Chapter 105: [105]: Outpost Rust, The Leviathan’s Skull
Floating through the absolute nothingness of the Juncture was honestly starting to piss Sebastian off.
There was no up, no down, and absolutely no breathable air. It was just a chaotic, swirling purple soup of deleted server code and the shattered, floating corpses of dead planets. If depression had a physical location, this was it.
"I really hate this patch," Sebastian grunted. His voice echoed weirdly inside his own skull since there was no atmosphere to carry the sound.
He didn’t cast a flight spell. Without his connection to the Earth server, his magical conduits were completely bricked. Instead, he relied entirely on the raw, unadulterated Concept of Mass he had violently ripped from the system’s foundational code.
By dropping his physical weight to absolute zero, he had launched himself through the void like a fleshy bullet.
His destination loomed in the distance, cutting through the dark purple smog like a nightmare.
It was a skull. But not a human one. It was the colossal, decaying cranium of a space leviathan. The thing was easily the size of a small moon.
Its bone structure was heavily pitted and scarred by cosmic radiation, and its massive, hollow eye sockets were glowing with a sickly, neon-lit grime.
This was Outpost Rust.
It looked exactly like a cyberpunk slum built entirely out of garbage, desperation, and stolen code. It was a lawless graveyard for scavengers, server anomalies, and the absolute worst scum the multiverse had to offer.
"Looks like a great place to raise kids," Sebastian wheezed.
A sudden, violent cough wracked his chest. He spat a thick glob of black, sludgy code into the void. It sizzled and popped before dissolving into raw static.
His hybrid green and blue UI flickered angrily in the corner of his vision.
[Status: Void Toxicity Building.]
[Warning: Base File Corruption at 15%.]
The sickness was accelerating. The Void Toxicity wasn’t a standard poison debuff that ticked down his health bar. It was a catastrophic hardware conflict.
His biological meat suit was slowly turning into unresponsive, dead pixels. If he didn’t find a Server Filter to translate the foreign data of the Juncture soon, he wasn’t going to die. He was just going to cease existing.
"Hold together, you stupid meat-suit," he muttered to himself.
He focused on his trajectory. As he rapidly approached a sprawling platform of fused metal jutting out from the leviathan’s lower jaw, he mentally engaged the Concept of Mass again.
He spiked his weight from zero to two solid tons right before impact.
CRASH!
Sebastian landed feet first on the rusted iron docking bay. His heavy boots cratered the metal, sending a shower of sparks flying into the air.
The localized gravity of the outpost immediately grabbed hold of him, and the sudden reintroduction of oxygen made him gasp loudly.
"Fuck me," he groaned. His knees buckled slightly under his own crushing density. He quickly dialed his mass back down to normal baseline human levels.
He stood up and dusted off his ruined, blood stained black leather coat. He looked like absolute hell.
His skin was pale and covered in a sheen of cold sweat. His left arm was occasionally stuttering, flickering between solid flesh and green wireframe polygons.
He walked toward the massive, heavily fortified entrance of the shantytown.
The gates were made of thick, reinforced starship hull plating. Standing guard in front of them were two towering, grotesque heavy borgs.
They were eight feet tall, their organic bodies entirely replaced by rusted hydraulic pistons, heavy plasma cannons, and thick iron plating. Their optical sensors glowed an angry, scanning red.
[Entity: Juncture Enforcer (Cyborg Class)]
[Level: 85]
"Halt," the left cyborg commanded. Its voice was a deep, synthesized rumble that vibrated Sebastian’s teeth. "Initiating biometric and server registry scan."
A wide beam of red light swept out from the cyborg’s visor, washing over Sebastian.
Sebastian’s heart skipped a beat. If their scanners read his core data, they would see the Anomaly tag. They would see he was a walking virus that the System’s anti-virus software desperately wanted deleted. He would be gunned down before he could even blink.
He needed to hide his digital identity.
He didn’t panic. He just accessed his green Admin UI. The Code Compiler he had evolved from his 10,000x Nexus Glitch flared to life.
He didn’t cast an illusion. He literally opened the localized CSS and HTML of his own character sheet and started frantically typing with his mind.
He grabbed his Anomaly tag and forcefully overwrote it, pasting the copied data of a generic, low level scavenger over his core files.
[Code Compiler Active: Spoofing User Data...]
[Temporary Patch Applied.]
The red scanning beam lingered on him for a terrifying three seconds.
BEEP.
"Scan complete," the cyborg buzzed. "Unregistered Scavenger. State your business in Outpost Rust, meat."
"Commerce," Sebastian said flatly. His voice was perfectly steady despite the fact his liver currently felt like it was turning into an aggressive computer virus. "I’m here to spend money and leave."
"Entry fee is one high tier core," the second cyborg demanded, aiming its heavy plasma cannon squarely at Sebastian’s chest. "Pay up, or get tossed back into the void."
Sebastian stared at the glowing barrel of the gun. He didn’t even flinch.
He reached into his bottomless inventory. He had the Divine Iron Shard in there. It was the ultimate prize he had just stolen from the European Warlords. But he wasn’t about to hand over the key to his empire to a glorified bouncer.
Instead, his hand brushed against the undigested, hyper dense core of the reptilian Warlord he had crushed into a bloody marble earlier. It was a Level 90 item.
"Catch," Sebastian said lazily.
He tossed the bloody, pulsing marble through the air. The cyborg caught it with a heavy, metallic clank.
CLANK!
The machine’s optical sensors flared brightly as it registered the sheer, unadulterated value of the item. It was enough raw data to power their weapons for a decade.
"Fee accepted," the cyborg grunted, stepping aside.
HISSSSSS.
The heavy blast doors ground open, revealing the sprawling, neon drenched nightmare of Outpost Rust.
Sebastian walked through the gates. His boots splashed in a puddle of oily water.
The outpost was a dark mirror of the Sanctuary he had built on Earth. Instead of polished obsidian and holy light, this place was a labyrinth of rusted shanties built on top of each other. Glowing neon signs written in a dozen different alien languages flickered through the air.
The streets were packed with the worst the multiverse had to offer. He saw four armed aliens dragging chained humans through the mud.
He saw cloaked Mages selling vials of glowing, highly illegal combat stims. He saw heavily armored Warlords laughing around burning barrels of trash.
It was pure, unadulterated anarchy.
Sebastian kept his head down, pulling the collar of his ruined leather coat up to hide his glitching neck.
He walked past a stall where a massive, insectoid merchant was violently ripping the cybernetic implants out of a dead player’s skull to sell for scrap.
"Fresh data! Get your raw memory drives here!" the merchant clicked happily.
Sebastian ignored him. He was operating on borrowed time. Every step he took felt like he was walking through thick mud.
The Void Toxicity was aggressively eating through his stamina. His vision swam with static, and a sharp, ringing pain echoed behind his eyes.
"I need a pharmacy," Sebastian wheezed, leaning heavily against a damp, rusted iron wall. "Or a really good mechanic."
He checked his UI.
[Warning: Base File Corruption at 18%.]
The temporary patch he had applied to his ID was holding, but his physical form was failing. If he didn’t secure a Server Filter to translate the Ethereal Plane’s code into his Earth based biology, his next stop was the digital graveyard.
He pushed himself off the wall and limped deeper into the neon lit slums. He was a Demigod, a Sovereign of Laws, and the richest man on his home server.
But right here, right now, he was just a dying man looking for a cure in the worst neighborhood in the universe.
And he was about to find out exactly how unwelcoming the locals could be.