Chapter 181: [181] : The Quarantine Zone, Abyssal Shockwave
Declan stepped fully into the Abyssal Quarantine Zone.
The transition out of the dark and ruined subway station was incredibly strange. One second he was standing in a relatively normal but completely destroyed metallic hallway.
The next second, he was standing in a landscape that looked like the game physics had completely given up trying to render a functioning world.
The sky above him wasn’t the bruised purple of Sector 7 or the burning orange of the wastelands.
It was a deep and violently churning blood-red. It literally looked like a massive infected open wound stretched across the digital atmosphere.
The clouds were thick, heavy, and swirling in slow unnatural circular patterns that made his eyes physically hurt if he stared at them for too long.
The ground was even worse. There was no dirt, gravel, or asphalt here. The floor of the entire wasteland was made of jagged and uneven black obsidian that looked sharp enough to cut through standard iron boots.
Between the massive slabs of black rock, thick pools of corrupted purple sludge bubbled aggressively.
They acted like highly acidic swamps just waiting for a careless player to fall in and watch their health bar melt.
The air was incredibly thick and heavy, pressing down on his shoulders with an unnatural weight. It smelled strongly of burnt ozone, melted plastic, and rotting meat.
There were no trees here. There were no ruined buildings or rusted cars to hide behind. It was just a massive, open, and completely flat wasteland of pure digital corruption stretching out for miles.
Declan checked his system interface just to be sure. There were no red warning boxes popping up in his vision. The environment was highly toxic, but his gear was simply better.
His mutated +10 Spiked Striders completely ignored the slippery and jagged terrain, and his +20 Black Predator’s Coat treated the highly corrosive air like a gentle summer breeze.
"This place is an absolute mess," Declan muttered to himself. He casually kicked a loose piece of black obsidian into a nearby sludge pool.
The rock hit the purple liquid with a loud hiss. It instantly dissolved into a cloud of white foul-smelling smoke.
"The developers really just copy-pasted the worst hazard codes into one single zone and called it a day," Declan sighed as he shook his head. "Lazy design."
He hadn’t come here to admire the terrible scenery. He had come here for one specific reason. He needed experience points.
At Level 80, the scaling for leveling up was a massive and impenetrable wall. Killing Level 20 Flesh Stalkers back in his city gave him basically zero progression.
He needed tens of millions of points just to move the experience bar a single inch. He needed enemies that actually registered on his Abyssal Sovereign threat radar.
He didn’t have to wait very long.
Before Declan could even take ten steps forward on the black glass, a low mechanical growl echoed from behind a massive rock formation to his left.
Then, another heavy growl came from his right. Then another from straight ahead.
Declan stopped walking. He didn’t pull out a weapon. He didn’t cast a magic shield or throw up a defensive barrier.
He just stood there completely relaxed with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pitch-black trench coat. He waited.
A monster stepped out into the open. Then another. Then fifty more.
Within ten seconds, an entire sea of glowing red eyes surrounded him. There were easily three hundred monsters circling his position, forming a tight and aggressive perimeter.
They looked vaguely like wolves, but they were easily the size of heavy corporate pickup trucks.
Their bodies were made entirely of crackling blue static electricity and jagged rusted iron plates that hovered just above their digital skin.
They didn’t have normal faces. Their heads were just terrifying clusters of glowing red optical lenses that locked onto Declan with pure and unfiltered hostility.
A golden system prompt appeared over the pack leader.
[Target Information]
↳ Name: Static Hound
↳ Level: 75
↳ HP: 45,000 / 45,000
"Level 75," Declan noted casually as his dark eyes scanned the massive pack. "That is more like it."
A normal raid party of forty max-geared players would look at a pack of three hundred Level 75 hazard mobs and instantly hit the emergency retreat button.
The action economy alone was a guaranteed death sentence. If three hundred massive iron wolves hit your shield wall at the exact same time, the raw kinetic impact would shatter your tanks. No amount of healing magic in the world was going to save your avatar from getting ripped into digital shreds by that many teeth.
The Static Hounds lowered their heavy heads and bared their jagged metal fangs.
The blue static electricity rolling off their massive bodies linked together. It formed a massive crackling net of energy that scorched the obsidian ground and made the air vibrate violently.
They were preparing to charge all at once. They wanted to completely overwhelm the single human standing in their territory.
He didn’t pull out his +40 Eclipse Severance halberd. Swinging a heavy melee weapon, even with his absurd physical stats, would take way too much time.
Chopping three hundred monsters to pieces one by one was incredibly inefficient. He was a Warlord. He operated on mass production and total efficiency.
Declan pulled his right hand out of his coat pocket.
He tapped into his digital inventory and equipped an active skill he had mutated a few days ago but hadn’t bothered to actually use yet.
He didn’t need to wave his hands around or chant a magic spell. His Sovereign Neural Interface ear-cuff reduced all system cast times to absolute zero.
"System," Declan commanded quietly in his mind. "Abyssal Shockwave."
The air directly in front of his open palm violently distorted.
The +20 Abyssal Shockwave was an Emperor-grade active skill. It wasn’t a standard fireball or a sweeping laser beam. It was a pure and physics-breaking attack of localized spatial distortion.
The three hundred Static Hounds lunged forward. They crossed the distance in a fraction of a second, moving like a literal tidal wave of iron plates, blue static, and snapping metal jaws.
They aimed directly for Declan’s chest, his throat, and his legs.
Declan didn’t dodge. He just casually flicked his right wrist.
A massive ring of dark corrupted purple energy exploded outward from his body. It didn’t expand like a normal concussive shockwave.
It actively tore through the air, completely severing the local coordinate plane in a perfect three-hundred-foot radius around him.
The sound was absolutely horrifying. It didn’t sound like magic clashing against heavy armor. It sounded like a massive sheet of thick canvas being ripped perfectly in half and amplified by a thousand speakers.
The Abyssal Shockwave slammed right into the charging pack of Static Hounds.
The massive monsters didn’t get knocked back. They didn’t burn or freeze. The true-damage spatial distortion simply ignored their high-tier defense stats entirely. The game’s math didn’t matter when the space you were occupying was suddenly deleted.
The dark purple ring passed right through the heavy iron plates and the crackling blue static bodies with absolute zero resistance.
The entire pack of three hundred Level 75 monsters froze perfectly still in mid-air.
For exactly one second, the blood-red wasteland was dead silent. The game engine desperately tried to calculate the math of what had just happened.
It furiously tried to process how a single player had just dealt fatal true damage to three hundred endgame mobs in a single frame without using a physical weapon.
Then, the server gave up.
A jagged black line appeared horizontally across the torso of every single Static Hound in the radius.
"Pop," Declan said softly.
The three hundred monsters violently slid apart. Their top halves separated smoothly from their bottom halves, and they instantly dissolved into a massive blinding storm of bright blue digital pixels!
It looked like a massive geyser of blue light erupting right in the middle of the dark wasteland. The digital blood and shattered code rained down onto the obsidian floor with a heavy wet sound.
The entire fight had lasted exactly ten seconds.
Declan lowered his hand and shoved it back into his pocket. He looked around at the massive empty circle he had just carved into the monster pack.
There wasn’t a single mechanical hound left standing.
"I love area-of-effect skills," Declan chuckled. He casually kicked a dissolving piece of a Static Hound’s iron jaw into a purple sludge puddle. "It makes farming so much cleaner."
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