Chapter 216: [220]: Ripping the Chains, Peeling the God
Sebastian let go of her shoulders. He slowly turned around in the void.
He looked at the heavy, glowing golden chains wrapped around his wrists, his ankles, and his throat. He looked at the arrogant, sneering Warlord who thought he had won.
Sebastian’s silver-tinged eyes flared beneath his cracked visor. He didn’t feel the crushing weight of the data anymore. He didn’t feel the exhaustion of the Juncture. He was one hundred percent stable, backed by the infinite processing power of his own planet.
"Hold my calls," Sebastian muttered. "This performance review is going to get messy."
—-
The golden chains of the Old World were supposed to be absolute. They were the foundational quarantine protocols written by the original Architects of the Ethereal Plane, designed specifically to lock down catastrophic errors that threatened the multiverse. They were mathematically unbreakable.
But math is just a suggestion when you hold the developer console.
Sebastian stood suspended in the void, the massive, glowing chains wrapped tightly around his newly stabilized, biological steel body.
Saint Kaelen raised his heavy broadsword, pointing the jagged tip directly at Sebastian’s chest.
"You survived the purge," Kaelen rumbled, his voice echoing with fanatical certainty. "But you are still a prisoner of the System. Those chains do not respond to physical strength. They do not respond to elemental magic. They are the undeniable weight of order. Accept your deletion, Anomaly!"
"Order is boring," Sebastian deadpanned.
He didn’t access his Administrator UI. He didn’t pull out the [Code Compiler] or try to forcefully write a new law of physics to dissolve the metal. He didn’t need to.
He just dropped his center of gravity, planted his heavy combat boots against the invisible bedrock of space, and rolled his shoulders.
He flexed.
CRACK!
The sound was like a massive glacier snapping in half.
Sebastian’s Demigod-tier muscles, packed with the hyper-condensed kinetic density of ten million units of Source Code, violently expanded against the restraints. The golden chains didn’t just groan. They shrieked.
The ’unbreakable’ mathematical constants violently warped, the glowing code stretching and distorting as it desperately tried to contain a physical force that completely exceeded its programmed parameters.
"What?!" Kaelen gasped, taking a sudden, terrified step backward on his floating debris. "That is impossible!"
"I really need to get that printed on a t-shirt," Sebastian grunted.
He jerked his arms outward in a brutal, sweeping motion.
SNAP! SHATTER!
The chains of the Old World violently exploded. The glowing golden links shattered like cheap, brittle plastic, blowing apart into a million tiny, harmless yellow pixels that rained down into the dark abyss.
Sebastian casually rubbed his wrists, brushing off a few stray sparks of code. He rolled his neck, the satisfying, heavy pop of his dense vertebrae echoing in the vacuum. He was completely unbound. He was operating at one hundred percent capacity, and there wasn’t a single line of code in the Ethereal Plane holding him back.
Kaelen’s arrogant sneer completely vanished. The sheer, existential terror of watching the foundational rules of his religion get casually snapped by a guy in a leather coat finally broke his fanaticism.
The Level 95 Warlord turned on his heel. He didn’t try to swing his broadsword. He dropped the massive weapon entirely. CLANG. It hit the rusted metal decking and slid off into the void.
"System! Emergency Warp!" Kaelen shrieked, frantically tapping his wrist console. "Any coordinates! Get me out of here!"
Sebastian just watched him panic. He didn’t run after the fleeing god. He didn’t cast a long-range spell.
He just activated his [Heavenly Steps].
Fzzt.
Sebastian ceased to exist in his current location. He instantly folded the spatial coordinates of the Juncture, bypassing the fifty yards of empty space in a fraction of a microsecond.
Kaelen was still frantically tapping his wrist, watching the golden circle of an escape portal slowly begin to render in front of him.
"Come on, come on!" Kaelen begged, sweat pouring down his pale face.
A heavy, black-gloved hand clamped down onto the Warlord’s shoulder. The grip was absolute, carrying the crushing, immovable weight of an industrial vice.
Kaelen froze. The blood drained entirely from his face.
"Running away?" Sebastian’s cold, deadpan voice whispered directly into the Warlord’s ear. "But we haven’t even gone over your severance package yet."
Sebastian didn’t use a sword. He didn’t use a dagger. He violently yanked Kaelen backward, throwing the massive, eight-hundred-pound man onto the rusted metal decking.
THUD!
Kaelen scrambled backward like a cornered rat, his boots slipping on the metal. He held his hands up in a desperate, pathetic gesture of surrender.
"Wait! Wait!" Kaelen pleaded, his voice cracking into a high-pitched whine. The god of the Vanguard was entirely gone. He was just a terrified player staring down a Game Over screen. "I yield! I have credits! I have millions of silver! I can give you the coordinates to a dozen unplundered servers! Just let me log out!"
Sebastian slowly walked forward. His featureless black helmet stared down at the groveling man.
"You guys always offer money when the armor fails," Sebastian sighed, shaking his head. "I don’t want your silver, Kaelen. I want you off my server."
Sebastian stepped directly into the Warlord’s guard.
He didn’t punch him. He reached down with both hands. His fingers, glowing with a faint, terrifying silver light, grabbed the thick, interlocking plates of Kaelen’s diamond-weave armor right at the collarbone.
This was Level 95, indestructible endgame gear. It was designed to withstand orbital bombardments.
Sebastian dug his fingers right into the microscopic gaps between the digital rendering.
And he pulled.
"NO!" Kaelen screamed.
SCREEECH! SQUELCH!
The sound was absolutely horrific. It wasn’t just metal tearing. It was wet, organic tearing.
Because the Ethereal Plane linked a player’s physical sensation to their gear, peeling the armor off forcefully didn’t just break the item. It bypassed the durability stats entirely.
Sebastian literally peeled the diamond-weave armor apart like he was opening a bag of chips. But as the metal tore away, the digital skin, muscle, and fat fused to the inside of the suit came with it.
"GAAAAAAAH!" Kaelen howled in pure, unadulterated agony.
A massive geyser of bright red blood and raw, floating polygons sprayed into the air. Sebastian ripped the chest plate completely off, tossing the heavy, blood-soaked metal over his shoulder.
Kaelen’s chest was entirely exposed, a ruined, bubbling mess of raw data and exposed ribs. The Warlord thrashed wildly on the floor, clutching his ruined torso, his health bar in an absolute freefall.
"Please," Kaelen gurgled, blood spilling from his lips. "Stop..."
Sebastian didn’t offer a villainous monologue. He didn’t gloat. He was just a guy cleaning up a very messy room.
He raised his heavy, steel-dense combat boot.
"Log out," Sebastian deadpanned.
He brought his boot down squarely on the center of Kaelen’s face.
CRUNCH!
The sound was wet, sharp, and final.
The Level 95 Warlord’s skull completely caved inward, flattening against the rusted metal deck into a paste of crushed bone and gray brain matter.
The screaming instantly stopped. Kaelen’s body went totally rigid for a fraction of a second before violently dissolving into a cloud of harmless, gray cosmic dust that drifted away into the void.
[Target Eliminated. Boss Defeated.]
Sebastian wiped a streak of blood off his black leather sleeve. He looked at the empty space where the god used to be, entirely unbothered by the violence.
He turned around, looking back at the glowing blue projection of Valerie hovering in the dark.
"Alright," Sebastian said casually, clapping his hands together to shake off the dust. "The yard is clear. Let’s go home."
—————
"The Juncture was a graveyard again. It was finally, blissfully quiet.
Sebastian stood on a massive, jagged piece of rusted hull plating that had once belonged to the flagship of the Holy Crusade. The oppressive, arrogant hum of the Vanguard dreadnoughts was completely gone. The fanatical screams of ten thousand elite Saints had been entirely silenced. There was no holy light piercing the dark, no plasma cannons charging up to vaporize planets.
There was only the soft, ambient drift of gray ash.
It fell like a gentle, macabre snowstorm. The pulverized remains of indestructible diamond-weave armor and the calcium dust of a billion high-level bones drifted lazily through the zero-gravity void. It coated Sebastian’s heavy combat boots in a fine, pale layer.
He didn’t move for a long time. He just stood there, letting the absolute silence wash over him.
His body was an absolute wreck. The Sovereign of Laws was barely holding his physical rendering together. His form was a towering, eight-foot-tall silhouette of violently churning black static and deep, bruised-purple error codes. Jagged, neon-green wireframes snapped in and out of existence around his limbs, desperately trying to maintain a cohesive shape. The thick, red error runes carved into his chest wept a constant stream of oily digital ash.
He looked like the physical manifestation of a fatal hard drive crash. He felt even worse.
Sebastian let out a long, ragged exhale. The sound didn’t travel through air—there was no atmosphere in this dead zone. It just vibrated directly into the foundational logic of the Juncture, a heavy, metallic distortion that sounded like two rusted gears grinding against each other.
