Chapter 194: [195]: The Price of Admin, A Burning Firewall

"I really hate passive-aggressive developers," Sebastian muttered to himself, the sound of his voice swallowed instantly by the vast, heavy silence of the data sea. "If you want to kill someone, just drop a meteor on them. Don’t hide a landmine in the terms and conditions."

He paced back and forth across the rippling surface of the liquid light. His heavy combat boots didn’t break the surface tension, thanks to the massive, Demigod-tier physical synchronization keeping his avatar completely stable.

He had the raw materials. Tucked away in his glitched, bottomless inventory were ten million units of raw Source Code, violently harvested from the dead World Cores of four assimilated planets. He had the fuel required to author a brand new law of physics. He had the [Law Synthesis] module unlocked and humming in the background of his green, corrupted Administrator UI.

But he couldn’t just hit a magical ’undelete’ button. The Spite Protocol was a deeply embedded, malicious sub-routine tightly wrapped around the very core of Valerie’s digital existence. If he just yanked at it with a blunt command, the trap would trigger, and her base files would shatter into a billion unrecoverable pieces.

To save her, he had to perform the digital equivalent of open-heart surgery. He needed to manually rewrite her soul, line by line, explicitly untangling the hostile code and weaving in a new, conceptual law that permitted her to exist outside the System’s established rules.

He stopped pacing. He looked down at his hands.

He was wearing sleek, black tactical gloves, a leftover from his ’Blank’ disguise. Beneath the polymer fabric, his physical body was currently rendered as biological steel. He was a walking, talking tank, packed with the kinetic density of a collapsing star. That physical density, combined with his passive defensive laws, was the only reason he was currently surviving his visit to the Mainframe. The raw data of the universe was inherently hostile to physical matter. His Demigod aura was acting as a localized hazmat suit, shielding him from the crushing, absolute logic of the server’s core.

But that shield was a two-way street.

If he wanted to reach directly into the uncompiled, raw core of the Mainframe to manually type a new reality into existence, he couldn’t wear gloves. He couldn’t wear armor. He couldn’t even use his defensive passive skills. The Ethereal Plane’s root directory only accepted raw, unprotected input.

He had to drop his shields. He had to expose his completely human, biological meat-suit to the pure, unadulterated processing power of the universe.

"It’s going to burn," Sebastian stated aloud. It wasn’t a guess. It was a simple, terrifying mathematical fact.

He didn’t hesitate. The pragmatic, cynical survivor who carefully weighed every risk and maximized every advantage was entirely silent. The guy who usually ran the numbers before picking a fight was nowhere to be found. In his place was just a man who absolutely refused to lose the only person in this godforsaken universe who actually understood him.

Sebastian took a deep, steadying breath. The air didn’t taste like oxygen; it tasted like ozone and static electricity.

"System," Sebastian commanded, his voice perfectly steady. "Disable all localized defensive wards. Deactivate [Thermal Immunity]. Deactivate [Physical Synchronization] shielding."

The green UI in the corner of his vision flashed with a frantic, blinking warning.

[WARNING: Disabling core defenses in the Mainframe environment will result in catastrophic physical degradation. Proceed?]

"I read the warning label. Accept," Sebastian grunted.

The heavy, bulletproof sensation in his muscles instantly vanished. The comforting, cool blanket of his thermal immunity evaporated. For the first time since he had initiated his physical sync, Sebastian felt completely, utterly fragile. He felt like a normal, squishy human being standing in the middle of a nuclear reactor core.

He didn’t give himself time to second-guess the decision. He raised his hands and plunged them directly into the glowing, violently humming core of Valerie’s digital soul.

He reached past the blue holographic globe, his fingers breaching the invisible barrier of the file directory.

The reaction was instantaneous, and it was absolute hell.

"GAAAAAH!" Sebastian roared, his voice tearing out of his throat in a ragged, completely unhinged scream of pure agony.

The moment his physical, organic-rendered hands touched the root code of the Ethereal Plane, the Mainframe violently retaliated. The server’s foundational logic did not understand flesh. It did not understand blood, bone, or physical matter. To the absolute core of the universe, Sebastian’s hands were a disgusting, incompatible anomaly that needed to be instantly purged.

The black tactical gloves didn’t melt. They simply ceased to exist, vaporizing into a puff of grey pixels the millisecond they made contact with the data stream.

Then, the raw code latched onto his skin.

It didn’t feel like a standard Ethereal Plane fire spell. It didn’t feel like the boiling acid of the Vanguard Syndicate’s vats. It felt like someone had wrapped his arms in razor wire, hooked the wire up to a high-voltage power grid, and then submerged the whole thing in liquid nitrogen.

His skin instantly blistered and charred. The heat was so intense, so entirely beyond the scope of biological comprehension, that the fat beneath his skin rendered and boiled in a fraction of a second. Thick, sickening plumes of black smoke erupted from his forearms, filling his nose with the horrific, unforgettable stench of his own burning meat.

"Fuck! Fuck!" Sebastian yelled, his back arching as his knees buckled.

He tried to hold his ground, but his boots slipped on the liquid starlight. The pain was mind-breaking. It was a torrential, endless wave of sensory overload that slammed into his nervous system like a freight train.

He had deleted his nociception code weeks ago. He had literally uninstalled his ability to feel pain to cross the Bridge of Souls. But that was a localized UI edit. That was a trick played on his avatar’s operating system.

Down here, in the raw, uncompiled depths of the Mainframe, the server bypassed his avatar entirely. It was directly attacking the foundational concept of his existence. The pain wasn’t a digital notification; it was the actual, physical reality of his body being forcefully rejected by the universe.

Sebastian gritted his teeth so hard he tasted copper. The muscles in his forearms were literally turning to ash, the red, raw tissue flaking away to reveal the gleaming, wet white of his own bones.

Through the blinding haze of pure, unadulterated torture, a cold, terrifying realization finally washed over his highly optimized brain.

He suddenly understood why the Grand Archons didn’t have bodies. He understood why the creators of the game appeared as towering, faceless pillars of pure white light.

You couldn’t be human and hold admin privileges. You couldn’t have a beating heart, pumping lungs, and a fragile nervous system while actively holding the reins of reality. Human biology was fundamentally, mathematically incompatible with the sheer, infinite processing power required to rewrite the cosmos. To be a god, you had to be pure data. You had to shed the meat.

The System wasn’t just burning him to punish him. It was trying to forcefully format him. It was the ultimate, physical barrier of the Ethereal Plane. If you wanted to touch the source code, you had to leave your humanity at the door.

"No," Sebastian hissed, his silver-tinged eyes squeezing shut as another wave of impossible heat tore through his biceps. "I am not becoming a glowing flashlight for you. I am keeping my body."

His instincts screamed at him to pull his hands out. Every single survival mechanism encoded into his human DNA was begging him to retreat, to yank his arms away from the agonizing fire and cast a healing spell. The pain was so absolute it threatened to simply shut his brain down and plunge him into a permanent, shock-induced coma.

If he pulled back, the pain would stop. His Demigod aura would snap back into place, and his incredible regeneration stats would slowly rebuild his ruined arms. He could walk away. He could leave the Mainframe, go back to Sanctuary, and figure out another way. He could conquer a hundred more planets. He could build an empire.

But if he pulled his hands out now, the Spite Protocol would recognize the failed intrusion. It would instantly trigger. Valerie’s file would be permanently deleted, scattered into a billion untraceable fragments of junk data.

He would live, and she would die.

"Not today," Sebastian growled, his voice a distorted, ragged rasp that sounded barely human.

He didn’t pull his hands away. He pushed them deeper into the blinding, agonizing light of the code. He buried his burning, disintegrating fingers directly into the complex, swirling matrix of Valerie’s digital soul.

He felt the malicious, jagged red lines of the Spite Protocol wrapping tightly around her base files like a digital parasitic vine. It was pulsing, preparing to execute its lethal command.

Sebastian locked his grip on the code. He ignored the smell of his own burning flesh. He ignored the horrific sight of his muscle fibers turning into glowing embers and drifting away into the data sea.