The hundred corporate elites, the nobles, and the high-tier Vanguard officers were pressed against the walls, trembling in absolute terror.

They had just watched an unarmored man physically tear apart a Level 85 World Boss-tier mech and rip a man’s spine out with his bare hands. Without magic. Without buffs.

Sebastian slowly turned his featureless black helmet toward the crowd.

"The Vanguard Syndicate is officially dissolved," Sebastian announced, his voice echoing in the dead silence.

"If anyone has a problem with that, you can take it up with my HR department."

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

Sebastian let out a long, exhausted sigh. He tossed the bloody spinal column onto the crushed chest plate of Guild Master Regis. It landed with a wet, heavy thud that made half the room flinch.

He reached up and gripped the edges of his featureless black helmet. The kinetic-dampening polymer of the Blank suit had done its job flawlessly, absorbing the sheer kinetic force of a hundred-ton mech without a single scratch.

But right now, it was just hot and stuffy.

With a sharp hiss of depressurization, Sebastian pulled the helmet off and carelessly tossed it onto the marble floor. It rolled away, clattering against a broken wine glass.

The moment the helmet disconnected from his neural link, the optical spoofing of his disguise dropped. The sleek, terrifying black tactical suit rippled, the polygons violently shifting and rendering back into the generic, grey-and-blue uniform of a Level 42 Vanguard Gunner. His face shifted, returning to the slightly pudgy, remarkably average features of Trent.

A collective gasp echoed from the huddled nobles. They recognized the uniform.

They recognized the low-level grunt insignia on his shoulder.

"He’s... he’s just a guard!" an aristocratic Mage whispered, her voice trembling in absolute disbelief. "A Level 42 grunt just ripped the Guild Master apart!"

Sebastian didn’t care about their shock. He cracked his neck, relishing the satisfying pop of his dense, biological steel vertebrae. He had just executed the hardest part of the infiltration. He had eliminated the top brass, secured the room, and bypassed the Reality Anchor’s magic suppression using pure, unadulterated physics.

"Alright," Sebastian muttered, wiping a smear of synthetic oil from his cheek.

"Time to go unplug the router and take this server off the grid."

But the Ethereal Plane was not a stupid machine. It was a highly advanced, painfully strict mathematical engine. And the math had just violently ceased to make sense.

For the last ten minutes, the server’s localized anti-cheat algorithms had been desperately trying to process what was happening in the ballroom.

A Level 42 Gunner with zero points in physical strength had just effortlessly crushed a Level 65 cyborg. That same Gunner had then survived a thirty-foot drop, tanked a barrage of depleted uranium rounds, and physically torn the arms off a Level 85 World Boss-tier mechanical suit.

Without magic. Without buffs. Without any registered Ethereal Plane skills.

The system’s logic gates finally caught up to the sheer, impossible absurdity of the physical violence.

BING! BING! BING!

The cheerful, standard system chime didn’t sound. Instead, a harsh, blaring klaxon erupted directly inside Sebastian’s skull. It was a sound like grinding gears and screaming metal.

His spoofed green-and-blue UI forcefully projected itself into his vision. The interface, which had been resting peacefully in the corner of his eye, suddenly expanded, turning a bright, glaring, and angry red.

[CRITICAL WARNING: IMPOSSIBLE PHYSICS PARAMETERS DETECTED.]

[Entity: ’Trent’ (Level 42 Gunner) Output Exceeds Maximum Server Limitations by 10,000%.]

Sebastian gritted his teeth as a sharp spike of pain lanced through his temples.

"Oh, come on. Don’t be a sore loser," he grumbled at the floating text.

The massive red [Admin Suspicion] meter, which had sat perfectly at zero percent since he entered the city, suddenly jerked to life.

It didn’t tick up slowly. It rocketed.

[ADMIN SUSPICION: 45%... 60%... 85%...]

"Shit," Sebastian hissed, his deadpan demeanor finally cracking. "The firewall is waking up."

The planetary defense grid of Server 112 wasn’t just a passive shield. It was an active, aggressive anti-virus software designed to instantly delete anything that threatened the structural integrity of the corporate dystopia.

And Sebastian had just tripped every single alarm in the building.

The ambient atmosphere in the grand ballroom violently shifted. The air grew incredibly heavy. The temperature plummeted.

[ADMIN SUSPICION: 95%...]

"What is happening?!" a noble screamed, pointing frantically at the walls.

The polished obsidian of the ballroom walls began to ripple and warp like water reacting to a heavy bass drop. The localized reality of the room was actively tearing at the seams.

From the dark, shifting geometry of the walls, figures began to manifest.

They didn’t walk through doors. They phased directly through the solid stone, stepping out of the server’s foundational code and into the physical space.

There were twelve of them. They were towering, faceless entities clad in liquid, reflective chrome. They possessed no features, no organic biology, and no mercy.

They were the Void Wardens, the absolute apex executioners of the Ethereal Plane, deployed only when the system needed to aggressively purge a critical anomaly.

"Oh, great. The fun police," Sebastian muttered, his silver-tinged eyes tracking the heavily armed entities.

The Wardens didn’t carry standard weapons.

In their right hands, they held long, thin rapiers made entirely of condensed, glowing red error code.

The logic-blades hummed with a terrifying, high-frequency vibration that made the surrounding air physically blur.

"Target localized," the lead Warden announced. Its voice wasn’t spoken; it was broadcasted simultaneously into the minds of everyone in the room.

"Anomaly detected. Initiating immediate and permanent deletion protocols."

The huddled masses of corporate elites shrieked and scrambled away from the chrome angels of death. The Wardens didn’t care about collateral damage. One of the nobles, an overweight merchant who tripped and fell into the path of a marching Warden, was casually stepped on.

The moment the Warden’s chrome boot touched the merchant, the NPC didn’t bleed.

He simply dissolved into a cloud of green, unrendered pixels, entirely erased from the server’s registry without a second thought.

Sebastian watched the man vanish. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He didn’t bother trying to fight them.

He knew exactly what the Wardens were. He had fought one in the Juncture. He had managed to crash it by injecting his own corrupted error code into its system, but that was a one-on-one fight in a dead zone.

Here, in the absolute center of a fully powered, heavily fortified server, fighting twelve Wardens at once was tactical suicide.

If one of those red logic-blades even grazed him, it wouldn’t just drain his health bar. It would permanently uninstall his digital existence.

[ADMIN SUSPICION: 98%...]

The red bar in his vision was flashing wildly.

The moment it hit one hundred percent, the orbital cannons mounted on the outside of the Dyson sphere would lock onto his exact coordinates and turn the entire Spire into a crater just to ensure his deletion.