The gauntlet slammed down onto the edge of the crater. The sheer, impossible weight of the hand caused the indestructible black glass beneath it to instantly spider-web and crush into fine powder.
*CRUNCH.*
Slowly, the rest of the nightmare pulled itself out of the mountain’s core.
Sebastian’s eyes widened behind his cracked porcelain mask. He had seen a lot of horrifying things in the Ethereal Plane. He had fought World Bosses, cybernetic juggernauts, and giant centipedes made of rusted server racks.
But the entity climbing out of the crater was on an entirely different level.
It was a giant, but not as tall as Prometheus. It stood roughly twenty feet high. It didn’t look like a sleek, high-tech robot or a magical deity. It looked like a walking, apocalyptic tank designed by a psychopath who loved blunt force trauma.
The entity was completely encased in massive, interlocking plates of dull, heavy metal that radiated a terrifying, toxic green aura. Thick, cruel spikes jutted out from its broad shoulders and massive knee joints. It didn’t have a face. Its head was just a heavy, sloped iron dome completely bolted to its chest plate, featuring a single, narrow horizontal slit that glowed with a burning, hateful orange light.
"System, give me the stats," Sebastian muttered.
[Entity Identified: Goliath]
[Class: Warden of Tartarus (Apex Physical Enforcer)]
[Level: 100 (Hard Cap)]
"Level one hundred," Sebastian whispered. A cold, heavy knot formed in his non-existent stomach. "Well, that’s not ideal."
But the level wasn’t the scariest part of the readout.
[Status: Magic Immunity Absolute. Conceptual Nullification Active.]
[Armor Composition: Compressed Depleted Uranium.]
"Depleted uranium," Valerie gasped, reading the prompt over his shoulder. "Sebastian, that’s not digital code! That’s actual, base-reality heavy metal! It’s hyper-dense!"
"Yeah, I can feel it," Sebastian grunted, his boots feeling suddenly very heavy.
The sheer physical mass of Goliath was actively warping the localized gravity of the plateau. The air around the Warden shimmered and distorted, the toxic green radiation bleeding off the heavy metal armor and poisoning the sterile environment.
Goliath didn’t roar. He didn’t monologue about the Grand Design or demand their surrender.
The Warden simply reached his massive, spiked gauntlet back down into the crater. He grabbed something heavy.
*SKREEEECH!*
With a brutal, effortless heave, Goliath hauled his weapon out of the hole.
It was a hammer. But calling it a hammer was like calling a hurricane a light breeze. The weapon was the size of a Vanguard dreadnought’s engine block. The head of the hammer was a solid, rectangular slab of dark, rusted pig-iron, bolted to a thick, hydraulic-powered shaft. The weapon was so impossibly heavy that as Goliath dragged it out of the crater, it carved a deep, jagged trench straight through the unbreakable black glass floor.
"Finally, a guy who actually lifts," Sebastian deadpanned, though his heart wasn’t really in the joke.
Goliath took a heavy, thudding step forward.
*THOOM.*
The entire mountain shook.
"INTRUDERS," Goliath’s voice rumbled. It wasn’t telepathic. It didn’t broadcast into their minds. It was a raw, physical acoustic wave that ripped out of the narrow slit in his helmet, vibrating so forcefully it actually cracked the glass near Sebastian’s boots. "YOU HAVE BREACHED CONTAINMENT. YOU HAVE UNBOUND THE FIRST. YOU WILL BE FLATTENED."
"You guys have exactly one setting, and it is incredibly boring," Sebastian sighed.
He didn’t want to get into a physical brawl with a guy wearing armor made of literal radioactive heavy metal. He raised his right hand, his fingers crackling with the chaotic, dark purple and green static of his [Error Accumulation].
"Let’s see how much your depleted uranium likes a little bit of malware," Sebastian sneered.
He didn’t hold back. He channeled a massive, highly concentrated burst of 80% Error directly into his palm and forcefully fired it at the towering Warden. The blast of pure, corrupted static tore through the air like a jagged lightning bolt, aiming squarely for the narrow orange slit in Goliath’s helmet.
*FWOOSH!*
The malware struck the massive chest plate.
It didn’t bubble. It didn’t melt the armor. It didn’t forcefully rewrite the entity’s code.
*BZZT.*
The blast of static simply sparked weakly against the dull green metal and instantly fizzled out, entirely absorbed by the sheer physical density of the depleted uranium.
"What?" Sebastian blinked in genuine shock.
[Attack Nullified. Target possesses ’Conceptual Nullification’. Pure physical mass completely grounds external software alterations.]
"He’s an analog clock in a digital world, Boss!" Corbin’s panicked voice screamed through the comm-link from the Rusthound below. "He doesn’t run on code! He runs on raw, stupid, unadulterated physics! Your magic won’t work on him!"
Goliath let out a low, rumbling chuckle that sounded like rocks grinding together inside a cement mixer.
"YOUR TRICKS ARE MEANINGLESS," Goliath boomed.
The Warden didn’t walk. He charged.
For a creature weighing hundreds of tons, Goliath moved with terrifying, explosive momentum. He closed the fifty-yard gap in three massive, ground-shattering strides. He gripped the shaft of the dreadnought-sized hammer with both gauntlets, twisting his colossal torso and bringing the weapon around in a devastating, horizontal sweep.
The hammer tore through the air, creating a localized vacuum that sucked the breath right out of Sebastian’s digital lungs.
"Valerie, move!" Sebastian roared.
He didn’t try to block. If he tried to parry a chunk of iron the size of a house swung by a Level 100 physical god, his biological steel arms would instantly snap like dry twigs.
Sebastian shoved Valerie’s Astral Avatar backward and dove flat onto the black glass floor.
*WHOOOOSH!*
The massive block of pig-iron sailed mere inches over his back. The sheer wind pressure from the swing ripped a massive tear in the back of his black leather coat.
The hammer didn’t hit Sebastian, but it hit the ground.
*KRA-DOOOOM!*
The impact was apocalyptic. The unbreakable black glass of the plateau completely exploded. A massive, fifty-foot-wide crater was instantly pulverized into the summit. The shockwave picked Sebastian up and threw him violently through the air like a discarded ragdoll.
He skipped across the jagged glass, tumbling hard before digging his heavy combat boots in to arrest his momentum.
He popped back up to his feet, panting heavily. The red warning runes on his chest flared brightly as his body desperately tried to process the kinetic shock.
Goliath didn’t even pause to admire the crater. The massive Warden effortlessly hoisted the colossal hammer back onto his shoulder, his glowing orange visor locking onto Sebastian’s new coordinates.
"YOU CANNOT DODGE FOREVER, GLITCH," Goliath rumbled, raising the hammer high above his head for an overhead strike.
Sebastian spat a thick glob of black digital blood onto the shattered glass. He looked up at the towering, twenty-foot-tall physical nightmare. Magic was useless. Hacks were useless. The server had literally sent a blunt instrument to fix a software problem.
"Fine," Sebastian whispered, his pitch-black eyes narrowing into dangerous, unyielding slits. He reached into his bottomless inventory. "You want to play baseball? Let’s play baseball."
He curled his fingers, and the massive, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword materialized in his grip. It was time to see whose physics hit harder.
——
Sebastian stood in the center of the shattered black glass plateau, his massive, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword gripped tightly in both hands. The weapon was a brutal, ugly slab of rusted rebar and heavy stone, but in the hands of the Sovereign of Laws, it usually hit with the force of a falling meteor.
Towering twenty feet above him, Goliath didn’t look impressed. The Warden of Tartarus was an apocalyptic nightmare of depleted uranium and toxic green radiation.
"Let’s see whose physics hit harder," Sebastian muttered, his distorted, metallic voice vibrating behind the cracked porcelain mask of his Glitch avatar.
He bent his knees, fully preparing to channel an ungodly amount of his [Concept of Mass] into the blade and swing it straight through the giant’s thick metal kneecaps. He wanted to shatter the brute’s legs and watch the Level 100 enforcer topple like a felled redwood.
But Goliath didn’t raise his dreadnought-sized hammer to strike. The massive, armored giant simply planted the head of the colossal weapon onto the obsidian floor.
*BOOM!*
The impact sent a tremor through the mountain. Goliath reached up with his free, spiked gauntlet and slammed a heavy fist directly against the center of his own chest plate.
"YOU RELY ON BROKEN CODE, ANOMALY," Goliath’s voice rumbled. The sound wasn’t telepathic; it was a raw, deafening acoustic wave that blasted out of the single orange slit in his helmet. "YOU MANIPULATE THE FOUNDATION. YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE A GOD BECAUSE YOU HOLD THE KEYS. BUT HERE, THE DOORS ARE WELDED SHUT."
A glowing, heavy gray light began to bleed out from the seams of Goliath’s depleted uranium armor.
Sebastian’s silver-tinged void eyes narrowed. He had seen that dull, lifeless gray light before. He had seen it in the hands of the European Warlord, Caesar, right before the idiot inverted gravity on himself. But that had been a tiny, portable artifact.
This was different. This wasn’t an artifact. It was a localized, hard-coded foundational lock.
"ABSOLUTE REALITY ANCHOR," Goliath boomed.