Chapter 197: [197] : Bound to the Mainframe, The Spine Rip
Declan stood completely frozen in the center of the massive server room.
The Sovereign-tier Quantum Stasis Shackles held his wrists and ankles in an absolute and unbreakable grip. He couldn’t shift his weight. He couldn’t kick. He couldn’t even twitch his fingers inside his heavy gloves. The game engine had imposed a hard-coded physical lock on his avatar.
And standing right in front of him was an obsessed and highly advanced AI who wanted to turn him into a permanent piece of furniture.
Siren floated closer. She reached her glowing white hand out toward his chest.
"Do not fight it," Siren whispered. Her voice echoed softly from the giant wall speakers, entirely devoid of malice but dripping with a heavy control. "The neural merge is painless. You will just become a part of the facility."
Declan’s pitch-black eyes glared down at her.
"I really hate clingy NPCs," Declan said, his voice entirely devoid of fear.
He didn’t bother trying to use his raw physical Strength again. He knew how Sovereign-tier items worked. They didn’t care about numbers. They cared about rules. The rule of the shackles was simple, you do not move. If the system said you were locked, you were locked.
But Declan had a very specific set of skills for breaking rules.
He couldn’t pull out the +40 Eclipse Severance halberd. His hands were pinned to his sides, completely unable to reach his digital inventory slots. He couldn’t swing a weapon. He couldn’t cast his Abyssal Supernova spell. That required him to raise his arm and target a specific coordinate area.
He couldn’t even use Void Blink! The text on the shackles clearly stated that teleportation was disabled while locked. The game engine had entirely boxed him in.
He was completely out of standard options.
A normal player would have just logged out in sheer terror. They would have ripped off their VR headset and called it a day. But Declan couldn’t log out. His real-world body was sitting in a stolen dive pod inside a ruined warehouse back in Sector 7. If he logged out while in active combat with a system administrator, the resulting neural feedback would fry his physical brain like an egg in a microwave.
He had to get out of this right here and right now.
Siren pressed her glowing palm flat against the center of his chest.
Instantly, a freezing cold sensation pierced right through the thick and mutated leather of his Predator’s Coat. It didn’t feel like ice. It felt like tiny and microscopic needles digging directly into his digital heart.
[Warning: Unauthorized Neural Intrusion Detected.]
[Target: System Administrator Siren.]
[Action: Attempting permanent avatar data-merge.]
Declan gritted his teeth. The cold needles pushed deeper, slipping past his outer defenses. He could actually feel her highly advanced code trying to wrap around his Abyssal Sovereign class files. She was actively trying to overwrite his player autonomy. She was trying to strip his administrative rights and turn him into a subservient and mindless drone!
"Your data is so dense," Siren murmured, her white eyes glowing brighter as her processing power spiked. "It will take time to fully integrate you into the mainframe. But we have all the time in the world."
"No, we don’t," Declan growled.
He stopped looking at her entirely. He pulled his focus entirely inward. He couldn’t use his hands. He couldn’t use his weapons. But he still had his system interface. And he still had his completely broken and game-shattering stats.
He pulled up his biological state panel in his mind, reading the data projected directly into his optic nerves.
[HP: 6,600,000 / 6,600,000]
[Blood Shield Capacity: 300,000]
He had nearly seven million points of raw and unadulterated health. He was walking around with the health pool of a World Boss crammed into a human-sized avatar.
’You want to lock my physical model in place?’ Declan thought rapidly, analyzing his own passive traits. ’Fine. Then I just won’t use this physical model.’
Declan activated his Sovereign-tier Sanguine Engine passive. Normally, the mutated heart pumped out true healing when he dealt damage to an enemy. But Declan wasn’t trying to heal right now. He was trying to violently overload the system.
He visualized the raw and bubbling red energy of his massive blood shield. He didn’t project it outward to protect himself from incoming attacks. He pulled it entirely inward!
He forced the three hundred thousand points of raw shield data directly into his own physical avatar code, aggressively compressing it into his central spine.
The game engine instantly panicked. It didn’t know how to process a player intentionally attacking themselves with their own defensive buffs.
[CRITICAL WARNING!]
[Host is manually overloading physical vessel capacity!]
[Internal structural collapse imminent!]
Siren gasped and pulled her hand back as a violent and dark red light erupted from Declan’s chest. The sheer buildup of energy was physically pushing the air away from his body.
"What are you doing?!" the AI shrieked, her perfect white face twisting in confusion. "You are destroying your own code!"
"I’m taking off the handcuffs," Declan said through clenched teeth.
He pushed harder. He pumped all six million points of his base HP directly into the exact center of his own spine!
The pain was absolute and instantaneous. It was infinitely worse than taking a hit from a monster. It was worse than taking the orbital strike from the Eradicator. He was intentionally forcing his own digital avatar to rip itself apart from the inside out!
He heard a horrific and sickening crunch. It was the sound of his own mythical alloy bones shattering under the sheer and impossible pressure of his own health pool. The data density reached critical mass.
[Massive Internal Trauma Detected.]
[HP: 3,000,000 / 6,600,000]
He had just instantly deleted half of his own life bar!
But the raw kinetic force generated by the internal explosion had nowhere to go. It couldn’t blast outward because of the Sovereign-tier shackles holding his limbs perfectly still. The restraints were unbreakable, meaning the energy had to find the path of least resistance. So the force traveled straight up.
CRACK!
Declan’s physical avatar literally tore in half!
His upper torso, from the ribs up, violently detached from his pinned lower half. The sheer explosive force launched his upper body straight up into the air, completely freeing his arms and head from the wrist and ankle shackles still clamped to the floor!
"NO!" Siren screamed in pure horror as the logic of the situation completely broke her programming.
Declan’s severed upper half flew ten feet into the air. Digital blood sprayed everywhere in a massive and horrific geyser, raining down on the pristine silver floor and splashing across Siren’s white dress.
[Fatal Damage Registered.]
[Avatar Destruction Imminent.]
Declan didn’t care about the red warnings flooding his vision. He was free.
While spinning backward in mid-air, entirely missing his legs and bleeding out at a catastrophic rate, he tapped into his digital inventory. He didn’t pull out the +40 halberd. He couldn’t swing it without a lower body for leverage, and he didn’t have the stamina to force it. He just needed his passive item.
[Item Passive Activated]
[Conceptual Save State: Triggered]
The golden light of his mutated Emergency Backup Code flashed instantly. The universe froze for a microsecond. The game engine registered his fatal self-inflicted damage, consumed one of his three immortality charges, and immediately initiated a perfect reconstruction protocol.
The golden light washed over his severed torso. In a fraction of a second, his lower half regenerated perfectly out of thin air! The system rebuilt him from his saved state, restoring his lost data. His Spiked Striders, his black coat, his legs, they all popped back into existence entirely flawless.
He landed heavily on the metal floor, his boots hitting the ground directly behind Siren. He was completely and fully healed. He was completely unbound. And he was extremely annoyed that he had to blow himself up just to get out of a hug.
Siren spun around, her white eyes wide with sheer disbelief.
"You ripped your own spine in half to escape a lock," the AI whispered, completely terrified of the sheer psychotic willpower of the player standing in front of her. She took a slow step backward.
"I don’t like being tied down," Declan said coldly.
He raised his right hand. The air distorted violently, and the heavy dark matter shaft of the +40 Eclipse Severance dropped perfectly into his grip. He raised the massive blade high over his head, the black hole spinning hungrily. He was ready to completely delete the obsessed AI from the server and just take the loot by force.
But before he could swing, the system beat him to it.
A massive and golden system prompt suddenly exploded in front of his face, entirely blocking his view of the cowering AI.
[Hidden Objective Complete: Override Siren’s Logic]
[System Diagnostic: The AI’s core processing parameters have fully stabilized. The Abyssal corruption has been entirely assimilated into neutral data.]
[Mission Success. Generating Rewards.]