Chapter 188: [188] : The Deep-Web Admin Node, Bypassing the Puzzle
The blast doors ground all the way open, revealing a hallway that looked like the inside of a supercomputer.
The walls were made of glowing white light and polished chrome. There were no visible seams, no exposed wires, and no rusted server racks like the places up on the surface. Everything here was built with absolute and intimidating perfection.
But the hallway was far from empty!
"Contact!" Nova shouted, immediately dropping into a defensive crouch and raising her silver staff.
Less than fifty yards away, standing at the first major intersection of the glowing corridor, were two heavily armed squads of players!
They weren’t low-level scavengers at all. They weren’t random explorers who had wandered into the wrong cave either.
They wore matching suits of dark crimson and gold power armor. Massive, bulky energy shields floated around their frontlines, and their weapons buzzed with the unmistakable, high-pitched whine of max-level corporate gear.
A bright golden guild emblem floated above both squads. It depicted a double-headed eagle gripping a broken sword!
"Apex Vanguard Remnants," Nova hissed through clenched teeth. Her fingers flew across her holographic interface as she scanned their tags. "They are Tier-1 corporate elites! They must have used a high-level tracking script to follow the portal opening when the mass-deletion wave hit!"
A tall player carrying a massive, glowing blue plasma cannon stepped out from behind the crimson shield wall. His system tag hovered brightly over his helmet.
[Name: Captain Vane]
[Level: 72]
[Guild: Apex Vanguard Elite]
"Look what we have here," Vane sneered, his voice amplified by his helmet’s external speakers. "The little Warlord from Sector 7 decided to crawl out of his slum."
Declan didn’t stop walking. He didn’t even draw his hands from his pockets. He just looked at the Level 72 player with mild annoyance.
"You guys are standing in my hallway," Declan said smoothly.
"Your hallway?" Vane laughed loudly. The twenty corporate mercenaries behind him joined in, raising their plasma rifles and aiming directly at Declan’s chest. "We have been camping this sector for three days waiting for the developer locks to drop. This is corporate property now, glitch. Hand over the Abyssal Daemon and strip your gear, and we might let your real-world body survive the disconnect!"
"Declan, there are twenty of them!" Nova warned rapidly from behind him. "All Level 70 and above! And the hallway behind them is laced with active developer traps! I am reading high-density laser grids and spatial gravity wells pulsing right past that intersection!"
Declan glanced past the corporate line.
Through the transparent glass walls of the corridor, he could see the complex security maze stretching out toward the inner vaults. Glowing red laser grids shifted erratically across the floor, and faint, distorting ripples in the air marked invisible spatial loops designed to trap and crush intruders.
A normal raid team would have to carefully fight through the corporate elite, spend hours disabling the laser grids, and solve the complex spatial math just to reach the first sub-vault.
Declan didn’t do puzzles. And he definitely didn’t waste time on corporate guards when a ten-hour deletion timer was ticking down on the good loot!
"Mirage," Declan said calmly. "Do you have a key for this?"
The Level 100 Mimicry Daemon glided forward. It didn’t look at the plasma rifles pointed at them. It reached into its shifting, liquid silver chest and pulled out a small, rectangular card made of glowing, solid white light.
"Affirmative, Administrator," Mirage droned in its synthetic voice. "This is an Emperor-grade Developer Bypass Keycard. It is utilized by system engineers to skip puzzle rendering and access testing environments directly."
[Item Recognized: Developer Bypass Keycard]
↳ Tier: Emperor (Restricted Asset)
↳ Functionality: Grants one-time pass-through access to local security doors.
↳ Limitation: Cannot bypass active combat states or high-density spatial firewalls above Level 75.
Declan took the glowing white card from the Daemon’s claw.
"One-time use, and it gets stopped by high-level firewalls?" Declan muttered while shaking his head. "That is way too limited."
"Fire!" Vane roared from down the hall. "Wipe them out! Don’t let him use an item!"
Twenty high-caliber plasma rifles whined as they discharged simultaneously! A blinding wall of super-heated pink and blue energy slugs tore down the pristine white corridor, aiming to turn Declan and his party into glowing ash!
Declan didn’t flinch. He didn’t pull out his halberd. He didn’t even summon his Black Aegis shield.
He just tapped his administrative interface and linked the glowing keycard directly to his Warlord treasury.
"System," Declan commanded, his voice dropping into that heavy, room-shaking bass. "Apply Boundless Enhancement. Push the keycard to plus twenty. Override all safety limits."
He had over forty million Origin Points sitting in his bank! Upgrading an Emperor-grade developer item was astronomically expensive for a normal player, but to him, it was literal pocket change.
[System Enhancement Initiated. Calculating cost...]
[Warning: Target item contains hard-coded developer encryption. Modification will trigger immediate neural backlash!]
[Cost for +1 to +20: 8,500,000 Origin Points.]
"Take the points," Declan ordered.
Eight and a half million points vanished from his treasury in a single microsecond!
The reaction was instantly violent. A blinding, searing white light erupted from the small card in his hand, completely outshining the incoming storm of plasma bolts!
The system chimes hammered inside Declan’s skull like an industrial jackhammer. Red warning boxes flooded his vision, screaming about core corruption and illegal parameter manipulation.
His SSS-Rank talent, Boundless Enhancement, surged forward and crushed the error codes into digital dust!
[Talent: Boundless Enhancement activated. Cap removed.]
[Bypass Keycard +10... +15... +20.]
[Triggering Ultimate Conceptual Mutation...]
The white light shifted. It turned into a deep, consuming pitch-black void outlined in crackling purple static.
The physical shape of the card warped in his grip. The thin piece of light thickened, turning into a heavy, dark metal slab covered in bleeding red runes that hummed with terrifying spatial authority.
[Item Mutated: Sovereign Spatial Logic Override +20]
↳ Tier: Divine Anomaly (Cheat Variant)
↳ Functionality: Permanently overwrites local server geometry. Bypasses all physical doors, spatial firewalls, puzzle directories, and combat locks within a ten-mile radius.
↳ Special Effect: Creates an instantaneous, unblockable spatial corridor directly to the user’s spoken target directory.
The wall of pink plasma bolts reached him!
Declan didn’t dodge. He just raised the heavy dark metal slab and tapped it against the empty air in front of his chest.
"Target directory," Declan spoke clearly over the roar of the incoming gunfire. "Server G-88."
BZZZT!
The air in the hallway didn’t just tear. It completely shattered!
A massive, ten-foot-wide circular portal made of swirling, pitch-black dark matter ripped open right in front of Declan, Nova, and Mirage!
The incoming volley of twenty super-heated plasma slugs hit the event horizon of the portal and simply vanished. They didn’t explode. They didn’t deal splash damage. They were instantly sucked into the spatial corridor and dumped somewhere in the endless void between servers!
Down the hall, Captain Vane’s jaw dropped behind his tactical visor.
"What the hell was that?!" Vane shrieked as he lowered his plasma cannon in sheer disbelief. "Where did the damage go?!"
"That is my exit," Declan smiled coldly.
He looked back at Nova, who was staring at the swirling dark matter portal with her icy blue eyes wide as saucers.
"You coming, hacker?" Declan asked. "Or do you want to stay here and play with the laser grids?"
"I am coming!" Nova gasped, immediately scrambling to her feet. She didn’t hesitate for a second, diving straight into the black portal behind the Level 100 Mimicry Daemon.
Declan stepped up to the edge of the rift. He looked down the pristine white hallway at the twenty corporate mercenaries. They were frantically reloading their weapons while their armor glowed as they prepared to charge.
"Enjoy the puzzle room," Declan said smoothly.
He stepped backward into the dark matter portal.
The moment his Spiked Striders crossed the threshold, the spatial rift snapped shut with a sharp, echoing pop!
It left absolutely no trace of energy behind.
Down the corridor, Captain Vane and his elite corporate squad were left standing in complete silence. They were locked outside the inner vaults, with four hours of brutal, high-lethality developer puzzles sitting between them and their target.
Declan Vance had just skipped the entire dungeon in three seconds!
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