Declan leaned forward. He rested his heavy elbows on the wooden table and looked at the glowing blue map. He looked at the white line dividing the world.
"No." Declan said.
Arthur paused. His polite, perfectly practiced smile faltered for a fraction of a second. He blinked, clearly thrown off by the immediate rejection.
"Excuse me?" Arthur asked softly.
"I said no," Declan repeated. His voice dropped into a heavy, threatening bass that completely ignored the peaceful aesthetic of the room. "I don’t do joint custody, Arthur."
Declan stood up. His pitch-black Predator’s Coat flared out around him. Even with his stats suppressed, his raw Level 70 physical presence was incredibly intimidating.
"I don’t play by baseline rules," Declan stated coldly, looking down at the Architect. "I don’t submit to heavily moderated servers. I don’t care about your corporate utopia, and I definitely don’t share my map."
He pointed a finger at the blue hologram floating over the table.
"I own what I take. And right now, your pristine little corporate cage is sitting on my real estate."
Arthur slowly shook his head. The diplomatic facade completely vanished. The calming light around his white suit shifted, turning into a stark, glaring, and highly aggressive white aura. The gray void around them seemed to shrink, pressing inward as the Architect’s SSS-Rank talent reacted to the hostility.
"That is truly unfortunate," the Architect said quietly. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded entirely resolved. "I had hoped you would be reasonable. I had hoped we could coexist."
Arthur looked up at Declan, his eyes devoid of any warmth.
"But a virus cannot be reasoned with. It can only be purged."
The gray, featureless expanse of the unassigned server void was completely silent. There was no wind. There was no toxic rain. There was just a perfectly smooth, infinite plane of un-rendered digital space.
Sitting across the simple wooden table, Arthur Cross looked like a man who had everything under control. His pristine white suit radiated a soft, calming light that actively pushed back against the heavy, oppressive dark matter swirling around Declan’s boots.
Arthur had just offered him half the world. He had offered to split the global map right down the middle. Sector 1 for the corporate elites. Sector 7 for the Warlord. A permanent, peaceful border, as long as Declan agreed to stop breaking the game’s core physics engine.
It was a massive offer. It was completely uncontested control over millions of square miles of real estate.
Declan leaned forward. He rested his elbows on the wooden table. His dense, mythical alloy bones popped loudly in the quiet void.
"No," Declan said flatly.
Arthur paused. The polite, completely relaxed smile on his face faltered for a fraction of a second. "Excuse me?"
"I said no," Declan repeated. His voice dropped into a heavy, threatening bass that physically vibrated the digital wood of the table between them. "I don’t play by baseline rules, Arthur. I don’t submit to heavily moderated servers. And I definitely don’t share my map."
Declan stood up. He pushed the wooden chair back. His pitch-black Predator’s Coat flared out around his legs, leaking thick shadows into the gray void.
"I own what I take," Declan stated coldly. "And right now, your pristine little corporate cage is sitting on my real estate."
Arthur slowly shook his head. He didn’t look angry. He didn’t yell or scream like Director Sterling or the other corporate executives Declan had slaughtered. Arthur just looked deeply disappointed.
The calming white light radiating from his tailored suit shifted. It turned into a stark, glaring white.
"That is truly unfortunate," the Architect said quietly. He placed his hands flat on the table and stood up. "I had hoped you would be reasonable. But a virus cannot be reasoned with. It can only be purged."
"You can try," Declan smirked.
He didn’t hesitate. Declan reached his right hand out into the empty gray air. The space around his fingers aggressively distorted. He tapped into his Abyssal Sovereign digital inventory.
The heavy, dark matter shaft of the +40 Eclipse Severance halberd dropped perfectly into his grip. The razor-thin blade, made entirely of the night sky, hummed with a chaotic, violent static. The localized black hole spinning in the center of the axe head instantly began pulling the gray light of the void toward it.
Declan didn’t wind up for a massive swing. He didn’t bother using a movement skill. He just stepped forward, raised the massive four-hundred-pound weapon, and swung it in a lethal, horizontal arc aimed directly at Arthur’s neck.
He expected the Spacetime Laceration trait to activate. He expected the dark blade to entirely ignore Arthur’s physical defense, sever the coordinate plane the man was standing on, and delete the CEO into a pile of blue pixels.
But Arthur didn’t even flinch. He didn’t pull out a shield. He didn’t cast a magic barrier.
"Absolute Equilibrium," Arthur said softly.
A perfectly spherical, geometric grid of glowing white light exploded outward from Arthur’s body. It expanded at the speed of light, covering exactly a one-hundred-foot radius in every single direction. It formed a localized dome of absolute, unyielding order.
The dark matter blade of the +40 Eclipse Severance hit the side of Arthur’s neck.
CLANG!
The sound was absolutely jarring. It didn’t sound like tearing wet canvas. It sounded like a piece of cheap scrap metal hitting a solid titanium wall.
The kinetic feedback shot right up the heavy shaft of the halberd and slammed into Declan’s arms. The sheer physical recoil actually pushed the Warlord backward. His heavy Spiked Striders scraped against the un-rendered floor, carving two shallow trenches in the gray data before he caught his balance.
Declan frowned heavily. He looked down at the weapon in his hands.
The localized black hole spinning in the center of the blade sputtered violently. The dark, consuming gravity well fizzled out completely, vanishing into thin air. The razor-thin edge of the night sky lost its terrifying glow.
Right in front of his eyes, the Sovereign-tier weapon aggressively degraded. The dark matter alloy turned into a dull, rusted iron. The glowing purple runes carved into the shaft died out.
It wasn’t a world-ending weapon anymore. It was just a heavy, blunt, rusted iron stick.
"What did you do?" Declan demanded, his dark eyes narrowing.
"I enforced the rules," Arthur replied calmly. He adjusted the cuffs of his white suit. He didn’t have a single scratch on his neck. "You rely on broken math, Player V. You force the system to accept multipliers and anomalies that should not exist. In my domain, those anomalies are corrected."
A massive, glaring red system warning box forcefully booted up directly in the center of Declan’s optic nerves.
[System/Math Breakdown]
[Warning: Hostile Domain active.]
[Target Talent: Absolute Equilibrium.]
[Effect: Target nullifies all enhancement multipliers and conceptual anomalies within radius. Environmental physics locked to absolute baseline. Item stats reverted to base code parameters.]
[Class Multipliers: Suppressed.]
[Declan’s Base Attack reduced from 342,000 to standard Level 85 baseline: 15,000.]
Declan read the red text hovering in front of his face. He quickly pulled up his own status screen.
It was a complete disaster. The SSS-Rank talent of the guy standing in front of him hadn’t just nerfed his halberd. It had stripped away every single piece of hacked gear he was wearing.
His +20 Abyssal Sovereign Crown? The massive 300,000 hit point barrier was entirely gone. It was just a normal piece of metal sitting on his head.
His +20 Desolation Armor Set? The true-damage reflection trait was completely offline.
His Abyssal Leviathan physiology multipliers? The system had forcefully turned off the ten-times mass multiplier. He no longer possessed the physical density of a collapsing star. He was just a standard Level 85 player standing in a gray void.
"You turned off my gear," Declan noted. His voice lacked its usual heavy, unnatural Abyssal resonance. He sounded like a completely normal guy.
"I leveled the playing field," Arthur corrected him. "You are an administrator of chaos. You manipulate the game’s code to deal millions of points of damage. But underneath all of those stolen developer tools, you are just a player. And in this domain, your numbers mean absolutely nothing."
Declan looked at the rusted iron halberd in his hands. He tossed it to the side. It hit the gray floor with a dull, pathetic clatter.
He didn’t bother reaching for his +20 Carnage Cleaver. He didn’t try to summon the +20 Black Aegis riot shield. If Arthur’s talent forced every single item within a hundred feet to revert to its absolute Level 1 baseline, pulling out more weapons was a complete waste of time.
Declan shoved his hands into the pockets of his dark coat. The coat didn’t feel heavy and indestructible anymore. It just felt like regular leather.