Chapter 59: The Sterile Layer
The heavy iron doors separating the ninth and eighth floors blasted completely off their hinges. Two massive Black Golems marched right through the thick metal like it was made of wet cardboard. Kanos stepped through the ruined doorway. His boots clicked loudly against a pristine, glowing white tiled floor.
This place looked absolutely nothing like a dungeon. It looked like the sterile lobby of a high tech corporate building.
The walls were completely white and seamless. There were no torches. There were no dripping stalactites. The bright, artificial light came from literally everywhere, emitting a soft, humming frequency that made the inside of Kanos’s skull itch violently.
"Maintenance layer," Sili whispered from behind Kanos. The skinny broker looked around the incredibly clean hallway with pure terror in his eyes. "This is where the system automatically sorts the background data of the entire lower district. It is essentially a giant server hallway. Nothing organic is supposed to be up here."
Belida stepped forward, his heavy boots leaving dirty mud tracks on the spotless white tiles. The giant knight gripped his black greatsword tightly. He looked left and right down the endless, curving white hallway. "There are no guards. No executioners. The place is completely dead."
"The system does not need human guards in the maintenance layer," Papuyu spoke flatly. The female hitman raised her twin daggers, her dead eyes scanning the smooth ceiling. "The building itself is the guard."
Right on cue, the seamless white walls smoothly split open.
Dozens of hidden panels slid perfectly into the ceiling and the floor. Smooth, silver metallic turrets extended outward, pointing directly at the group. They were not magic cannons. They did not gather fire or ice mana. The tips of the turrets glowed with a terrifyingly bright, pure white light. It was the exact same raw erasure code that made up the Quarantine Protocol barrier outside.
"Move!" Kanos commanded sharply.
He did not need to give specific tactical orders to his printed army. The Null Hounds operated on an absolute instinct to consume magic and system data. Twenty dark violet beasts instantly leaped off the floor, launching themselves aggressively toward the ceiling turrets.
The turrets fired simultaneously. A chaotic storm of blinding white beams crisscrossed through the pristine hallway. The moment the white beams hit the Null Hounds, a horrific static screeching sound tore through the air. The hounds absorbed the erasure code directly into their smoky bodies. The dark violet smoke violently flickered and turned gray as the hounds struggled to digest the incredibly concentrated system logic.
Three hounds exploded in mid air, their bodies completely overloaded by the raw data.
"They cannot eat everything!" Sili screamed, covering his head and diving behind the thick leg of a Black Golem. "Those turrets are hooked directly to the main system battery! They have unlimited ammo!"
Kanos gritted his teeth. The pain in his head spiked brutally. He could feel the connection snapping every time a Null Hound was destroyed. His right arm hung completely useless, strapped tightly to his chest. His left hand was still heavily stained with dried blood and charcoal. He could not draw a new virus. He had to rely entirely on the pieces currently on the board.
"Golems. Break the walls," Kanos ordered coldly.
The remaining eighteen Black Golems charged into the sides of the hallway. They ignored the white beams entirely. The erasure code burned and chipped away at their thick void stone armor, but it was not enough to stop their massive physical momentum. The golems slammed their giant fists into the pristine white walls. The seamless material shattered like fragile glass, exposing thick cables and glowing blue energy conduits hidden behind the panels.
The golems ruthlessly grabbed the exposed cables and ripped them entirely out of the walls. Sparks rained down like a fireworks show. The turrets instantly lost power and died. The blaring white lights in the hallway flickered rapidly before completely shutting off, plunging the area into a dim, chaotic red emergency glow.
"Keep pushing forward," Kanos said, walking quickly past the sparking debris. "Do not give the system time to reboot."
They sprinted down the long, curving hallway. The Null Hounds ran a few meters ahead, acting as an extremely aggressive vanguard. Belida and Papuyu covered the flanks, slicing any smaller maintenance drones that occasionally popped out of the floor grates.
They finally reached the end of the hallway. The path opened up into a massive, circular room. In the dead center of the room stood a giant, glowing blue elevator tube that clearly led straight up to the central command layer.
But the elevator was not unguarded.
A single figure stood perfectly still in front of the blue tube. It looked exactly like a normal human man. He wore a flawless, tailor made white suit. His face was entirely devoid of any unique features. No scars, no blemishes, no real expression. His eyes were pure, glowing white circles without any pupils.
"You are heavily corrupting the local server data," the man in the white suit spoke. His voice echoed perfectly from every corner of the room at once. "I am the designated Area Moderator. Your illegal access ends right here."
Kanos did not stop walking. He did not care about the man’s title. He simply looked at Belida.
Belida roared loudly and charged. The giant knight swung his massive black sword in a devastating horizontal arc, aiming to cleanly cut the Moderator entirely in half.
The Moderator did not dodge. He simply raised one finger.
The space right in front of the Moderator instantly warped. Belida’s heavy sword swung completely through empty air. The giant knight stumbled forward, his momentum betraying him. The Moderator casually pressed his palm against Belida’s heavy chest armor. A powerful, concentrated pulse of kinetic energy blasted Belida backward. The knight skidded across the smooth tiles, coughing heavily.
Papuyu instantly appeared behind the Moderator from the shadows. Her daggers aimed directly for the back of his neck. But the Moderator simply stepped slightly to the side. It was not a fast movement. It was a complete spatial edit. He simply moved his coordinates a few inches to the right without actually walking. Papuyu’s daggers hit nothing.
The Moderator backhanded the air. Another kinetic shockwave hit Papuyu, sending her crashing hard into the wall.
"Physical violence is completely irrelevant," the Moderator stated in a boring, flat tone. "I do not possess a physical hit box. I am a localized system projection. I control the spatial parameters of this room."
Sili was hiding near the entrance, typing frantically on a stolen data slate. "Boss, he is right! He is literally editing the space around his body! We cannot touch him using normal weapons!"
Kanos stopped walking. He stared at the arrogant, flawless figure in the white suit. The Moderator was a perfect, highly privileged system program. He could dodge swords and daggers because he read their trajectories through the system’s physics engine.
But Kanos knew perfectly well that even the most advanced physics engine had a breaking point if you overloaded it with too much chaotic debris.
"He edits the space around his body," Kanos whispered coldly. He looked at the massive ceiling right above the Moderator. "Then we crush the space entirely."
Kanos raised his left hand. He commanded the Null Hounds to stay back. He focused his connection entirely on the massive Black Golems.
"Do not attack him," Kanos ordered the giant stone beasts. "Attack the room."
Ten Black Golems charged forward. They completely ignored the Moderator. Instead, they leaped into the air and slammed their massive stone fists directly into the smooth white ceiling and the supporting pillars all around the center of the room.
The sheer physical trauma was catastrophic. The ceiling violently cracked. Massive blocks of solid concrete and steel beams began raining down directly onto the Moderator’s position.
The Moderator raised his hands, frantically trying to warp the falling debris away from his coordinates. But there was simply way too much of it. The system algorithm struggled to calculate the spatial edits for hundreds of massive, chaotic objects falling at random speeds.
A giant chunk of the ceiling, the size of a small house, crashed directly onto the Moderator.
The man in the white suit did not bleed. His body simply glitched wildly, turning into a mess of red and green pixels before being completely crushed flat under the concrete boulder. The spatial locks in the room instantly vanished.
Kanos walked slowly toward the blue elevator tube. He stepped casually over the pile of rubble that buried the system’s perfect proxy.
"Your system is highly unoptimized," Kanos muttered coldly to the crushed pixels.
Sili ran over to the elevator control panel. The broker plugged his crystal drive in, hacking the final security gate in seconds. The blue energy shield sliding around the elevator tube opened smoothly.
"We are in, boss," Sili said, his hands shaking with pure adrenaline. "Next stop is the core."
Kanos stepped into the elevator. Belida and Papuyu limped in right behind him, followed closely by the surviving pack of dark violet hounds. They were heavily battered, bleeding, and entirely exhausted. But they had just broken into the heart of the world.
