Chapter 93: [93]: Conceptual Warfare, Dust to Dust
The hammer connected.
BANG!
The kinetic shockwave was so absolute that it instantly vaporized the remaining ice of the glacier they were standing on. A massive crater formed in the ocean beneath them as the water was forcefully pushed away.
Terra let out a booming laugh. "You arrogant little glitch! You cannot block the earth! I am the concept of foundation! I am..."
The Saint’s laughter choked off.
The dust cleared to reveal Sebastian still standing there. His boots had sunk a few inches into the invisible bedrock of the air. He was anchored by his own gravity laws.
His left arm was raised, and his open palm was pressed perfectly against the flat face of the diamond war hammer.
His arm hadn’t shattered. His bones hadn’t turned to dust.
Sebastian let out a long and exhausted sigh. "You guys really love to hear yourselves talk. Do you practice these monologues in the mirror, or does the Void just hand you a script when you sell out your species?"
Terra’s glowing brown eyes widened in sheer disbelief. He pushed harder. The muscles in his massive rocky arms bulged as he tried to force the hammer down.
It didn’t budge an inch. It was like he was trying to push a skyscraper with his bare hands.
"At this level, it is not about hit points, you overgrown pebble," Sebastian stated. His voice carried a calm tone that vibrated in the empty air. "It is not about armor ratings or damage multipliers. It is an argument of reality. You are telling the server that your hammer is an unstoppable force."
Sebastian’s silver-tinged eyes narrowed into cold slits.
"But I am the administrator. And I am telling the server that your hammer is garbage."
He didn’t reach for his spatial spells. He didn’t use the localized nuclear fusion of his Solar Flare. He reached deep into the bottom of his glitched inventory.
He accessed a memory from his very first days in the tutorial zone. It was a pathetic little spell used by beginner warlocks to make dead rats rot a little faster.
[Tier 0 Spell: Basic Rot]
It was a spell designed to apply a microscopic damage-over-time debuff to slimes. It was literally the weakest form of offensive magic in the game.
Sebastian pushed that pathetic concept into the palm of his hand.
And then, the 10,000x Nexus Glitch violently woke up.
[Action Registered: Cast Basic Rot.]
[Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.]
The system interface in his vision instantly flooded his sight with a cascade of frantic glowing blue windows.
The server desperately tried to process ten thousand lifetimes of absolute biological and material decay forcefully injected into a single point in space.
[Basic Rot leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!]
[Evolution Requirement Met. Basic Rot evolves to Tier 1: Accelerated Decay!]
[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Accelerated Decay leveled up to 10/10!]
[Evolution Requirement Met. Accelerated Decay evolves to Tier 3: Entropy’s Touch!]
[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Entropy’s Touch leveled up to 10/10!]
[WARNING: Concept Threshold Breached. Thermodynamic Law Unlocked.]
[Entropy’s Touch evolves to Conceptual Law: Concept of Decay.]
Sebastian didn’t feel a rush of elemental power. He felt the cold and inevitable truth of the universe.
Everything ends. Everything breaks down. Mountains crumble to dust, oceans dry up, and stars burn out. He grabbed that absolute mathematical certainty and shoved it directly into Terra’s weapon.
"Dust to dust, asshole," Sebastian whispered.
The effect was instantaneous.
Where Sebastian’s black leather glove touched the diamond hammer, the pristine and indestructible material turned a sickly ashen gray.
There was no explosion. There was no flashy damage number. The concept of decay simply ignored the hammer’s durability.
The diamond rotted. It turned to gray flaking dust that blew away in the howling arctic wind.
"What?!" Terra gasped, desperately trying to pull his weapon back.
It was too late. The rot spread up the handle of the hammer with terrifying speed. It reached Terra’s heavily armored gauntlets.
The Saint of the Void possessed the ’Concept of Indestructibility’. His class made him immune to physical trauma, fire, ice, and lightning. But he wasn’t taking damage. He was just ending.
The gray rot touched Terra’s skin.
"NO! NO! HELP ME!" Terra yelled. His booming voice cracked into a pathetic high-pitched wail of pure terror.
He dropped the rotting handle of his weapon and stumbled backward. He frantically clawed at his own arm, but wherever he touched, the decay spread faster.
The indestructible diamond and bedrock armor plating his body crumbled into fine powder. His dense godly muscles withered and turned to dry flaking ash.
Up in the bleeding crimson sky, the server itself was having a catastrophic meltdown.
It was trying to calculate how an entity with an absolute immunity to damage was currently being deleted from existence.
Massive glitching red text flashed across the entire horizon.
[ERROR: DAMAGE CALCULATION FAILED.]
[ERROR: ENTITY INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.]
"Your indestructible buff just met the server’s trash bin," Sebastian noted. He dusted his hands off on his coat.
He watched with total apathy as the towering Earth Deity fell to his knees.
Terra reached a crumbling gray hand toward the sky and the Abyssal Gate. He tried to speak, but his jaw simply turned to dust and blew away.
In less than five seconds, the Level 86 World Boss, a god who had consumed entire planets, was reduced to a pile of gray sand.
The howling wind of the Arctic picked up the remains and scattered them across the boiling ocean.
Sebastian let out a short tired breath. He looked down at the tiny gray soul shard Terra had left behind and kicked it casually into the water.
"One down," Sebastian muttered. He turned his head slowly to look at the two remaining Saints hovering in the air. "Who’s next in line for the uninstall wizard?"
Off to the right, Saint Apollo looked absolutely horrified. He was still nursing a massive glowing burn across his chest from his own reflected attack.
The Solar Deity was trembling, and his plasma wings flickered weakly in the freezing air.
To the left, Saint Hydros stared at the empty space where Terra used to be. The Ocean Deity’s liquid blue body shifted erratically.
She didn’t look angry. She looked like a cornered animal that had just realized it was trapped in a cage with the butcher.
"He... he didn’t even cast a high-tier spell," Apollo stammered, backing away slowly. "He just touched him. Terra was immune to everything!"
"He’s not a player," Hydros hissed, her voice sounding like crashing waves. "He’s a localized glitch. We cannot fight his math."
"Then what the fvck do we do?!" Apollo screamed, panic finally breaking his divine composure. "The Gate is open! We have to secure the server!"
Hydros narrowed her deep eyes at Sebastian. A cold and ruthless determination settled over her shifting form.
"We don’t fight him," Hydros said, raising her icy trident high above her head. "We drown his world."
Sebastian raised an eyebrow. "Oh, this should be good. You’re going to throw water at the guy who just deleted a diamond mountain?"
Hydros didn’t aim her trident at Sebastian. She aimed it straight down directly at the churning boiling Arctic Ocean beneath them.
"I am the Ocean Deity," Hydros’s voice boomed. "I do not need to kill you, Anomaly. I just need to kill your planet."
She gripped her weapon with both hands and screamed a single godly command into the deep.
"DELUGE!"