Chapter 103: [103]: Claiming the Tax, The Bloody Marble
The scavenger skiff loomed over the asteroid like a floating mountain of garbage. The five Outer Warlords standing on the bone fused deck leaned over the railing, pointing their massive glowing weapons down at the single human in the ragged black coat.
They were a horrifying collection of assimilated nightmares. The leader was a towering four armed reptilian behemoth clad in thick pulsating bio armor. Beside him stood a creature made entirely of shifting razor sharp obsidian, and a humanoid figure radiating an aura of toxic green radiation.
They looked like end game raid bosses. They expected a terrified victim.
Sebastian just looked annoyed.
"Hey!" Sebastian yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth so his voice would carry across the hundred yards of empty void. "Did you guys bring the shard or is it direct deposit?!"
The Warlords stopped laughing. The reptilian leader’s yellow slitted eyes narrowed in sheer confusion.
"Are you malfunctioning, meat?" the leader’s magically amplified voice ground out. "You are cornered. You have no ship. You have no mana grid. Surrender your code, and we might kill you fast."
"That’s a no on the shard then," Sebastian deadpanned, dropping his hands to his sides. "Fine. I will just hack it out of your interface when you are dead."
"KILL THE GLITCH!" the leader roared, raising a massive multi barreled plasma cannon with two of his four arms.
The other Warlords immediately surged forward, preparing to leap off the deck and turn the tiny human into a red smear on the asteroid.
They didn’t get the chance.
Sebastian didn’t dodge. He didn’t summon his Earth Sword. He simply raised his right hand, his index and middle fingers extended, and pointed directly at the massive glowing plasma engine mounted at the rear of the scavenger skiff.
He didn’t have magic. But he had the Concept of Mass, and his green Admin UI bypassed the server’s basic physics engine entirely.
He didn’t target the Warlords. They had too much health and too much conceptual armor.
He targeted the exact X, Y, and Z coordinates of the ship’s core.
"Mass," Sebastian whispered, his pitch black eyes locking onto the engine. "Times one million."
CREEAAAK!
The sound of the ship’s structural integrity failing was deafening. It didn’t explode. It was far, far worse.
In a fraction of a microsecond, the localized mass of the ship’s engine spiked to that of a dying hyper dense star. The sheer impossible gravitational pull created an instant localized singularity.
"What the f" the reptilian leader gasped.
VROOOOM!
The entire rear half of the massive fortress like skiff violently crumpled inward. Thick steel beams, bedrock hull plates, and glowing mana conduits were instantly sucked into the engine block like wet noodles going down a drain.
The four Warlords standing near the back of the deck didn’t even have time to scream.
The gravitational sheer was absolute. The Level 90 monsters with all their god tier armor and millions of hit points were violently yanked backward.
CRUNCH! SQUELCH! SNAP!
Sebastian watched calmly as the four towering figures were sucked into the imploding engine. Their indestructible armor folded like tin foil. Their bones shattered into dust. Their digital flesh was compressed so forcefully that their blood couldn’t even spray. It was simply crushed into a hyper dense glowing red liquid.
In less than two seconds, the massive ship and four end game Warlords were compacted into a perfectly spherical bloody marble the size of a golf ball.
The tiny hyper dense sphere hovered in the void, humming with contained kinetic energy.
Only the reptilian leader survived. He had been standing at the very edge of the front prow, just outside the immediate event horizon of the implosion. The force had ripped his lower legs completely off, leaving him clinging to a single floating piece of wooden debris, screaming in absolute terror.
"My ship! My crew! What did you do?!" the Warlord shrieked, blood pouring from his severed stumps into the vacuum.
"I balanced the equation," Sebastian said flatly.
He didn’t waste time. He edited his own physical mass to zero, bent his knees, and launched himself off the asteroid like a fired bullet.
He sailed across the void, completely ignoring the floating bloody marble of crushed steel and meat. He collided heavily with the wooden debris, his boots slamming into the wood and instantly restoring his mass to a solid ton to arrest his momentum.
Sebastian reached down and grabbed the screaming four armed Warlord by the throat.
"Wait! Please!" the alien god begged, his terrifying facade completely broken. "I have credits! I have cores!"
"I don’t care," Sebastian said.
He violently twisted his wrist.
SNAP!
The reptilian neck shattered. The Warlord’s slitted eyes rolled into the back of his head, and his massive health bar instantly zeroed out.
Sebastian didn’t let the body dissolve. He needed the UI.
While the corpse was still twitching, Sebastian forcefully shoved his left hand directly into the Warlord’s chest. He didn’t pull out a heart. He pulled out the player’s glowing blue digital interface.
Sebastian’s own green Admin UI flared to life. He aggressively smashed his code against the Warlord’s quest log.
[Bounty Interception Detected.]
[Status: Target Alive.]
Sebastian’s fingers danced across the raw code of the interface. He wasn’t playing the game, he was rewriting the rules. He highlighted the target parameters of the bounty and forcefully swapped the numerical IDs.
[Warning: Unauthorized Quest Modification.]
[Override Authorized by System Administrator.]
Sebastian changed the target from ’Zero’ to the dead Warlord he was currently choking. Then he changed the ’Claimant’ ID to his own.
The System’s logic was rigid, brutal, and entirely blind. It didn’t care about context. It only cared if the mathematical conditions were met. Target dead? Yes. Claimant present? Yes.
BING!
[Quest Complete: Extermination Bounty.]
[Target Verified.]
[Reward Distributed.]
A blinding flash of golden light erupted from the dead Warlord’s interface.
Sebastian dropped the corpse, letting it dissolve into a cloud of harmless grey ash. He opened his own inventory.
Sitting perfectly in the first slot was a jagged heavy piece of grey metal that pulsed with an intense reality warping aura.
[Item Acquired: Divine Iron Shard]