Chapter 117: [117]: Error vs. Holy, The System Purge
The silence in the flooded cavern was incredibly heavy.
Sebastian stood knee deep in the green sludge of Outpost Rust. His black leather coat hung heavy on his shoulders. His silver eyes were locked onto the glowing white robes of Apostle Cole.
Just a few feet away, the ash of the alien scavenger that Cole had casually deleted from the server was quietly blowing away in the damp draft.
"When you find a virus you can’t delete," Sebastian growled. His voice dropped into a dark metallic hum that rattled the loose stones on the walls. "You’re about to get your hard drive formatted."
Apostle Cole did not laugh. He didn’t even sneer. The man’s face was a completely smooth and unbothered mask of absolute fanaticism.
He was an Administrator lite. He had surrendered his human autonomy and his emotions to the Void in exchange for a fraction of the System’s root commands. To Cole, Sebastian wasn’t a threat. He was just a line of bad code that needed to be scrubbed from the registry.
"Your bravado is inefficient, Anomaly," Cole’s telepathic voice echoed directly inside Sebastian’s skull. It sounded like an automated customer service line. "You manipulate physics. You bend the localized rules. But I am an extension of the System itself. You cannot hack the hand that feeds you."
"Watch me, Clippy," Sebastian deadpanned.
Cole raised his platinum gloved hand. The intricate mathematical equations etched into his pristine armor flared with a blinding holy light. The sheer magical pressure radiating from the Apostle pushed the toxic sludge away from him. It created a perfectly dry circle in the middle of the flooded tunnel.
"Admin Command: Holy Severance," Cole stated flatly.
FWOOSH!
It wasn’t a fireball or a lightning strike. It was a massive pillar of pure localized erasure. The blinding white beam shot from Cole’s extended finger and moved at the speed of light.
It was designed to bypass physical armor, magical wards, and health bars entirely. It was an uninstall wizard aimed directly at Sebastian’s chest.
Sebastian didn’t dodge. He didn’t have the stamina to spam his [Heavenly Steps] teleportation right now. His physical body was still actively fighting off the Void Toxicity trying to unrender his internal organs.
He didn’t pull out the Earth Sword either. You couldn’t block a deletion command with a piece of concrete no matter how heavy it was.
Instead, Sebastian opened his green Admin UI. He reached into his own corrupted architecture and activated the unique mechanic the Legacy Code had granted him.
[Action Registered: Access Code Compiler.]
[Mechanic Activated: Error Accumulation.]
To beat a perfect and holy system, you didn’t fight it with more perfection. You introduced a catastrophic mistake.
Sebastian closed his eyes for a fraction of a microsecond. He forcefully grabbed the digital tether of his own biological heart. He commanded the muscle to beat backward. He commanded his blood pressure to invert. He commanded his lungs to process carbon dioxide instead of oxygen.
It was a complete and unhinged biological paradox. The server’s logic engine violently panicked.
[WARNING: Critical Biological Logic Failure!]
[Error Accumulated: 30%]
"GAAAHK!" Sebastian grunted.
The pain was absolutely staggering. His knees buckled as a wave of sheer agony tore through his chest. He felt like his ribs were being pulled apart.
His entire body violently glitched as his avatar flickered rapidly between flesh, black leather, and raw green wireframe polygons.
But he didn’t collapse. He harnessed that agonizing corrupted data.
He channeled the 30% Error directly into his right arm.
His hand shifted. The black leather glove dissolved entirely and was replaced by a buzzing chaotic void of pure static and red warning prompts. It looked like a localized computer crash given physical form.
The beam of Holy Severance hit him.
Sebastian stepped forward. He planted his heavy boots in the sludge and punched directly into the blinding white light with his glitched right hand.
CRACK-BZZZZT!
The sound was deafening. It was the horrific screech of a pristine firewall colliding with the ultimate malware.
The holy light didn’t burn him. It didn’t delete him. The moment Sebastian’s weaponized Error touched the Admin code, the sheer chaotic garbage data of the glitch aggressively ate the perfection.
The blinding white beam instantly turned a sickly bruised purple. It fractured into jagged shards of static before violently shattering into nothingness.
Cole’s perfectly smooth face finally cracked. The Apostle’s eyes widened in genuine unfiltered horror as his ultimate deletion command was casually swatted away by a fist full of bad math.
"What?!" Cole gasped as he took a panicked step backward. "That is impossible! The code is absolute!"
"Your code is outdated, man," Sebastian wheezed as he pushed through the dissipating static. "Time for a forced update."
Sebastian closed the distance with terrifying speed. Before the Apostle could summon another command, Sebastian reached out with his glitching and static filled right hand and grabbed Cole directly by the face.
SLAM!
His fingers dug into the platinum helmet. His palm pressed flat against the Apostle’s pale skin.
"Transfer," Sebastian whispered ruthlessly.
[Action Registered: Error Transfer.]
[Target: Apostle Cole.]
[Executing System Purge...]
He forcefully pushed the 30% Error he had accumulated in his own body directly into the core registry of the High Inquisitor.
The reaction wasn’t just violent. It was apocalyptic.
Error was the natural predator of Admin code. The pristine holy mana running through Cole’s platinum armor instantly recognized the catastrophic corruption. The defensive wards tried to purge it. However, the 10,000x multiplier backing Sebastian’s raw willpower forcefully shoved the virus down the armor’s throat.
"SKREEEEEECH!"
The sound didn’t come from Cole. It came from the armor itself.
The flawless platinum began to violently bubble and boil. The flowing mathematical equations etched into the metal turned into jagged red error logs. The temperature of the armor skyrocketed from room temperature to five thousand degrees in a millisecond.
"AGGGGGHHHH!" Cole finally screamed. It was a horrifically human sound that was entirely stripped of its digital filter.
The armor didn’t melt off him. It fused to him.
The superheated and corrupted metal shrank. It aggressively gripped Cole’s digital flesh. The platinum melted directly into his pores and seared through his skin while boiling his blood.
The Apostle thrashed wildly. His hands clawed at Sebastian’s wrists as he desperately tried to pry the Drifter off.
Sebastian didn’t let go. His deadpan silver eyes stared blankly into Cole’s terrified and burning face. The heat radiating from the Apostle was enough to singe the edges of Sebastian’s coat. Yet, his [Thermal Immunity] kept his own skin perfectly cool.
"Unsubscribe," Sebastian muttered.
SQUELCH.
SIZZLE.
Inside the superheated suit, Cole was literally cooking alive. The fat beneath his skin rendered and leaked out of the joints of the armor in thick yellow streams. His eyeballs boiled and popped inside his skull. His agonizing screams turned into a wet gurgling hiss as his vocal cords turned to ash.
The Apostle’s massive health bar didn’t just tick down. It violently collapsed as the server recognized a catastrophic and unrecoverable hardware failure.
In less than five seconds, the thrashing stopped.
The glowing corrupted platinum armor went completely rigid and stood perfectly upright in the mud. Inside it was nothing but charred bone and a puddle of boiling meat.
[Target Executed.]
[Error Reset to 0%.]
Sebastian let go of the helmet. The green static faded from his right arm. The pixels solidified back into pale skin and a black leather glove.
He took a slow deep breath. His chest ached from the phantom strain of the biological paradox he had forced upon himself.
He looked down at the smoking melted statue that used to be an Apostle.
"Well," Sebastian grunted and wiped a speck of yellow grease off his visor. "I guess that makes me the new regional manager."
From the shadows of the tunnel behind him, Gwen slowly stepped out. The hardened smuggler had her kinetic pistols drawn but they were pointed at the floor. She stared at the smoking suit of armor with her jaw slightly slack.
"You didn’t even use a weapon," Gwen breathed and shook her head. "You just touched him and his own armor cooked him like a microwave dinner."
"Admin gear is highly conductive," Sebastian noted clinically as he knelt down next to the smoking corpse. "Plus, the guy really needed to lighten up."
Sebastian didn’t wait for her to respond. He had work to do and the apocalypse was still ticking.