It didn’t burn. It didn’t feel like the boiling acid vats of the Vanguard Syndicate or the scorching, bloody magma of Tartarus. It was an absolute, terrifying numbness. The white light was pure, unadulterated formatting code. The moment it touched the outer layers of his giant black leather coat, it didn’t just damage the fabric—it explicitly told the universe that the fabric had never existed in the first place.
His massive arms plunged into the white wave. Instantly, the black static making up his forearms was wiped clean, replaced by a smooth, featureless void.
"Oh, you have got to be shitting me!" Sebastian yelled, his eyes widening behind his continent-sized porcelain mask. "This is the worst exfoliation treatment I’ve ever had! You’re taking off way too much off the top!"
He couldn’t just stand there and tank the hit. The Genesis Protocol was erasing millions of his polygons every single microsecond. If he did nothing, his planetary-sized avatar would be completely formatted back to a Level 1 base file in less than a heartbeat, and the wave would roll right over him to swallow Earth.
He had to fight math with math.
"System!" Sebastian bellowed, his voice echoing in his own head. "Push the compiler to absolute maximum! Do not stop rendering!"
He forcefully grabbed his 10,000x Nexus Glitch and tied it directly to his avatar’s base rendering speed.
He didn’t have magic to fight this. He only had fuel. Deep inside his chest, the ten million units of raw Source Code he had violently harvested from the four dead planets burned like a contained supernova. He tapped the keg.
*BING! BING! BING!*
His corrupted, green Administrator UI exploded with cascading holographic windows. They were so massive they blotted out the stars.
[CRITICAL ALERT: Catastrophic Code Deletion Detected.]
[Executing Emergency Re-Render.]
[Applying Multiplier: x10,000.]
[Source Code Reserves: 9,985,000 Units Remaining...]
It became a brutal, unimaginably agonizing loop of destruction and creation.
The white wave washed over his giant right shoulder, silently erasing thousands of tons of his biological steel muscles into gray nothingness. A millisecond later, his [Code Compiler] violently shoved a massive chunk of raw Source Code into the gap, rendering the missing flesh and black leather back into existence with a jagged, explosive burst of green static.
*CRACK! SQUELCH! BZZZZT!*
He was being deleted and reborn ten thousand times a second.
The pain was mind-breaking. Even though he had uninstalled his nociception code, the sheer, catastrophic strain on his digital soul bypassed his physical nerves entirely. It felt like his ego was being repeatedly shoved through a cosmic meat grinder, pulverized, and glued back together with duct tape and spite.
"Is that all you’ve got?!" Sebastian snarled, his planetary jaw muscles bulging as he dug his massive combat boots into the invisible bedrock of space. "I’ve had worse hangovers! Come on, you sterile little freaks! Push harder!"
*VMMMMMMMMM.*
The Genesis Protocol answered by accelerating. The resonant, heavy hum of the formatting wave grew louder, pressing against him with the relentless, unyielding weight of an entire operating system trying to reboot.
Sebastian’s arms were shaking. They were a chaotic, flickering mess of white erasure and violent green reconstruction. Thick, oily black tears wept from the empty eye sockets of his cracked mask, raining down into the dark abyss like massive rivers of sludge.
He glanced down toward his right heel.
Tucked safely within a tiny, localized pocket of his [Gravity Domain] was the floating slab of shattered obsidian. Huddled on that rock were the thousands of naked, heavily scarred prisoners who had managed to escape the Tartarus wipe. They were staring up at him in absolute, paralyzed awe. To them, he was a dark, bleeding god physically holding back the end of the world.
"Keep your heads down!" Sebastian roared down at them, a massive droplet of black static splashing harmlessly against the invisible shield protecting their rock. "I’m not paying for your therapy if you watch this!"
He turned his masked face back toward the blinding white light.
He was holding the line, but the math was incredibly, terrifyingly grim.
He pulled up his resource monitor in the corner of his flashing vision.
[Source Code Reserves: 8,400,000 Units Remaining...]
[Source Code Reserves: 7,900,000 Units Remaining...]
The fuel was burning too fast. The sheer volume of data required to constantly re-render a planet-sized body against a multiversal formatting wave was astronomical. He was chewing through the harvested hearts of dead worlds just to buy a few extra seconds.
"Okay, this is getting a little expensive," Sebastian grunted, spitting a massive glob of pixelated red blood into the white wave. It vanished instantly.
He leaned forward, throwing his broad, static-filled shoulders directly into the light. He spread his arms out as wide as he physically could, acting as a literal, unyielding dam. The white light crashed against his chest, spilling around his sides in massive, glowing arcs, but it couldn’t penetrate his center mass.
He looked over his shoulder.
Millions of miles away, completely untouched by the sterile white horror of the Genesis Protocol, the tiny, fragile golden globe of Earth hovered in the dark.
The Sovereign’s Aegis was holding. Inside that golden bubble, the refugees of Sanctuary were probably eating terrible synthetic rations. Galleon was probably swearing at a broken pipe. And Valerie was lying on that cold marble altar, bleeding from her nose just to keep the lights on for him.
"I’m keeping the bugs out of the yard, Princess," Sebastian whispered, his voice incredibly soft despite his colossal size. "Just like I promised."
*BZZZZT!*
A massive, jagged error string violently tore across his chest. The white light chewed a hole straight through his sternum, exposing the swirling, raw green data of his core files.
"GAAAAAH!" Sebastian screamed as the compiler forcefully slammed a million new polygons into the wound, stitching his chest back together with a searing, explosive burst of heat.
[WARNING: Rendering Lag Detected.]
[Source Code Reserves: 5,100,000 Units Remaining...]
He was lagging.
The 10,000x multiplier was working perfectly, but his own, human consciousness was struggling to process the commands fast enough. The sheer, overwhelming trauma of dying and resurrecting thousands of times a second was slowing his reaction time down.
"I can do this all day!" Sebastian lied through his teeth, his arms trembling violently as he pushed against the wave. "I’ve got infinite lives, you stupid machine! You’re going to have to unplug the wall to get rid of me!"
He braced his boots harder, his heavy, bruised-purple silhouette cutting a jagged, defiant shadow against the blinding perfection of the end of the world. He didn’t care if he ran out of fuel. He didn’t care if he dissolved into a million pieces of gray dust.
He was the Sovereign of Laws. And he had absolutely no intention of letting the universe take his home.
—
Sebastian hovered in the Juncture, an impossibly massive, pitch-black shadow violently clashing against the infinite white wall of the Genesis Protocol. The deafening, grinding noise of his own body being deleted and re-rendered echoed across the void like a chainsaw chewing through a solid block of iron.
But the white light was moving too fast.
*BING!*
[CRITICAL ALERT: Source Code Reserves Depleted Below Safe Threshold.]
[Source Code Reserves: 2,300,000 Units Remaining...]
[Warning: Unable to sustain planetary rendering volume.]
"No, no, no, don’t you dare downsize me!" Sebastian roared, his voice cracking with pure, unfiltered panic. "Override! Keep the scale!"
He tried to force the [Code Compiler] to maintain his planetary size, but there simply wasn’t enough fuel left in the tank. The harvested cores of the four dead worlds were practically running on fumes.
With a sickening, heavy *SQUELCH*, his massive avatar began to violently shrink.
He didn’t want to get smaller. Shrinking meant exposing more of the void behind him to the formatting wave. But the system aggressively forced the compression. He shrank from the size of a small planet down to the size of a moon. Then down to the size of a continent.
As he shrank, the blinding white light of the Genesis Protocol spilled further around his sides, creeping dangerously close to the trajectory of the golden sphere of Earth hovering millions of miles away.
"Fuck! Get back here!" Sebastian yelled, desperately throwing his shrinking, glitching arms out wide to catch the edges of the light.
His left arm, composed of bruised-purple malware and green wireframes, plunged into the wave. Because his rendering speed was lagging from the lack of Source Code, the white light ate through his forearm faster than he could replace it.
*FWIP.*
His massive left hand simply ceased to exist.
"Ah, shit, not again!" Sebastian grunted, staggering backward in the void. "I just got that arm back, you sterile assholes!"
He was losing ground. The absolute, unyielding pressure of the formatting wave was pushing his shrinking body backward. His boots skidded against the empty space, leaving trails of sparking red error codes in his wake.
And then, the worst possible thing happened.