Corbin was completely losing his mind. The rogue code-smith was running in circles, his grease-stained overalls flapping as he tried to yank expensive mana-crystals out of his overheating server banks.

"They’re here! The Saints are here!" Corbin shrieked, dropping a crystal and ignoring it as it shattered on the concrete. "The proximity alarms are maxed out! There’s enough holy mana up there to vaporize this entire skull!

We’re dead! We’re deleted!"

Sebastian stood in the center of the chaotic room. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t packing.

He just stood there, his black leather coat perfectly still, his silver-tinged eyes radiating a terrifying, deadpan calmness.

"Calm down, Seattle," Sebastian said smoothly, his voice entirely devoid of panic.

He casually checked the clasps on his tactical gloves. "It’s just a little traffic jam."

Gwen stopped packing. She zipped the duffel bag shut with a sharp, angry pull and hoisted it over her shoulder. She looked at Sebastian like he had completely lost his mind.

"Traffic jam?!" Gwen yelled, marching right up to him. "Sebastian, look at the monitors! That isn’t a strike team! That’s the entire Vanguard fleet of the Outer Servers! There are literally hundreds of dreadnoughts up there! They are going to glass this entire outpost from orbit just to make sure they hit you!"

"Good," Sebastian nodded slightly. "Saves me the trouble of hunting them down."

"Are you entirely stupid?!" Gwen grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with desperate urgency. "I know you’re a Demigod. I know you can punch a mech in half. But you cannot punch an army of ten thousand Level 90 zealots!

You have the Spoofing Drive! You have the filters! We need to get to my stealth skiff and jump to Earth right now!"

Sebastian gently but firmly removed her hand from his arm.

"You guys go," Sebastian said, his voice dropping into that low, metallic hum of absolute authority. "Take the skiff. Get out of the blast radius. I’ll catch an Uber home when I’m done here."

"Sebastian, you’ll die!" Gwen pleaded.

Sebastian looked past her, his gaze seemingly piercing right through the heavy lead-lined walls of the bunker and up toward the descending fleet.

"I need their Cores," Sebastian stated simply.

It wasn’t a boast. It was a cold, mathematical fact.

He had ten million units of Source Code, but he had a whole planet to rebuild. He had a barrier to permanently anchor. He needed fuel, and the Saints had just conveniently delivered hundreds of massive, high-tier engine cores right to his doorstep.

"You’re a lunatic," Gwen whispered, shaking her head. She realized in that moment that the man standing in front of her wasn’t a player trying to survive the game. He was a monster trying to break it.

"Thanks," Sebastian smirked. "Now get out of here before the ceiling caves in."

Gwen didn’t argue anymore. She grabbed Corbin by the collar of his overalls, dragging the sobbing engineer toward the heavy blast doors. "Come on, stubby! We’re leaving!"

Sebastian watched them go, waiting until the heavy metal doors slammed shut behind them.

The bunker was quiet, save for the rhythmic thudding of the planetary bombardment beginning on the surface.

Sebastian cracked his neck. He didn’t use a portal to get to the surface. He didn’t want to waste the mana. He just activated his thirty-percent physical synchronization, bent his knees, and jumped straight up.

BOOM!

His hyper-dense body shattered the reinforced concrete ceiling of the bunker. He shot upward like a human missile, tearing through hundreds of feet of petrified bone, rusted metal, and toxic sludge.

He burst out of the top of the leviathan’s skull, landing heavily on the decaying, rusted metal docks that overlooked the massive void of the Juncture.

The scene was apocalyptic.

Outpost Rust was actively burning. High-caliber plasma beams rained down from the dreadnoughts above, instantly vaporizing entire blocks of the neon-lit slums. Scavenger ships trying to flee were violently swatted out of the sky by the golden anti-air turrets of the holy fleet. The air was thick with smoke, the screams of dying NPCs, and the deafening roar of massive engines.

Sebastian walked to the very edge of the rusted dock. He didn’t draw his Earth Sword.

He didn’t summon a protective shield.

He stood completely alone against the backdrop of a burning world, a tiny, insignificant speck of black leather facing down a sky made entirely of hostile steel.

He looked up at the flagship ’Righteous Dawn’ hovering directly above him. He could feel the thousands of targeting lasers locking onto his exact coordinates.

Sebastian casually shoved his hands into his pockets. He smiled.

"Alright, boys," Sebastian whispered to the roaring wind, his silver eyes flashing with the terrifying promise of the Sovereign. "Let’s see how much you weigh."

The dark, heavily irradiated wind of the Juncture whipped his ruined black leather coat around his calves.

He simply shoved his black-gloved hands deep into his pockets, tilted his head back, and stared up at the apocalyptic nightmare descending upon him.

The sky, which was normally just a chaotic, swirling mess of dark purple smog and deleted data, had been entirely replaced. It was a suffocating ceiling of pristine, blindingly white durasteel and glowing gold.

The Vanguard of the Holy Crusade had arrived, and they clearly didn’t believe in subtlety.

Hundreds of massive, city-sized planetary dreadnoughts drifted slowly out of the twenty-mile-wide warp gate. They were terrifying monuments to the absolute peak of military engineering that the Ethereal Plane’s server could possibly render. Their hulls were flawless, lacking a single scratch or speck of cosmic dust. Intricate, pulsing gold runes were etched along their sides, humming with a deep, administrative power that physically vibrated the rusted floorboards beneath Sebastian’s heavy boots.

Each dreadnought was larger than the entire industrial district of Earth. They possessed towering, cathedral-like spires that doubled as heavy plasma cannons. Their anti-gravity engines burned with a fierce, blinding blue light that completely blotted out the distant, dying stars of the multiverse.

The sheer, unadulterated mass of the fleet violently displaced the ambient smog of the Juncture. It created a localized atmospheric storm, sending swirling purple clouds and jagged arcs of red lightning crashing across the void.

Down below, the lawless shantytown of Outpost Rust was having a complete, server-wide meltdown.

The inhabitants of the giant, dead space leviathan skull were scavengers, smugglers, and cutthroats. They were the absolute worst scum the multiverse had to offer. But even they knew when a game was over. The sirens blared from every corner of the neon-drenched slums, a chaotic, shrieking chorus of pure panic.

Sebastian watched with mild, deadpan interest as a dozen patched-together scavenger ships frantically detached from the lower docking bays. They fired their unstable plasma thrusters, desperately trying to jump into warp speed before the armada could establish a localized lockdown.

They didn’t even make it a mile.

High above, the golden anti-air turrets of the holy fleet tracked the fleeing vessels with terrifying, automated precision. There was no warning shot. There was no demand for surrender. Beams of hyper-condensed, super-heated holy light rained down from the heavens. The scavenger ships were violently swatted out of the sky, exploding into massive, silent fireballs of expanding plasma and shredded metal.

The burning debris rained down on the neon-lit slums below, crushing rusted shanties and incinerating the screaming NPCs who hadn’t managed to find deep cover.

"Well," Sebastian muttered to himself, his voice completely calm despite the absolute carnage unfolding around him. "So much for the ’holy’ part of the crusade. You guys just blew up a noodle stand."

[System Alert: Multiple Hostile Entities Detected.]

[Threat Level: APOCALYPTIC.]

[Warning: Evasive Maneuvers Highly Recommended.]

Sebastian lazily swiped the glowing red warning prompt away from his vision. He didn’t have time for the system’s automated panic. He was focused on the massive flagship hovering directly above him, dead center in the armada’s formation.

The side of the flagship proudly displayed the glowing golden text: Righteous Dawn.

Standing on the polished, heavily shielded observation deck of the massive dreadnought were the two commanders of this ridiculous overkill. Even from miles away, Sebastian’s newly stabilized, thirty-percent synchronized Demigod biology allowed his [True Sight] to easily pierce the distance.

He saw Saint Grigori, the Warlord of the Heavens. The man was a towering mountain of a player, clad in heavy, pristine white Paladin armor that glowed with a sickeningly pure holy light. He held a massive diamond warhammer resting casually on his shoulder. He looked exactly like the kind of arrogant, pay-to-win elite that Sebastian absolutely despised.