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

Sebastian dragged the Architect over to the shattered remains of the massive golden keyboard. Jagged, heavy blocks of solid gold and sparking brass circuits littered the floor.

Sebastian forced the Architect’s face downward.

”No! Please!” the creator of the Ethereal Plane begged.

*WHAM!*

Sebastian slammed the Architect’s face directly into the jagged edge of the broken console.

The impact was sickening. The golden armor on the faceplate completely shattered.

Sebastian didn’t stop. He pulled the god’s head back by the hair and slammed it down again.

*WHAM!*

And again.

*WHAM!*

This wasn’t an epic, magical duel. This wasn’t a battle of conceptual laws or 10,000x multipliers. This was a gruesome, intimate, entirely physical street fight in the sterile heart of the universe. Sebastian was venting every single ounce of trauma, frustration, and exhaustion he had accumulated over the past year directly into the skull of the man who had caused it.

”This is for the spiders in my apartment!” Sebastian roared, slamming the head down.

*CRACK!*

”This is for the acid vats!”

*SMASH!*

”And this is for making me run on that stupid fucking bridge!”

*KRA-SQUELCH!*

With a final, devastating slam, the heavy golden armor of the Architect’s head completely gave way. The skull fractured into a hundred jagged, golden shards. A massive spray of thick, gray brain matter and glowing golden fluid exploded across the white marble floor, painting Sebastian’s torn coat and face in the gore of a dead god.

The Prime Architect’s body went completely, entirely limp. The golden light radiating from the armor flickered weakly, and then permanently died out, turning into a dull, lifeless brass color.

[Target Eliminated.]

[Status: Prime Architect Deceased.]

The faint, gray system prompt flickered in the dead air for a second before fading away.

Sebastian slowly let go of the ruined collar. The headless, pulverized corpse of the creator dropped to the floor with a heavy, wet thud.

The room fell absolutely silent. The only sound was the heavy, ragged, wet breathing echoing inside Sebastian’s chest.

He stood over the dead god for a long, heavy moment. He looked at his own hands. His right glove was completely shredded, his knuckles a raw, bleeding mess of torn meat and exposed bone. He felt incredibly, profoundly cold.

The adrenaline suddenly, violently abandoned him.

His eyes rolled back. His knees buckled completely.

”Seattle!” Valerie’s voice screamed in the distance.

Sebastian didn’t hear her. He hit the pristine white marble floor completely unconscious, collapsing right next to the shattered remains of the keyboard.

***

The cold of the white marble floor was seeping directly into Sebastian’s bones.

He was drowning in a hazy, suffocating dark. His physical body was shutting down. The fractured ribs, the deep slice in his thigh, the pulverized knuckles, and the sheer, ungodly strain of carrying the planet’s Source Code without a digital safety net had finally broken his meat-suit.

He was dying. He knew what it felt like to un-render in the Ethereal Plane, but this was different. This was just raw, biological death.

”Sebastian! Hey! Look at me!”

A warm, frantic pair of hands grabbed his face.

Sebastian slowly forced his eyes open. His vision was incredibly blurry, the sterile white light of the throne room burning his retinas. Hovering right above him was Valerie.

She looked like absolute hell. Her face was smeared with soot and dried blood. Her mechanic’s overalls were torn and scorched. She was weeping, real tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks as she desperately pressed her hands against the bleeding wounds on his chest.

”Don’t you dare die on me, Seattle,” Valerie sobbed, her voice cracking violently. ”I didn’t melt my brain on an altar just to watch you bleed out on a fancy floor. Wake up!”

Sebastian let out a wet, bubbling cough. He tasted copper. He forced a weak, incredibly lopsided smile.

”You look terrible, Princess,” Sebastian wheezed, his voice barely above a whisper.

”You look worse than my cooking,” Valerie choked out a laugh, though the tears kept falling. She ripped a long strip of fabric from her overalls and aggressively pressed it against the deep slice on his right thigh. ”Just hold on. We won. The Architect is dead. We just need to figure out how to call an ambulance.”

”Can’t,” Sebastian grunted, his eyes slowly drifting toward the center of the room.

Looming just twenty feet away, past the shattered golden console, was the infinite white wall of the Genesis Protocol. The formatting wave hadn’t stopped. With the Architect dead, the automated wipe was still slowly, inevitably advancing outward. If it breached the room and hit the Juncture, Earth was still going to be deleted.

”The loading screen is still going,” Sebastian coughed, his body trembling violently. ”I need to hit save.”

”You can’t move!” Valerie pleaded, pressing her hands against his chest to keep him pinned to the floor. ”Your body is literally falling apart!”

”I’m the IT guy, Seattle,” Sebastian whispered, reaching his bloody right hand up to gently touch her cheek. ”I have to finish the ticket.”

He didn’t wait for her to argue. Sebastian gritted his teeth, letting out a raw, agonizing groan as he rolled onto his stomach. The pain was absolute torture. Every single movement felt like a rusty knife dragging across his nerves.

He dug his ruined, bleeding right hand into the polished white marble. He began to drag himself forward, inch by bloody inch.

*SQUELCH. DRAG.*

He left a thick, dark crimson trail of blood across the pristine floor. Valerie scrambled along beside him, her hands hovering nervously, entirely unsure how to help without causing him more pain.

”Almost there,” Sebastian panted, his vision swimming with dark, heavy shadows.

He reached the shattered remains of the massive golden console. The pristine physical keys of the Keyboard of Genesis were completely pulverized into useless gold shards. But beneath the broken metal, thick, glowing blue and gold fiber-optic wires pulsed with raw, foundational energy.

It was the root connection to the Core OS. It was the direct line into the hard drive of the multiverse.

Sebastian collapsed at the base of the broken console. He couldn’t lift his upper body. He was too weak.

Valerie dropped to her knees beside him. She wrapped her arms around his chest and forcefully hauled his upper body off the floor, propping his shoulders against her lap so he could reach the exposed wires.

”I’ve got you,” Valerie whispered, tears dripping from her chin onto his torn leather coat. ”Just do your math, Seattle.”

”Thanks,” Sebastian wheezed.

He raised his shaking, blood-soaked right hand. He didn’t have a keyboard to type on. He couldn’t use his [Code Compiler] because the UI was suppressed by the Hardware Level’s base reality.

But he still had the ten million units of Source Code digesting in his chest. And he had blood.

Sebastian plunged his raw, bleeding fingers directly into the thick, sparking bundle of exposed blue and gold wires.

*BZZZZZT!*

”GAAAAH!” Sebastian screamed as raw, unadulterated multiversal electricity shot directly into his open wounds.

It didn’t reject him. The moment his actual, human blood mixed with the raw Source Code in his veins and touched the exposed wires, the hardware registered his DNA. It recognized the absolute, overriding authority of the Anomaly who had consumed four worlds.

*BING!*

A massive, brilliant, blindingly clear golden window exploded into his vision, entirely overriding the suppressed gray interface of the Motherboard.

[ROOT ACCESS: UNRESTRICTED.]

[System Hub Override Accepted. Welcome, Administrator Zero.]

[Action Required: Genesis Protocol is currently active. Proceed?]

”Cancel format,” Sebastian growled, his voice a distorted, echoing hum that vibrated the entire chamber.

[Command Accepted. Genesis Protocol Aborted.]

Out in the distance, the infinite, blinding white wall of the formatting wave instantly froze. The low, resonant hum of deletion simply ceased to exist. The light flickered, turned a dull, harmless gray, and quietly evaporated into nothingness.

The multiverse was saved. But Sebastian wasn’t done.

”Open the core logic files,” Sebastian commanded, his fingers burning as he gripped the live wires tighter. ”It’s time for a patch update.”

A sprawling, infinite list of green and gold text cascaded across his vision. It was the rules of the Ethereal Plane.

”Delete the leveling system,” Sebastian snarled, his eyes burning with absolute focus. ”Delete the stats. Delete the forced monster spawns. Delete the Void.”

[Processing... Warning: Deleting foundational mechanics will result in an unguided reality. Proceed?]

”I said delete it!” Sebastian roared.

The text in his vision blurred as billions of lines of code were permanently erased from the hard drive. The meat grinder was officially dismantled. The system would no longer force people to murder each other for arbitrary power.

”Make magic a natural law,” Sebastian whispered, his breathing growing incredibly shallow. ”Make it tied to the physical environment. No more UI. No more game interfaces. Just a normal, breathing universe.”

[Processing... Physics Engine updated.]

”Restore the deleted servers,” Sebastian commanded, thinking of the innocent worlds that had been formatted by the Cleaners and the Archons.