Chapter 119: [119] : Unilateral Erasure, Sector 9 Deleted
The central plaza of Sector 9 was dead silent.
Thirty thousand elite players stood frozen in their tracks. The neon pink and green lights from their high tier corporate armor flickered weakly in the toxic rain.
They just stared at the massive crater in the middle of the street. They stared at the tiny cubes of compressed meat and metal that used to be their friends, their guildmates, and their absolute best frontline tanks.
Ten thousand players. Wiped out in exactly two seconds.
There was no epic battle. There was no trading of blows or careful strategy. It was an industrial extermination.
"He... he just deleted the vanguard." A mage whispered from a fire escape. Her staff clattered against the metal grating. "He didn’t even swing the weapon. He just stood there!"
Down on the street, the morale of the Neon Syndicate completely shattered.
These were not brave soldiers defending their homeland. They were corporate gamers who bullied low level players for fun. They were used to overwhelming their targets with superior gear and massive numbers.
But their numbers meant absolutely nothing to a walking glitch.
"Run!" A player in the backline screamed, dropping his plasma rifle onto the wet concrete. "I quit! Force disconnect!"
He frantically swiped at his system interface, desperately jabbing his finger at the logout button.
A glaring red warning box popped up in his face.
[System Alert]
↳ Action Denied.
↳ Sector Annihilation Protocol is currently active.
↳ All exits are locked.
↳ Disconnect features are disabled until a victor is determined.
"I am trapped!" The player shrieked, falling to his knees. "We can’t leave! The Warlord locked the zone!"
Panic spread like a wildfire. Thousands of players started backing away, bumping into each other, entirely forgetting their military formations.
Some tried to use teleportation scrolls, but the items just burned up into useless gray ash. The server mandated deathmatch overrode all escape mechanics.
They were locked in a cage with a monster.
Declan watched them panic from the edge of the crater. He looked entirely bored.
He rested the massive dark matter halberd on his shoulder. He looked at his one hundred pitch black shadow clones standing perfectly still around him.
"Stand down, Legion." Declan commanded softly.
He didn’t need the clones for this next part. He now wanted to finish this quickly. He had a city to run back in Sector 7, and standing in the rain dealing with thirty thousand crying gamers was a waste of his time.
The clones could have helped him though.
He willed the +40 Eclipse Severance back into his digital inventory. The massive weapon vanished into a swirl of blue pixels.
Declan raised his right hand.
"System." Declan thought. "Equip the Orbital Ion Reflector."
The air in front of him distorted violently. It didn’t just warp, it groaned under the sheer absurdity of what he was pulling out of his digital storage.
A massive twenty foot long barrel made of glowing blue glass and dark steel materialized in his grip. It was incredibly bulky, covered in heavy magnetic rails and cooling vents that hissed loudly in the damp air.
It was the Sovereign tier corporate asset he had stolen from Kato just a few minutes ago. It was a siege weapon designed to be mounted on a heavy tank or a reinforced bunker.
Declan just held it with his bare hands.
His Ascendant tier Abyssal Sovereign stats made the multi ton weapon feel like a plastic toy.
The Neon Syndicate players stared at the massive gun.
"Is that... is that the Guild Master’s Reflector?" An officer gasped, his eyes wide behind his visor. "He looted Kato’s weapon! How is he holding that?! That requires a vehicle mount!"
Declan didn’t care about their confusion. He tapped into his massive mana pool. He had over fifteen thousand raw mana points sitting in his system, fueled by his absurd Level 70 stats.
He channeled his mana directly into the heavy weapon.
The blue glass barrel lit up like a supernova. Bright blue electricity crackled aggressively along the magnetic rails. The air around the cannon instantly grew boiling hot, turning the falling raindrops into hissing steam.
"He is charging it!" Someone screamed. "Get behind cover! Hide behind the buildings!"
The thirty thousand players scrambled like cockroaches. They dove behind rusted cars, concrete pillars, and into the lobbies of the towering skyscrapers. They thought solid walls would save them.
Declan just smiled. He tapped into his 90 base Agility and the +20 stats from his Mythic ring.
He didn’t use a spell to fly. He just pushed off the ground with a massive burst of physical force.
His boots cracked the concrete, and he launched himself two hundred feet straight up into the air. He floated there, perfectly suspended in the dark and rainy sky above the plaza.
He looked down at the sprawling cyberpunk city and the thousands of players trying to hide like rats in a maze.
Declan raised the massive blue cannon and pointed it straight down.
"Let’s see what this button does." Declan muttered.
He pulled the heavy trigger.
There was no loud explosion. There was no fiery blast.
A pillar of pure and blinding white light shot out from the massive barrel. It was easily fifty feet wide. It wasn’t a laser. It wasn’t plasma. It was pure server deletion code.
The white beam slammed into the center of the plaza.
It didn’t cause a crater. It just instantly vaporized whatever it touched.
The sleek black concrete ceased to exist. The abandoned cars melted into digital dust. And the players caught in the initial blast radius didn’t even get to scream. Their avatars were completely scrubbed from the server registry in a fraction of a millisecond.
But Declan didn’t just fire a single shot.
Thanks to his Boundless Enhancement talent, he had completely removed the weapon cooldowns and thermal limits. He just held the trigger down!
A continuous screen tearing beam of localized deletion poured out of the cannon.
Declan slowly swept the twenty foot barrel to the right.
The massive white beam dragged across Sector 9.
It hit a towering sixty story glass skyscraper where hundreds of snipers were hiding. The deletion code ignored the reinforced glass and the steel beams. The entire middle section of the building was instantly erased.
The top half of the skyscraper groaned, tilted, and then violently collapsed into the street below, crushing anyone who had survived the beam.
"Keep moving." Declan whispered, his eyes glowing with purple Abyssal energy.
He swept the beam across the commercial district.
It was absolute unilateral erasure.
Whole blocks of the city simply vanished. The neon lit alleyways, the corporate banks, the massive guild halls, they were all wiped clean, leaving behind only perfectly smooth and bottomless trenches of empty void space.
The players didn’t stand a chance.
High tier energy shields shattered instantly. Physical armor was useless. The moment the white light touched them, their health bars didn’t drain, they just disappeared.
Millions of bright blue digital pixels flooded the sky, looking like a massive glowing snowstorm rising from the ruins.
"Stop! Please!" A voice cried out from the comms, but the sound was quickly cut off as a street full of hiding players was vaporized into nothingness.
Declan dragged the beam in a wide and devastating circle. He painted the city with deletion code.
The system struggled to render the massive scale of the destruction. The edges of Declan’s vision glitched wildly with jagged lines of gray static. The audio engine completely failed, leaving the entire sector in a terrifying and ringing silence.
In less than thirty seconds, the massive cyberpunk metropolis of Sector 9 was gone.
Declan released the trigger.
The blinding white beam cut off.
He floated in the air and looked down.
There were no skyscrapers left. There were no neon signs. There were no streets.
The entire sector had been reduced to a perfectly flat and smoking wasteland of gray ash and blue pixel dust.
All forty thousand members of the Neon Syndicate had been permanently deleted from the database.
Now everyone would know not to mess with his people.
A massive golden system chime rang out in Declan’s head, breaking the silence.
[System Notification]
↳ Sector Annihilation Protocol Concluded.
↳ Victor: Player V. Sector 7 Iron Bastion.
↳ Target Faction: Neon Syndicate. Permanently Erased.
Declan smirked. He rested the smoking barrel of the heavy cannon on his shoulder.
"Well." Declan said to the empty and ruined sky. "That was efficient."
