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

But as the seconds ticked by, the crushing, horrifying reality settled over him like a suffocating lead blanket.

She wasn’t breathing. The warm, comforting hum of her presence in his mind—the tether that had kept his ego intact while he floated in this cosmic graveyard—was completely, entirely silent.

Sebastian slowly pulled her body closer to his face. The cracked porcelain mask that covered his visage wept thick, oily black tears of digital blood. The heavy drops fell from his empty eye sockets, splashing silently against the dark void.

”You really couldn’t just order takeout, could you, Princess?” Sebastian whispered, his voice cracking violently. ”You always had to do things the hard way. You couldn’t just sit in the bunker and let me handle it.”

A profound, suffocating grief opened up in the absolute center of his chest. It was a cold, terrifying void that had absolutely nothing to do with the malware running through his veins. He had deleted his pain receptors months ago. He couldn’t feel the physical burn of the white light behind him, and he couldn’t feel the phantom ache of his scars.

But the system couldn’t delete human misery.

The pain he felt right now bypassed every single line of code in the Ethereal Plane. It was raw. It was ugly. It felt like someone had reached into his chest, grabbed his heart, and twisted it until it snapped.

He remembered the cramped, rain-slicked alleyways of Ironhold. He remembered her buying his overpriced ’Potion of Knitting’ without a single complaint, and then immediately turning around to beat her attackers into the pavement with her bare hands. She hadn’t been a damsel in distress. She had been a partner. She had been the only person in this entire, stupid, gamified universe who looked at a glitching, homicidal monster and saw someone worth saving.

And now she was gone.

”I told you I’d keep the lights on,” Sebastian choked out, his shoulders shaking. ”I told you.”

He didn’t want to fight anymore. He didn’t care about the Architects. He didn’t care about the Core OS or the millions of planets sitting in the dark. He just wanted to go back to his shitty, rusted warehouse on Earth and sit on the ugly leather couch with her.

*VMMMMMMMMM.*

The low, resonant hum of the Genesis Protocol pressed against his back, a sterile, uncaring reminder that the universe was actively trying to end. The white light of the formatting wave tried to wrap around his sides, desperately reaching for the golden sphere of Earth hovering millions of miles away in the distance.

Sebastian slowly lifted his head.

Through the thick, weeping black tears, his silver-tinged eyes locked onto the distant, golden barrier he had built. He could see Sanctuary down there. He knew Wraith and Galleon were probably staring at the sky right now, waiting to see if they were going to live or die.

Valerie had literally ripped her own soul apart to give him the power to protect that planet. If he let the wave pass him now, her sacrifice would mean absolutely nothing. She would have died for a delayed Game Over screen.

”Okay,” Sebastian whispered, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly cold, hollow hum.

He didn’t have time to bury her. He didn’t have a grave. But he was absolutely not going to leave her floating in the cold vacuum of the Juncture.

Sebastian gently, carefully pressed her broken body against the center of his massive, static-laced chest.

”System,” Sebastian commanded. ”Access localized [Gravity Domain]. Create a stasis pocket. Target: Valerie.”

*BING.*

A soft, pulsing sphere of dark, bruised-purple energy formed right over his heart. It wasn’t a destructive spell. It was a perfectly preserved, zero-gravity safe room built directly into his own physical rendering. He gently tucked her tiny, lifeless body into the glowing pocket. The dark energy wrapped around her, protecting her frozen form from the chaotic, violent malware of his avatar and the searing heat of the universe outside.

She rested safely inside his chest cavity, nestled right next to the roaring, infinite engine of the Sanctuary Core she had given him.

”I’ve got you, Seattle,” Sebastian murmured, placing his massive black-gloved hand over the stasis pocket for a second. ”You can rest now. I’ll take the night shift.”

He slowly turned his massive, twenty-foot-tall body around.

The endless, seamless wall of blinding white light loomed before him. The Genesis Protocol. The absolute, unyielding factory reset button pressed by the cowardly gods hiding in the Core OS. They thought they could just wipe the slate clean because they had lost control of their own game. They thought they could erase trillion of lives, erase Earth, and erase the woman sleeping in his chest.

Sebastian stood fully upright.

He cracked his knuckles. The sound was like two massive tectonic plates violently colliding.

*CRACK.*

The grief that had been suffocating him didn’t vanish. It didn’t fade away. It simply compressed. It condensed into a dark, bottomless, apocalyptic fury. It was the kind of rage that didn’t scream or thrash. It was cold. It was calculating. It was the absolute, focused certainty of a man who was about to commit an atrocity so severe the multiverse would never forget it.

The red error runes carved into his chest and arms didn’t just flare; they detonated. They burned with a blinding, searing white-hot intensity, bleeding thick streams of corrupted green data into the dark void.

”You sterile, soulless pieces of shit,” Sebastian snarled. His voice vibrated through the empty space, a singular, booming roar of pure human hatred that physically cracked the ambient fabric of the Juncture.

He wasn’t going to just stand here and hold the wall. He wasn’t playing defense anymore.

He raised his massive, glitching fists, entirely prepared to tear the universe a new asshole.

—-

The Genesis Protocol was entirely apathetic. It was a wave of pure, unadulterated software formatting, marching through the Juncture with the sole purpose of rendering everything it touched into a blank, pristine white void. It didn’t understand anger. It didn’t understand grief.

But it was about to learn.

Sebastian stood in the direct path of the apocalyptic light, a towering, twenty-foot colossus of bruised-purple malware and jagged green wireframes. The infinite mana of the Sanctuary Core pulsed inside his chest, an endless reservoir of raw, golden Earth-mana that completely eclipsed the ten million units of Source Code he had previously burned.

He was fully stabilized. The white wave crashed against his broad shoulders and simply parted, entirely unable to delete a file that possessed infinite fuel.

”You want a clean slate?” Sebastian’s distorted, overlapping voice boomed, drowning out the low, resonant hum of the formatting wave. ”I prefer things a little messy.”

He didn’t just brace his boots. He took a heavy, aggressive step forward, directly *into* the searing white light.

*HSSSSS!*

The contact between his corrupted, virus-laden avatar and the pristine, sterile logic of the Core OS generated a localized explosion of displaced physics. Blinding sparks of red and gold erupted around him, but Sebastian didn’t feel the heat. He didn’t feel anything except the cold, suffocating weight of Valerie’s lifeless body tucked safely inside the stasis pocket in his chest.

He raised both of his massive hands.

”System,” Sebastian growled, his silver-tinged void eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. ”Access [Code Compiler]. Pull everything.”

He wasn’t going to try and rust the wave again. He knew the [Concept of Decay] didn’t work on pure kernel logic. He had to hit the system with something it couldn’t mathematically process. He had to feed it a paradox so profound it would shatter the foundational architecture of the Ethereal Plane.

He reached deep into his own base files. He grabbed the 99% Error Accumulation that had nearly torn his mind apart just an hour ago. It was raw, catastrophic garbage data—the absolute manifestation of broken rules and fatal glitches.

But Error alone wasn’t enough to stop a multiversal reset.

Sebastian needed a catalyst. He needed a variable that the sterile, unfeeling Architects simply could not account for.

He looked inward, toward the massive, swirling golden sphere of planetary mana resting in his chest. The Sanctuary Core wasn’t just magic. It was the condensed life-force of Earth. It was the trees, the oceans, the survivors fighting in the rubble, and the desperate, stubborn sacrifice of a woman who had burned her own brain to save him.

It was pure, chaotic, beautiful life.

”Let’s mix a little heart into the malware,” Sebastian whispered.

He didn’t use the standard UI to combine them. He bypassed the safe synthesis menus and violently, forcefully slammed the pure golden Earth-mana directly into the pitch-black, jagged red strings of his [Error].

*BZZZZT!*

The reaction inside his digital meat-suit was explosive.

”GAAAAH!” Sebastian roared, throwing his head back as the two opposing forces collided.

It wasn’t physical pain. It was the sheer, terrifying ecstasy of creation. The dark, brooding purple static that made up his body suddenly erupted with brilliant, blinding streaks of gold. The red error runes carved into his flesh shifted, the edges turning a bright, vibrant, living green.

He wasn’t just a glitch anymore. The virus had evolved.

*BING! BING! BING!*