*VWOOOM!*
A massive, suffocating wave of heavy gray energy exploded outward from the Warden. It didn’t travel like a shockwave. It moved at the speed of light, washing over the entire plateau of the black glass mountain in a fraction of a microsecond.
The moment the gray light hit Sebastian, the universe simply turned off.
"GAAAAAAH!"
The scream that tore out of Sebastian wasn’t a layered, distorted chorus of overlapping audio files. It was a raw, agonizing, completely human shriek of pure physical torment.
His majestic, terrifying eight-foot-tall avatar violently collapsed. The dark, bruised-purple error codes and jagged green wireframes that made up his glitch form didn’t fade; they were aggressively, forcefully deleted from reality. The cracked porcelain mask that covered his face shattered into a million useless gray pixels, blowing away in the dead air.
*BING! BING! BING!*
His pristine green Administrator UI flooded his vision with frantic, glaring red errors before the entire interface short-circuited.
[System Alert: Absolute Reality Anchor Deployed.]
[Status Effect: Total Magic Suppression. Conceptual Nullification.]
[Reality Rendering: OFFLINE.]
[Error Accumulation: OFFLINE.]
The blue and green holographic windows shattered like cheap glass, dissolving into a flat, dead gray hue before vanishing entirely.
Sebastian felt his body violently shrink, forcefully compressed back down into his normal, six-foot-two human meat-suit. The heavy, comforting hum of his infinite mana pool completely vanished. It was like someone had reached into his chest and violently ripped a pulsing, warm engine right out of his ribcage, leaving nothing but a hollow, agonizing void.
*CRASH!*
Without the magical enhancements supporting the impossible weight of the Earth Sword, the weapon suddenly felt like a literal ton of concrete. It slipped from his hands, slamming heavily onto the indestructible black glass and pinning the edge of his black tactical coat.
Sebastian’s knees buckled. He hit the floor hard, his bare hands slapping against the cold, smooth obsidian.
"Fuck... shit!" Sebastian gasped, his entire body convulsing.
He coughed violently, his chest heaving with desperate, ragged breaths. A thick splatter of liquid hit the black glass beneath his face.
It wasn’t black, oily digital sludge. It wasn’t green, pixelated static.
It was bright, crimson, actual human blood.
He stared at the red drops. The deletion of his nociception code—the hack that had kept him from feeling pain for months—was completely suppressed. The firewall was down. Every single phantom ache, every strained muscle, and every micro-fracture in his biological steel bones came rushing back with a vengeance.
It hurt. It hurt so incredibly bad that his vision swam with dark spots.
"Sebastian!"
Valerie’s voice broke through the ringing in his ears. He turned his head slightly, wincing as a sharp pain shot up his neck.
Hovering a few yards away, Valerie’s Astral Avatar was violently struggling. The gray wave of the Reality Anchor had hit her too, forcefully pushing her pristine blue Earth-mana back. She couldn’t enter the immediate radius of the plateau. The suppression field was acting like a solid wall, trapping her projection on the outer perimeter of the arena.
"I can’t... I can’t reach you!" Valerie cried out, slamming her glowing translucent fists against the invisible gray barrier. Sparks of blue and gray energy clashed violently. "The field is rejecting the astral tether! It’s completely dead space in there!"
"Stay... stay back, Princess," Sebastian wheezed, spitting another mouthful of warm, metallic-tasting blood onto the glass. "I got this."
He sounded terrible. He sounded like a normal guy who had just been thrown out of a moving car.
"PUNY," Goliath’s voice rumbled, shaking the floorboards.
The twenty-foot-tall Warden took a heavy, thudding step forward. The toxic green radiation bleeding off his depleted uranium armor hissed against the dead, magic-less air.
"THIS IS WHAT YOU TRULY ARE," Goliath mocked, looking down at the coughing, bleeding human on the floor. "WITHOUT YOUR HACKS. WITHOUT YOUR MALWARE. YOU ARE JUST FRAGILE, PATHETIC MEAT. YOU ARE A MISTAKE IN THE CODE, AND NOW YOU WILL BE DELETED BY PURE, UNADULTERATED FORCE."
Sebastian slowly placed his palms flat against the glass. He gritted his teeth, his jaw muscles bulging.
The magic was gone. His developer console was locked. He couldn’t drop a black hole on the giant’s head, and he couldn’t alter the gravity to crush the Warden’s knees.
But the Architects had made a massive, fundamental miscalculation.
They thought his power came entirely from the 10,000x Nexus Glitch. They thought he was just a clever hacker who relied on broken code to survive. They forgot about the thirty-percent physical synchronization that had permanently altered his base biology. They forgot that his muscles were still braided like biological steel cables, and his bones were still denser than titanium.
He didn’t need magic to break things.
"You know," Sebastian grunted, slowly pushing himself up to his feet. His knees trembled slightly, but he locked them into place. He wiped a streak of real, human blood from his chin with the back of his black leather glove. "I actually really liked that mask. It hid my pores."
He stood up to his full height. He looked incredibly small compared to the towering, heavily armored behemoth standing in front of him.
"But honestly?" Sebastian continued, his voice losing the ragged wheeze and settling into a cold, terrifyingly calm cadence. He cracked his neck, the heavy pop echoing sharply in the silent, magic-less arena. "It’s been a really long time since I got to just punch somebody in the face without doing a bunch of math first."
Goliath let out a harsh, grinding laugh. The sound was like a rockslide.
"YOU WILL SHATTER LIKE GLASS, INTRUDER."
Goliath reached down and ripped his colossal, dreadnought-sized hammer from the floor. The sheer kinetic weight of the weapon carved another jagged trench into the obsidian.
Sebastian didn’t reach for the Earth Sword. It was too heavy, too clumsy without his [Concept of Mass] to swing it at supersonic speeds. It was a liability now.
He left the sword on the ground and dropped his center of gravity into a loose, perfectly balanced Southpaw boxing stance. He kept his hands up, protecting his face. He felt the cold sweat dripping down his neck. He felt his heart hammering a frantic, completely human rhythm against his ribs.
He wasn’t a god anymore. He was just a hyper-optimized man trapped in a cage with a radioactive monster.
"Come on then, ugly," Sebastian smirked, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing into predatory slits. "Let’s see if you know how to actually fight, or if you just rely on your fancy armor."
Goliath roared, a deafening wave of acoustic pressure, and charged forward to turn the Anomaly into a red smear on the glass.
***
Goliath moved with terrifying, thundering speed. For a monster composed entirely of depleted uranium and toxic radiation, the Warden didn’t lack agility. Every massive step shook the black glass plateau, vibrating the shattered shards of obsidian into the air.
He closed the twenty-yard gap in two explosive strides.
"DIE, MEAT!" Goliath roared.
The twenty-foot-tall brute gripped the shaft of his colossal, dreadnought-sized hammer with both gauntlets. He didn’t swing it horizontally. He raised the massive block of rusted pig-iron high above his helmet and brought it down in a devastating, vertical execution strike aimed squarely at the top of Sebastian’s head.
The sheer kinetic force of the descending weapon created a localized vacuum. It sucked the air right out of Sebastian’s lungs.
Sebastian couldn’t cast [Heavenly Steps]. He couldn’t fold space to instantly materialize behind the giant. He had to rely entirely on his biological reflexes.
His thirty-percent physical synchronization fired. His biological steel muscles coiled, and he violently threw himself to the right, diving into a frantic, incredibly ungraceful combat roll.
*KRA-DOOOOM!*
The hammer slammed into the indestructible black glass floor exactly where Sebastian had been standing a millisecond prior. The impact was an apocalyptic explosion of pure, unadulterated physics. A massive crater instantly pulverized into the summit, and a shockwave of displaced air and razor-sharp glass shrapnel blasted outward.
Sebastian skidded across the smooth floor, his black tactical suit tearing as jagged shards of obsidian sliced into his shoulder.
"Fuck!" Sebastian yelled, gritting his teeth.
Actual, searing pain flared in his deltoid. He felt a warm trickle of red blood seep into the fabric of his suit. It was a sharp, burning reminder that he was entirely mortal. One clean hit from that hammer wouldn’t just drop his health bar; it would literally turn his body into a Jackson Pollock painting.
"Sebastian, keep moving! He’s recovering his stance!" Valerie’s voice screamed from the outer perimeter, her blue hands pressed flat against the invisible gray wall of the suppression field.
Sebastian scrambled to his feet. He didn’t have time to check his wound.
Goliath ripped the massive hammer out of the crater, completely unfazed by the sheer weight of the weapon. The Warden spun on his heel, using the momentum of pulling the hammer free to immediately launch into a wide, sweeping horizontal backhand aimed at Sebastian’s ribs.