Chapter 203: [203] : The Sector 1 Response, Raining Deletion
"You have a hundred and thirty million points. Buy the maximum slot expansions. Buy every single storage upgrade on the global market."
"I did that ten minutes ago!" Sloane argued, pointing at the sky as if the developers were hiding in the clouds.
"I bought the Platinum-tier vault upgrades. I bought the Diamond-tier sub-folders. I even bought out three other guilds’ storage permissions."
"We are still going to run out of room. You are farming faster than the game engine can physically spawn storage containers!"
Declan cracked his neck. The dense mythical alloy bones in his spine popped loudly in the quiet air of the balcony.
He walked past the stressed Quartermaster and looked out over the sprawling city. The massive purple forges were roaring in the distance.
The automated anti-air turrets were smoothly tracking the sky. Down below, thousands of robotic spiders were dragging mountains of raw materials back into the city limits, dropping them into massive digital hoppers.
"Fine," Declan said. "If we have too much metal, we spend the metal. Tell Bram to stop building standard turrets."
"I want him to start building the Sovereign-tier Void Artillery cannons. I want one on every single corner of the perimeter wall."
"I want them overlapping so heavily a bird couldn’t fly through without getting deleted."
"That is going to take thousands of pounds of iron per cannon," Sloane noted, rapidly typing the new orders into her clipboard. "It’s a massive drain on resources."
"Exactly," Declan smirked. "I want this city to have enough firepower to shoot the moon out of the sky."
"Keep the drones running. We aren’t stopping until the entire map is completely stripped of resources."
Sloane shook her head, but a small greedy smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "You’re an absolute maniac, boss. But the accounting is beautiful."
Declan turned his attention back to the distant horizon. Sector 6 was his. He had the money. He had the automated army. He had the impenetrable shield.
He was just waiting for the corporate elites in Sector 1 to realize that they didn’t own the game anymore.
He was waiting for them to figure out that Player V had just forcefully bought them out.
The absolute peace of the automated empire didn’t last very long.
A harsh blaring siren suddenly ripped through the quiet atmosphere of the Iron Bastion. It wasn’t the standard digital chime of a monster spawn or a low-level hazard alert.
It was a deep bone-rattling klaxon that sounded exactly like a nuclear submarine diving alarm.
The red warning lights along the heavy iron battlements flared to life, casting an eerie and violent glow over the stone courtyard below.
Declan didn’t flinch. He didn’t jump in surprise. He just stood his ground on the penthouse balcony and looked up at the sky.
The perfect artificial blue sky that the energy dome usually projected above the city was rapidly shifting.
Thick bruising purple clouds began to gather just outside the one-kilometer safety barrier. The clouds weren’t acting like normal weather patterns.
They were swirling violently, forming a massive incredibly dense vortex directly over the exact center of the Iron Bastion.
A sleek pitch-black figure stepped out onto the balcony behind him. Her movements were perfectly silent.
Aegis.
The Level 80 System Defense Entity stood next to Declan. The glowing purple energy lines on her metallic chassis pulsed rapidly, indicating a massive spike in her processing power.
Her bright blue optical sensors were locked onto the swirling vortex in the sky, analyzing the incoming threat with terrifying efficiency.
"Report," Declan ordered smoothly, keeping his hands stuffed in his coat pockets.
"Massive territorial shift detected," Aegis stated, her synthetic voice completely devoid of panic.
"Sector 1 administrative logs indicate that our forced annexation of Sector 6 has triggered a global threat response from the central corporate guilds."
"They finally noticed their military base is missing," Declan smirked. "I figured the billionaire club wouldn’t like that. What are they doing about it?"
"They are initiating a targeted macro-level hazard," Aegis explained. She raised her metallic hand.
A glowing blue holographic screen projected into the air between them.
"The corporate elites have bypassed standard combat protocols. They are using their root access to forcefully spawn a server-mandated weather event."
Declan looked at the glowing blue screen. The numbers flashing across it were not pretty.
[System/Math Breakdown]
鈫’ Threat Detected: Level 95 Area-of-Effect Hazard
鈫’ Name: Atmospheric Deletion Storm
鈫’ Dome Integrity Drain: -50,000 HP/sec
鈫’ Aegis Shield Reserves: 9,500,000 / 10,000,000
"Level 95," Declan noted, his dark eyes narrowing slightly. "A deletion storm. That’s a new one. Usually, they just send guys with guns."
"It is entirely composed of raw environmental code, Boss," Aegis reported. Her optical sensors dimmed as she read the incoming data streams.
"It is not a monster. It does not have a physical hit box. It does not have a central core to target."
"So we can’t shoot it," Declan said.
"Negative. Master Artificer Bram’s automated turrets and the Void Artillery cannons cannot acquire a lock on atmospheric conditions."
"The storm is specifically designed to bypass physical defense grids." Aegis’s blue eyes flickered.
"The storm’s primary function is to rain highly concentrated acidic deletion code directly onto the city. The impact will drain our energy dome by fifty thousand health points every single second."
Declan did the math in his head instantly. His base Intelligence stat of +1,500 made the calculation completely trivial.
Ten million total shield health. Fifty thousand damage a second.
"Two hundred seconds," Declan said flatly. "A little over three minutes before the shield breaks and the storm melts the entire city."
Down in the massive courtyard, absolute chaos erupted.
The three thousand human refugees who had just started getting used to the safety of the Iron Bastion looked up at the sky.
They saw the massive swirling vortex of dark purple energy. They heard the terrifying rumble of the unnatural and heavily coded thunder.
They didn’t need a system interface to know that death was hanging right over their heads.
"It’s a server wipe!" a player in rusted iron armor screamed, dropping his pickaxe onto the pavement. "They’re dropping a wipe on us! We’re all dead! Run!"
"Run where?!" another player yelled, shoving his way toward the central keep. "We’re trapped in the dome! If the shield falls, we burn with it!"
Sloane was standing on top of a wooden merchant crate. She frantically blew a physical non-digital whistle to try and get their attention.
"Do not panic! Stay away from the outer walls! Move into the lower levels of the keep! Get away from the glass!"
Her voice was completely drowned out by the screaming mob.
The terrified players were trampling each other, desperately trying to find cover from an attack that would literally vaporize concrete. They had traded one nightmare for another.
Declan watched them scramble from the balcony. He let out a heavy annoyed sigh.
"I really hate it when they scream," Declan muttered. "It ruins the aesthetic of the city."
"Boss," Aegis said, her voice remaining perfectly steady despite the timer ticking down. "I recommend immediate evacuation."
"I can initiate a localized Void Blink to transfer your physical vessel to a secondary safe zone before the shield collapses."
"I don’t run from weather," Declan said coldly.
He didn’t pull out the +40 Eclipse Severance halberd. The heavy reality-tearing weapon was entirely useless against a cloud.
He didn’t summon his Black Aegis riot shield. Blocking a few drops of rain wouldn’t save the city below him.
He needed to outsmart the server logic. If Sector 1 wanted to play with environmental code, he would just rewrite the environment.
Declan opened his digital inventory. He bypassed the weapons and the armor.
He scrolled straight to the restricted developer assets he had looted from the Deep-Web Admin Node.
He found a heavy thick book bound in carved sapphire. The silver data lines on the cover pulsed with intense magical potential.
He willed it into his right hand. The Divine-grade artifact materialized perfectly.
[Item Recognized: Source-Code Illusion Tome]
鈫’ Tier: Divine (Creator-Class Artifact)
鈫’ Functionality: Grants the user absolute mastery over light and spatial perception. The user can generate permanent physical illusions that possess real-world mass and density.
"You can’t shoot a storm," Declan smirked as he ran his fingers over the cold sapphire cover. "But you can definitely lie to it."
High above the city, the dark purple clouds violently ruptured like it was commanded to do so.