Chapter 81: [81] : The Seraph of the Protocol, Law of Eradication

The transition from the dark void to the final landing was blinding.

Declan stepped onto the one hundredth block, and the suffocating blackness of the staircase instantly vanished. He was standing on a massive and perfectly circular platform made of smooth reflective glass. The area was bathed in an intense and sterile white light that cast no shadows.

It looked exactly like the inside of a high-end corporate server room.

His one hundred shadow clones stepped onto the glass platform right behind him. The dark matter of their bodies strongly contrasted against the glaring white environment. They gripped their halberds and were ready to strike.

Declan looked at the center of the room.

There was no giant dragon waiting for him. There was no hulking demon or heavily armored knight.

Floating three feet above the glass floor was a creature made entirely of light and geometry.

It was vaguely humanoid in shape, but it had no physical features. It had no face, no skin, and no armor. Its body was composed of pure and glowing white energy. Extending from its back were six massive wings, but they weren’t made of feathers. They were constructed from hundreds of floating and interlocking glass prisms that shifted and rotated with mechanical precision.

Hovering perfectly still above its faceless head was a jagged and golden halo.

A system prompt appeared directly in front of Declan’s eyes. The text wasn’t the standard blue or red. It was a stark and glaring white.

[Boss Encounter: Seraph of the Protocol]

↳ Level: 80

↳ Status: System Administrative Entity

↳ HP: N/A

"Level 80," Declan noted, his voice sounding flat in the perfectly silent room. "And no health bar. I really hate puzzle bosses."

The Seraph did not move. Its glass prism wings rotated slowly and hummed with a low electric frequency.

When it spoke, the voice didn’t echo in the room. It didn’t project telepathically into Declan’s mind like the Abyssal Herald had. The voice simply played directly through the system UI, sounding exactly like the robotic announcer from the dive pod laboratory.

[Anomaly detected at maximum threshold.]

[Challenger ’Player V’ possesses unauthorized data density. Core ruleset violated. Progression locked.]

[Initiating Purge Protocol.]

"You guys really need new lines," Declan sighed. "Every time I walk into a room, someone tells me I’m a virus and tries to delete me. It’s getting repetitive."

The Seraph did not respond to the taunt. It did not have emotions. It was an administrator program designed for one specific purpose. To act as a firewall against players who grew too strong.

Declan didn’t want to waste time chatting with an antivirus software. He had a real-world body currently sitting in a stolen dive pod in a highly contested sector. He needed to clear this trial and secure his Ascendant status.

Declan pointed a finger at the glowing angel.

"Kill it."

Three of his shadow clones instantly blurred forward. With ninety base Agility, they crossed the glass platform in a fraction of a millisecond. They surrounded the Seraph on three sides and raised their dark matter halberds high into the air.

They brought the weapons down in a synchronized and devastating strike. The ’Weight of the Warden’ trait activated, generating three massive sonic booms as the heavy blades crashed toward the entity.

The Seraph didn’t dodge. It didn’t raise a shield.

It simply lifted one hand made of pure light and pointed a single glowing finger at the clone on its left.

[Law of Eradication.]

A thin and perfectly straight beam of white light shot out from the Seraph’s finger. It didn’t look like a laser or a magic spell. It looked like a barcode of rapidly shifting numbers.

The beam hit the shadow clone squarely in the chest.

There was no kind of explosion. There was no massive damage number popping up. There was no kinetic knockback.

The shadow clone just stopped mid-swing.

The dark matter making up its body instantly turned completely white. The clone didn’t shatter into pixels or turn to ash. It literally dissolved into a string of zero and one text characters that floated upward and vanished into the ceiling!

The halberd it was holding clattered to the glass floor and immediately ceased to exist.

The other two clones completed their swings. The Spacetime Laceration trait tore through the air, carving deep black tears in the fabric of the room. The blades passed right through the Seraph’s body.

Nothing happened.

The spatial cuts didn’t affect the boss. The entity wasn’t occupying physical or server space. It existed entirely outside the combat engine.

The Seraph casually pointed its finger at the second clone.

[Law of Eradication.]

Another beam of data struck the clone. It turned white, dissolved into text, and was deleted from the room instantly.

They were disappearing.

The third clone immediately used Void Blink, teleporting backward to put distance between itself and the boss.

Declan stood near the entrance as his eyes narrowed. He didn’t look at the boss. He pulled up his active skill interface.

[Legion of the Eclipse Sovereign]

↳ Active Clones: 98 / 98 (Maximum Capacity Reduced)

Declan’s jaw tightened.

The max capacity hadn’t just ticked down because the clones were destroyed. The skill clearly stated the clones were immortal and immune to damage.

The Seraph hadn’t dealt damage. It had actively reached into Declan’s skill code and permanently deleted the data slots for those two summons! His maximum capacity was permanently reduced to 98 until he logged out and let the system repair the code.

"Okay," Declan muttered softly. "That’s a problem."

This was bad. This was really, really bad. If the Seraph shot him with that beam, it wouldn’t matter how high his Blood Shield was. It wouldn’t matter that he had thirty percent real-world synchronization. The boss wasn’t going to drain his health. It was just going to highlight his player profile and hit backspace.

The Seraph of the Protocol slowly turned its faceless head toward Declan. The glass prism wings flared brightly.

[Target lock acquired.]

[Executing Anomaly.]