Chapter 212: [216]: Crashing the Stars
Sebastian stood entirely alone on the command bridge of The Eclipse. The air was thick with the smell of vaporized platinum, burnt ozone, and the distinct, metallic tang of digital blood. He let out a long, heavy exhale that ruffled the collar of his ruined black leather coat. The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the soft, dying sparks of the shattered cybernetic consoles and the faint, wet dripping of what used to be the elite vanguard of the Holy Crusade.
He didn’t feel a single ounce of remorse. The Ethereal Plane was a slaughterhouse, and he was just the guy who had finally figured out how to lock the abattoir doors from the inside.
He walked over to the primary command console at the front of the room. He casually wiped a smear of a Mage’s gray ash off the holographic keyboard using the sleeve of his coat. He looked out the massive, reinforced viewport.
The view was absolutely breathtaking, in a terrifying, apocalyptic sort of way.
Hovering in the dark, swirling purple smog of the Juncture were hundreds of massive, city-sized planetary dreadnoughts. They were the remainder of the Star-Killers’ armada. They sat in perfect, rigid formation, their white durasteel hulls gleaming with arrogant, holy light. They were waiting for orders from their Warlord. They were waiting for Saint Kaelen to tell them to push forward and glass the absolute hell out of Earth.
"Sorry, boys," Sebastian muttered, his voice echoing flatly in the empty room. "The captain is currently experiencing a critical existence failure. But don’t worry. I’ll take the wheel."
He looked down at the glowing holographic controls of the flagship. It wasn’t a steering wheel. It was a massive, highly complex matrix of Ethereal runes, spatial coordinates, and mana-injection sliders. To a normal player, even a Level 90 pilot, this would take a team of ten technicians to operate smoothly.
Sebastian didn’t have ten technicians. But he did have the [Code Compiler] and absolute Root Access.
"System," Sebastian commanded, his voice dropping into that chilling, metallic hum of a Sovereign. "Override manual flight controls. Sync local helm to Administrator UI."
BZZZZT!
The glowing gold runes on the console violently flickered. They shifted from a pristine, holy yellow to a jagged, corrupted neon green. The Ethereal Plane’s underlying logic tried to reject the unauthorized access, throwing up a handful of pathetic, flickering red warning screens.
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED. PLEASE INSERT COMMANDER’S BIOMETRIC KEY.]
"I literally just deleted the guy," Sebastian sighed, rolling his silver-tinged eyes. He slammed his right hand down flat onto the console. "Force bypass. Execute."
His thirty-percent synchronized physical form pushed a concentrated burst of his glitched, raw data directly into the ship’s mainframe. The red warning screens shattered like cheap glass. The console chirped a cheerful, compliant chime, and the entire dreadnought violently hummed to life under his absolute control.
[Override Successful. Welcome, Administrator Zero.]
"That’s more like it," Sebastian smirked, a dark, predatory grin stretching across his pale face.
He looked back out the viewport at the hundreds of dreadnoughts floating peacefully in the void. They were packed tightly together, a massive cluster of arrogant, heavily armored piñatas just waiting to be cracked open.
Sebastian didn’t want to fight them one by one. He didn’t want to fly around the Juncture playing a cosmic game of laser tag. He was tired, his physical meat-suit was aching from the sheer strain of maintaining his Demigod stats, and he had a very impatient, comatose girlfriend waiting for him back home.
He needed to wrap this up. Fast.
"Let’s play bumper cars," Sebastian whispered.
He mentally grabbed the massive, glowing slider for the flagship’s anti-gravity thrusters. He didn’t ease it forward. He didn’t calculate a safe trajectory. He just violently yanked the digital throttle to absolute maximum, ignoring every single safety governor programmed into the ship’s engine block.
"Punch it."
VWOOOSH!
The Eclipse didn’t just accelerate. It violently tore a hole through the localized physics engine. The enslaved, dying sun chained to the rear of the dreadnought shrieked as its raw plasma was instantly, entirely drained to fuel the impossible thrust.
The sheer kinetic force of the launch threw Sebastian backward. He crashed into the heavy command table, his boots skidding across the polished steel floor. He gritted his teeth, his biological steel muscles coiling tight as he braced against the console, laughing a harsh, static-filled laugh.
Outside the viewport, the stars didn’t blur. The universe simply ceased to exist for a fraction of a microsecond.
The flagship of the Holy Crusade, weighing hundreds of millions of tons, crossed the twenty miles of empty void at full light-speed, aiming directly for the absolute dead center of the Vanguard armada.
The other dreadnoughts didn’t even have time to register the movement on their radars. Their automated [Absolute Aegis] shields didn’t have the processing frames required to deploy.
KRA-DOOOOM!
The collision was entirely beyond human comprehension. It was a catastrophic, multi-ship pileup that instantly ignited the dark void in pure, unadulterated nuclear fire.
The Eclipse acted like a hyper-dense battering ram, plowing perfectly through the center of the formation. It violently cleaved through the hulls of three adjacent dreadnoughts, shattering their pristine white durasteel like it was made of wet cardboard.
The resulting shockwave of displaced spatial coordinates and superheated plasma rippled outward in a massive, expanding sphere of absolute destruction.
"Holy shit!" Sebastian yelled, throwing his arms up to shield his face as the reinforced glass of the viewport entirely gave way.
The bridge of the flagship tore apart around him. Secondary explosions ripped through the lower decks as the ship’s core finally buckled under the impossible kinetic stress. Outside, the entire armada was caught in the chain reaction. Ships slammed into other ships. Enslaved suns broke their tethers and detonated, washing the Juncture in blinding, white-hot waves of cosmic radiation.
It was an apocalypse rendered in real-time.
Sebastian’s [Gravity Domain] automatically engaged, tethering his boots to a massive, floating chunk of the ruined bridge as the rest of the ship disintegrated around him. He hovered in the center of the raging inferno, entirely protected by his [Thermal Immunity] as the heat of a dozen dying stars washed over his tattered black leather coat.
"Strike!" Sebastian cheered, lowering his arms and admiring the absolute carnage.
Millions of heavily armored Saints were currently being vaporized, their digital screams completely drowned out by the roaring vacuum of the explosions. It was a flawless victory.
But the Ethereal Plane had a very strict, fundamental rule about mass destruction. When you break something, you collect the loot.
And Sebastian had just broken an entire fleet of endgame hardware.
BING! BING! BING!
His green Administrator UI didn’t just flash; it violently exploded across his vision. Thousands of cascading notifications flooded his optic nerves, completely blinding him with a wall of frantic text.
[Massive Entity Deletion Detected.] [Calculating Experience...] [Calculating Source Code...] [Auto-Loot Function Engaged.]
"Wait, no, turn that off!" Sebastian gasped, his eyes widening in sudden, genuine panic.
He didn’t have time to navigate the menus. The raw, unadulterated data of a hundred destroyed dreadnoughts and tens of thousands of Level 90 players didn’t drop as neat, physical items. Because he had bypassed the server’s standard loot tables with his Root Access, the system simply forcefully injected the raw Source Code directly into his avatar.
A torrential, blinding river of glowing white and purple code erupted from the burning wreckage around him. It surged toward him like a magnetic storm, slamming directly into his chest.
"GAAAAAH!" Sebastian roared, dropping to his knees on the floating chunk of metal.
It felt like trying to swallow a tsunami through a cocktail straw. His internal feedback loops instantly went critical. His biological meat-suit, already pushed to the absolute brink by the day’s reality-bending stunts, began to violently reject the data.
[WARNING: CRITICAL DATA OVERLOAD.] [SYSTEM MEMORY CAPACITY EXCEEDED BY 8,000%.]
The dark, bruised-purple static of his glitch form began to bleed through his human skin. The jagged, red error runes carved into his flesh didn’t just glow; they burned white-hot, searing through his black leather coat and hissing violently in the vacuum.
"Too much! It’s too fucking much!" Sebastian choked out, his hands clawing at his chest.
He was forcefully absorbing the raw foundational code of an entire armada. His Demigod stats couldn’t handle the sheer volume. His internal UI began to violently tear itself apart, the green screens glitching into a chaotic mess of red and black static.
He felt his bones vibrating, the physical density of his body increasing to the point where he felt like he was going to collapse into a localized black hole.
He was a walking, talking hard drive, and he was on the absolute verge of a catastrophic, physical detonation.
—-
Sebastian was burning alive from the inside out.
He lay curled on his side atop the floating, jagged chunk of The Eclipse’s ruined decking. His black leather coat was entirely reduced to floating green pixels, leaving his torso exposed to the cold vacuum of the Juncture. But he didn’t feel the cold.
