Declan stood on the high stone balcony of the central keep. He rested his hands heavily on the cold iron railing and looked out over his newly expanded territory. He took in the sheer mathematically impossible scale of what he had just pulled off.
Sector 6 was officially his. It wasn’t a ruined military zone anymore. It wasn’t a hazardous wasteland filled with the rotting corpses of corporate mercenaries.
The massive Abyssal Warp-Gate and the Sovereign Root Authority token had forcefully overwritten the game’s terrain in a matter of seconds. The area was now a sprawling ten-kilometer extension of the Iron Bastion.
Sleek and perfectly smooth black stone paving stretched out all the way to the distant horizon. Towering gothic spires had forcefully replaced the shattered white corporate bunkers. The toxic and burning atmosphere had been completely pushed away by his clean purple energy dome.
He didn’t have to fight a single war for it. He didn’t have to rally troops or lay a bloody siege to a fortress like he has always done.
He just dropped a highly corrupted piece of developer code on the ground. He let the system panic as it frantically rewrote the entire regional map to accommodate his unyielding administrative demands.
"I need to put something in all this empty space," Declan muttered to himself.
He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his black Predator’s Coat. Having a massive backyard was nice, but empty real estate didn’t generate revenue. And Warlords needed revenue.
He opened his digital inventory with a quick mental command. The glowing blue interface materialized perfectly in his vision, hovering seamlessly over the real-world landscape.
He bypassed the hundreds of high-tier energy weapons and towering stacks of raw iron ingots. He completely ignored the tens of millions of Origin Points sitting lazily in his bank account.
He scrolled down until he found the massive facility core he had forcefully mutated back in the developer vault.
The +20 Sovereign Abyssal Forge.
Declan didn’t walk all the way down the heavy stone stairs to the courtyard to place it. He just used his administrative privileges to select a massive empty grid in the newly annexed Sector 6 territory on his minimap.
He dragged the heavy facility icon out of his inventory and tapped the deployment button.
A blinding flash of dark purple light erupted a few miles away. The ground actually shook beneath his boots.
A heavy thud echoed across the quiet newly generated city streets, completely bypassing the speed of sound.
The forge materialized perfectly into the physical world. It was a gargantuan industrial factory made entirely of sleek dark matter alloy.
Thick smokestacks shot up into the clean air, instantly burning with bright purple Abyssal fire. The heavy metal gears inside the factory began to grind and turn, completely ignoring standard mechanical speed limits.
Declan didn’t need a Level 50 Artificer to run this thing anymore. The Sovereign-tier mutation allowed the facility to operate entirely on its own. It completely bypassed the game engine’s annoying crafting wait times.
He pulled up the factory’s control panel on his holographic interface.
"System," Declan commanded quietly. "Set production target to Abyssal Scavenger Drones."
"Set operational area to the outer perimeter of Sector 6. Priority targets are ruined corporate mechs and raw Void-Ore veins. Begin."
The massive factory roared to life in the distance. The heavy iron doors at the base of the facility slammed open with a loud mechanical clank.
They didn’t march out in a neat orderly line. They scrambled.
Thousands of sleek metallic spiders poured out of the dark matter forge. They were the size of large dogs and built from entirely pitch-black metal.
They had razor-sharp multi-jointed legs and a single glowing purple optical lens in the center of their chassis.
They were Level 60 Abyssal Scavenger Drones. And they were terrifyingly fast.
They moved like a massive wave of dark water spilling across the pavement. The drones scattered across the empty black stone of Sector 6, heading straight for the border.
The terrain there was still fractured and full of corporate wreckage. They possessed a hive-mind link directly to the facility.
They didn’t bump into each other. They didn’t pause to calculate routing algorithms. They just moved with singular flawless purpose.
Declan watched a swarm of about fifty drones reach the twisted remains of a Titan Heavy Industries combat mech sitting near the border wall.
They didn’t use pickaxes. They didn’t have standard and boring mining animations.
They just jumped onto the heavy armor plating and started vibrating their sharp front legs at a hyper-kinetic frequency. They sliced through the military-grade titanium like a hot knife going through warm butter.
In less than ten seconds, the entire three-story mech was reduced to perfectly neat stackable cubes of refined metal.
The drones grabbed the cubes, turned around, and sprinted back toward the central treasury vaults at sixty miles an hour.
Declan smiled. It was a cold and highly capitalist smile.
"Boss!" a loud and incredibly frantic voice yelled from the heavy wooden doors behind him.
Declan turned around. Sloane burst onto the balcony. The Quartermaster of the Iron Bastion looked like she was about to have a literal heart attack.
She was gripping her glowing digital clipboard with both hands, staring at the screen with wide panicked eyes.
Her white medical tunic was messy, and her hair looked like she had been pulling at it for an hour.
"Declan, what did you just do?!" Sloane demanded, her voice cracking loudly. She marched right up to him and shoved the clipboard right into his face.
"I expanded the workforce," Declan said smoothly. He didn’t even blink at the screen shoved in his nose.
"You broke the interface!" Sloane shrieked. "Look at this! Just look at the numbers! My system is having a meltdown!"
Declan casually glanced at the scrolling text on her screen.
[System/Math Breakdown]
鈫� Item Consumed: Sovereign Root Authority +20
鈫� Territory Expanded: 1,000 Square Kilometers
鈫� Origin Points Gained via passive assimilation of Sector 6 dropped loot: +12,400,000
鈫� Current Treasury: 132,400,000
"A hundred and thirty-two million," Declan noted casually as he rubbed his chin. "That’s a very solid baseline to work with."
"That’s not the problem!" Sloane yelled, furiously tapping the side of the clipboard to switch tabs.
"Look at the incoming resource logs! My screen is freezing! The system can’t process the transaction history fast enough! I am getting a hundred deposit notifications every single second!"
The new screen popped up. The numbers were spinning so fast they looked like a blurry slot machine.
鈫� Facility Output: 1,000 Drones/Hour
鈫� Resource Yield Multiplier: Warlord’s Fortune (10,000%)
鈫� Hourly Income: +2,500,000 Origin Points / +50,000 lbs Refined Sovereign Iron
Declan let out a low whistle of genuine appreciation. "Two and a half million points an hour. Plus fifty thousand pounds of high-grade metal. That is incredibly efficient."
"Efficient?!" Sloane grabbed her hair in pure frustration. "Declan, you turned a survival horror death game into an idle clicker!"
"We have three thousand actual human refugees down in the courtyard holding rusty swords. They are terrified."
"They think they have to go out and fight zombies to pay rent. And meanwhile, you have a literal army of robot spiders strip-mining a continent for you!"
"The refugees are good for morale," Declan shrugged and turned back to look at the city. "It makes the city look busy."
"But human labor is highly inefficient. They get tired. They need sleep. They complain about the toxic rain."
"My drones don’t complain. They don’t need health insurance."
Sloane just stared at him. She slowly lowered the clipboard. She took a deep breath, trying desperately to process the absolute absurdity of the situation.
She was a retail manager back in the real world. She knew supply chains. She knew inventory limits.
She knew that dealing with this much raw data was going to crash her administrative tools.
"Boss," Sloane said, her voice dropping to a very tired and serious tone. "We literally do not have the digital storage space for fifty thousand pounds of Sovereign Iron every hour."
"The town bank is going to hit its absolute data cap by midnight. If the bank overflows, the system will start permanently deleting the excess loot."
Declan frowned. He hated wasting loot.
"Then upgrade the bank," Declan said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.