital code being deleted and re-rendered ten thousand times a second abruptly stopped. The high-pitched, screeching whine of the Genesis Protocol eating away at his black static faded into a dull, insignificant hum.

*BING! BING!*

[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: INFINITE MANA SOURCE DETECTED.]

[Entity Cohesion: 100%.]

[Fragmentation Arrested. Fuel Reserves: MAXIMUM.]

Sebastian didn’t care about the prompts. He swiped them away with a frantic, desperate thought. His massive, twenty-foot-tall avatar was perfectly stable now. The infinite power of the Sanctuary Core had acted like cosmic superglue, instantly stitching his bruised-purple malware and jagged green wireframes back into a solid, impenetrable wall of dark data.

He had the juice. He could hold back the white light of the apocalypse forever if he had to. The formatting wave crashed against his broad back, but it no longer ate his flesh. It just washed over him, harmless and ineffective.

But none of that mattered.

Sebastian gently, carefully held Valerie’s lifeless body in the palm of his colossal black glove.

She looked so incredibly small. Her charred mechanic’s overalls were stiff with frozen, crystallized blood. Her legs were completely missing from the knees down, vaporized by the sheer kinetic friction of launching herself through the vacuum of space. Her pale face was slack, her chin stained with a thick smear of red pixels that had frozen into jagged ice.

The brilliant, beautiful blue light that usually burned in her eyes was gone.

”Valerie?” Sebastian whispered.

His voice didn’t boom. It didn’t carry the terrifying, metallic distortion of the Sovereign of Laws. It was just the quiet, shaking voice of a guy who had just watched his entire world shatter.

”Hey. Seattle. Come on,” Sebastian pleaded, his massive thumb gently brushing against her frozen cheek. ”You delivered the battery. You did good. Now wake up. Tell me I’m an idiot. Yell at me for leaving a mess on the floor.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe.

[WARNING: Biological Host Valerie - Life Signs Terminated.]

[Status: Deceased.]

”Shut the fuck up!” Sebastian roared at his own UI, his pitch-black, empty eye sockets flaring with a sudden burst of violent green static. He physically swiped his hand through the empty air, shattering the holographic text into a million pieces. ”I didn’t ask for a status update! You don’t know anything!”

He stared down at her. He expected her to cough. He expected the stubborn, corporate heiress to force her eyes open out of pure, unadulterated spite. She had survived an exploding sky-fortress. She had survived the Vanguard Syndicate. She was the Guild Master. Guild Masters didn’t just die in the dark.