Chapter 94: [94]: The Sacrifice, A Tsunami of Despair
The command from Saint Hydros didn’t target Sebastian. It targeted the geography of the Earth itself.
The Arctic Ocean, already boiling from her previous attack, violently erupted. But it wasn’t just the water immediately beneath them.
Sebastian’s glitched [True Sight] eyes widened behind his silver visor as he saw the sheer catastrophic scale of the law she was invoking.
She was forcefully melting the entire polar ice cap in a matter of seconds.
"You have got to be shitting me," Sebastian cursed, taking a step forward.
The ambient temperature skyrocketed. The massive glaciers surrounding them let out a deafening groan before instantly liquefying into millions of tons of freezing water.
The ocean didn’t just rise. It stood up.
A five-hundred-foot wall of water formed a perfect circle around the horizon. It blotted out the bleeding crimson sky.
It was a massive tsunami carrying the weight of an entire ocean, and it was expanding outward at terrifying speed. It was a server-wiping event designed to instantly drown the billions of low-level players who had just integrated into the plane.
"Let’s see your little tricks stop an ocean, glitch!" Apollo laughed hysterically from the sky, his panic momentarily replaced by cruel triumph.
Sebastian stood on his tiny platform of localized gravity. His mind raced through thousands of combat calculations per millisecond.
His tools were absolute, but they were precise.
[Dimensional Sever] could cut the wave in half, but the water would just reform around the cut. [Absolute Zero] could freeze a massive chunk of it, but the sheer kinetic momentum of a five-hundred-foot global tsunami would just shatter the ice and keep going.
He could use [Reality Overwrite] to delete a massive sphere of the ocean, but he couldn’t delete the entire planet’s water supply fast enough to stop the wave from washing over North America.
He was a single-target executioner. He wasn’t designed for global crowd control.
"Fvck," Sebastian gritted his teeth, his hands balling into fists. "I don’t have the area-of-effect for this."
He could survive it. His [Thermal Immunity] and high-level physical sync meant he could just sit at the bottom of the new ocean and wait it out.
But Sanctuary would be crushed. The refugees would drown. His base, his resources, and his people would be wiped from the server.
Everything he had spent the last week painstakingly building would be gone.
"Boss! Above you!" Wraith’s frantic voice crackled through the encrypted comm-link.
Sebastian snapped his head up.
Tearing through the bleeding red clouds and leaving a massive trail of blue exhaust in its wake was the Sky-Fortress. The flying chunk of basalt and titanium looked heavily battered.
Its hull was scorched black, and two of the heavy railguns were smoking ruins, but it was flying fast.
Standing at the very edge of the heavy stone rampart was Valerie.
The Arcane Valkyrie looked like she had been through hell. Her face was pale and smeared with dirt and dried blood. Her azure silk robes were torn, but her eyes burned with an absolute unyielding fire.
She gripped her carved oak staff staring down at the massive wave rushing outward to consume the world.
"Valerie! Turn that ship around right now!" Sebastian roared into his comms. "You can’t out-fly that wave! Get back to Sanctuary!"
"Sanctuary is dead if that wave hits the coast, Sebastian!" Valerie’s voice cracked over the radio. "Your magic is too focused! You can’t stop it!"
"I’ll figure it out! Just get out of the blast radius!" he yelled.
Genuine human panic finally leaked into his usually deadpan voice.
He didn’t care about the refugees in that moment. He didn’t care about the base. He had spent his entire first life watching her die to save him. He had ripped the timeline apart to prevent it from happening again.
Valerie looked down at him. She offered a sad but incredibly beautiful smile.
"You always figure it out, Sebastian. But sometimes, you need a little help with the logistics."
She didn’t raise her staff to cast a spell. She turned around and ran toward the center of the Sky-Fortress directly toward the glowing heavily shielded cylinder that housed the Level 50 Dragon’s Heart.
"Valerie, what the fvck are you doing?!" Sebastian screamed. He activated his [Heavenly Steps], trying to fold space and teleport onto the ship.
[System Error: Target destination moving too fast. Spatial lock failed.]
The Sky-Fortress was moving at Mach 2, erratic and unstable. The system wouldn’t let him tether to it. He was trapped on his invisible ledge above the boiling sea.
On the platform, Valerie reached the pulsing blue core. She didn’t hesitate. She slammed her staff directly into the fragile runic dampeners Galleon had hastily installed to keep the massive battery from detonating.
"Manual override," Valerie whispered. She channeled every single drop of her maxed-out Valkyrie mana pool directly into the unstable elemental heart.
"NO!" Sebastian roared, reaching a desperate hand upward.
The Dragon’s Heart didn’t just pulse. It let out a loud noise.
The containment field shattered. The raw unfiltered absolute zero mana of a World Boss violently collided with the super-heated boiling atmosphere of the Arctic Ocean.
The Sky-Fortress detonated.
It was a blast of pure blinding white light that completely erased the shadows. A massive expanding dome of absolute cold exploded outward from the ship.
The shockwave hit the 500-foot tsunami.
The reaction was instantaneous. The sheer drop in temperature didn’t just freeze the water. It sublimated it.
Millions of tons of boiling ocean were instantly flash-frozen and then shattered into harmless microscopic snow by the concussive force of the exploding platform.
The tsunami wave was evaporated. The threat to the server was entirely neutralized in a single blinding flash of sacrificial glory.
But the cost was absolute.
Sebastian shielded his eyes from the blast, his heart stopping in his chest. When the blinding white light faded, the Sky-Fortress was gone. It was just a cloud of falling gravel and twisted titanium.
And falling from the center of that debris cloud was a tiny broken figure.
Sebastian didn’t think. He didn’t calculate. He fired his [Heavenly Steps], pushing the glitch to its absolute breaking point to catch her mid-air.
He materialized fifty feet above the churning water, wrapping his arms around Valerie’s body and instantly activating [Float] to arrest their fall.
He pulled her to his chest, slowly lowering them down to a relatively stable chunk of floating ice.
"Valerie," Sebastian gasped, dropping to his knees on the frost. "Valerie, hey. Look at me."
She was a ruin. The physical shrapnel from the exploding rock had shredded her avatar. Her legs were crushed. Her chest plate was completely caved in. Blood poured freely from her mouth, her eyes, and her ears.
Worse than the physical damage was the magical backlash. Her UI was visible floating above her head. Her health bar wasn’t just low. It was rapidly ticking down to zero.
[Status: Critical Mana Burn. System Organ Failure.]
[HP: 12... 9... 4...]
"Hey..." Valerie coughed, a wet sound. She weakly reached up, her trembling blood-soaked fingers brushing against his cold metallic visor. "Did I... did I fix the leak?"
"You fixed it, Princess. You got them all," Sebastian choked out. He frantically opened his inventory, pulling out the Divine Potion of Knitting. He popped the cork and tried to pour it into her mouth.
She weakly turned her head away, the golden liquid spilling uselessly onto the ice.
"Doesn’t work... on blown cores, Sebas," she whispered, her eyes losing focus. "It’s fine. We saved the base. We won the trade."
"Shut up. Stop talking like a corporate suit," Sebastian snarled, his hands shaking violently as he tried to put pressure on her massive chest wound. "You’re not dying here. I didn’t rewind the whole fvcking universe just to watch you die again!"
Valerie offered that same sad beautiful smile. Her hand dropped from his visor falling limply to the ice.
"See you... at the respawn, landlord."
Her eyes fluttered shut.
[HP: 0]
[System Alert: Player ’Valerie’ has entered a Comatose State. Awaiting Resurrection.]
Her body didn’t dissolve into pixels. Because of the real-world synchronization, the system couldn’t just delete her physical form.
She just went entirely limp in his arms, her chest perfectly still. She was locked in a deep magical coma, her soul forcefully ripped into the waiting queue of the Sanctuary’s altar.
She was gone.
Sebastian knelt on the ice cradling her broken body. The howling wind of the Arctic whipped around him, but he didn’t hear it. The world went perfectly quiet.