Chapter 183: [183] : Tearing the Code, The Scythe of Darkness
Declan walked deeper into the Abyssal Quarantine Zone.
The further he went, the more broken the environment became. The game engine was completely failing to maintain the reality of the sector under the crushing weight of the Abyssal corruption.
It actually looked like an early access video game that had been released entirely too early.
The ground wasn’t just jagged obsidian anymore. Massive and heavy chunks of the earth literally floated in the air, defying gravity completely.
Rivers of toxic purple sludge flowed upward instead of downward, dripping into the blood-red sky like reversed waterfalls. Dead and petrified trees grew upside down from the bottoms of the floating rocks. Their dry branches aggressively scraped against the empty air.
It was a chaotic and sickening mess of fractured code and raw digital corruption. It looked like a glitching nightmare.
Declan strolled through it casually. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his black Predator’s Coat.
His +10 Spiked Striders clicked sharply against the floating rocks as he effortlessly hopped from one platform to another.
Normal players would have to carefully map out a jumping route here. They would have to throw basic stones to test the weird gravity pockets or use expensive levitation scrolls just to cross a ten-foot gap.
Declan just used his absurd Agility stats to completely ignore the massive and bottomless drops below him. He cleared fifty-foot gaps with a lazy and casual hop.
’Normal players would definitely die here.’ Declan thought, not bothering to use stealth. He wasn’t trying to hide his presence at all.
In fact, he wanted them to find him.
About two miles into the deepest part of the wasteland, the floating rocks finally opened up into a massive and flat plain of cracked gray concrete. It looked like an old military airstrip that had been dragged directly into hell.
And it was completely occupied.
Standing in perfect and rigid military formation across the cracked airstrip was an army.
Declan stopped on the edge of a floating rock and looked down at them. He let out a low whistle of appreciation.
There were exactly one thousand monsters down there.
But they didn’t look like the wild beasts or feral demons he had been fighting earlier. They looked like heavily militarized corporate soldiers that had been horribly mutated by a highly aggressive computer virus.
They wore thick and dark gray tactical armor, but the metal was fused directly into their pale and rotting skin. Their faces were hidden behind shattered black visors that leaked glowing green code like tears.
Their arms ended in heavy and integrated plasma rifles that buzzed with unstable and erratic energy. Wires and cables snaked in and out of their physical flesh, connecting their weapons directly to their corrupted spinal cords.
A golden system prompt hovered faintly above the massive battalion.
[Target Information]
↳ Name: Corrupted Trooper
↳ Level: 75
↳ HP: 80,000 / 80,000
They were an entire battalion of elite ranged units.
"One thousand mobs," Declan muttered to himself. "Eighty million total hit points sitting right there. That is a lot of target practice."
The exact moment Declan stepped fully into view on the edge of the floating rock, the entire army reacted simultaneously. The game’s AI was simple but incredibly efficient.
One thousand Corrupted Troopers snapped their heavy plasma rifles up and aimed directly at the Warlord in the black coat.
They didn’t shout a battle cry. They didn’t roar to intimidate him. They didn’t even break their perfect military formation.
They just pulled their triggers in perfect and terrifying synchronization.
A literal wall of super-heated green plasma erupted from the army.
It lit up the dark and corrupted wasteland like a second sun. One thousand high-caliber energy rounds screamed through the air, completely covering every single inch of space around Declan.
The sheer heat radiating off the plasma barrage instantly evaporated the toxic moisture in the air, creating a massive cloud of hissing white steam.
It was an absolutely unavoidable barrage. A normal player would be vaporized into digital dust before they could even blink.
The action economy of a thousand Level 75 monsters firing at the exact same time was a mathematical death sentence. Even a top-tier heavy tank with a massive shield would be crushed under the sheer volume of incoming damage.
Declan didn’t dodge. He didn’t use Void Blink to teleport behind them. He didn’t even summon his +20 Black Aegis riot shield to block the massive incoming damage.
He just stood perfectly still and smiled.
"Void Laceration Wave!" Declan commanded smoothly.
He didn’t pull out a physical weapon. He just raised his right hand high above his head and swiped his arm down in a massive and sweeping diagonal arc.
The air in front of him violently tore open!
A colossal and pitch-black projection of a scythe materialized out of thin air. It was made entirely of dense and swirling dark matter and jagged purple static.
The scythe was easily fifty feet tall. The curved blade was so massive it cast a terrifying and eclipsing shadow over the entire military airstrip.
The giant dark matter scythe didn’t just fall. It was propelled by Declan’s Abyssal Sovereign stats and his absurd 500 percent true damage multiplier.
It swept forward like a hurricane of pure deletion code.
The massive wall of green plasma rounds hit the dark matter blade and simply ceased to exist.
The energy didn’t explode. It didn’t deflect or bounce back into the crowd. The scythe literally severed the spatial coordinates the plasma was occupying, deleting the attacks from the server entirely.
The green light just vanished. It was swallowed up by the pitch-black void of the blade.
The scythe projection hit the ground and kept going.
It tore through the concrete airstrip, carving a massive and bottomless trench in the earth as it rushed toward the army of Corrupted Troopers.
The concrete didn’t shatter. It was just perfectly erased, leaving a smooth and dark gap in the physical reality of the zone.
The monsters didn’t try to run. They didn’t break formation. They didn’t have the programming to comprehend an attack of this magnitude.
They just stood there with their rifles raised, waiting for their internal cooldowns to reset so they could fire again.
The Void Laceration Wave slammed into the front line.
There was no sound of clashing metal. There was no fiery explosion of impact.
There was only the distinct and sickeningly wet sound of thick canvas tearing perfectly in half.
The dark matter blade swept through the entire battalion in a single and devastating motion.
It ignored their heavy corporate armor. It ignored their eighty thousand health points. It bypassed the game’s durability math entirely.
The attack didn’t calculate defense values or elemental resistances. It just checked to see if the target was occupying the space the blade passed through, and then it deleted that space.
One thousand Corrupted Troopers froze perfectly still.
A jagged black line appeared perfectly across the chest of every single monster on the airstrip. The line glowed with a faint and corrupted purple static.
A split second later, the top halves of one thousand soldiers slowly slid backward. The heavy metal armor and rotting flesh cleanly separated from their waists and crashed heavily to the concrete floor.
They didn’t bleed. They didn’t scream.
One thousand Level 75 Elite monsters instantly dissolved into a massive and blinding ocean of bright blue digital pixels!
The sheer volume of shattered code floating up into the blood-red sky was absolutely staggering. It looked like a localized snowstorm of pure blue light.
The entire airstrip was covered in a thick and glowing fog of deleted data.
The system chimes hammered into Declan’s brain so fast they formed one long and continuous ring of absolute victory. The server’s audio engine physically struggled to process the sheer amount of death that had just occurred in a single frame.
[Multiple Enemies Defeated!]
[Combat Rating: SSS]
[Origin Points +150,000]
[High-Tier Loot Generated.]
The massive dark matter scythe dissipated into harmless black smoke, leaving behind a perfectly smooth and mile-long trench that split the entire military base perfectly in half.
Declan slowly lowered his arm. He shoved his hand back into his coat pocket.
He looked out at the sprawling field of blue pixels and glowing loot drops covering the concrete. There were hundreds of rare energy cores, advanced plasma rifle components, and heavy armor platings sitting in the dirt.
He hadn’t even broken a sweat. His stamina bar was still practically full. His health bar hadn’t dropped a single digit.
"Now that," Declan laughed as his deep voice echoed across the silent and ruined wasteland. "Is how you clear a room.
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