Chapter 120: [120]: Stabilization, The Biological Server
The alleyway was completely silent. The only sound was the bubbling of the molten slag and the hiss of evaporating blood.
Sebastian stood up slowly. He dusted off his coat and remained completely unfazed by the sheer number of bodies he had just dropped.
He looked at the river of melted iron and bone that used to be a hundred heavily armed religious zealots.
"Well," Sebastian muttered as he turned back toward Gwen.
The hardened smuggler stared at him from behind her rusted dumpster with absolute terror in her eyes.
"I’d say the neighborhood is officially gentrified. Let’s go get our router."
Gwen didn’t move for a long second. She just stared at the bubbling river of superheated grease that had formerly been the Iron Disciples. Her kinetic pistols hung loosely in her hands.
"You didn’t even cast a spell," she finally whispered with a cracking voice.
"You just touched the ground and turned them into soup. What the fvck are you, Seattle?"
"I’m a guy on a very tight schedule with a massive headache," Sebastian replied flatly.
He didn’t have the energy for a dramatic villain speech.
His left leg violently hitched. The kneecap momentarily un-rendered into a jagged block of green static before snapping back into meat and bone.
"Guh!" Sebastian grunted and leaned heavily against the brick wall.
The Void Toxicity wasn’t just creeping anymore. It was sprinting!
The sheer physical strain of forcefully injecting the conceptual law of a supernova into the physical world had pushed his base file corruption past the tipping point.
[Warning: Base File Corruption at 42%.]
[System Integrity Failing. Rendering Collapse Imminent.]
"Right. The medication," Gwen snapped out of her shock.
She holstered her weapons and rushed over. She grabbed his good arm and threw it over her shoulder.
"Come on, glitch. Keep your feet moving. If you melt into a puddle of bad code in my alley, I’m going to be really pissed."
They navigated the twisting neon-drenched maze of Outpost Rust as fast as Sebastian’s failing digital biology would allow. Every step felt like walking through waist-deep mud.
The vibrant lights of the alien shantytown blurred together into a sickening smear of colors.
"Almost there," Gwen grunted as her boots splashed through a puddle of irradiated runoff. "Just hold your damn pixels together."
They finally reached the heavy steel blast doors of Corbin’s bunker. The heavy metal was still warped from when Sebastian had casually kicked it off its hinges earlier.
They stumbled inside. The air in the bunker was incredibly thick and suffocating.
"Corbin!" Gwen barked and dropped Sebastian onto the cracked leather couch in the center of the room. "Tell me you have the filters!"
The rogue code-smith spun around from his heavily modified arcane soldering station. He looked like an absolute madman.
His grease-stained overalls were covered in scorch marks. A fresh unlit cigarette hung loosely from his lips and bounced as he spoke.
"I got ’em! I got ’em!" Corbin shrieked. He frantically waved a metal tray filled with six small cylindrical glass vials.
"Premium grade! I had to bypass the local mana-forge limiters to condense the code, but they are absolutely pristine!"
Sebastian didn’t say a word. He couldn’t. His throat felt like it was filled with broken glass and battery acid.
His vision was swimming with aggressive overlapping red error codes.
He reached out with a trembling glitching hand and snatched one of the vials from the tray.
Inside the glass, a swirling highly concentrated storm of pure brilliant white data pulsed with a calming rhythmic hum. It looked like bottled starlight.
[Item: Premium Server Filter]
[Tier: Divine Utility]
[Effect: Translates, stabilizes, and forcefully integrates foreign and corrupted data streams into the user’s base architecture. Cures Void Toxicity.]
"Down the hatch," Sebastian wheezed.
POP!
He popped the seal with his thumb and downed the swirling white data in a single desperate gulp.
GULP!
The reaction was immediate and it was absolutely violent!
"GAAAAH!" Sebastian roared.
His back arched off the leather couch and his spine popped sickeningly. He gripped the armrests so hard his steel-dense fingers tore right through the material and buried into the metal frame beneath.
It didn’t feel like drinking a soothing healing potion. It felt like swallowing a lit stick of dynamite mixed with liquid nitrogen.
The Premium Server Filter aggressively clashed with the Void Toxicity ravaging his system.
Brilliant blinding white light erupted from his pitch-black eyes, his mouth, and the very pores of his skin.
The heavy black sludge that had been corrupting his veins was forcefully and violently scrubbed away from the inside out.
"Holy shit!" Corbin yelled. He dived behind his workbench and covered his head. "He’s gonna blow!"
"Shut up and stay down!" Gwen yelled over the roaring sound of Sebastian’s biology rewriting itself while shielding her eyes from the blinding glare.
But it didn’t just cure the sickness. The Server Filter acted as a universal translator.
Deep inside Sebastian’s bottomless digital inventory sat the massive undigested divine cores of the Ocean Deity and the Solar Deity he had cannibalized back on Earth.
The foreign alien data of those two World Bosses had been slowly killing his human meat-suit.
Now, the Filter unlocked them. It translated their alien source code into a language his Ethereal Plane avatar could actually understand.
And the moment the data was translated, the 10,000x Nexus Glitch recognized it. And it went to work.
BING! BING! BING!
The blue and green UI overlapping his vision exploded with a torrential cascading flood of notifications.
[Foreign Data Translated. Integration Successful.]
[Massive Experience Processed.]
[Demigod Architecture Expanding.]
[Physical Synchronization Stabilized at 30%.]
Sebastian’s physical body underwent a massive brutal compression.
The raw unadulterated power of two dead gods was forcefully crammed into his biological meat-suit.
His bones cracked, splintered, and instantly re-forged themselves into something infinitely denser than titanium.
The muscle fibers across his chest and arms tore apart and stitched back together, hardening into thick rolling cables of biological steel.
The heat radiating from his body was so intense it singed the edges of the cracked leather couch. Smoke poured off his skin and filled the bunker.
He didn’t grow larger. He didn’t turn into a hulking grotesque monster like the Warlords of the Juncture.
The physical compression merely refined his baseline human form, packing the kinetic equivalent of a collapsing star into a lean six-foot frame.
Slowly, the blinding white light faded.
The bunker fell dead silent save for the heavy rhythmic hum of Corbin’s server banks.
Sebastian slumped forward. His chest heaved with deep steady breaths. He rested his elbows on his knees with his head bowed.
The violent glitching of his left arm was completely gone. The skin was pale, smooth, and absolutely perfect.
The only indication of the catastrophic magic he wielded were the faint silver runic scars permanently etched into his flesh, pulsing with a slow sleeping power.
"Hey," Gwen whispered from the other side of the room as she took a cautious step forward. Her hand rested nervously on the grip of her pistol. "Are you... still you, Seattle?"
Sebastian slowly raised his head.
His eyes were no longer the pitch-black voids of a corrupted anomaly. They had returned to their brilliant burning silver.
They radiated a terrifying calm clarity that felt heavier than gravity itself.
He pushed himself up off the ruined couch. His movements were incredibly fluid and entirely devoid of the heavy dragging exhaustion from before.
He felt impossibly light yet mathematically anchored to the floor. He was no longer a human trying to process a video game.
He was a perfectly optimized biological server.
"I’m better than me," Sebastian said.
His voice wasn’t raspy anymore. It was a smooth resonant hum that carried absolute undeniable authority.
He flexed his right hand. The sheer kinetic power coiled in his forearm was intoxicating. He felt like he could snap the dead space leviathan’s skull in half with a casual backhand.
He looked down at the remaining five Server Filters in the metal tray and then up at the trembling code-smith peeking out from behind the workbench.
"You do good work, Corbin," Sebastian noted. A genuine albeit dark smile curved his lips.
He casually picked up the metal tray and dumped the remaining vials into his bottomless inventory.
"The Void Toxicity is completely wiped. My base files are solid."
Corbin let out a breathless hysterical laugh and slowly stood up. "I told you! Premium grade! You just processed the raw data of two deities and didn’t even melt the floor! It’s a masterpiece of digital pharmacology!"
"Yeah, yeah, you’re a genius," Gwen sighed. She walked over and crossed her arms.
She looked Sebastian up and down, clearly impressed by the complete lack of glitching static.
"You look less like a walking error code and more like a guy who can actually pay me. So, what’s next, boss?"
Sebastian cracked his knuckles. The sound echoed like two heavy stones grinding together.
"Next," Sebastian said with his silver eyes narrowing. "We build the router. I have a planet to save and a whole lot of people to evict."
He was perfectly stabilized. He was a Sovereign of Laws. And he was finally ready to go on the offensive.