But he also knew that if those millions of Sanitizers finished wiping out the prisoners, they would immediately turn their glowing, faceless heads toward the black glass mountain. He didn’t want to fight a million Level 90 security guards while trying to walk across a narrow bridge of light.
He needed a distraction. A massive, server-lagging distraction.
"You know, Princess," Sebastian said, his voice dropping into a dark, metallic hum. "I really hate it when upper management brings in scabs to break up a union strike."
He let go of Valerie’s hand for a split second. He slammed both of his black-gloved palms together, interlacing his fingers.
"System," Sebastian commanded.
*BING!*
His green, corrupted Administrator UI expanded across his vision, forcefully pushing the red warning screens out of the way. He bypassed his massive, apocalyptic combat laws. He didn’t need a black hole. He needed hardware.
He opened his [Code Compiler] and accessed his memory cache. He searched for the most basic, garbage-tier items he had ever looted back in the tutorial zone.
[Item Selected: Basic Iron Broadsword (Tier 0)]
[Item Selected: Standard Kinetic Rifle (Tier 1)]
[Item Selected: Rusted Spiked Mace (Tier 0)]
They were trash. Weapons that a Level 5 player would sell to a vendor for two copper coins. They had terrible durability, awful damage scaling, and zero magical enchantments.
But against enemies that relied on pure, sterile logic, brute physical mass was a highly effective virus.
"You can’t shield them all, Anomaly," Prometheus warned, his deep voice vibrating the glass. "Your localized reality edits cannot stretch across an entire dimension. The rendering load will unmake your physical vessel."
"I’m not going to shield them, granddad," Sebastian smirked behind his mask. "I’m going to arm them."
Sebastian fed a massive, blinding chunk of the raw Source Code he had harvested from the dead planets directly into the [Code Compiler].
"Multiplier," Sebastian snarled, the red error runes carved into his chest flaring with a violent, searing heat.
The 10,000x Nexus Glitch woke up like a starving beast. But Sebastian didn’t stop at ten thousand. He kept holding the digital throttle down, pouring raw, unadulterated planetary fuel into the generation command.
[Action Registered: Compile Matter.]
[Applying Multiplier: x10,000...]
[Warning: Source Code Overload. Multiplier scaling...]
[x1,000,000...]
[x1,000,000,000...]
[x1,000,000,000,000!]
"Holy shit, Seattle!" Valerie gasped, stepping back as a localized hurricane of displaced air exploded outward from Sebastian’s body.
"DELIVERY!" Sebastian roared, his voice magically amplified to boom across the fiery expanse of Tartarus like a thunderclap.
The blood-red sky above the dimension suddenly turned a dull, heavy gray.
It wasn’t a cloud. It was physical matter forcefully rendering into existence by the trillions.
*WHOOOSH!*
The sky literally began to rain steel.
It was an impossible, breathtaking visual. Trillions of heavy, perfectly balanced iron swords, dark metal kinetic rifles, and jagged spiked maces plummeted from the heavens. The sheer volume of the rendering caused the Ethereal Plane’s physics engine to violently stutter.
*CLANG! CLATTER! CRASH!*
The weapons hit the hot, porous red stone of the canyon floor in a deafening, metallic downpour. They bounced off the rusted iron spires. They splashed into the boiling magma rivers. They piled up in massive, jagged heaps of steel and wood right at the feet of the terrified, naked prisoners.
A heavy iron broadsword plummeted from the sky and jammed itself tip-first into the rock right next to a cowering, scarred Orc player.
*SHING!*
The Orc flinched, throwing his arms over his head. When he didn’t die, he slowly opened his bloodshot eyes. He stared at the dull, rusted iron hilt of the sword sitting inches from his face.
All across the dimension, the exact same scene played out.
Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and beast-men looked at the piles of weaponry that had just miraculously dropped out of the sky.
"Look at the sky!" a human Rogue shouted, pointing up at the black glass mountain.
Millions of eyes turned upward. Through the hazy, ash-choked air, they saw the towering, glitching silhouette of Sebastian standing at the absolute peak. The green static and bruised-purple code radiating from his body acted as a massive, unmissable beacon.
Sebastian didn’t give an inspiring, heroic speech. He didn’t tell them they were fighting for freedom or justice. He knew exactly what these people were. They were gamers, warlords, and survivors who had been pushed past the breaking point.
"THEY TOOK YOUR LOOT!" Sebastian’s voice thundered, echoing with overlapping, distorted static. "THEY TOOK YOUR LEVELS! THEY TURNED YOU INTO BATTERIES!"
He pointed a jagged, black-gloved finger directly at the descending army of pristine white Sanitizers.
"THERE’S THE MANAGEMENT! GO GET YOUR FUCKING REFUND!"
For one long, agonizing second, the silence hung heavy in the hot air.
Then, the Orc player wrapped his massive, pixelated hand around the hilt of the iron broadsword. He ripped it out of the stone with a sharp, grating sound. He looked up at the flawless, faceless white angels gliding down toward him.
The Orc didn’t scream a battle cry. He just let out a wet, guttural roar of pure, unadulterated hatred.
"KILL THEM!" the Orc bellowed, charging forward.
"TEAR THEM APART!"
"BURN THE SYSTEM!"
The riot didn’t just ignite; it exploded.
A trillion hands reached down into the dirt and grabbed the steel. The terrified, cowering victims vanished in a microsecond, replaced entirely by a localized tsunami of psychotic, heavily armed vengeance.
They didn’t care that the weapons were Tier 0 garbage. They didn’t care that they had no armor or magic. They had pure, unfiltered numbers, and they had a thousand years of pent-up, agonizing rage.
"Oh, this is going to be incredibly messy," Sebastian muttered, crossing his arms and leaning his weight on one leg.
"You’re a maniac," Valerie breathed, floating up next to him. But a fierce, triumphant smile was spreading across her glowing blue face. "You just turned the entire prison population into a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack."
"Exactly," Sebastian smirked beneath his cracked porcelain mask. "Let’s see the Core OS process a trillion simultaneous melee swings. The lag is going to be glorious."
Down in the valley, the first wave of white-light Sanitizers hit the ground. They raised their glowing executioner’s blades, fully expecting to calmly and cleanly erase the unarmed prisoners.
They were brutally, catastrophically mistaken.
The ultimate, multiversal prison riot had officially begun.
—-
The clash was an absolute, visually nauseating collision of opposites.
On one side, the Core OS Sanitizers descended with flawless, mechanical grace. They were entities of pure, blinding white hard-light, possessing no faces, no voices, and no capacity for fear. They were moving lines of anti-virus code designed to sanitize corrupted sectors.
On the other side was a trillion-strong mob of naked, bleeding, heavily scarred players and NPCs armed with cheap iron and raw spite.
*CRASH! SQUELCH!*
The vanguard of the Sanitizers landed on the red stone floor. A towering white angel swung its glowing blade in a perfect horizontal arc, instantly slicing through the torsos of five charging human players. The players didn’t even have time to scream before their avatars burst into gray, un-rendered pixels.
But for every five players the Sanitizer deleted, five hundred more leaped directly onto its back.
"Get him down!" a half-flayed Elven mage shrieked, entirely abandoning her useless spell-casting class to swing a heavy, rusted spiked mace directly into the back of the angel’s knee.
*CLANG!*
The iron mace didn’t do much damage to the hard-light code, but the sheer, localized physical mass of the weapon forced the entity to stagger.
Before the Sanitizer could correct its balance, the massive Orc player vaulted off a pile of red rocks. He didn’t swing his broadsword; he just threw his entire, heavy biological weight directly onto the faceless entity’s chest, tackling it to the hot dirt.
"I’LL EAT YOUR FUCKING CODE!" the Orc roared, spit and blood flying from his lips.
He didn’t bother using the blade. He reversed his grip and repeatedly smashed the heavy, iron pommel of the broadsword directly into the pristine white dome of the Sanitizer’s face.
*WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!*
The flawless white light flickered, sputtered, and violently burst into a shower of white sparks. The entity’s logic gates completely crashed under the relentless, unyielding blunt force trauma. It dissolved into a cloud of harmless white pixels, leaving the Orc kneeling in the dirt, panting heavily.
"They can die!" the Orc bellowed, holding his bloody iron sword high. "THE MACHINES CAN BLEED!"
That single shout acted like a spark in a powder keg.
The hesitation among the prisoners completely vanished. The fear instilled by millennia of torture was instantly violently overwritten by the intoxicating, addictive high of revenge.
*RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!*
The deafening roar of automatic gunfire echoed across the fiery valleys as thousands of players figured out how to use the basic kinetic rifles Sebastian had dropped. The air was suddenly thick with heavy tungsten slugs.
The bullets didn’t have magical armor-piercing enchantments. They were just heavy pieces of metal moving very fast. But when a hundred thousand bullets hit a single, perfect hard-light entity at the same time, the sheer volume of kinetic data completely overwhelmed the entity’s rendering engine.