The reaction was instantaneous.

The arcane acid violently ate through the reinforced visor.

The guard’s muffled agonizing screams bubbled up through the liquid for exactly

two seconds before his brain pan completely dissolved.

Sebastian pulled the headless smoking corpse back over the railing and dropped it onto the floor.

Two down. No alarms. No magic. Just pure physical violence.

He cracked his knuckles and the sound was entirely muted by his dampening suit.

He walked calmly down the catwalk and headed for the central control room.

He didn’t sneak anymore. He just walked.

A squad of three Elite Guards rounded the corner.

They were Level 60 and wore the heavy polished black armor of the Onyx Syndicate

while holding crackling energy halberds.

"Hey! Who the fuck are you?!" the lead Elite shouted and raised his weapon. "Identify yourself!"

Sebastian didn’t stop walking and didn’t speak.

He just raised his right hand.

He couldn’t use his world-breaking conceptual laws.

But he had spent some time in his bunk quietly editing the garbage-tier skills attached to Trent’s ID.

He had taken [Advanced Vitality Drain] and forcefully rewritten its core parameters.

He had created [Cellular Necrosis].

The Elite Guard lunged and swung the heavy energy halberd in a sweeping arc aimed right at Sebastian’s neck.

Sebastian casually swatted the weapon aside with his left forearm.

The heavy polymer suit absorbed the kinetic shock.

He stepped perfectly inside the Elite’s guard and pressed his right palm flat against the thick impenetrable black chest plate.

He didn’t try to punch through it. He just applied the edited code.

The effect was silent and absolutely revolting.

The [Cellular Necrosis] completely bypassed the physical armor rating.

It didn’t damage the metal.

It flowed right through the steel and directly targeted the biological rendering of the player inside.

"W-What?" the Elite gasped and froze in place.

Inside the pristine black armor, the player’s flesh instantly liquefied.

His skin blackened and sloughed off his bones.

His internal organs turned to a thick sludge and he didn’t even have the vocal cords left to scream.

The heavy armor simply collapsed inward with a wet squelch and hit the floor as nothing more than a metal bucket filled with bubbling organic soup.

The other two Elites stared at the puddle of their squad leader in absolute horror.

"He’s a glitch!" one of them shrieked and backed away frantically. "Shoot him! Just shoot him!"

They raised their heavy kinetic sidearms and their hands shook wildly.

Sebastian didn’t give them the chance.

He blurred forward and grabbed the first guard by the wrist, snapping the bone with a sharp twist.

He drove his elbow into the man’s faceplate and shattered the glass.

Then he applied the [Cellular Necrosis] directly to the exposed face.

The man melted into gray ash before he hit the ground.

The final guard didn’t shoot.

He dropped his weapon, turned, and bolted down the catwalk toward the security room while screaming into his comm-link.

"Hostile in the main processing bay! We need backup! It’s a monster!"

Inside the elevated security room overlooking the vats, four Vanguard technicians were frantically tapping at their holographic monitors.

"I don’t have a visual!" the lead technician yelled and sweat poured down hisface. "The cameras aren’t picking up a player model! It’s just a blurry shadow!"

"Look at the biometrics of the Elites!" another tech panicked. "Their health bars didn’t drop! They just ceased existing! It’s a localized deletion error!"

They watched through the reinforced glass window as the screaming Elite Guard sprinted down the catwalk toward them.

Right behind him and moving with a terrifyingly slow stroll was the featureless black figure.

The Elite reached the security door and pounded his fists against the glass.

"Let me in! Open the door!"

Sebastian walked up behind him. He didn’t rush.

He reached out, grabbed the Elite by the back of the neck, and effortlessly lifted the heavy armored man off the ground with one hand.

The technicians watched in frozen wide-eyed terror.

Sebastian looked directly through the glass at the security team.

His blank featureless black mask offered absolutely no human emotion.

He didn’t say a word.

He just squeezed his hand.

CRACK.

The Elite’s neck snapped.

Sebastian casually tossed the body over the railing and let it plummet into the acid vats below.

He raised his rusted iron dagger and the [God-Slayer’s Edge] passive hummed quietly.

He pressed the tip against the reinforced blast-proof security glass.

The glass didn’t shatter.

It simply parted like wet tissue paper as he drew a perfect circle, kicked the pane inward, and stepped into the room.

"Time to log out, boys," Sebastian whispered with a distorted voice through the helmet’s filter.

It was going to be a very messy cleanup.

——

The control room was completely silent save for the soft dripping of blood from the central console.

The four Vanguard technicians were dead and their digital bodies rapidly dissolved into gray ash on the floor.

The Blank stood over the main terminal.

Sebastian casually wiped the edge of his Rusty Iron Dagger on the sleeve of a dead man’s uniform before sheathing it.

He looked out the shattered security window.

The massive cavern was empty of Syndicate personnel.

The processing plant had been entirely cleared.

Dozens of empty Vanguard armor suits lay scattered across the catwalks, sitting in puddles of their own liquefied biology.

But the work wasn’t done.

Sebastian stared down at the massive central vat in the middle of the factory floor.

It was fifty feet across and filled to the brim with violently bubbling blue liquid.

It was pure Core Fluid.

Through his [True Sight], the liquid wasn’t just a chemical acid.

It was a terrifying condensed ocean of raw data.

It was the harvested souls, the stolen experience points, and the agonizing life force of thousands of refugees boiled down into a liquid battery.

It was an atrocity of game mechanics. It was pure evil.

"And it’s exactly what I need," Sebastian murmured to himself.

He turned away from the console and leaped through the shattered window.

He dropped fifty feet down to the main factory floor.

His heavy boots cracked the concrete upon landing and the kinetic dampeners in his suit absorbed the shock perfectly.

He walked up to the edge of the massive vat.

The heat radiating off the liquid was immense but his [Thermal Immunity] batted it away.