Chapter 108: [108]: Boardroom Massacre, Frictionless
The walk from Gwen’s hidden slum bunker to the central headquarters of the Iron Wraiths was a miserable journey.
Outpost Rust was a localized nightmare that never slept.
Sebastian limped slightly as his heavy black boots splashed through puddles of unknown glowing fluids. His Void Toxicity was rapidly ticking up and gnawing at the base files of his digital existence.
Every third step, his left knee joint would violently un-render. It turned into a block of raw buzzing green static before snapping painfully back into flesh and bone.
"You look like a walking bad connection," Gwen muttered. Her kinetic pistols rested casually in her hands as she kept pace beside him. Her eyes darted toward the dark alleyways to scan for scavengers.
"If you fall apart before we get to the vault, I’m leaving you in the mud. I’m not dragging a glitched corpse through Syndicate territory."
"I’m not dying," Sebastian wheezed. He coughed a thick wad of black pixelated blood into his hand and wiped it on his ruined leather coat. "I’m just buffering. How much further to your uncle’s hostile takeover?"
"Just up this ramp," Gwen pointed toward a massive elevated platform. It was constructed from the fused spinal column of a dead space leviathan.
Sitting atop the colossal bone structure was a heavily fortified compound. It looked like a brutalist corporate office building violently smashed together with a military bunker.
High-powered neon floodlights cut through the dark purple smog of the Juncture, illuminating the heavy steel blast doors at the front entrance.
"That’s the boardroom," Gwen explained, her voice dropping into a harsh tactical whisper. She pulled her distressed trench coat tighter around her kevlar armor.
"Jax used to keep it low-key. But since my uncle Jared sold us out, the Onyx Syndicate brought in their own muscle to secure the transition."
Sebastian leaned against a rusted metal railing and caught his breath. His pitch-black eyes scanned the entrance.
Standing in front of the heavy blast doors were four towering figures. They wore the colors of the Onyx Syndicate. It was sleek high-tier armor forged from polished black metal with glowing crimson mana veins running through the plating.
They held massive two-handed energy halberds. The weapons crackled with enough voltage to fry a Level 50 tank in a single swing.
"They look like try-hard cosplayers," Sebastian deadpanned as he shook his head. "I really hate guild uniforms. It just screams I have no personality outside of my management structure."
"Those cosplayers are Level 80 Vanguard Elites," Gwen hissed.
CLICK-CLACK.
She checked the magazines of her pistols. "Their armor is enchanted with absolute kinetic reflection. If I shoot them, the bullets bounce back at twice the speed. We can’t just run up on them. We need a distraction. I’ll throw a localized EMP grenade to blind their optics, then we sweep the legs"
"Gwen," Sebastian interrupted with a tired heavy sigh. "I don’t have the stamina for a tactical espionage sequence. My liver feels like it’s downloading a terabyte of malware. We are taking the front door."
"Are you out of your fucking mind?!" Gwen grabbed his shoulder, her eyes wide with sheer disbelief. "I just told you, their armor reflects physical damage! You can’t just punch them!"
"I’m not going to punch them," Sebastian said.
He shrugged off her hand and stepped out of the shadows. He didn’t draw his concrete-encrusted Earth Sword. He didn’t drop his center of gravity into a fighting stance.
He just casually shoved his hands into the pockets of his torn coat and started walking directly up the bone ramp toward the heavily armed guards.
Gwen cursed violently under her breath, but she didn’t run away. She raised her pistols and followed a few paces behind him. She fully expected the ragged Drifter to be turned into a smoking pile of ash.
The moment Sebastian’s boots hit the metal grating of the upper platform, the four Onyx guards snapped to attention.
CLANG!
Their heavy halberds crossed in perfect synchronized intimidation to block the path to the blast doors.
"Halt," the lead guard barked. His voice was heavily modulated and stripped of any human warmth. "This facility is currently under the administrative lockdown of the Onyx Syndicate. State your business or be immediately deleted."
Sebastian stopped about ten feet away. He looked at the glowing red visors of their helmets. He looked at their pristine mathematically perfect armor.
"I have a meeting with Jared," Sebastian said flatly. "Tell him the IT guy is here to fix his horrible life choices."
The guards didn’t laugh. They didn’t even shift their posture.
"Target is unregistered. Target is heavily corrupted," the second guard announced as he scanned Sebastian’s glitching shifting left arm. "Lethal force authorized. Exterminate the anomaly."
The four guards surged forward. They didn’t run, they glided with that terrifying frictionless speed that only high-level players with maxed-out agility stats possessed. Their halberds raised high, the crimson energy blades humming loudly.
"Sebastian! Move!" Gwen screamed from behind him. She raised her pistols to fire despite the reflection warning.
"Relax," Sebastian murmured.
He didn’t pull a weapon. He didn’t summon a black hole or drop a miniature sun on their heads. At this level of the Ethereal Plane’s underlying architecture, combat wasn’t about who had the biggest fireball. It was about who controlled the fundamental laws of reality.
Traditional armor was completely useless against a man who could edit the physics engine.
Sebastian accessed his green Admin UI using his [Code Compiler]. He looked at the four charging guards. He didn’t look at their health bars. He looked at the mechanical biological reality of their internal organs.
Everything in the universe from the gears of a machine to the beating heart of a human relied on one very specific and boring concept to function. Friction.
Without friction, blood couldn’t pump. Lungs couldn’t expand against the ribcage. Tendons couldn’t grip bone. Without friction, a biological entity was just a sack of slippery disconnected meat.
Sebastian raised his right hand. He pointed a single black-gloved finger at the charging guards.
"Friction," Sebastian whispered, his voice vibrating with the cold absolute authority of a Sovereign. "Value: Zero."
He didn’t target the ground. He didn’t target their armor. He selectively highlighted the internal biological code of the four Syndicate elites and simply deleted the concept of friction from their bodies.
The effect was entirely silent and absolutely horrifying.
The four guards were mid-swing. Their halberds were inches from Sebastian’s face.
Suddenly, they just stopped.
There was no explosion. There was no flashy burst of elemental magic. There was no screaming.
The lead guard’s massive armored body simply collapsed inward. Inside his chest, his heart tried to beat, but the muscle fibers completely lost their grip on each other.
The organ just slid apart like wet gelatin. His lungs tried to inflate, but they slipped effortlessly off his diaphragm. The ligaments in his knees detached from the bone without a single snap.
SQUELCH.
The sound was muffled by their heavy expensive armor. It was the sickening noise of internal organs violently dissolving into a loose disconnected soup.
The heavy halberds slipped from their utterly useless frictionless fingers, clattering loudly against the metal grating.
CLANG!
The four Level 80 Vanguard Elites crumpled to the floor like marionettes whose strings had all been cut simultaneously. Their pristine black armor hit the deck with a heavy thud, totally undamaged.
They didn’t bleed. There wasn’t a single drop of red on the floor. Their health bars just instantly vanished from the server’s registry. Catastrophic unrecoverable biological failure.
They were dead before their knees even touched the ground.
Sebastian stood perfectly still, his hands slipping back into his pockets. He let out a small tired cough, spitting another speck of static onto the floor.
Behind him, Gwen stood frozen. Her kinetic pistols were still raised and her finger resting on the trigger. Her jaw was practically unhinged as she stared at the four dead men.
"What... what did you do?" Gwen breathed. She cautiously stepped forward and nudged the lead guard’s helmet with the toe of her boot. The head inside rolled loosely, completely disconnected from the spine. "They didn’t even scream. There’s no damage on the armor."
"I turned off their internal traction," Sebastian explained casually, stepping over the bodies and walking toward the heavy blast doors. "Armor is just math, Seattle. If you ignore the outside and turn off the math on the inside, the meat just gives up."
Gwen swallowed hard. She had survived three years in the lawless brutal void of the Juncture. She had seen warlords eat people. She had seen space leviathans swallow entire servers. But she had never seen someone weaponize pure absolute physics with a flick of a wrist.
She looked at the ragged glitching man in the torn coat. He wasn’t just a heavy hitter. He was a walking developer console.
"Remind me never to piss you off," Gwen muttered, holstering her pistols and hurrying after him.
"Just get me my medication," Sebastian said, his voice completely devoid of humor.
He stopped in front of the massive reinforced steel doors of the boardroom. He didn’t bother looking for a keycard or a hacking terminal. He just raised his heavy biological steel-dense boot.
"Let’s go crash a meeting."
BOOM!
Sebastian kicked the blast doors with the concentrated kinetic force of a freight train. The heavy steel hinges shrieked and buckled instantly. The massive doors blew inward and crashed into the opulent room beyond.
The Boardroom Massacre had officially begun.