The gory fallout rained down onto the Juncture, completely painting the invisible air with the remnants of the Vanguard’s leader.

BING!

[Target Eliminated: Saint Grigori.] [Experience Gain Negated by Level Cap.] [Loot Dropped: Warlord’s Halo (Mythic), 50,000 Gold Coins.]

Sebastian glanced at the floating system prompt, then swiped it away with a bored flick of his eyes.

"And that," Sebastian muttered, watching the golden escape portal slowly fizzle out and close. "Is why you always run an antivirus."

He cracked his neck, the satisfying pop echoing in the quiet void. The sky was entirely clear. The heavily armored piñatas had all been thoroughly smashed.

It was time to collect the candy.

Sebastian dropped his localized gravity anchor and began his descent back down to the rusted, ash-covered docks of Outpost Rust.

—-

The absolute silence of the Juncture was heavy, thick, and entirely unsettling.

Sebastian landed softly on the jagged, rusted metal of the docking bay. His heavy boots crunched against the thick layer of grey ash and bone dust that now blanketed the entire outpost. The sprawling, neon-lit shantytown of Outpost Rust looked like a snow globe that had been shaken and then violently dropped on the floor.

The sky above him, which just twenty minutes ago had been choked with hundreds of city-sized dreadnoughts and tens of thousands of elite Saints, was completely empty. There was no holy light. There were no plasma cannons. Just the dark, swirling purple smog of the Ethereal Plane’s dead zone.

"I really need to start charging for waste disposal," Sebastian grumbled, dusting a thick layer of pulverized Paladin off the shoulder of his black leather coat.

He didn’t immediately rush to check on Gwen and Corbin. He knew they were fine, locked safely away in their lead-lined bunker beneath the leviathan’s skull. He had work to do on the surface first.

Sebastian walked toward the massive, smoking crater where the flagship, the Righteous Dawn, had violently crashed before turning to dust.

The Ethereal Plane’s loot preservation laws were a beautiful thing. While the [Law of Rotting Gravity] had completely erased the physical structures, the armor, and the biological bodies of the crusade, the server still registered the sheer, unadulterated value of the items they carried.

Sitting in the center of the ash piles were the drops.

It was a literal sea of glowing, high-tier loot.

"Jackpot," Sebastian whispered, a dark, completely unhinged smirk spreading across his face.

He didn’t bother picking up the gold coins or the basic magical staves. He waded through the knee-deep ash, his silver-tinged eyes perfectly scanning the debris for the high-value targets.

He approached a massive, glowing blue crystal the size of a minivan. It was humming with raw, anti-gravity magic.

[Item Acquired: Dreadnought Engine Core (Legendary)]

Sebastian touched it, instantly sending the massive item into his bottomless digital inventory. He walked a few feet further and found a jagged, pulsating purple crystal that screamed with the condensed agony of a Level 90 player.

[Item Acquired: Grand Soul Shard]

He hoovered them up like a guy walking through a grocery store with a blank check.

Ship cores. Soul shards. Rare crafting metals that had survived the rust. He gathered enough raw materials in ten minutes to build three new Sky-Fortresses and power Sanctuary for the next century.

But he wasn’t looking for building materials right now. He was looking for a map.

He marched over to the specific patch of ash where Saint Grigori’s mutated body had rained down. Sitting perfectly untouched in the center of the blackened gore was a sleek, perfectly rectangular datapad made of glowing white glass.

Sebastian crouched down and picked it up. It felt cold to the touch.

[Item Identified: Administrator’s Ledger (Heavily Encrypted)]

"Let’s see what you were hiding, Grigori," Sebastian murmured.

He didn’t try to guess the password. He didn’t try to hack it with a rogue skill. He simply opened his green Admin UI and channeled his [Code Compiler] directly into the device.

The 10,000x Nexus Glitch aggressively tore through the holy encryption. Red warning screens flashed on the datapad for a fraction of a second before Sebastian’s raw administrative authority violently bypassed the firewalls. The screen turned a friendly, compliant blue.

[Encryption Broken. Accessing Files.]

Sebastian scrolled past the Warlord’s personal logs, his supply chain records, and his boring, fanatical prayers to the Void. He was looking for coordinates.

His eyes locked onto a heavily shielded file titled: Pilgrimage to the Architects.

He tapped it.

A glowing, three-dimensional holographic map projected from the datapad into the dark air. It showed the sprawling layout of the Juncture, highlighting a very specific, heavily warded route that entirely bypassed the normal server transit lines.

At the very end of the route, sitting entirely isolated from the rest of the multiverse, was a massive, blindingly white icon.

[Target Coordinates Acquired: The System Hub.] [Status: Absolute Administrative Center.]

Sebastian’s breath hitched slightly. He stared at the glowing white dot.

The System Hub. The physical, multiversal server farm where the Grand Archons—the supreme Admins of the Ethereal Plane—dictated the rules of the Game. It was the place where the death-lock on Valerie’s soul had been written. It was the only place where he could permanently lift the barrier around Earth.

It was the final dungeon.

"Found it," Sebastian whispered, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, absolute certainty.

"I found the manager’s office."

"Are we dead?!" a frantic, incredibly loud voice broke his concentration.

Sebastian turned around.

Climbing out of a heavy maintenance hatch set into the rusted floor of the docks were Gwen and Corbin. The smuggler had her kinetic pistols drawn, her eyes darting around wildly. The code-smith looked like he was about to have a nervous breakdown, clutching his toolbox to his chest like a shield.

They scrambled onto the deck and froze.

They looked up at the empty sky. They looked at the miles of gray ash and pulverized metal.

They looked at the complete, total absence of the ten thousand invincible zealots who had been threatening to glass the planet just twenty minutes ago.