Chapter 170: [170] : The Acoustic Anomaly, Feedback Beasts
The transition out of the Void Blink was totally instant.
Declan’s heavy Spiked Striders hit solid ground with a loud metallic clang. The Kinetic Dampener trait absorbed the physical drop, leaving him standing perfectly straight.
Nova stumbled hard next to him. She gripped her stomach as the cross-map teleportation aggressively tested her digital stomach. The game engine did not like moving players across the map without a loading screen.
"I really hate your fast travel," Nova groaned. She leaned heavily against a cold metal wall to catch her breath.
"You will live," Declan said casually. He let go of her collar and looked around.
They were not outside. They hadn’t materialized in a ruined street or a toxic bubbling swamp.
They were standing in a massive perfectly clean metallic hallway. The walls were made of smooth brushed silver. Bright harsh fluorescent lights hummed loudly overhead casting a stark white glow over everything. Thick bundles of black fiber-optic cables ran along the ceiling like thick mechanical vines.
It looked exactly like the backstage maintenance area of a massive real-world data center.
"We are inside the Hub," Nova whispered. She stood up straight and pulled out her sleek silver staff. The weapon glowed with a faint blue magic. "The teleport actually bypassed the outer bunker completely. We skipped the front door."
"Of course it did," Declan said adjusting his coat. "My ring ignores spatial geometry. It doesn’t care about doors."
He started walking down the silver hallway. His pitch-black Predator’s Coat dragged slightly against the pristine floor.
The air in here was incredibly cold. It smelled heavily like sterile ozone and burnt copper wire.
Declan checked his system interface. There were no warning boxes popping up in his vision. There were no environmental debuffs draining his health. The area felt completely stable.
But it was way too quiet.
"Keep your guard up," Nova warned. She walked closely behind him, her icy blue eyes darting to the dark corners of the corridor. "If the Abyssal monsters breached the outer doors, they are in here somewhere. And they are not low-level trash mobs. They will be endgame anomalies."
Declan didn’t pull out a weapon. He just shoved his hands deep into his pockets.
"Let them come," Declan said, his voice echoing slightly in the empty hall. "I need the target practice anyway."
They reached the end of the hallway. The narrow corridor opened up into a sprawling cavernous room.
This was the Audio-Visual Hub.
The room was easily the size of a commercial aircraft hangar. Massive towering server racks formed a literal maze of black metal and blinking green lights. The servers stretched up into the darkness of the high ceiling.
But the most prominent feature of the room was the sheer amount of speakers.
Giant industrial-sized audio drivers were built directly into the walls and the ceiling. They looked like massive black cones humming with a low latent energy that physically made the floor vibrate beneath their boots.
"This is it," Nova said. She pulled up a holographic map on her wrist, checking their location. "The main control terminal is in the exact center of this maze. We just need to walk through here and..."
SCREECH!
A horrific high-pitched sound violently interrupted her.
It didn’t sound like a monster roaring. It didn’t sound like a beast growling. It sounded exactly like a live microphone getting pushed directly into a massive amplifier. It was pure unadulterated system feedback!
Nova cried out in pain. She dropped her glowing staff and clamped both hands over her ears falling to her knees.
Declan winced hard. His sixty percent real-world synchronization rate meant his physical hearing was incredibly sensitive. The noise felt like a physical needle jabbing directly into his brain stem.
Four massive heavy shapes dropped from the ceiling of the server maze.
They landed on the silver floor with heavy booming thuds that shook the room.
Declan looked at them through the glaring lights. They didn’t look like the Flesh Stalkers or the Abyssal Knights he had fought back at the city gates. They looked like walking pieces of audio equipment.
They were large ape-like beasts made entirely of thick braided black speaker wire. Their massive chests were completely hollow housing rapidly vibrating bass cones instead of organs. Instead of eyes, they had glowing green equalizer bars on their faces that bounced up and down with every movement they made.
A system prompt appeared over the pack leader.
[Target Information]
↳ Name: Feedback Beast
↳ Level: 100
↳ HP: 2,500,000 / 2,500,000
Declan’s dark eyes narrowed. "Level 100 mobs. They really don’t want us in here."
"Declan!" Nova shouted over the painful ringing in her ears. "They are entirely made of acoustic code! Don’t let them scream! It deals internal damage!"
The four Feedback Beasts beat their wire-wrapped chests like angry gorillas. The bass cones inside their bodies vibrated violently preparing to unleash another wave of sonic destruction.
Declan didn’t wait for them to attack. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket.
The space around his fingers distorted and warped. The +40 Eclipse Severance halberd materialized directly into his grip with a heavy metallic clank. The razor-thin blade, made of the night sky, hummed with chaotic static. It was eager to delete something.
He didn’t use Void Blink. He just relied on his absurd 90 base Agility.
He blurred forward, crossing the fifty feet of empty space between him and the monsters in a fraction of a second. He raised the heavy dark matter shaft aiming a wide horizontal slash right at the lead beast’s thick wire neck.
The Spacetime Laceration trait didn’t care about two and a half million hit points. It didn’t care about armor. It just needed to touch the physical code to erase it entirely.
But before the dark blade could connect, the room itself rebelled.
BWAAAAAAAA!
A sudden deafening electronic frequency blasted out from the massive speakers built into the walls of the cavernous room!
It wasn’t a normal sound. It was a targeted server-mandated physical suppression wave.
The sound wave hit Declan like a solid wall of rapidly moving concrete.
It didn’t deal physical damage. It didn’t drain his massive health bar. It did something much, much worse.
Declan’s high-speed charge was instantly halted. He froze perfectly still in mid-swing. The massive halberd was locked exactly two inches away from the Feedback Beast’s neck.
He tried to push forward. He tried to force his Abyssal Leviathan muscles to move and finish the swing.
Nothing happened.
The system threw up a massive glaring red warning box directly in his face.
[Warning: Acoustic Anomaly Detected.]
[Status: Absolute Paralysis.]
[Your physical movement stats have been reduced to zero.]
Declan gritted his teeth. The sound was so incredibly loud it was actively vibrating his teeth. The game engine wasn’t fighting his Sovereign-tier defense stat. It was just turning off his ability to move his physical coordinate data!
"Well," Declan muttered, completely frozen in place in the middle of the room. "That is highly annoying."
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