Sebastian needed to upgrade Sanctuary. He needed the Regional Core.

But to do that, he had to wage war on a Level 65 Warlord and thousands of heavily armed troops.

His current physical synchronization was stuck at thirty percent.

He was incredibly strong but against a concentrated army, he was still a glass cannon.

He needed more mass. He needed a higher baseline.

He couldn’t just drink this with a cup. He needed to absorb the entire pool. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"Let’s see if this meat-suit can handle an all-you-can-eat buffet," Sebastian whispered.

He didn’t take off the black tactical suit. He didn’t hesitate.

He stepped up onto the metal railing, took a deep breath, and dove headfirst into the boiling sea of biomass.

SPLASH!

The moment he hit the liquid, the world exploded into absolute blinding agony.

It wasn’t physical heat. It was data overload.

Millions of fractured memories, screams of terror, and raw experience points violently forced their way into his digital pores.

His hybrid UI violently glitched into existence and flashed wildly across his vision.

[Warning: Massive Foreign Data Influx Detected!]

[Entity Integrity Compromised.]

[System Overload Imminent.]

Sebastian sank deep into the glowing blue fluid.

He opened his mouth and inhaled the liquid code.

’Root Protocol,’ Sebastian thought as his mind forcefully gripped the administrative controls of his own glitch. ’Bypass limiters. Absorb everything.’

The 10,000x Nexus Glitch woke up like a starving beast.

It didn’t just multiply the experience.

It acted as a massive hyper-aggressive funnel and dragged the entire volume of the vat’s power directly into his physical and digital architecture.

The physical reconstruction was horrifying.

Beneath the black tactical suit, Sebastian’s muscles literally tore themselves apart.

The raw screaming data forced his biological fibers to expand, snap, and aggressively weave back together.

His bone density skyrocketed and the calcium hardened into a material that felt

heavier and denser than depleted uranium.

He thrashed in the center of the vat.

His body convulsed as the sheer volume of souls was packed into his six-foot frame.

[Massive Experience Processed.]

[Physical Baseline Upgraded.]

[Strength Stat: Incalculable.]

[Endurance Stat: Incalculable.]

He felt his heart struggling to pump the newly enriched hyper-oxygenated blood through his expanding veins.

The agony was mind-breaking.

It was a constant tearing sensation of being stretched over a rack and crushed under a mountain simultaneously.

But he didn’t stop. He pulled harder.

He visualized the struggling refugees.

He visualized Valerie bleeding from her eyes on the Sky-Fortress.

He visualized the smug face of Garret kicking him in the mud.

He took all of that anger and all of that suffering, and weaponized it into pure unyielding hunger.

"Give it to me!" Sebastian’s muffled roar vibrated through the fluid.

The level of the massive vat began to drop.

Outside, the facility alarms finally blared to life.

WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!

The massive mechanical cranes ground to a halt.

The emergency lights flickered and died.

The Syndicate’s primary power source was being violently drained by a single entity.

The fifty-foot pool of glowing blue liquid spiraled downward like water in a flushing drain.

In less than three minutes, the vat was completely dry.

Sebastian hit the metal floor of the empty basin and landed on his hands and knees.

He was completely soaked in the residual glowing blue residue.

His chest heaved with slow and incredibly deep breaths.

The alarms continued to wail in the dark powerless factory.

Sebastian slowly pushed himself up to his feet.

He didn’t look any different.

The black tactical suit still fit perfectly.

He hadn’t grown into a towering monster.

But the way he moved had fundamentally changed.

He felt the weight of a dying star resting comfortably in his chest.

His body felt entirely bulletproof.

The thirty-percent synchronization had been forcefully packed with enough raw data to rival the physical baseline of a Vanguard Siege Mech.

He rolled his neck.

It sounded like two boulders cracking together.

Sebastian looked up at the rim of the empty vat.

He didn’t look for a ladder. He just bent his knees and jumped.

BOOM!

The sheer localized kinetic force of his leap cratered the heavy steel floor of the basin.

He shot fifty feet straight up into the air and landed effortlessly on the metal catwalk above.

The metal grating groaned and buckled slightly under his new hyper-dense weight.

He stood in the dark as flashing red emergency lights painted his featureless black helmet in strobe-like pulses.

He opened his hand and clenched it into a fist.

The air around his knuckles warped from the sheer physical pressure.

He had the power.

He had the physical baseline to survive a war without relying entirely on his glitched magic.

"Thanks for the meal, Syndicate," Sebastian muttered with absolute confidence.

He turned his back on the empty vats and began the long walk back up to the surface.

He had a Regional Core to steal, and he was feeling very, very motivated.

——

The screeching sound of the sector-wide lockdown alarm was an absolutely

terrible way to wake up.

Sebastian lay on his uncomfortable cot in the Vanguard barracks and stared at the rusted metal springs of the bunk above him. The red emergency lights flashed rhythmically and cast harsh shadows across the small room.

"Get up! Everyone on your feet right fvcking now!"

Lieutenant Garret kicked the heavy metal door open. His cybernetic arm hummed

with an angry whine. The officer looked like he had not slept a single wink. His uniform was rumpled, his face was quite pale, and he was sweating heavily.

Around Sebastian, the other soldiers of the squad scrambled out of their bunks in a state of absolute panic. Rix, the young grunt who slept in the bed next to Sebastian, actually tripped over his own boots.

THUD!

He crashed directly onto the floor.

’Garret looks like he just swallowed a live grenade,’ Sebastian noted internally. He slowly sat up and stretched his neck.

POP!

His joints popped with a heavy sound that he quickly tried to muffle.

"Gear up! No weapons! Move it to Holding Block C!" Garret roared. He grabbed Rix by the collar and hauled the kid to his feet.

"Sector 4 is under fullInquisition lockdown!"