"Nice toy," Sebastian muttered, his voice a distorted, metallic hum.

The 40% Error forcefully injected itself directly into the weapon’s core registry. The flawless Ethereal iron began to aggressively bubble and boil. The sleek, divine metal turned a deep, flaky orange in a fraction of a second.

The Sun-Splitter Halberd screamed. The magical enchantments actively trying to hold the weapon together were rapidly deleted by the raw, corrupted data.

In less than three seconds, the magnificent, god-tier weapon completely rusted through.

The heavy blade turned brittle, fracturing into a dozen jagged pieces before crumbling entirely into a pile of useless, screaming red dust that blew away in the desert wind.

Vargas stood perfectly still, holding nothing but a tiny, rusted stump of a wooden handle.

He stared at his empty hands. He stared at the terrifying, unmoving figure in the black coat. The illusion of the System’s absolute power shattered into a million pieces.

"My... my reward," Vargas whispered, his voice cracking with absolute despair.

Sebastian casually lowered his static-filled hand. The green glitching faded back into his black leather glove. He took a slow, heavy step forward.

"Your reward got recalled," Sebastian said flatly.

The silence across the multiverse was absolute.

Billions of players, refugees, and Warlords watched the hijacked broadcast feed in utter, paralyzing horror. They had just seen the System’s ultimate prize—a Divine-tier weapon forged from the very code of the heavens—casually swatted into a pile of rusty dust by a man in a torn leather coat.

Vargas, the newly crowned champion of the Eternal Draft, stood frozen atop his mountain of corpses. The arrogant, triumphant warlord who had slaughtered his own guildmates for power was completely gone. He was just a terrified, trembling man holding a broken stick.

"N-no," Vargas stammered, frantically taking a step backward. His rejuvenated, youthful face was pale with shock. "You can’t do that.

The Archons gave me that! It was indestructible!"

"Nothing is indestructible," Sebastian replied, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. His words carried perfectly through the broadcast, echoing into the minds of everyone watching. "It’s just code. And code can be rewritten."

Sebastian didn’t give the man a chance to run. He moved with that terrifying, frictionless grace, bypassing the physical space between them in a fraction of a microsecond.

Before Vargas could even drop the broken handle, Sebastian’s heavy, black-gloved hand shot forward and clamped onto the warlord’s throat.

"GUK!" Vargas choked, his boots lifting off the bloody ground as Sebastian effortlessly hoisted the two-hundred-pound man into the air with one arm.

Sebastian didn’t draw a knife. He didn’t use his [Concept of Mass] to crush the man’s windpipe. He wasn’t going to just kill him.

Killing him would just send his soul back into the Ethereal Plane’s recycling bin. It wouldn’t prove a point.

To break the faith of the players, Sebastian had to show them that the System’s progression meant absolutely nothing.

He opened his green Admin UI. He activated his [Code Compiler].

"You spent your whole life grinding, didn’t you, Vargas?" Sebastian asked softly, his featureless black visor staring directly into the terrified man’s eyes. "You backstabbed. You betrayed. You leveled up. You built a nice, shiny skill tree."

Sebastian didn’t target the man’s health bar.

He reached his mind directly into the digital, foundational tether connecting Vargas to the server. He forcefully opened the player’s character sheet.

[Target Acquired: Vargas] [Class: Warlord] [Level: 70] [Accessing Core Skill Tree...]

"Let’s see what you bought with all those souls," Sebastian whispered.

He found the first node. It was a high-tier passive skill that granted the warlord enhanced physical regeneration.

Sebastian mentally highlighted the glowing blue node. And he hit delete.

"AAAAAAHHHHH!"

Vargas’s scream was completely unhinged. It was the horrific, mind-breaking agony of having a fundamental piece of your own existence violently ripped out of your brain.

The warlord’s body convulsed wildly in Sebastian’s grip. The localized healing magic permanently stitched into his biology abruptly failed. The small, superficial cuts he had sustained during his battle royale suddenly tore open, bleeding freely down his armor.

"What... what are you doing to me?!" Vargas sobbed, his eyes rolling back in his head. "My stats! I can’t feel my stats!"

"I’m auditing your account," Sebastian stated coldly.

He moved to the next node. [Tier 3 Active Skill: Sweeping Cleave]. Delete.

Vargas shrieked again, his body seizing so violently his armor clattered loudly against the quiet desert air. The muscle memory, the thousands of hours he had spent practicing that specific martial arts swing, was instantly, permanently erased from his mind. He forgot how to hold a sword. He forgot how to fight.

"Stop! Please stop!" Vargas begged, tears streaming down his face, completely humiliated in front of the entire multiverse.

"Just kill me! Just kill me!"

"Death is a reset," Sebastian deadpanned, scrolling down the massive, glowing list of the warlord’s achievements. "I don’t want you to reset. I want you to un-install."

Delete. [Tier 4 Aura: Intimidating Presence].

Delete. [Tier 2 Passive: Iron Skin].

Delete. [Tier 5 Ultimate: Blood Rage].

With every single deletion, Vargas’s physical avatar deteriorated. The artificial youth the System had granted him began to violently unravel. His skin sagged, his hair turned a brittle white, and his heavily muscled arms withered into thin, frail sticks.

He was being stripped down to a Level 1 base file, right there on live television.

The players watching the feed were entirely paralyzed. The sheer, existential terror of watching a high-level player lose their entire progression path was paralyzing. In a world where levels meant everything, Sebastian was demonstrating that he could take it all away with a single thought.

Sebastian finally reached the bottom of the skill tree. He left the man with absolutely nothing but his base, biological rendering code. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

He pulled Vargas closer, bringing the weeping, broken old man right up to his featureless visor. Sebastian looked directly past him, staring straight into the hovering, invisible camera drones broadcasting the feed.

"Listen to me," Sebastian’s voice dropped into a terrifying, metallic hum that vibrated the very core of the Earth. "The Grand Archons think they can use you. They think they can throw shiny swords and arbitrary levels at you, and you will happily march into the meat grinder to power their servers."

Sebastian casually squeezed his hand.

CRUNCH.

The sound of Vargas’s cervical spine snapping was sharp and definitive. The old man went entirely limp, his health bar finally, mercifully plummeting to zero.

Sebastian didn’t drop the body. He held the twitching corpse up to the camera like a gruesome trophy.

"The game is over," Sebastian declared, his words carrying the absolute, unyielding authority of a Sovereign. "Anyone who participates in the Eternal Draft will not receive a reward. You will not receive a ticket to the Inner Worlds. You will receive me. And I do not leave a health bar to regenerate."

Sebastian tossed the dead warlord onto the pile of corpses.

He reached out with his left hand, his fingers glowing with that violent, corrupted green static. He grabbed the localized broadcast code and forcefully crushed it.

"Show’s over," Sebastian muttered.

The multiversal feed violently snapped. The holographic screens across billions of planets shattered into white noise before instantly going dark.

The connection was severed. The absolute terror was firmly planted.

Sebastian stood alone in the desert, the silence of the canyon returning in full force.

He wiped a smear of blood off his leather glove, his highly optimized brain already calculating his next jump.

He had broken the System’s propaganda. He had the Regional Core. He had the Law of Law Synthesis.

It was finally time to go home. It was time to wake up the Princess.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The transition from the dead, ash-choked desert of Server 901 back to the pristine System Hub was like jumping out of a dusty frying pan directly into a highly pressurized nuclear reactor.

Sebastian didn’t stumble as he materialized out of the jagged, static-filled Juncture portal.

His heavy black boots hit the polished white marble of the Hub’s central platform with a resounding, heavy THUD. He immediately straightened his posture, his black leather coat billowing slightly from the displaced air of his teleportation.

He had his fuel. He had the ten million units of raw Source Code safely tucked away in his glitched, bottomless inventory. He had everything he needed to synthesize a brand new law of physics and wake Valerie up from her magical coma. But he couldn’t go back to Sanctuary just yet. If he went home now, the Grand Archons would just keep throwing planets, warlords, and cosmic bounties at his front door.

He was tired of playing defense. It was time to permanently format the landlords.

"I’m back, assholes," Sebastian announced to the empty, sprawling chamber. "And I want to speak to a manager!"

The System Hub was no longer the quiet, sterile utopia of flowing blue mana and peaceful, arrogant administrators.

The moment Sebastian’s feet touched the marble, the entire Dyson sphere absolutely lost its mind.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!