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

”Where the hell is my health bar?!” Galleon roared, finally reaching them. He was furiously tapping the empty air in front of his face. ”I’ve been trying to pull up my crafting menu for ten minutes! I feel naked without my stat sheet!”

”The stats are gone, Galleon,” Sebastian called out, strolling down the hill at a leisurely pace. ”The game is over. You’re just gonna have to use a regular hammer from now on.”

Galleon stared at Sebastian, his eyes wide. ”Drifter? You look... normal. You don’t look like a walking television static nightmare anymore.”

”Thanks,” Sebastian smirked. ”You have no idea how nice it is to just be a guy again.”

*WHOOOOSH-THUD.*

Before anyone could say anything else, a massive, rusted, incredibly ugly spaceship suddenly materialized out of thin air about fifty yards away. It dropped onto the grass with a heavy, metallic crunch, skidding a few feet before digging into the dirt.

It was the Rusthound.

The heavy airlock door hissed and violently kicked open.

Gwen stumbled out, immediately dropping to her hands and knees in the green grass. She took a deep breath, grabbed a handful of dirt, and literally kissed the ground.

”I am never, ever going to space again,” Gwen groaned, rolling onto her back and staring up at the blue sky. ”I don’t care if there’s a clearance sale on laser cannons. Keep me on the dirt.”

Corbin poked his head out of the ship’s door, adjusting his thick goggles. He looked around at the sunny, peaceful valley, his jaw dropping.

”The Dead Servers are gone,” Corbin whispered in pure awe. He looked over and saw Sebastian walking toward the ship. ”Boss! You actually did it! You pulled the plug!”

”Yeah, well, management had terrible benefits anyway,” Sebastian said, offering his hand to help Gwen up from the grass.

She took it, pulling herself up and brushing the dirt off her jeans. She looked at Sebastian, then over at Valerie, who was currently laughing at something Galleon was saying.

”So,” Gwen smirked, leaning against the rusted hull of her ship. ”No more levels. No more Void. What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

Sebastian looked out over the valley. He saw the survivors of Sanctuary slowly walking out of the gates, looking up at the real sun with tears in their eyes. He felt the warm breeze ruffle his hair. He didn’t have to calculate probabilities. He didn’t have to worry about min-maxing his Source Code or keeping the universe from deleting itself.

He was just Sebastian.

”I don’t know about you guys,” Sebastian sighed, a genuine, completely relaxed smile touching his face. ”But I’m going to go find a really comfortable couch, and I’m not moving for at least a week.”

**

Three weeks later.

*THWACK.*

Sebastian hit his thumb with a steel hammer.

”FUCK!”

He dropped the hammer, hopping backward on one foot while violently shaking his hand in the air. He gripped his throbbing thumb, gritting his teeth as genuine, unadulterated pain shot up his wrist.

”Language, Seattle,” Valerie called out from the makeshift porch of their newly built cabin. She didn’t even look up from her clipboard, casually sipping from a ceramic mug of hot tea. ”There are children playing down the street.”

”I don’t care if the Pope is playing down the street,” Sebastian grumbled, glaring at his slightly bruised thumb. ”I forgot how much basic carpentry sucks when you don’t have a ’Master Builder’ passive skill to do the work for you.”

He bent down, picked up the hammer, and glared at the wooden fence post he was trying to fix.

Life without the System was an incredible, chaotic, and entirely wonderful adjustment. Sanctuary was no longer a military Citadel waiting for a siege. It had blossomed into a bustling, messy, real human town. People were farming outside the walls. There were no more random monster spawns in the woods. The currency had shifted from ’Soul Shards’ back to normal, boring trade and scavenged goods.

And best of all, the UI was permanently dead.

Nobody had a level tag hovering over their head. There were no health bars to obsess over. If you got sick, you needed medicine, not a magical potion. If you got tired, you actually had to sleep.

But magic wasn’t completely gone. Sebastian had made sure of that during his final compile. Magic was no longer a gamified mechanic with cooldowns and mana costs. It was just a natural law of physics now, like gravity or thermodynamics.

Sebastian sighed, looking at the bent nail in the fence. He didn’t want to pull it out with the hammer.

He took a slow breath, focused his mind, and stared at the nail.

*Pop.*

With a very faint, almost imperceptible hum of kinetic energy, the nail smoothly slid itself backward out of the wood and hovered in the air for a second before dropping into Sebastian’s open palm.

It didn’t cost ’mana’. It didn’t trigger a glowing blue screen. It just felt like flexing a muscle he hadn’t used in a while.

”Show-off,” Galleon snorted as he walked past carrying a massive bundle of chopped firewood on his shoulder. The dwarf didn’t have his ’Super Strength’ stat anymore, but he was still built like a brick outhouse, so carrying logs wasn’t much of a problem for him.

”Work smarter, not harder, Galleon,” Sebastian smirked, tossing the bent nail into a bucket.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and walked up the wooden steps to the porch. He slumped into a rickety wooden chair next to Valerie, letting out a long, exhausted breath.

Valerie looked over at him, a fond, amused smile playing on her lips. She set her clipboard down on the small table. She was wearing a simple, comfortable pair of jeans and a loose gray sweater. The jagged scar on her cheek was still there, but her face was relaxed, completely free of the terrible stress that used to haunt her as a Guild Master.

”You know,” Valerie said, leaning over and resting her head on his shoulder. ”If you hate fixing the fence so much, you could just ask Wraith to do it. He’s been complaining all morning that he doesn’t have anything to assassinate.”

”Wraith would probably try to stealth-kill the fence post,” Sebastian snorted, wrapping his arm around her. ”I watched him try to sneak up on a squirrel yesterday. The guy literally doesn’t know how to walk normally without his stealth skill. He looks like a cartoon burglar tiptoeing around town.”

Valerie laughed, the sound warm and bright in the afternoon air. ”He’ll adjust. We all will.”

”Speaking of adjusting,” Sebastian said, sitting up slightly and pointing toward the open front door of the cabin. ”Did you see what Gwen and Corbin dragged in from the old city ruins this morning?”

Valerie groaned, burying her face in her hands. ”Please tell me you didn’t keep it.”

”I absolutely kept it,” Sebastian declared proudly. ”I told you I wanted a couch. They found a couch.”

”Sebastian, it is fluorescent orange and has dark brown floral patterns,” Valerie argued, looking at him in sheer disbelief. ”It looks like something my grandmother would have thrown out in the 1970s. It’s a crime against interior design.”

”It is the single softest piece of furniture in existence,” Sebastian defended, placing a hand over his heart in mock offense. ”I survived a multiversal apocalypse. I beat the Prime Architect to death with my bare hands. I earned the right to sit on an ugly couch.”

”Fine,” Valerie sighed, rolling her eyes affectionately. ”But if we ever have guests over, I am throwing a tarp over it.”

”Deal.”

*HISSSSSS!*

A loud, sizzling sound erupted from the backyard of the cabin, followed immediately by a string of aggressive dwarven cursing.

”Goddammit! The fire is too high!” Galleon’s voice roared. ”Wraith, stop trying to use your stupid fire magic to light the grill! You’re gonna burn the meat, you edgy lunatic!”

”I’m just trying to get a good sear!” Wraith yelled back.

Sebastian and Valerie exchanged a look, both trying to suppress a laugh.

”We should probably go supervise before they set the backyard on fire,” Valerie suggested, pushing her chair back.

”Yeah, probably,” Sebastian agreed.

They walked around to the back of the cabin.

The sun was just beginning to set over the rolling green hills surrounding Sanctuary, casting a beautiful, warm, golden-orange light across the valley. It was a real sunset. Not a rendered skybox. The sky wasn’t bleeding purple smog, and there were no giant white hyper-cubes threatening to delete the neighborhood.

Galleon was standing in front of a makeshift, welded-iron grill, furiously flipping three massive, thick cuts of real beef with a pair of metal tongs. Wraith was standing a few feet back, looking thoroughly scolded, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie.

”It smells amazing, Galleon,” Valerie smiled, leaning against the wooden railing.

”It’s gonna be perfect, medium-rare,” the dwarf grunted proudly, patting his round stomach. ”None of that synthetic, pixelated garbage we used to eat. Real meat. Real fire. I haven’t been this happy since I found a legendary warhammer in a loot drop.”