Chapter 95: [95]: The Void King, Consuming the Divine
The silence stretched for a long terrible moment.
High above, Saint Hydros and Saint Apollo watched the scene unfold. Hydros lowered her trident, a look of grim satisfaction crossing her shifting liquid features.
The Anomaly had survived, but his morale was broken. He was distracted. He was vulnerable.
"He’s grieving," Apollo sneered, wiping golden blood from his chin. "The glitch has a heart. Pathetic. Finish him, Hydros, before he realizes his little girlfriend is dead."
Down on the ice, Sebastian didn’t move. He held Valerie’s mangled body tightly against his chest. His black leather coat was soaked in her blood.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream to the heavens in a dramatic display of agony. He just stared down at her pale scarred face.
In his first life, he had been too weak to save her. He had sworn to himself that he would be perfectly optimized this time.
He had deleted his pain. He had gathered god-tier skills. He had built an impenetrable fortress. And yet, the game had still managed to take her from him.
The System didn’t care about his math. The Void didn’t care about his rules.
A shadow detached itself from the falling debris above them and landed silently on the ice nearby. It was Wraith.
The Level 25 Assassin was heavily wounded and his armor cracked, but he had survived the ship’s detonation using his ultimate evasion skills.
Wraith looked at Valerie’s body, then up at Sebastian. The Assassin didn’t say a word. He just slowly walked over, kneeling down, and gently placed his hands under Valerie’s shoulders, silently offering to take her.
Sebastian slowly loosened his grip. He let his head of security take the comatose heiress.
"Take her back to the Core," Sebastian whispered. His voice didn’t sound human anymore. It didn’t sound like the cold pragmatic Drifter. It sounded like two huge rocks grinding together in the dark. "Put her on the Altar."
"Yes, Boss," Wraith said softly, carefully gathering Valerie into his arms. He activated his [Shadow Step] and vanished from the ice, rushing back to Sanctuary.
Sebastian was alone.
He slowly stood up. He didn’t bother dusting the snow off his coat. He kept his head bowed, his silver visor hiding his eyes.
Something fundamental in his mind finally snapped cleanly.
The pragmatic survivor, the guy who wanted to build a base and run a safe economy, was dead.
The Void wanted an end of the world? He was going to give them one they would never ever forget.
He opened his status menu. He didn’t look at his skills. He looked at his Titles.
Hidden beneath ’Sovereign of Laws’ and ’First World Boss Clear’ was a title he had kept dormant. It was a title granted only to a player whose localized threat level exceeded the parameters of the server itself.
[Title Activated: Enemy of the System]
[Warning: Activating this Title completely unbinds your avatar from standard Ethereal Plane physics. You will be flagged as a hostile virus by the server.]
"You want to eat my world?" Sebastian whispered to the icy wind.
He reached up and grabbed the edge of his silver visor. He violently ripped it off his face and tossed it onto the snow.
He looked up at the two Gods hovering in the sky.
His eyes were no longer silver. They weren’t even the pitch-black of his deleted humanity. They were absolute swirling voids of corrupted consuming nothingness.
"Let’s see how you taste."
Sebastian didn’t cast a spell. He didn’t use the 10,000x multiplier to bend a law. He combined the glitch with his new Title, forcefully dragging an entity out of the deepest most restricted files of the Void itself.
[Skill Activated: World Eater]
Sebastian’s physical form violently warped. He didn’t grow into a giant monster. His silhouette simply began to absorb the light around him.
The air around his body distorted as the localized gravity infinitely collapsed inward. He became a walking singularity of pure hatred and hunger.
He didn’t jump. He simply ceased to exist on the ice and instantly materialized in the sky directly in front of Saint Hydros.
"What the..." Hydros gasped, raising her trident.
She was too slow.
Sebastian didn’t use a sword. He didn’t punch her. He lunged forward like a feral beast, his jaw unhinging to an impossible terrifying degree.
He sank his teeth directly into the shifting liquid blue throat of the Ocean Deity!
"GAAAHK!" Hydros screamed loudly.
She tried to turn her body into water to escape the grapple, but Sebastian’s [World Eater] concept bypassed physical states entirely. He wasn’t biting her avatar. He was physically tearing chunks of her divine source code out of the server.
He violently jerked his head back. SHLUCK!
He ripped a massive glowing chunk of blue data right out of her neck. Hydros thrashed wildly, dropping her trident as glowing divine blood sprayed into the sky.
Sebastian didn’t spit it out. He swallowed it.
He consumed the god.
As the raw divine data slid down his throat, his glitched biology violently absorbed her stats. His health bar, previously chipped by the fight, surged past its maximum. A sickening rush of stolen power flooded his veins.
He looked at Hydros, blood and blue code dripping from his chin. His void eyes locked onto her terrified weeping face.
"You taste like salt and failure," Sebastian growled.
He grabbed her by the shoulders, his steel-dense fingers easily crushing her conceptual armor. He pulled her forward and buried his face in her chest, his teeth tearing through her breastplate and ripping directly into her divine core.
It was a brutal slaughter. He ate her alive. He tore through her avatar with the messy efficiency of a starving wolf.
Hydros’s screams slowly gurgled into silence as her body was systematically deleted from existence, absorbed directly into Sebastian’s terrifying new framework.
In less than ten seconds, the Level 84 Ocean Deity was gone.
Sebastian floated in the air, his coat stained with a horrifying mix of red and blue blood. He slowly turned his head to look at Apollo.
The Solar Deity was completely paralyzed. He stared at the Drifter who had just cannibalized a god in mid-air.
Apollo didn’t try to attack. He turned and fled, his plasma wings beating frantically as he desperately tried to reach the safety of the Abyssal Gate.
"Check please," Sebastian whispered.
He vanished, reappearing directly above Apollo. He brought both of his heavy boots down, stomping the Sun God directly into the freezing ocean below.
The splash was enormous. Sebastian didn’t wait for him to surface. He dove into the water after him, intent on finishing his meal.
The Void had started this war, but the Sovereign of Laws was going to finish it. And he was very, very hungry.