Chapter 192: [192] : Data Devouring Hand, The Authority Token
The ceiling of the Deep-Web corridor caved in!
Tons of melted steel, white-hot rock, and shattered concrete blew inward as the orbital kinetic projectile breached the underground vault.
It was massive!
It was a solid, twenty-foot-wide cylinder of hyper-dense tungsten, glowing a blinding, burning white from atmospheric friction. It screamed down from the sky, carrying enough pure kinetic energy to vaporize an entire city block and turn everything in the hallway into atomic dust!
The gravitational lock of the skill pressed heavily against the floor, trying to hold Declan in place so the meteor could crush him flat.
Mercer stood safely outside the blast zone, his arms raised in triumph as his camera drones captured every millisecond of the impending execution.
"Delete him!" Mercer roared!
Declan didn’t flinch at all.
He didn’t shift his stance. He didn’t activate a defensive magic barrier.
He just raised his bare right hand toward the falling meteor and tapped into an active skill he had looted and upgraded days ago.
’System,’ Declan commanded in his mind. ’Activate Data Devouring Hand. Plus twenty!’
[Skill Activated: Data Devouring Hand +20]
↳ Tier: Sovereign Anomaly
↳ Functionality: Generates a localized, conceptual void field around the user’s limb. The hand does not interact with physical mass or kinetic momentum.
↳ Special Effect: Instantly consumes and permanently deletes the unformatted digital code of any incoming projectile, spell, or energy construct upon contact. Converts 10% of deleted data into permanent raw mana pool reserves.
The air surrounding Declan’s right arm didn’t just distort. It turned completely black!
A massive, pitch-black claw made of swirling void energy and raw dark matter erupted from his hand. It expanded instantly, growing to match the exact width of the falling tungsten cylinder.
It didn’t look like a shield. It looked like the open mouth of a starving beast!
The Mach 5 orbital projectile slammed directly into the open palm of the dark matter claw!
There was no deafening explosion.
There was no blinding flash of fire, no massive shockwave of displaced air, and no crater forming in the floor.
The sound simply ceased to exist!
The moment the white-hot, ten-thousand-ton tungsten cylinder touched the pitch-black void of Declan’s hand, its physics engine calculations were forcefully terminated!
The metal didn’t crumple. It didn’t bounce off.
It just turned into a bright, harmless stream of green binary code and blue digital pixels!
The Data Devouring Hand ate the entire orbital strike in less than half a second! The massive kinetic warhead simply dissolved into thin air, sucked straight into the dark void around Declan’s fingers like water going down a drain!
A quiet, pleasant chime rang out in Declan’s head.
[Hostile Projectile Code Deleted.]
[Converting data to reserves... +1,500 Max Mana permanently added to host.]
Declan lowered his arm. The dark matter claw dissipated into a few harmless wisps of black smoke that drifted away in the cold air.
He stood perfectly untouched in the center of the room. His black Predator’s Coat hadn’t even fluttered!
The hallway was dead silent.
Across the melted trench, Mercer was frozen like a statue.
His arms were still raised in the air. His mouth was hanging wide open behind his transparent tactical visor. He stared at the empty space above Declan’s head where his multi-million-credit ultimate attack had just vanished.
"Where..." Mercer choked out, his voice cracking into a high squeak. "Where did the meteor go?!"
"I ate it," Declan replied flatly.
The live chat on the four camera drones completely broke! The scrolling text was moving so fast the monitors actually started glitching with system overload errors!
[User_Ironclad: HE ATE AN ORBITAL STRIKE?! WITH HIS BARE HAND?!]
[Clip_God: WHAT IS THIS GAME?! WHAT CLASS IS THAT?!]
[ProudSword_Fanboy: This is rigged! He’s hacking! Report him!]
Mercer’s brain completely short-circuited! He couldn’t process what he was seeing. A standard player couldn’t just catch an orbital bombardment and delete it from the server!
"You... you cheated!" Mercer shrieked, stumbling backward in a blind panic. He fumbled with his heavy plasma rifle, desperately trying to rack the bolt to fire another round. "Fire support! Send another drop! Send everything!"
"My turn," Declan said smoothly.
He didn’t use a spell. He didn’t wait for his cooldowns.
He just tapped into the massive base Agility of his Abyssal Sovereign body.
’Void Blink.’
The world went pitch black for a fraction of a millisecond.
Declan completely bypassed the sixty yards of melted floor, the spatial gravity locks, and the burning debris!
He materialized out of thin air right in front of Mercer!
He was standing so close their chest plates almost touched.
Mercer gasped, his bloodshot eyes widening in pure terror as he looked up into the dark, galaxy-filled voids of Declan’s eyes.
Before the streamer could pull the trigger on his rifle, Declan reached out with his right hand.
He didn’t use a weapon. He just used his raw, one-hundred-percent synchronized real-world physical strength.
His dense, mythical alloy fingers wrapped squarely around Mercer’s platinum-armored throat!
Declan squeezed.
The high-tier, expensive cybernetic neck armor didn’t offer a single second of resistance. The metal groaned and violently buckled inward under the weight of a collapsing star!
Declan hoisted the seventy-eight-level Vanguard Prime completely off the floor with one hand!
Mercer kicked his legs wildly in the air, dropping his plasma rifle. The heavy gun clattered uselessly onto the floor. He clawed desperately at Declan’s arm, but his fingers couldn’t find a purchase on the thick leather of the coat.
"Please," Mercer choked out, a thin stream of digital blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. "Don’t... don’t delete me... the stream is live..."
Declan turned his head slightly. He looked directly into the lens of the closest camera drone.
His expression was entirely cold, completely void of any mercy.
"Sector 1," Declan’s deep, loud voice boomed through the live broadcast audio feed. "Stop sending me your sponsored toys. They break too easily."
He looked back at Mercer.
"CRACK!"
The sound of Mercer’s digital spine and neck armor snapping at the exact same time was sharp and sickeningly loud!
The streamer’s health bar instantly zeroed out, plummeting from full to nothing in a single frame!
[Player Mercer Defeated.]
[Target permanently erased from local registry.]
Declan opened his hand and let go.
Mercer’s limp body didn’t hit the floor. The moment his health hit zero, his avatar violently exploded into a massive, blinding shower of bright blue digital pixels!
The four camera drones hovering around them instantly lost their connection signals. Their glowing red lenses went dark, and they dropped from the air, crashing onto the metal floor like dead insects.
The broadcast was over.
Declan stood alone in the shower of falling blue pixels. He brushed a speck of digital dust off his sleeve.
"Loud and fragile," Declan muttered to himself. "Terrible combination."
He looked down at the floor where Mercer had just been deleted.
When a player killer died in a high-hazard zone, they dropped their active inventory. Sitting right in the middle of the dissolving blue pixels was a small pile of glowing loot.
There were several stacks of high-grade credit chips, a few rare potions, and Mercer’s heavy plasma rifle.
Declan ignored all of it. He didn’t care about standard gear.
His eyes locked onto a single, small object resting at the very bottom of the pile.
It was a flat, rectangular tablet made of dark, unpolished iron. It didn’t glow with the bright gold light of a standard drop. It pulsed with a heavy, suffocating crimson aura that made the air around it physically warp and ripple!
Declan knelt down and picked it up.
It felt heavy in his palm, incredibly heavy. Even with his massive Strength stat, he could feel the sheer density of the data stored inside it!
A brilliant, glaring white-gold prompt appeared in his vision!
[Item Retrieved: Server Authority Token (Fragment 1 of 4)]
↳ Tier: Sovereign (Root Administrative Artifact)
↳ Type: Faction Control Catalyst
↳ Description: One of four foundational master tokens forged by the original creators of the Primordial Grid. Contains the hard-coded administrative commands for global sector boundaries.
↳ Current Functionality: Incomplete. Grants the holder passive resistance to all server-mandated environmental wipes and territorial restrictions.
↳ Complete Set Bonus: Unlocks [Root Authority]. Allows the user to permanently edit, merge, or delete sector maps, disable enemy dive pods globally, and override the Great Convergence ruleset.
Declan read the text twice. A slow, highly satisfied smile spread across his pale face.
This wasn’t just a weapon. This wasn’t just a piece of armor that gave him higher damage numbers.
This was the actual control panel for the entire world!
If he found the other three fragments, he wouldn’t just survive the apocalypse. He would own the servers running it! He could shut down Apex Paradigm and Proud Sword Megacorp with a single line of text!
"A fragment," Declan whispered, his eyes gleaming with dark ambition. "Let’s see what happens when we upgrade a broken piece of code."
He didn’t wait to find the other three pieces. He didn’t care about set bonuses or standard progression. He had his SSS-Rank talent!
He opened his system enhancement menu with a quick mental thought and targeted the dark iron tablet in his hand.
"System," Declan commanded, his voice ringing with absolute authority in the empty vault. "Apply Boundless Enhancement to the Server Authority Token. Push it to plus twenty. Burn whatever points it takes!"
The system UI immediately flashed a glaring, panicked red!
[CRITICAL WARNING!]
[Target is a Root Administrative Artifact Fragment.]
[Enhancing incomplete root assets violates core server stability! Immediate item destruction and severe neural feedback guaranteed!]
[Cost for +1 to +20: 30,000,000 Origin Points.]
Thirty million points!
That was an astronomical price tag. It was nearly his entire remaining bank balance from the Abyssal Tide and the Sector 9 deathmatch combined! Anyone else would have hesitated or fainted from the sheer cost.
Declan didn’t even blink.
"Take the points," Declan ordered. "Override."
Thirty million Origin Points vanished from his treasury in a single microsecond!
The reaction was catastrophic!
A blinding, violent column of white-gold light erupted from the small iron tablet in his hand. The light was so intense it completely shattered the remaining fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling of the Deep-Web corridor!
The system chimes didn’t ring. They shrieked in pure panic as the game engine tried desperately to stop an incomplete developer tool from exceeding its hard-coded parameters!
Declan gritted his teeth. A sharp, splitting headache slammed into his skull, but his Boundless Enhancement talent surged forward like a runaway train.
The digital sledgehammer crushed the system’s safety protocols instantly! The red error boxes flooding his vision shattered into harmless blue dust!
[Talent: Boundless Enhancement activated. Cap removed.]
[Server Authority Token +10... +15... +20.]
[Item has reached +20.]
[Triggering Ultimate Conceptual Mutation...]
The white-gold light violently shifted. It turned into a deep, consuming pitch-black void outlined in jagged, bleeding red runes!
The physical shape of the iron tablet warped and stretched in his grip. The rough metal smoothed out, turning into a sleek, four-sided prism of solid dark matter that hummed with terrifying, world-bending power!
The new item parameters burned brightly in his vision.
[Item Mutated: Sovereign Root Authority (Glitch Variant)]
↳ Tier: Divine Anomaly
↳ Status: Fragment restrictions bypassed via forced data density.
↳ Active Trait: Territorial Overwrite. The user can manually assert ownership over any neutral or hostile sector by planting this token into the earth. Instantly converts the targeted zone into an extension of the user’s primary Safe Zone.
↳ Passive Trait: Absolute Admin. All friendly faction members within the user’s territory gain 100% immunity to enemy spatial locks, debuffs, and server-mandated purge events.
Declan laughed out loud! The sound rumbled through the corridor, vibrating the melted silver walls.
He didn’t need the other three pieces anymore! His talent had completely bypassed the set requirement by stuffing thirty million points of raw data into a single fragment!
He could literally walk into any corporate sector on the planet, drop this prism on the ground, and turn their expensive, bought-and-paid-for safe zones into his personal property!
Declan willed the mutated dark matter prism into his digital storage. It vanished into a swirl of blue pixels.
He turned around to face Nova, Morgan, and the silent Mirage Daemon.
The hacker and the assassin were staring at him in absolute, speechless awe. They had just watched him eat an orbital strike, kill a corporate celebrity with one hand, and force-hack a developer artifact until the server broke!
"Alright," Declan said smoothly, adjusting the collar of his black coat as he walked past them toward the inner vault doors. "The Warlord just got a promotion. Let’s go clear out the rest of this node."
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