Chapter 200: [200] : Emergency Teleportation, Bypassing the Locks
Declan read the text twice. The headache was completely gone.
"Invincibility frames," Declan noted with a dark chuckle. "And it ignores spatial locks."
It wasn’t just a fast-travel button anymore. It was an unblockable invasion tool. He could drop his physical body directly into the middle of a heavily fortified corporate bunker, and the system would literally force his enemies to do zero damage to him for ten solid seconds. In a game where fights were decided in milliseconds, ten seconds of pure invincibility was an absolute death sentence for anyone standing on the other side of that door.
He didn’t wait. He smashed the dark matter sphere directly against his chest.
The sphere shattered into black light and absorbed straight into his physical skin. The highly complex spatial coordinates and the mutated logic code downloaded instantly into his neural link.
[Skill Learned: Abyssal Warp-Gate]
Declan checked his mana bar. His base mana was sitting at an absurdly high number. Casting this skill would barely put a dent in his reserves.
He rolled his shoulders. He was done with the Deep-Web Admin Node. He had the Sovereign-tier loot. He had the developer’s fast-travel code. And he had successfully bypassed the Level 100 defense AI.
It was time to leave before the game engine threw another glitch at him.
He turned his back on the heavy blast doors of Server G-88 and started walking down the pristine chrome corridor. He needed to go pick up his hacker and his assassin.
They had a lot of work to do. The server merge was still active, and he had an entire wasteland full of corporate assets waiting to be liquidated.
Declan strolled casually down the bright, sterile corridor of the Admin Node. His black Predator’s Coat trailed behind him. He wasn’t in a rush. He had absolute confidence in his new stats.
But his quiet walk was abruptly interrupted.
A sharp, high-pitched ping echoed in his ears. It wasn’t a standard system notification. It was his Quantum Radar.
He had fused three Scavenged-tier tracking skills together earlier that week to create the Epic-tier radar. It constantly sent out an undetectable pulse of dark mana, highlighting all living entities within a five-mile radius.
Right now, the radar was flashing violently.
Declan pulled up his transparent minimap.
Dozens of bright red dots had just appeared at the very edge of the map. They weren’t moving randomly like the Glitch Hounds or the roaming Abyssal monsters. They were moving in a tight, highly coordinated tactical formation. They were pushing past the outer ring of the facility and heading straight down the main elevator shaft toward the lower vaults.
"Players," Declan muttered.
He didn’t need to guess who they were. The corporate guilds of Sector 1 had been trying to crack this developer vault for months. Apex Paradigm, Proud Sword Megacorp, the Golden Vanguard. They all wanted the Sovereign-tier loot hidden down here.
Declan had just blown the massive iron blast doors off their hinges and casually cleared the Level 100 Black-ICE Sentinel guards. He had literally left the front door wide open for them.
The corporate hit squads must have finally rallied their max-level players and pushed through the breach.
"They brought an army," Declan noted, watching the red dots multiply on his screen. "Probably a hundred max-leveled elites. Heavy tanks, plasma mages, the works."
He stopped walking. He stood in the middle of the empty white hallway.
He thought about pulling out the +40 Eclipse Severance halberd. With his 90 base Agility and the massive physical density of his Abyssal Sovereign class, he could easily blur into their frontline and turn a hundred corporate elites into digital paste in about four seconds. He could drop a localized black hole in the hallway and watch them all get compressed into a single bloody cube.
It would be incredibly easy.
But he quickly did the math in his head.
"They don’t have anything I want," Declan sighed.
He had just looted the actual developer stash. He had Sovereign-tier items and millions of Origin Points. A bunch of Level 70 corporate guards were just going to drop standard Forged-tier rifles and maybe a few basic health potions. It was vendor trash.
Fighting them wasn’t worth the stamina drain. It wasn’t worth the time.
He tapped his communication link.
"Nova. Morgan," Declan said. His deep voice easily cut through the static of the comms channel. "We have company coming down the main elevator. Corporate squads. Pack up your gear. We are leaving."
"Leaving?!" Nova’s voice cracked over the radio. She sounded panicked. "Declan, the main elevator is the only way out! If they are coming down the shaft, we are completely trapped! They’ll have a heavy firing line set up before we even reach the lobby!"
"They also deployed spatial lock wards," Morgan added. The assassin sounded grim. "My scanners are picking up high-density red magic circles painting the upper walls. They sealed the coordinate plane. Standard teleportation scrolls won’t work in here."
The corporate guilds weren’t stupid. They knew how to lock down a boss room. By deploying spatial wards, they effectively turned the entire underground facility into a cage. You couldn’t blink out. You couldn’t use a portal item. You had to fight them face-to-face.
"I don’t use standard scrolls," Declan replied flatly.
He didn’t run toward the entrance. He just stood exactly where he was. He raised his right hand into the air.
"System," Declan commanded. "Activate Abyssal Warp-Gate."
He didn’t need to chant a long magical sequence. He didn’t need to wave a staff. The Sovereign Neural Interface clamped to his right ear completely deleted the game’s cast-time mechanics. The skill triggered the exact millisecond he thought about it.
He tapped into his massive Ascendant-tier mana pool. Five hundred points of raw digital energy vanished from his reserves.
The air directly in front of him violently tore open.
It didn’t sound like a magic spell. It sounded like a massive sheet of thick canvas being ripped perfectly in half. A towering portal made of pure, swirling black dark matter materialized out of thin air. It was easily twenty feet high and completely ignored the physical chrome of the ceiling, phasing right through the metal.
The heavy red warning boxes from the corporate spatial locks flashed in his vision. The game engine tried to tell him that teleportation was disabled in this zone.
The Abyssal Warp-Gate didn’t care. It was a Divine Anomaly skill. It possessed a higher administrative priority than the corporate wards. The dark matter portal easily crushed the red error codes, shattering the spatial lock into useless digital sparks.
"Target coordinates," Declan stated calmly. "Sector 7. Iron Bastion. Central Keep."
He looked through the dark, swirling vortex. He couldn’t see the destination. It was just an endless abyss of nothingness.
"Nova, Morgan. Step through," Declan ordered over the comms. "I’m holding the door."
Less than two seconds later, the elite hacker and the corporate assassin sprinted down the hallway. Nova was clutching her silver data pad tightly to her chest. Morgan had both of her combat daggers drawn, constantly checking over her shoulder for the approaching corporate army.
They saw the massive black portal standing in the middle of the corridor. They saw Declan standing next to it, completely unfazed by the blaring alarms echoing from the upper levels.
They didn’t hesitate. They didn’t ask questions. They just threw themselves directly into the dark matter rift.
Declan stepped in right behind them.
The transition was absolutely flawless.
There was no nauseating spinning sensation. There was no freezing cold wind hitting his face. There was no bright, flashing white light to blind him while the game engine struggled to render the new environment.
It was just a single step. One second he was standing in the heavily corrupted, pristine white basement of Sector 1, and the next second, his heavy Spiked Striders hit solid stone pavement with a satisfying crunch.
He was standing right in the absolute center of the Iron Bastion.
He had just crossed over a hundred kilometers of highly toxic wasteland, completely bypassing every single corporate checkpoint, wall, and monster horde on the map. And he did it in a fraction of a millisecond.
Nova stumbled out of the portal right next to him. She dropped to her knees on the clean paving stones. The elite hacker looked down at her hands. She patted her chest, breathing heavily. She looked completely amazed.