Chapter 143: [144]: The Trap Sprung, The Anchor of Reality

The Aegis Suit was an absolute masterpiece of digital engineering.

It was not just a piece of armor. It was a walking heavily armed fortress.

The sheer radiating pressure of the Level 85 mechanical monstrosity forced the huddled

crowd of aristocratic players to press themselves flat against the locked blast doors.

Guild Master Regis stood in the center of the ruined ballroom, the massive hydraulic servos in his legs hissing as he adjusted his stance. The twin rotary cannons mounted on his broad titanium shoulders whined aggressively, tracking the silent black-clad figure standing on the balcony above.

"You have made a catastrophic miscalculation, Drifter," Regis’s magically

amplified voice boomed from the suit’s external speakers.

The sound was so loud it rattled the remaining glass in the empty wine fountains.

"You think because you killed a few low-level grunts in the slums that you are a god? You think your little spatial glitches mean anything in the Inner Spire?"

Sebastian stood perfectly still.

He did not draw his Rusty Iron Dagger. He did

not reach for the massive concrete-encrusted Earth Sword sitting in his bottomless inventory.

Beneath the smooth featureless black glass of his helmet, his silver-tinged eyes analyzed the massive mech with total unbothered apathy.

He was just waiting for the rich idiot to stop talking.

"I know your tricks," Regis sneered, his mechanical gauntlets clenching into massive car-crushing fists. "The Vanguard intelligence network analyzed your fight in the arena. You rely on broken spatial edits. You rely on localized physics manipulation. You are a squishy unarmored rogue who uses code exploits to survive."

Regis took a heavy thudding step forward.

"But I am the Administrator of this sector," Regis declared proudly. "And in my

boardroom, magic is a privilege. A privilege I am officially revoking."

The massive chest plate of the Aegis Suit slid open with a sharp hiss of pressurized air.

Resting inside the chest cavity, glowing with a dull heavy leaden light, was a fist-sized metallic cube. It was covered in jagged anti-magic runes that seemed to aggressively absorb the red emergency lighting of the room.

Sebastian’s posture finally shifted. He recognized the hardware.

’Reality Anchor,’ Sebastian murmured to himself, his voice completely muted by his helmet’s internal filters.

"System Override!" Regis roared. "Activate Absolute Suppression!"

BZZZT!

The metallic cube pulsed. A massive suffocating wave of heavy grey energy exploded outward from the Aegis Suit. It moved at the speed of light, washing over the entire grand ballroom in a fraction of a microsecond.

The effect was instantaneous and absolutely devastating.

The grey wave hit the terrified crowd of elites.

The brilliant glowing mana masks shaped like lions and foxes instantly died, turning into dull useless pieces of cloudy glass. The beautiful gowns immediately lost their magical

properties, unraveling and turning into dirty drab grey rags.

Players who were using low-level levitation rings to comfortably hover a few inches off the ground suddenly yelped as the magic failed, dropping them unceremoniously onto the hard obsidian floor.

The entire room was plunged into a heavy oppressive entirely mundane reality.

Up on the balcony, the grey wave hit Sebastian like a physical wall of wet cement.

Instantly, his internal HUD violently flickered.

The comforting blue-and-green hybrid UI that connected him to the Ethereal Plane’s underlying code sparked, glitched, and turned a dead flat grey.

The [Admin Suspicion] meter vanished.

The skill icons for [Dimensional Sever], [Absolute Zero], and [Gravity Domain] were aggressively crossed out with thick red ’X’s.

The warm limitless well of glitched mana pulsing in his chest was violently smothered, choked out by the localized digital blanket.

[System Alert: Reality Anchor Deployed.] [Status Effect: Absolute Magic Suppression.]

[Notice: All active spells, conceptual laws, and UI functions are disabled.]

Down below, the heavy metallic faceplate of the Aegis Suit shifted, mimicking a cruel highly arrogant smile.

"How does it feel, Anomaly?" Regis mocked, his voice echoing in the sudden entirely non-magical silence of the room. "Your connection to the server is severed. Your spatial cuts are gone. Your gravity wells are gone. You are just a man in a cheap leather suit standing in front of a heavily armored tank."

Regis raised his massive right arm, pointing the heavy glowing barrel of a plasma incinerator directly at Sebastian.

"You brought a knife to a mech fight," Regis laughed. "Die."

Sebastian did not panic. He did not scramble backward or desperately try to reboot his UI.

He just let out a slow deeply exhausted sigh that fogged the inside of his visor.

’These corporate idiots really do not read the patch notes,’ Sebastian thought to himself.

A Reality Anchor was an incredibly powerful late-game artifact. It was designed to completely shut down high-level Mages and Clerics by cutting off their access to the server’s mana grid. It forced players to rely entirely on their base stats and their physical weapons.

But Regis had completely misunderstood what Sebastian actually was.

Sebastian was not a Mage. He was not a rogue who relied on stealth magic.

He was a Demigod with a thirty-percent physical synchronization to the real world.

For the past week, the game’s physics engine had actually been holding him back.

The server’s logic limiters had been actively trying to suppress the sheer ungodly density of his biological steel muscles to prevent his character model from breaking the environment every time he took a step.

With the Reality Anchor active, the game’s physics engine was turned off.

The leash was gone.

Sebastian reached down to his thigh holster.

He drew the Rusty Iron Dagger.

Regis laughed even harder, the sound booming from the mech. "A rusty knife?!

That is your grand backup plan? My Aegis Suit is plated in twelve inches of reinforced durasteel! You could not scratch the paint if I gave you a hundred years!"

Sebastian looked at the dagger. The magic suppression had turned off the [God-Slayer’s Edge] passive. It was no longer a weapon of absolute severance. It was just a pathetic brittle piece of rusted junk.

Sebastian casually tossed the dagger over his shoulder.

CLATTER.

It bounced harmlessly against the stone wall behind him.

He did not need it.

Sebastian stepped up to the edge of the marble balcony railing. He did not cast a flight spell. He did not use a dash mechanic.

He just stepped off the edge.

He dropped thirty feet straight down into the ballroom.

He did not cast a wind cushion. He did not perform a graceful acrobatic roll to mitigate the fall damage. He just let his raw unadulterated physical mass hit the ground.

BOOM!

The impact was absolutely catastrophic. Sebastian landed feet-first on the polished obsidian floor. The sheer hyper-dense kinetic force of his synchronized biology hit the stone like a dropped meteor.

The indestructible magically reinforced obsidian floor instantly shattered.

A massive crater spiderwebbed outward from his boots, sending chunks of black stone and jagged marble flying into the air.

The entire grand ballroom violently shuddered, the shockwave knocking several of the huddled elites flat onto their backs.

The heavy dust settled.

Sebastian slowly stood up from the center of the crater. He rolled his neck, the joints popping with a deep heavy sound that sounded like two boulders grinding against each other.

He was not hurt. He had not lost a single point of health. His physical body was a perfectly optimized biological server, and it absolutely thrived in the absence of the game’s restrictive laws.

He looked up at the towering Aegis Suit.

Regis’s mechanical laughter abruptly died.

The Guild Master stared at the crater, his advanced AI targeting systems desperately trying to calculate how an unarmored human had just survived a thirty-foot drop without shattering every bone in his legs.

"You talk too much, Regis," Sebastian said.

His voice was no longer muffled by the suit’s digital filter. It was his real voice.

Cold, flat, and carrying the heavy promise of absolute violence.

Sebastian cracked his knuckles. He took a heavy thudding step out of the crater.

"You turned off the magic," Sebastian stated, his featureless black visor staring dead at the massive mech. "Thanks. I always preferred a hands-on approach anyway."