Chapter 119: [119]: The Slum Meat-Grinder, Boiling Slag
The entrance to the narrow alleyway suddenly darkened. A tidal wave of rusted iron and mutilated flesh poured around the corner.
There were at least a hundred of them. The Iron Disciples moved in a terrifying jerky unison. They were a nightmare of self inflicted cybernetics.
They were men and women who had voluntarily sawed off their own jaws and replaced them with crude steel grills. Arms had been swapped for heavy grinding buzzsaws and massive sledgehammers bolted directly to the bone.
Their eyes were completely blank. They glowed with a dull fanatic red light.
"PURGE THE GLITCH! SANITIZE THE CODE!" they chanted in a horrifying monotone synthesized chorus.
They didn’t hesitate. They didn’t assess the tactical disadvantage of the bottleneck. They just surged forward as a mindless trampling horde of metal and meat charging directly at Sebastian.
"Light ’em up!" Sebastian yelled.
Gwen didn’t need to be told twice. From behind her rusted dumpster, she slammed her hand onto the remote detonator.
BRRRRRRRRT!
The two heavy kinetic auto turrets spun to life. The deafening roar of high caliber armor piercing rounds echoed through the claustrophobic space. Massive foot long muzzle flashes illuminated the alley in strobe like bursts of yellow light.
The front line of the Disciples was instantly shredded. The heavy slugs tore through their crude iron plating. It severed robotic legs and blew organic kneecaps into red mist.
Dozens of the zealots collapsed as their heavy bodies crashed into the mud and garbage.
But they didn’t stop. They didn’t feel pain.
A Disciple missing his entire lower half simply dragged himself forward with his one remaining biological arm. His iron jaw snapped wildly at the air.
The zealots behind them just trampled over their fallen comrades. They used the twitching bodies of their own people as a ramp to push deeper into the kill zone.
"The turrets aren’t enough!" Gwen screamed over the gunfire and blindly fired her own pistols into the mass. "There are too many of them! They’re going to overrun the perimeter!"
Sebastian watched the horde close the distance. Fifty yards. Forty yards.
He let out a slow tired breath. He pulled his hands out of his pockets.
He didn’t pull his heavy broadsword. He didn’t want to swing a weapon a hundred times. He needed absolute mathematical crowd control.
He stepped forward. He walked directly past the blazing barrels of the auto turrets and right into the front line of the meat grinder.
A heavily armored Disciple lunged at him and raised a massive sparking stun baton.
Sebastian casually side stepped the clumsy swing. He didn’t punch the man. He reached out and grabbed the zealot by the throat.
Through his [True Sight], he looked past the iron mask and the rotting flesh. He looked at the underlying code of the player’s class.
It was a Pyromancer. A low level fire mage who had augmented his body with iron.
Sebastian didn’t want the man’s life. He wanted his physics.
He dug his digital fingers into the Pyromancer’s core data. He bypassed the health pool entirely and forcefully extracted the foundational concept of the player’s magic.
[Action Registered: Extract Conceptual Data.]
[Target: Concept of Heat.]
Sebastian ripped his hand back. The Pyromancer went instantly rigid. His internal temperature plummeted to absolute zero as the very concept of thermal energy was stolen from his code.
The fanatic shattered into frozen harmless grey dust.
Sebastian held his glowing red hot hand up. He didn’t just hold fire. He held the pure unadulterated mathematical concept of boiling rising temperatures.
And then, the 10,000x Nexus Glitch aggressively woke up.
[Code Compiler Activated: Proficiency x10,000.]
[Concept of Heat leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!]
[Evolution Requirement Met. Evolves to Conceptual Law: Supernova.]
The system practically wept as Sebastian forced ten thousand lifetimes of thermal manipulation into a single localized space.
"Is it hot in here, or is it just you guys?" Sebastian whispered. His silver eyes flared with blinding light.
He didn’t throw a fireball. He simply pressed his glowing palm flat against the muddy garbage strewn ground of the alleyway.
"Boil."
VROOOOM!
There was no explosive shockwave. There was just an instantaneous apocalyptic spike in the ambient temperature.
The muddy water flooding the alleyway didn’t just evaporate. It violently flashed into superheated blinding white steam.
The rusted shipping containers lining the walls instantly glowed cherry red. The paint peeled and incinerated in a fraction of a second.
But the true horror happened to the Iron Disciples.
The concept of heat completely ignored their health bars and their physical armor ratings. It directly targeted the crude heavy iron plating bolted to their bodies.
The metal melted.
"G-GAAAHK!"
The synthesized chanting turned into a horrific symphony of gurgling wet shrieks.
The iron masks welded to their faces instantly turned into liquid soup. It seared through their skulls and boiled their brains inside their heads.
The heavy steel struts replacing their legs turned to glowing orange slag. This caused the entire horde to collapse into the boiling mud.
They violently combusted. Without the metal to protect them, their biological flesh simply caught fire.
Lungs turned to ash mid scream. Blood boiled in their veins before exploding outward in tiny sickening pops of red steam.
Sebastian stood in the center of the localized inferno. He was entirely protected by his own [Thermal Immunity] passive.
He watched with cold clinical detachment as a hundred heavily armed zealots were reduced to a bubbling river of blackened grease and liquid iron.
Within ten seconds, the screaming stopped.
The alleyway was a perfectly silent glowing orange oven. The only sound was the bubbling of the molten slag and the hiss of evaporating blood.
Sebastian slowly stood up. He dusted off his coat and was entirely unfazed by the sheer unyielding body count he had just accrued.
He looked at the river of melted iron and bone.
"Well," Sebastian muttered and turned back toward Gwen. She was staring at him from behind her dumpster with absolute terrified awe.
"I’d say the neighborhood is officially gentrified. Let’s go get our router."