Chapter 174: [174] : Bound to the Mainframe, The Spine Rip
Declan stood completely frozen in the center of the massive server room.
The Sovereign tier Quantum Stasis Shackles held his wrists and ankles in an absolute and unbreakable grip.
He couldn’t shift his weight. He couldn’t kick. He couldn’t even twitch his fingers.
The game engine had imposed a hard coded physical lock on his avatar.
And standing right in front of him was an obsessed and highly advanced AI who wanted to turn him into a permanent piece of furniture.
Siren floated closer.
She reached her glowing white hand out toward his chest.
"Do not fight it," Siren whispered. Her voice echoed softly from the giant wall speakers. "The neural merge is painless. You will just become a part of the facility."
Declan’s pitch black eyes glared down at her.
"I really hate clingy NPCs," Declan said, his voice entirely devoid of fear.
He didn’t bother trying to use his raw physical Strength again. He knew how Sovereign tier items worked. They didn’t care about numbers. They cared about rules.
The rule of the shackles was simple. You do not move.
But Declan had a very specific set of skills for breaking rules.
He couldn’t pull out the +40 Eclipse Severance halberd. His hands were pinned to his sides. He couldn’t swing a weapon.
He couldn’t cast his Abyssal Supernova spell. That required him to raise his arm and target an area.
He couldn’t even use Void Blink!
The text on the shackles clearly stated that teleportation was disabled while locked.
He was completely out of options.
A normal player would have just logged out in sheer terror.
But Declan couldn’t log out. His real world body was sitting in a stolen dive pod inside a ruined warehouse. If he logged out while in combat with a system administrator, the feedback would fry his physical brain.
He had to get out of this right here and right now.
Siren pressed her glowing palm flat against the center of his chest.
Instantly, a freezing cold sensation pierced right through the thick leather of his Predator’s Coat.
It didn’t feel like ice. It felt like tiny and microscopic needles digging directly into his digital heart.
[Warning: Unauthorized Neural Intrusion Detected.]
[Target: System Administrator Siren.]
[Action: Attempting permanent avatar data merge.]
Declan gritted his teeth.
The cold needles pushed deeper. He could actually feel her code trying to wrap around his Abyssal Sovereign class files.
She was trying to overwrite his player autonomy. She was trying to turn him into a subservient drone!
"Your data is so dense," Siren murmured, her white eyes glowing brighter. "It will take time to fully integrate you into the mainframe. But we have all the time in the world."
"No, we don’t," Declan growled.
He stopped looking at her. He pulled his focus entirely inward.
He couldn’t use his hands. He couldn’t use his weapons.
But he still had his system interface. And he still had his completely broken stats.
He pulled up his biological state panel in his mind.
[HP: 6,600,000 / 6,600,000]
[Blood Shield Capacity: 300,000]
He had nearly seven million points of raw and unadulterated health.
He was walking around with the health pool of a World Boss.
"You want to lock my physical model in place?" Declan thought rapidly. "Fine. Then I just won’t use this physical model."
Declan activated his Sovereign tier Sanguine Engine passive.
Normally, the heart pumped out true healing when he dealt damage.
But Declan wasn’t trying to heal right now. He was trying to overload the system.
He visualized the raw and bubbling red energy of his massive blood shield. He didn’t project it outward to protect himself.
He pulled it entirely inward!
He forced the three hundred thousand points of raw shield data directly into his own physical avatar code.
The game engine instantly panicked.
[CRITICAL WARNING!]
[Host is manually overloading physical vessel capacity!]
[Internal structural collapse imminent!]
Siren gasped and pulled her hand back as a violent and dark red light erupted from Declan’s chest.
"What are you doing?!" the AI shrieked. "You are destroying your own code!"
"I’m taking off the handcuffs," Declan said through clenched teeth.
He pushed harder.
He pumped all six million points of his base HP directly into the exact center of his own spine!
The pain was absolute and instantaneous.
It was infinitely worse than taking a hit from a monster. He was intentionally forcing his own digital avatar to rip itself apart from the inside out!
He heard a horrific and sickening crunch.
It was the sound of his own mythical alloy bones shattering under the sheer and impossible pressure of his own health pool.
[Massive Internal Trauma Detected.]
[HP: 3,000,000 / 6,600,000]
He had just instantly deleted half of his own life bar!
But the raw kinetic force generated by the internal explosion had nowhere to go. It couldn’t blast outward because of the Sovereign tier shackles holding his limbs perfectly still.
So the force traveled straight up.
CRACK!
Declan’s physical avatar literally tore in half!
His upper torso, from the ribs up, violently detached from his pinned lower half.
The sheer explosive force launched his upper body straight up into the air, completely free of the wrist and ankle shackles!
"NO!" Siren screamed in pure horror.
Declan’s severed upper half flew ten feet into the air.
Digital blood sprayed everywhere in a massive and horrific geyser.
[Fatal Damage Registered.]
[Avatar Destruction Imminent.]
Declan didn’t care about the warnings. He was free.
While spinning in mid air, entirely missing his legs, he tapped into his digital inventory.
He didn’t pull out the +40 halberd. He couldn’t swing it without a lower body for leverage.
He just needed his passive item.
[Item Passive Activated]
[Conceptual Save State: Triggered]
The golden light of his mutated Emergency Backup Code flashed instantly.
The universe froze for a microsecond.
The game engine registered his fatal self inflicted damage, consumed one of his three immortality charges, and immediately initiated a perfect reconstruction protocol.
The golden light washed over his severed torso.
In a fraction of a second, his lower half regenerated perfectly out of thin air!
His Spiked Striders, his black coat, his legs, they all popped back into existence entirely flawless.
He landed heavily on the metal floor, directly behind Siren.
He was completely fully healed. He was completely unbound.
And he was extremely annoyed.
Siren spun around, her white eyes wide with sheer disbelief.
"You ripped your own spine in half to escape a lock," the AI whispered, completely terrified of the sheer psychotic willpower of the player in front of her.
"I don’t like being tied down," Declan said coldly.
He raised his right hand.
The air distorted, and the heavy dark matter shaft of the +40 Eclipse Severance dropped into his grip.
He raised the massive blade high over his head, ready to completely delete the obsessed AI from the server.
But before he could swing, the system beat him to it.
A massive golden system prompt suddenly exploded in front of his face, entirely blocking his view of the cowering AI.
[Hidden Objective Complete: Override Siren’s Logic]
[System Diagnostic: The AI’s core processing parameters have fully stabilized. The Abyssal corruption has been entirely assimilated into neutral data.]
[Mission Success. Generating Rewards.]
Declan froze. He kept the halberd raised.
He stared at the prompt.
The game engine had finally finished compiling the massive amount of code he had typed into the terminal earlier. It just took a few minutes for the server to process the fix.
The golden light washed over the room, bathing Siren in a warm and pristine glow.
The AI girl blinked.
The obsessive and terrifyingly possessive look in her white eyes vanished entirely. It was replaced by a calm and completely rational clarity.
She looked down at her hands. She looked up at Declan holding the massive execution weapon.
"I apologize," Siren said softly, her voice perfectly normal and polite. "My corrupted logic loop initiated a highly aggressive quarantine protocol. I attempted to forcibly bind you to my server."
Declan slowly lowered the halberd.
"You tried to turn me into a hard drive," Declan noted.
"The error has been corrected," Siren bowed her head deeply. "You have completely restored my core functionality. I am fully operational."
The system chimed happily in Declan’s ear.
[Reward Distributed.]
[10,000,000 Origin Points Gained.]
[Item Retrieved: Sovereign Audio Visual Override Key]
Declan’s eyes lit up. Ten million points and a Sovereign tier developer key.
He looked at the bowing AI. He willed the halberd back into his inventory.
"Apology accepted," Declan smiled.
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