He didn’t pull away. He dug his glitching, malware-soaked fingers directly into the flawless golden metal of the cuffs.
"Multiplier!" Sebastian roared.
He forcefully rammed the 10,000x Nexus Glitch straight down into his hands. He took the horrific, corrosive mixture of absolute entropy and raw software error and multiplied its potency by ten thousand lifetimes.
The clash between the ultimate malware and the perfect Admin-code was deafening.
*SKREEEEEECH!*
It sounded like a massive circular saw biting into a sheet of solid titanium. Bright, blinding sparks of conflicting data erupted from the contact point, showering the black glass plateau in a deadly rain of red and gold pixels.
"Sebastian, your hands!" Valerie yelled, her astral form flaring with desperate blue light as she watched his fingers literally begin to un-render from the sheer feedback loop.
"I’m fine!" Sebastian lied through gritted teeth, pushing even harder. "Just a little... software update!"
The golden cuffs aggressively fought back. Pulses of pure, sterile white light surged through the chains, attempting to scrub Sebastian’s corrupted code away. It was a brutal tug-of-war between the creator’s absolute logic and the Anomaly’s absolute chaos.
But the [Error] was too dense. It was fueled by the raw Source Code of four deleted planets.
Slowly, agonizingly, the math began to fail.
Right beneath Sebastian’s glitching, bleeding fingers, the flawless, blinding gold of the cuffs began to blister.
*HSSSSS.*
The pristine metal turned a sickly, bruised purple. Then, the purple rapidly faded into a dull, ugly, flaky orange.
"Impossible," Prometheus gasped, his massive 8-bit wireframe body shuddering in absolute shock. "You are... you are altering the foundational syntax..."
"I told you," Sebastian grunted, sweat pouring down his face beneath the mask. "Rust is just a matter of time and bad maintenance."
The rot aggressively spread. The orange rust crawled up the thick links of the chain, completely eating away the glowing Admin-runes that had held the giant captive for millennia. The heavy, oppressive hum of the Core OS’s authority sputtered, skipped a beat, and entirely died out.
Sebastian didn’t let up. He poured another wave of 10,000x multiplied [Concept of Decay] into the brittle metal.
*CRACK!*
The massive, indestructible cuff binding Prometheus’s right wrist gave way. It didn’t just break; it completely disintegrated. The rusted iron crumbled into a pile of fine, gray ash that blew across the dark glass plateau in the silent, dead air.
Sebastian ripped his hands away, collapsing backward onto his ass. He panted heavily, his chest heaving. He looked down at his hands. They were smoking, covered in jagged green static, and missing chunks of digital flesh, but his passive regeneration was already kicking in, slowly stitching the code back together.
"One down," Sebastian wheezed, shaking out his tingling fingers. "Three to go."
He didn’t waste any time resting. He crawled over to the left wrist, slapped his hands onto the glowing gold, and repeated the agonizing process.
*SKREEECH! CRUNCH!*
The left cuff rusted and turned to ash.
He moved to the massive chains wrapped around the giant’s ankles, ignoring the searing pain in his forearms as the malware chewed on his own biology just as hard as it chewed on the chains.
*SNAP! SHATTER!*
The ankle restraints blew apart into gray dust.
Finally, Sebastian stood up, stumbling slightly as a wave of dizziness hit him. He walked over to the massive, glowing collar locked tightly around Prometheus’s wireframe throat.
"Try not to swallow any of this," Sebastian advised the giant.
He plunged his hands into the golden collar. He unleashed the final, massive payload of Error and Decay.
*KRA-BOOM!*
The collar violently exploded into a cloud of rusted flakes.
Prometheus was free.
For a long, heavy moment, the First Admin didn’t move. The giant just lay there on the black glass, as if his code couldn’t comprehend the sudden lack of restriction. Then, slowly, the massive, 8-bit entity pushed his hands against the floor.
The entire mountain shook as Prometheus sat up.
He rubbed his blocky, pixelated wrists, staring at the empty space where the unbreakable chains had been. He looked down at the tiny, ragged human in the black leather coat.
"You broke the unbreakable," Prometheus whispered, his voice a low, booming hum of pure awe. "You bypassed the absolute parameters of the operating system. You truly are a virus."
"I prefer ’freelance troubleshooter’," Sebastian said, wiping a streak of black blood off his visor. He looked up at the towering, fifty-foot giant. "So, you’re off the leash. What’s the plan, granddad? You going to help me burn this router down, or are you just going to sit there and enjoy the view?"
Prometheus slowly stood up to his full, staggering height. The green light of his wireframe body cast long, eerie shadows across the plateau.
"I cannot fight the Core OS, Sebastian," Prometheus rumbled sadly. "My code is too old. My rendering engine cannot process the combat algorithms of the modern executioners. But I can guide you. I can show you where the absolute center of the Mainframe lies."
"That works for me," Sebastian nodded, cracking his neck. "Just point me at the guy in charge, and I’ll do the punching."
Valerie floated down, her blue light offering a stark contrast to the green giant. "Sebastian, we need to hurry. My physical body is burning up. The longer we stay here, the harder it gets to keep the tether stable."
"I know, Seattle," Sebastian said softly, reaching out to gently squeeze her translucent shoulder. "We’re moving. Let’s go."
But the Ethereal Plane was never going to make it that easy.
*BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!*
Before Sebastian could take a single step toward the edge of the plateau, his green UI violently exploded with massive, flashing red critical alerts. The noise wasn’t just in his head. The entire black glass mountain began to scream with the deafening sound of a multiversal alarm system.
[CRITICAL SECURITY BREACH!]
[FOUNDATIONAL ASSET ’PROMETHEUS’ UNBOUND.]
[INITIATING OMEGA-LEVEL CONTAINMENT.]
Sebastian cursed loudly. "Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me. I didn’t disable the alarm on the cuffs?"
"You didn’t break a lock, Anomaly," Prometheus warned, his blocky eyes widening in sudden, terrifying realization. "You broke a load-bearing pillar of Tartarus. You tripped the final breaker."
The perfectly smooth, indestructible black glass floor beneath their feet began to violently tremble.
It wasn’t a minor earthquake. It felt like the entire mountain was trying to tear itself apart from the inside out.
"Hold on!" Sebastian roared, grabbing Valerie’s astral hand and anchoring his heavy boots to the shaking floor with a massive spike of his [Concept of Mass].
Right in the absolute center of the arena, the glass violently bulged upward.
"Here comes the landlord," Sebastian muttered, staring at the rising glass, fully prepared for whatever apocalyptic nightmare the Core OS was about to spit out.
—-
The summit of the black glass mountain was actively tearing itself to pieces.
*RUMBLE... CRACK!*
The deafening sound of splitting obsidian echoed through the cold, dead air of the High-Security Ward. The perfectly smooth, polished plateau that had served as Prometheus’s eternal prison was buckling violently upward. Massive, jagged shards of black glass the size of city buses exploded into the air, raining down like deadly shrapnel.
Sebastian didn’t run. He instantly threw his body in front of Valerie’s flickering Astral Avatar, raising his right arm to form a localized, microscopic [Micro-Deflection] shield.
*PING! SMASH!*
Heavy chunks of shattered glass bounced harmlessly off his invisible barrier, completely pulverized by the kinetic redirection.
"Sebastian, what the hell is happening?!" Valerie yelled over the roaring destruction, her hands covering her ears. Her blue Earth-mana violently spiked as she fought the intense, localized gravity fluctuations tearing through the arena.
"I think we woke the dog’s owner!" Sebastian shouted back, his silver-tinged void eyes locked perfectly on the massive, expanding crater in the center of the plateau.
*BING! BING! BING!*
His green, corrupted Administrator UI was completely flooding with red, flashing warning prompts. The system wasn’t just sending an alarm; it was practically screaming in absolute, unadulterated panic.
[WARDEN PROTOCOL INITIATED.]
[UNAUTHORIZED ASSET REMOVAL DETECTED. DEPLOYING TARTARUS OVERSEER.]
[THREAT LEVEL: ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM.]
Prometheus, the colossal 8-bit wireframe giant, stumbled backward. The ancient creator’s green pixels flickered erratically, a deep, rumbling sound of genuine terror vibrating from his chest.
"Run, Anomaly!" Prometheus boomed, pointing a blocky, glowing finger at the crater. "You cannot fight this! That is not a digital construct! That is a hyper-physical rendering!"
"I don’t run from pop-up ads," Sebastian growled.
He stood his ground, dropping his center of gravity into a perfect, loose combat stance. He kept his hands free, ready to summon a localized black hole or an ocean of [Error] at a moment’s notice.
From the absolute depths of the shattered crater, a hand reached out.
It wasn’t a hand made of blinding white light like the Cleaners or the Archons. It wasn’t a hand made of shifting black static. It was a massive, incredibly thick gauntlet forged from dull, heavy, sickly-green metal.