Sebastian yanked the rifle forward, pulling the guard completely off balance. As the man stumbled, Sebastian drove his right elbow directly into the center of the guard’s iron faceplate.

SMASH!

The faceplate shattered into a dozen jagged pieces. The sheer blunt force trauma drove the broken metal directly into the man’s skull.

The guard went instantly limp, his health bar zeroing out before he even hit the obsidian platform.

The second guard didn’t try to shoot. He dropped his weapon, turned around, and sprinted down the platform stairs, screaming for his life.

"Nope," Sebastian said flatly.

He reached down, scooped up the discarded kinetic rifle by its crushed barrel, and hurled it like a javelin.

WHOOSH.

The heavy block of metal sailed through the air with the speed of a missile. It caught the fleeing guard squarely in the center of his back.

CRUNCH!

The guard’s spine snapped with a loud, sickening pop. He folded backward at a completely unnatural angle, skidding face-first across the ash-covered ground until he crashed into one of the rusted iron cages.

[Target Eliminated x2. EXP Gained.]

Sebastian dusted off his leather coat. He looked around the shoreline.

The area was clear of hostiles. The only people left were the hundreds of emaciated, terrified refugees locked inside the rusted cages lining the Blood Lake.

They were staring at him in absolute shock. A few of them were crying. Most of them were just trembling, their low-level UI tags flickering weakly in the oppressive heat of the canyon.

"Please," a woman in the closest cage whispered, gripping the iron bars with bloody, dirt-stained fingers. "Please, get us out. We don’t want to go in the lake."

Sebastian walked to the edge of the platform.

He didn’t look at the cages. He didn’t look at the pleading faces. He looked entirely past them, his silver eyes locked onto the massive, bubbling reservoir of red liquid.

"Shut up," Sebastian commanded. His voice wasn’t angry. It was just a flat, metallic hum that vibrated the air. "I’m working."

He didn’t care about their sob stories. He wasn’t here to play savior. He was here to rob the server blind.

He pulled up his interface, ignoring the terrified whimpers behind him. He looked at the massive concentration of raw data sitting in the lake.

"Alright, let’s see how much fuel this dump actually has," Sebastian muttered, cracking his knuckles.

Before he could take a step toward the shoreline, the Blood Lake violently rebelled.

The red fluid began to churn with a frantic, aggressive rhythm. Massive bubbles the size of cars breached the surface, popping with sickening hisses of escaping steam. The ambient temperature in the canyon suddenly skyrocketed.

Sebastian narrowed his eyes. The server was reacting to Kenji’s death.

"Always a catch," Sebastian sighed, his hand resting near his thigh holster.

From the absolute center of the boiling lake, a colossal shadow began to rise.

The Blood Lake violently ruptured.

Millions of gallons of thick, crimson Source Code displaced as a towering, horrifying monstrosity dragged itself out of the depths.

It was a Leviathan. But it wasn’t a majestic creature of the deep. It was a bloated, festering nightmare of failed code and rotting biology. It was easily the size of a commercial cruise liner. Its body was a chaotic mess of decaying grey flesh, exposed digital ribcages, and jagged, neon-purple Void tumors.

The beast didn’t have eyes. It just had a massive, gaping maw lined with hundreds of crooked, shattered teeth.

[Entity: Void Leviathan (Corrupted Guardian)][Level: 80] [Status: Enraged]

"Oh, you are incredibly ugly," Sebastian noted, not taking a single step back.

The Leviathan threw its massive head back and let out a roar that shook the very foundations of the canyon.

RRRROOOAAARRR!

It was a physical shockwave of pure, unadulterated rot. The rusted iron cages along the shoreline groaned. The terrified refugees screamed, covering their ears as the sheer audio pressure chipped away at their pathetic health bars.

The beast slammed its massive, rotting flippers onto the edge of the lake. It didn’t wait for Sebastian to make a move. Its jaw unhinged, revealing a glowing, sickly green light building in the back of its throat.

"Breath attack," Sebastian deduced instantly, his highly optimized brain doing the math.

"Level 80 corruption. Probably area-of-effect."

He didn’t run. He didn’t use his [Heavenly Steps] to teleport out of the blast radius.

He needed to synthesize a brand new law of physics to save Valerie. To do that, he needed raw Source Code. But to deal with the Void safely in the future, he needed the specific mathematical concept of absolute decay. He needed to understand how the virus deleted things.

He was going to steal its breath.

"Let’s see what you’ve got, ugly," Sebastian gritted his teeth, planting his heavy boots firmly onto the black stone platform.

The Leviathan lunged forward and exhaled.

FWOOSH!

A massive, sweeping torrent of pure, concentrated necrosis erupted from the beast’s mouth. It wasn’t fire. It was a thick, green sludge of absolute decay. It washed over the shoreline like a toxic tidal wave.

Where the breath hit the ground, the solid obsidian rock instantly hissed, bubbling and melting into gray, lifeless ash. It simply ceased to hold its molecular bonds.

The green wave slammed directly into Sebastian.

"FUCK!" Sebastian roared, his voice tearing from his throat.

The pain was mind-breaking.

Even with his [Thermal Immunity] and his thirty-percent physical synchronization, the necrosis bypassed standard damage. It directly attacked his foundational code.

His black leather coat instantly dissolved into green static. The skin on his forearms blistered, turned black, and began to violently slough off his digital bones.

[Warning: Catastrophic Biological Decay Detected!] [HP: 80%... 60%... 40%...]

His health bar was in absolute freefall. The sheer agony of his meat-suit being un-rendered alive made his vision swim.

But Sebastian didn’t retreat. He didn’t put up a [Water Mirror].

He raised his right hand, pushing it directly into the thickest, most agonizing center of the green necrotic breath. His fingers were completely stripped of flesh, revealing the glowing silver wireframe of his avatar beneath.

"Admin Interface," Sebastian commanded, his voice glitching with static.

His green UI forcefully popped into existence, fighting against the red warning screens.

He activated the module he had looted from the Juncture Scavenger.

[Skill Activated: Concept Extraction] [Target: Incoming Hostile Code]

Sebastian’s digital, skeletal fingers violently grasped at the empty air. He wasn’t grabbing the green slime. He was grabbing the absolute mathematical principle causing the damage.

He closed his fist.

[Extraction Successful: Concept of Decay (Raw)]

The moment the data packet hit his inventory, the 10,000x Nexus Glitch aggressively woke up.

[Code Compiler Activated: Compiling data x10,000...]

The system UI practically shrieked in protest.

Hundreds of blue windows cascaded across his vision, overlapping the red damage warnings. The server was being forcefully fed ten thousand lifetimes of understanding absolute entropy in a fraction of a second.

[Concept of Decay Maxed. Authority Granted.]