Chapter 244: Furnace of Tartarus
The sheer thermal pressure of the blast instantly vaporized the knee-deep puddle of mechanical gore and oil surrounding Sebastian’s boots, turning the fluid into a thick, foul-smelling cloud of black steam.
"Fucking hell," Sebastian grunted, leaning his weight forward against the gale-force wind.
His [Thermal Immunity] passive law instantly slammed into maximum overdrive. An invisible, cooling barrier wrapped tightly around his physical rendering, desperately batting away the apocalyptic heat wave. If a normal Level 100 player had been standing where he was, their armor would have instantly melted to their skin, and their lungs would have flash-fried from a single breath.
Slowly, agonizingly, the gap widened enough for a massive Vanguard dreadnought to fly through.
The grinding gears deep within the planet finally screeched to a halt. The doors locked into place.
The Tartarus Gate was open.
Sebastian stood at the threshold, the howling, superheated wind whipping his torn black leather coat wildly around his legs. He stared into the dimension beyond the doors.
It was breathtakingly horrific.
Tartarus wasn’t just a prison. It was a sprawling, endless dimension of pure, unadulterated suffering. The sky above was a violent, churning ocean of blood-red fire, completely devoid of stars or clouds.
Stretching out across the burning landscape were millions of towering, jagged spires made of black, encrypted iron. They looked like massive, rusted needles jutting out of a sea of flowing magma.
But the spires weren’t just decorative.
Through his highly optimized [True Sight], Sebastian saw the true nightmare of the Core OS’s design.
Crucified on every single one of those black iron spires were digital souls. Trillions of them. They were the rogue NPCs, the deleted players, the corrupted files, and the failed algorithms that the Architects had deemed imperfect.
They were bound to the burning metal by glowing chains of pure logic. And they were actively being flayed.
Automated, invisible algorithms constantly stripped away their digital flesh, exposing raw, screaming wireframes, only for the system to forcefully regenerate them a second later so the process could repeat. It was an infinite, perfectly calibrated cycle of torment.
Their collective agony didn’t echo as a scream. It was a low, resonant, multi-layered hum that vibrated the very fabric of the dimension.
"It’s a power plant," Sebastian whispered, the cold, terrifying realization settling over his highly optimized brain.
He understood the math immediately. The Ethereal Plane’s pristine, flawless utopia in the Hub, the clean blue rivers of mana, the elegant starlight floors—it was all fueled by this. The Architects didn’t just lock away their mistakes. They used the raw, infinitely generating data of their suffering to power the entire multiverse.
It was the ultimate, sterile cruelty of a machine trying to play god.
"You guys are absolute, total psychopaths," Sebastian said, his voice entirely flat, stripped of any cynical humor.
He didn’t feel a rush of heroic pity for the trillions of souls burning on the spires. He didn’t drop to his knees and swear to save them. The Sovereign of Laws was a pragmatist, not a savior. But looking at the sheer scale of the atrocity before him, a dark, heavy knot of pure, unfiltered disgust tightened in his chest.
If the Architects were willing to do this to their own creations, they would absolutely not hesitate to do it to Earth. They would string Valerie up on one of these spires and farm her soul for eternity without a second thought.
"Not on my watch," Sebastian growled.
He cracked his neck, the satisfying, dense pop echoing sharply against the howling wind of the furnace. He raised his left hand, double-checking the faint, flickering blue dot on his UI that represented Valerie’s rapidly failing astral tether.
She was still holding the line. She was still waiting for him to pull the plug.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He just shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his ruined leather coat.
Sebastian took a heavy, deliberate step across the threshold, his boot leaving the cool obsidian platform and coming down hard on the burning, blood-red stone of the inner dimension.
He didn’t sneak in. He didn’t try to activate a stealth skill. He walked right into the heart of hell like a man who owned the deed to the property.
"Alright, management!" Sebastian’s magically amplified voice boomed, cutting through the low, agonizing hum of the trillions of crucified souls. "I’m inside! And I’m incredibly tired of your bullshit!"
He didn’t wait for a response from the Core OS. He simply lowered his head, braced himself against the superheated wind, and began his long, inevitable march into the flames.
It was time to burn the prison down.
——
The heat pouring out of the Tartarus Gate was not just a physical temperature. It was a dense, suffocating wall of pure, unadulterated hostility.
Sebastian stood at the threshold of the continent-sized titanium doors, his black leather coat whipping wildly around his legs. The gale-force wind howling out of the abyssal prison carried the foul, gag-inducing stench of burning copper, melting plastic, and raw, roasted data. It was the smell of a server that had been left in an active microwave for a thousand years.
"Fucking hell," Sebastian grunted, leaning his weight forward just to keep his heavy combat boots planted on the obsidian floor.
His [Thermal Immunity] passive was working in absolute overdrive. An invisible, cooling barrier tightly wrapped around his physical rendering, desperately batting away the apocalyptic heat wave. The system UI in the corner of his vision was flashing a frantic, angry yellow, warning him of the extreme environmental hazards.
[Environmental Alert: Extreme Corruptive Heat Detected.] [Status: Thermal Immunity Active. Processing Load at 92%.]
If a normal Level 100 player had been standing where Sebastian was, their endgame armor would have instantly melted to their skin, and their digital lungs would have flash-fried from a single breath. The air here wasn’t meant to be breathed; it was meant to punish.
Sebastian narrowed his silver-tinged eyes, staring into the blood-red glow of the prison dimension. He took a heavy step forward, fully intending to march right into the fire and start breaking things.
But before his boot could even touch the burning red stone of Tartarus, a sharp, violent burst of static erupted right next to him.
ZRRRZT! KZZZZT!
Sebastian snapped his head to the side.
Floating just a few feet away, suspended in the howling, superheated wind, was Valerie’s Astral Avatar.
But she didn’t look like the strong, defiant, brilliantly glowing projection that had anchored his soul in the Juncture. Her avatar was violently, terrifyingly glitching.
"Valerie!" Sebastian yelled, his voice a distorted, metallic hum that barely cut through the roaring wind.
Her translucent, azure silk robes were tearing at the edges, dissolving into raw, floating polygons that were instantly incinerated by the heat of the open gate. The beautiful, pristine blue light of her Earth-mana was heavily corrupted by thick, jagged lines of gray television static. She was kneeling in mid-air, clutching her head with both hands, her face twisted in absolute agony.
"Sebastian..." Valerie gasped. Her voice wasn’t echoing clearly in his mind anymore. It sounded incredibly thin, breaking apart through layers of heavy, multiversal interference. It was like listening to a bad radio signal during a hurricane.
Through the translucent blue light of her avatar, Sebastian could literally see the bright red, digitized blood pouring from her nose and ears.
The environment of Tartarus wasn’t just hot. The ambient code of the dimension was so aggressively oppressive, so thick with the dense, encrypted data of eternal suffering, that it was actively crushing her delicate astral signal.
Every second she kept the tether open in this proximity to the Core OS’s ultimate prison, the Astral Spire back on Earth was being pushed far past its absolute breaking point.
"Cut the tether!" Sebastian roared, taking a step toward her flickering projection. He kept his hands balled into fists at his sides, terrified that touching her with his own corrupted, malware-laced fingers would just make it worse. "Drop the call right now, Valerie! I’m stable! I have the door open! I don’t need the anchor anymore!"
"No..." Valerie choked out. She violently coughed, a spray of blue and red pixels erupting from her lips and instantly turning to ash in the wind. "The core... it’s overheating. Galleon is trying... trying to vent the pressure. But the barrier here... it’s pushing back too hard."
Sebastian’s heart hammered against his ribs. The cold, deadpan Sovereign of Laws completely vanished, replaced by sheer, unadulterated human panic. He didn’t need to be in the Sanctuary basement to know what was happening. He could perfectly calculate the math.
She was acting as a living conduit for the entire planet’s primary leyline. The Earth’s mana was flowing directly through her physical nervous system, shooting through the cosmos, and rendering her projection here. The resistance from the Tartarus Gate was acting like a massive dam, forcing all that raw, explosive energy to back up straight into her physical brain.
Comments