Chapter 238: Screaming Titanium!
Sebastian stood on the sprawling, perfectly smooth platform of polished black obsidian. His heavy combat boots tapped against the glossy surface, the sound echoing outward into the cavernous, oppressive expanse. He had just plummeted down a lightless chasm lined with the rotting, discarded rough drafts of the multiverse’s failed gods. Now, he was finally at the front door of the Core OS’s most secure facility.
He tilted his featureless black helmet upward, taking in the sheer, mind-breaking scale of the Tartarus Gate.
"Well, somebody was definitely going through a goth phase when they designed this," Sebastian muttered. His voice was a distorted, metallic hum through the helmet’s audio filters, but the deadpan sarcasm was entirely human.
The gate was the size of a literal continent. It stretched infinitely upward into the absolute dark, and extended endlessly to his left and right, completely wrapping around the boundaries of the localized space. It was forged from a dark, encrypted titanium that seemed to actively suck the faint, pulsing red ambient light right out of the air. It was a heavy, suffocating structure that screamed of absolute, unyielding imprisonment.
But it wasn’t the size of the door that made Sebastian’s stomach turn. It was the decorations.
Wrapped tightly around the colossal structure were thick, glowing chains made of pure, corrupted code. They pulsed with a sickly, bruised-purple light. And bound beneath those chains, fused directly into the cold, dark metal of the gate itself, were faces.
Millions of them.
"Jesus Christ," Sebastian whispered, taking a slow step forward.
They were the faces of deleted entities. Rogue NPCs who had gained too much sentience, corrupted players who had broken the rules, and failed code-smiths that the Architects had deemed too dangerous to simply recycle in the memory ocean.
Their faces were stretched and contorted in permanent, horrifying agony. Their mouths were thrown wide open in endless, silent screams. Thick, gray digital static wept from their digital eyes, running down the face of the massive door like a waterfall of pixelated tears.
Sebastian walked up to the base of the colossal gate. The smell of raw, unadulterated ozone and burning iron was so thick he could practically taste it on his tongue.
He didn’t feel a surge of heroic pity, but a cold, heavy knot of disgust settled in his chest. The Architects, the so-called perfect creators of the Ethereal Plane, had built their pristine, white utopia on top of a literal foundation of eternal torture.
He reached out a black-gloved hand and hovered it just an inch over one of the weeping faces. It was the face of a young woman, her features twisted in an unrecognizable mask of pain.
"System," Sebastian commanded softly, opening his green, corrupted Administrator UI. "Run a diagnostic on the gate materials. Look for a structural weak point. I want to know how thick this titanium is."
BZZZZT!
The moment his UI attempted to interface with the gate, a massive, glaring red error window violently snapped into his vision, completely blinding him for a fraction of a second.
[CRITICAL WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED SCAN DETECTED.] [Material Identified: Absolute Encrypted Titanium.] [Status: Indestructible. Immutable. Foundational Asset.] [Notice: The Tartarus Gate cannot be bypassed via localized physics manipulation or brute force rendering.]
Sebastian swiped the red warning away with a deeply annoyed flick of his wrist.
"Immutable," Sebastian scoffed, turning his back to the weeping faces. "Right. Because wrapping your front door in absolute durability is the oldest trick in the developer handbook. You can’t just blow it up. You have to play by their stupid rules."
He knew he couldn’t just use his [Concept of Mass] to punch the door off its hinges. The server’s foundational logic explicitly stated that the door could not be broken. If he tried to force a million tons of kinetic energy into the metal, the physics engine would just reflect the damage right back into his own body, instantly turning him into a fine, gray paste on the obsidian floor.
"If you can’t break the door, you find the keyhole," he reasoned, his highly optimized brain rapidly shifting gears.
He began to walk along the base of the continent-sized gate, his silver-tinged void eyes scanning the dark metal for any sign of a control panel, a biometric scanner, or a physical locking mechanism.
The silence of the abyss was heavy and oppressive. He thought about Valerie, millions of miles above him, bleeding on the Resurrection Altar just to keep the astral tether open so his brain wouldn’t turn to mush in the deep Juncture. The faint, comforting blue pulse of her Earth-mana hummed weakly in the back of his mind.
"Hold on, Seattle," Sebastian murmured to the empty air. "I’m looking for the doorbell."
After about ten minutes of walking along the endless expanse of screaming titanium, his [True Sight] finally caught a break in the geometry.
Sitting roughly fifty yards away from the base of the gate, resting perfectly in the center of the polished obsidian platform, was a pedestal. It was relatively small compared to the gargantuan door, standing about four feet tall and forged from the same dark, light-absorbing metal.
Sebastian jogged over to it, his heavy boots echoing loudly.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
He stopped in front of the pedestal. The top of the structure was slanted at a forty-five-degree angle. Embedded into the smooth metal was a rectangular, glowing red slot. It wasn’t a keypad. It wasn’t a biometric scanner for a handprint or a retinal scan. It was a physical insertion port.
"A physical key," Sebastian grunted, leaning over to inspect the glowing red slot. "In a universe made of pure data, they use a physical key. That is so incredibly retro it actually makes me angry."
He pulled up his UI and ran a quick scan on the pedestal itself.
[Asset Identified: Tartarus Lockdown Console.] [Status: Locked.] [Requirement: The Warden’s Passkey.]
Sebastian stared at the glowing green text. "The Warden’s Passkey. Great. Let me just check under the cosmic welcome mat."
He knew exactly how this worked. It was classic game design.
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