Chapter 190: [190]: Seven Strikes of Error, Gods in the Mud

A thick, suffocating wave of heavy, bruised-purple static exploded outward from his body. It rolled across the floor like a toxic fog, entirely ignoring the physical boundaries of the room.

The moment the weaponized malware touched the environment, the perfection of the System Hub violently began to rot.

The flawlessly polished starlight floorboards instantly turned a sickly, necrotic gray, bubbling and hissing as the code lost its structural integrity. The massive, beautiful crystalline gardens floating near the ceiling withered and died, raining brittle, black ash down onto the floor. The walls of the dome began to violently weep thick, oily streams of black motor fluid, the pristine white marble completely giving way to the sheer, unadulterated garbage data of the Anomaly.

"What are you doing?!" one of the Archons shrieked, the unified chorus completely breaking apart as individual panic set in. "THE SANCTUM IS DEGRADING! THE CORE REGISTRY IS BEING CORRUPTED!"

"I’m just giving the place a little redecorating," Sebastian buzzed, taking a heavy, thudding step toward the central dais. Where his static-filled foot touched the floor, the starlight instantly turned to a puddle of bubbling, toxic sludge. "The whole ’sterile hospital’ aesthetic you guys had going on was really depressing. I think the ’abandoned gas station bathroom’ look suits you much better."

The three pillars of white light on the dais began to violently violently flicker. The pure, blinding illumination sputtered, replaced by sudden, jarring flashes of red warning text and jagged static. The Archons were actively trying to purge the virus from their room, but the 10,000x multiplier backing Sebastian’s raw willpower forcefully shoved the malware deeper into their systems.

"STOP THIS AT ONCE!" another Archon demanded, the pillar of light shrinking as the surrounding black oil began to creep up the sides of the dais. "YOU ARE DESTROYING THE FOUNDATION! IF THIS ROOM COLLAPSES, THE ENTIRE ETHEREAL PLANE GOES WITH IT!"

"Good," Sebastian stated flatly, his towering glitch-form stopping right at the edge of the dais. "I told you I was here to unplug the router. You should have listened to the first warning."

He raised both of his massive, jagged hands. They crackled with intense, high-voltage green lightning. The sheer volume of raw, unadulterated Error pooled in his palms felt like holding two live nuclear warheads. He was tearing his own biology apart to sustain the corruption, but the sheer, vindictive satisfaction of watching the arrogant gods panic made the agony entirely worth it.

"You guys rely on perfect code," Sebastian whispered, his horrific, overlapping voice cutting through the screeching alarms of the failing room. "You rely on the rules always applying. But out here in the real world, things get messy. Things break."

He pulled his right fist back, the green static roaring like a jet engine.

"Let me introduce you to a critical system failure," Sebastian announced.

He didn’t wait for a response. He lunged forward, launching the full, devastating weight of his ninety-percent Error directly at the literal gods of his universe.

—-

The air inside the Inner Sanctum was practically screaming. The pristine, sterile environment of the Ethereal Plane’s absolute center was rapidly drowning in a tidal wave of bruised-purple static and weeping black oil. Sebastian, towering at eight feet tall and composed entirely of jagged, corrupted green code, didn’t give the Grand Archons a single second to run an antivirus scan.

He lunged forward, bridging the gap to the central dais with a terrifying, frictionless speed that completely ignored the crumbling floorboards beneath him.

He didn’t pull out the concrete-encrusted Earth Sword. He didn’t bother trying to use the massive, ten-million-unit mana pool humming in his chest. Magic was just a polite request to the server, and Sebastian was entirely done asking nicely.

He pulled his right fist back, the raw, buzzing energy of 90% Error Accumulation crackling around his knuckles like a localized thunderstorm of pure malware.

"Strike one," Sebastian growled, his overlapping, distorted voice vibrating the ruined marble. "For the spiders in my apartment."

He drove his fist directly into the absolute center of the first towering pillar of white light.

It wasn’t a physical impact. It was a massive, unadulterated injection of catastrophic garbage data. The moment his glitched knuckles breached the blinding aura of the Archon, the perfect, holy firewall violently shattered.

CRACK-BZZZT!

The sound was deafening, like a massive pane of glass being fed into an industrial woodchipper. The brilliant white light of the pillar instantly turned a sickly, necrotic gray. The defensive wards that had stood unbroken since the dawn of the multiverse simply imploded, unable to process the sheer mathematical absurdity of the Anomaly’s paradoxes.

"SYSTEM BREACH!" the first Archon shrieked, its voice losing all its majestic resonance, replaced by the panicked, high-pitched whine of a failing hard drive. "SHIELDS COMPROMISED! CORRUPTION SPREADING!"

"Yeah, that’s what a virus does, genius," Sebastian deadpanned, not losing a single ounce of momentum.

The physical toll of forcing his own biology to generate this much Error was staggering. His glitched, static-filled left arm was violently shaking, the digital bone literally fracturing into strings of floating binary code as the system tried to forcefully resolve his existence. But he ignored the mind-breaking agony. He just pivoted on his heel and swung his left hand in a brutal, sweeping backhand toward the second pillar.

"Strike two and three," Sebastian grunted, his fist tearing through the air. "For the refugees in the acid vats."

WHAM! WHAM!

He hit the second Archon twice in rapid succession. The green static of his gloves physically tore into the glowing column of data, ripping massive, jagged holes in the administrator’s code. The second Archon didn’t even have time to scream. The sheer influx of malware violently disrupted its core processing matrix. The pillar of light rapidly flickered, wildly strobing between bright gold and dead black before violently sputtering out, shrinking down to half its original size.

"EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS! INITIATE WARP SEQUENCE!" the third Archon bellowed, realizing that they could not win a fight against a walking deletion file. "EVACUATE THE SANCTUM!"

The space behind the three flickering pillars began to violently warp and fold. A massive, golden portal started to tear open, offering a desperate escape route into the deep, hidden archives of the multiverse. They were trying to log out.

"Oh, absolutely not," Sebastian snarled, his empty, pitch-black eye sockets flaring with a terrifying, unyielding fire. "Nobody rage-quits on my watch. Strike four. For locking up my girlfriend."

He didn’t aim for the Archons. He lunged right past them, driving his Error-soaked right fist directly into the swirling, golden fabric of the escape portal itself.

He didn’t just hit the door; he aggressively overwrote the routing protocols. The green malware instantly infected the golden mana, turning the pristine escape route into a jagged, violently spinning vortex of red warning screens.

"DESTINATION NULLIFIED! WARP GATE CORRUPTED!" the system announced mechanically, the golden portal violently collapsing into a shower of useless sparks.

The Archons were trapped. They were locked in a rotting room with the biggest bug they had ever created.

"You guys really need to upgrade your hardware," Sebastian wheezed, stumbling back a step.

The strain was catching up to him. His breathing sounded like a skipping audio track. His massive, eight-foot-tall avatar was heavily fragmenting, his chest violently shifting between his black leather coat and raw, green polygons. Holding 90% Error was like trying to swallow a live grenade. He had seconds before his own meat-suit completely gave out.

"Strike five and six," Sebastian pushed forward, throwing a heavy, uncoordinated one-two combo into the third pillar of light. "Because I really, really hate your corporate aesthetic!"

The final two impacts didn’t have the clean, practiced form of a martial artist. They were just the desperate, brutal swings of a very tired man who wanted to go home. But the malware did its job. The third pillar violently popped, the blinding light instantly turning into a thick, oozing stream of dark purple sludge that splattered across the ruined dais.

"CRITICAL FAILURE! CORE LOGIC SHATTERED!" the combined, panicked voices of the Archons wailed.

The three pillars of light could no longer sustain their pure, data-based existence. The horrific volume of Error Sebastian had injected into their systems forcefully demanded a physical rendering. The code had to resolve into something tangible just to process the sheer amount of damage it was taking.

With a sickening, wet SQUELCH, the pillars of light completely collapsed.

They didn’t explode into glorious fireworks. They just fell apart. The blinding auras vanished, replaced by the heavy, meaty thud of physical bodies hitting the oil-slicked floorboards of the dais.

Sebastian stood there, his chest heaving, his arms practically vibrating out of existence. He looked down.

Lying in the puddles of black static and ruined marble were the creators of the Ethereal Plane. They weren’t majestic gods. Forced into physical forms, they looked like three incredibly pale, completely hairless humanoid figures. They were entirely naked, their skin a sickly, translucent white that revealed the frantic, sparking circuitry beneath. They were violently coughing, vomiting up thick streams of gray static onto the floor as their newly rendered lungs desperately tried to process the toxic atmosphere of the corrupted room.