Chapter 248: Echoes of the Past, The Guild Master’s Plea
"BURN THEM DOWN!"
The riot ignited.
It was an absolute, breathtaking tidal wave of human and NPC vengeance. Millions of unarmed, naked prisoners suddenly became a heavily armed, psychotic mob. They didn’t care about strategy. They didn’t care about taking damage. They had literally been tortured for eternity; a hit from a magma axe meant absolutely nothing to them anymore.
They swarmed the Tartarus Daemons like a colony of rabid fire ants attacking a beetle.
CLANG! SMASH!
A Level 85 Daemon swung its massive executioner’s axe, cutting down twenty players in a single swipe. But before the Daemon could recover its stance, three hundred more players leaped onto its back. They jammed iron swords into the monster’s glowing yellow eyes. They fired kinetic rifles point-blank into its molten joints.
The Daemon roared, thrashing wildly, but the sheer, crushing weight of bodies dragged it down to the ground. In seconds, the towering brute was literally hacked into a puddle of cooling, lifeless slag by a thousand desperate hands.
[System Alert: Sub-Routine Guard Destroyed.]
"Well, look at that," Sebastian smirked behind his cracked porcelain mask, watching the absolute chaos unfold. "Teamwork makes the dream work."
He squeezed Valerie’s hand.
"The distraction is set," Sebastian said, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the massive, pulsing black glass mountain in the far distance. "Let’s go smash the router."
—-
Navigating through the absolute chaos of the Tartarus prison riot was like trying to take a casual stroll through an active meat grinder.
The blood-red sky above churned with angry, swirling clouds of data as the Core OS frantically tried to process the sheer volume of unauthorized combat happening on its floor. The air was a suffocating mix of vaporized magma, burnt ozone, and the coppery tang of digital blood.
Everywhere Sebastian looked, the damned were taking their pound of flesh.
CLANG! BOOM!
To his left, a horde of furious, half-flayed Elves were using a barrage of generated kinetic rifles to systematically blow the legs off a roaring Tartarus Daemon. To his right, a group of human warriors were beating a downed magma-brute into dust with heavy iron maces, entirely ignoring the third-degree burns they were taking from the creature’s superheated body.
Sebastian didn’t intervene. He didn’t swing his massive Earth Sword, and he didn’t drop a [Gravity Domain] to help them. He just kept walking, keeping Valerie tucked safely under the umbrella of his dark, static-filled Sovereign aura.
"They really have a lot of pent-up anger," Valerie noted, wincing as a severed, molten Daemon arm flew through the air and crashed into a rusted iron spire nearby.
"When you spend a thousand years getting skinned alive for server juice, you tend to hold a grudge," Sebastian replied dryly, stepping over a puddle of cooling black slag.
His eyes were fixed perfectly on the horizon. Looming over the chaotic battlefield was the central hub of Tartarus—a colossal mountain made entirely of jagged, black glass. It pulsed with an intense, concentrated aura of raw, dark purple data, absorbing the energy of the dimension. That was the main breaker box. If he shattered that mountain, the Architects would lose their primary power supply.
As they pushed deeper into the fray, a sudden, violent explosion of magma erupted just twenty feet in front of them.
FWOOSH!
A Level 85 Tartarus Daemon, heavily wounded and leaking bright orange lava from a dozen sword wounds, blindly swung its massive executioner’s axe in a wide, desperate arc.
The heavy iron blade caught a small group of rioting players, sending them flying through the air like discarded ragdolls. One of the players hit the ground hard, tumbling and skidding across the hot red stone until he crashed directly into Sebastian’s heavy combat boots.
THUD.
Sebastian stopped. He looked down at the battered, groaning player at his feet.
The man was a complete mess. He was missing his left arm from the elbow down, the stump a mess of pixelated red gore. His chest was covered in deep, weeping lacerations from the skinning algorithms. He was clutching a generated iron broadsword in his remaining hand so tightly his knuckles were white.
The player slowly pushed himself up onto his knees, coughing up a mouthful of digital blood. He raised his head, his terrified, bloodshot eyes locking onto the towering, eight-foot-tall Glitch standing over him.
Sebastian tilted his head, his silver-tinged void eyes analyzing the man’s face. Despite the grime, the scars, and the missing arm, the facial rendering was incredibly familiar.
A tiny system prompt flickered above the kneeling man’s head.
[Entity: Viper] [Class: Rogue / Former Guild Master] [Status: Corrupted Prisoner]
Sebastian let out a short, incredibly cynical bark of laughter. The sheer, absurd irony of the Ethereal Plane’s matchmaking algorithms never ceased to amaze him.
It was Viper. The Guild Master of the ’Crimson Skull’. The arrogant, bullying prick who had blocked the bridge back in Novice Village 109, demanding protection money from low-level players on the very first day of the apocalypse. The guy Sebastian had casually one-shot with a rusty dagger to the back of the neck.
"Well, well, well," Sebastian murmured, his voice a distorted, metallic hum that carried a thick layer of dark amusement. "If it isn’t the terror of the starter zone. You look like shit, Viper. Have you been dieting?"
Viper froze. The terrified rogue stared at the cracked porcelain mask, the shifting black static, and the weeping red runes. He didn’t recognize the monster in front of him.
"Who... who are you?" Viper gasped, scrambling backward on the hot stone, his iron sword shaking wildly in his single hand. "Are you an Admin? Please! I’ve been fighting the Daemons! I’m doing what you said!"
Sebastian casually reached up and tapped the side of his mask. He dialed back the aggressive, overlapping distortion in his audio output, letting his normal, slightly raspy human voice bleed through.
"I’m deeply offended you don’t remember me, Viper," Sebastian sighed. "We had such a lovely interaction on the bridge. You made fun of my starter gear, and I severed your spinal cord with a rusty knife. Good times."
Viper’s jaw literally dropped. The bloodshot eyes bulged so far out of his skull they looked like they might pop.
"The... the Drifter?" Viper choked out, absolute, unadulterated shock breaking through his pain. "You’re the Drifter?! You’re the Anomaly the whole server was whispering about before the system dumped me in here?!"
"I prefer Sovereign of Laws, but yeah, Drifter works," Sebastian said casually.
Viper dropped his iron sword. It clattered loudly against the stone. The former Guild Master scrambled forward, ignoring his missing arm, and practically threw himself at Sebastian’s boots. He didn’t try to attack. He grabbed the hem of Sebastian’s black leather coat, weeping openly.
"Please!" Viper sobbed, tears cutting tracks through the soot on his face. "Please, Drifter! You have to get me out of here! I’ve been in this hell for months! The pain... it never stops! I’m sorry I tried to rob you! I’m sorry for everything! I’ll give you all my gold! I’ll be your slave! Just open a portal! Just let me log out!"
Valerie stood quietly next to Sebastian. She looked down at the weeping, broken man. In the old world, the corporate heiress might have felt a pang of pity. But she had seen exactly what Viper and his guild had done to innocent players in the early days of the merge. She didn’t say a word. She just squeezed Sebastian’s hand, trusting his judgment.
Sebastian looked down at the groveling bully.
He didn’t feel a surge of vindictive pleasure. He didn’t feel the need to kick the man while he was down. The game had already broken Viper far more thoroughly than Sebastian ever could have. The arrogant Guild Master had been reduced to a pathetic, sniveling mess begging for scraps.
"I’m not a taxi service, Viper," Sebastian said flatly, his voice devoid of anger or empathy. It was just business. "I don’t hold grudges against dead men, but I’m not opening a personal portal for you. If I drop my firewall to cast a transit spell right now, the Core OS will instantly zero in on my coordinates and un-render my girlfriend."
"No! Please! I’ll do anything!" Viper wailed, clawing desperately at Sebastian’s boots. "You can’t leave me here!"
"I’m not leaving you anywhere," Sebastian corrected, gently but firmly pulling his boot out of the rogue’s grip.
He pointed a black-gloved finger past Viper’s head, aiming directly toward the massive, pulsing black glass mountain in the distance.
"I’m walking over to that giant, ugly glass router, and I’m going to smash it into a billion pieces," Sebastian explained, his tone completely matter-of-fact. "When I break the mainframe, this entire prison dimension is going to catastrophically fail. The doors will unlock. The servers will crash. Everyone gets out."
Sebastian looked back down into Viper’s terrified, tear-streaked face.
"So pick up your sword, Viper," Sebastian ordered coldly. "I’m breaking the prison. Your job is to try not to die in the next ten minutes before I pull the plug."
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