GLOBAL AWAKENING: My 10,000x Exp Multiplier-Chapter 37: []The Ghost City, Guardian of the Spire

The cathedral of corrupted data looked like a place of absolute despair. Towering pillars of jagged black iron stretched endlessly upward, disappearing into a ceiling that resembled a swirling vortex of digital blood.

The air inside this hidden realm known as the Ghost of Sovereign City lacked oxygen entirely. It felt heavy and suffocating. It tasted metallic, just like chewing on a copper wire.

Standing at the far end of the sprawling plaza was Pierce Valerius. He was illuminated by floating orbs of sickening golden light. He was the Alpha.

He wore clean Platinum-Tier armor that radiated an artificial holy aura. This completely contrasted with the decay surrounding them both.

"Sell them out?" Pierce laughed loudly.

His booming laugh echoed through the massive chamber. The sound was grating and entirely unnatural.

"I am saving them! The Spire is a test, peasant. The Overlords demand a tribute of data to spare this world from total deletion. I am the Guardian. I alone possess the strength to gather the core and present it to the Vanguard."

Vahn Ryker stood ten meters away. His hands rested casually in the pockets of his cheap standard-issue academy jacket.

The black rune of the Calamity Curse burned violently against his chest. It pulsed with a dark rhythm that actively tried to anchor his physical movements.

He was losing base stats by the second. His internal processing speed lagged heavily under the sheer weight of the Demon Duke’s parasitic code.

Yet, looking at the towering muscle-bound aristocrat in front of him, Vahn couldn’t help but smile.

It wasn’t a cold robotic expression. It was a deeply human and highly amused smirk.

"You really believe that, don’t you?" Vahn asked effortlessly. His voice easily cut through the heavy atmosphere.

"You actually think you are the hero of this story. The Overlords don’t want a tribute, Pierce. They want a battery."

Vahn paused for a moment and then continued.

"They are going to plug this planet into their grid, drain it dry, and leave you ruling over a floating rock of gray ash. You aren’t a guardian. You are just a glorified middle manager."

Pierce narrowed his sapphire eyes. The arrogant amusement vanished entirely from his perfectly sculpted face.

"You speak with entirely too much confidence for a man who is currently dying. I can see the curse eating your data, Ryker. I can see your foundational code unraveling. You are a glitch that has overstayed its welcome."

Pierce didn’t draw a weapon. He simply didn’t need to.

He raised his right hand. His Platinum-Tier gauntlet glowed with a blinding condensed aura of pure kinetic force. Then he snapped his fingers.

The air between them compressed violently. A localized shockwave erupted toward Vahn’s chest. It was invisible to the naked eye but carried the concussive force of a freight train.

Vahn immediately engaged his Verdant Chronos-Sight.

Faint green and azure circuit lines flared across his deep purple irises. The system broke the incoming attack down into geometric wireframes and mathematical vectors. He had exactly zero point four seconds to evade.

He tried to engage his base Agility to simply side-step the massive wall of force. But the Calamity Curse spiked instantly.

A horrific jagged pain tore through his ribs. It acted as a systemic tether that forcefully dragged his reaction time down. His legs felt like they were submerged in wet concrete.

The shockwave violently clipped his left shoulder.

Vahn was thrown backward. His boots skidded roughly across the polished bone-white floor of the cathedral.

He managed to correct his center of gravity. He dropped to one knee to anchor himself, but the kinetic impact still rattled his teeth. The cheap fabric of his academy jacket tore open, revealing the violently glowing black rune branded directly into his skin.

"You are sluggish," Pierce noted. He took a slow and arrogant step forward.

"The forums called you a ghost. They said you moved faster than the engine could process. But look at you now. You are just a fragile broken commoner choking on abyssal code."

Vahn touched his shoulder. He felt the phantom ache of the heavy impact.

He let out a slow measured breath to force his erratic heart rate to stabilize. The curse was a massive liability.

He couldn’t fight an elite powerhouse like Pierce while actively dividing his processing power to keep the Demon Duke’s parasite from consuming his soul.

He really needed to format the drive.

"The curse is aggressive," Vahn admitted as he slowly stood back up.

He didn’t look afraid at all. He just looked mildly inconvenienced.

"It utilizes a continuous tether to the abyssal server to constantly rewrite my localized defenses. I tried to heal it with standard restorative magic. Aria poured enough raw life-force into my chest to cure a terminal illness, but she couldn’t break the code."

"Because it is absolute!" Pierce roared while spreading his arms wide. "It is the mark of the Vanguard! It cannot be broken by human hands!"

"Aria treats the symptom," Vahn continued. He completely ignored Pierce’s showy display.

He took a step forward. His eyes locked onto the swirling vortex of corrupted data bleeding directly from the cathedral’s ceiling.

"But I don’t heal, Pierce. I edit."

Vahn raised his right hand and pointed his palm directly at his own chest.

If the Calamity Curse was a digital parasite feeding on his baseline data, the only way to kill it was to force-feed it something entirely toxic. He didn’t need pure golden healing magic. He needed raw unfiltered system garbage.

And the Ghost City was overflowing with it.

’System,’ Vahn commanded internally.

His authority immediately overrode the localized environmental parameters of the cathedral.

’Target: Ambient Corrupted Data. Initiate forced localized vacuum. Anchor point: The Calamity Curse.’

The air inside the cathedral shrieked loudly.

The red bleeding data swirling in the ceiling was violently pulled downward. It formed a localized tornado of thick oppressive digital ash. The data rushed directly into Vahn’s chest.

"What are you doing?!" Pierce demanded.

He took a step back as the sheer gravitational pull of the vacuum rattled his heavy armor.

"You are absorbing raw corruption! You will shatter your own core!"

Vahn gritted his teeth. A sharp hiss escaped his lips as the corrupted data slammed into the black rune.

The pain was terrible. It felt exactly like swallowing liquid nitrogen. But the math was absolute.

The Calamity Curse was designed to drain his stats, but it had a maximum bandwidth. By aggressively flooding the rune with millions of gigabytes of corrupted environmental data, he was intentionally overloading the parasite’s processing capacity.

— [Warning] —

↳ Critical Data Overflow Detected in Foreign Code!

↳ Calamity Curse array destabilizing...

"Choke on it," Vahn whispered. His eyes glowed with an intense and terrifying azure light.

He tapped into his massive reservoir of stored experience points. He didn’t use it to level up. He used it as a blunt-force hammer.

’Allocate one million EXP. Target: Personal Code Structure. Execute localized format.’

A blinding flash of pure white light erupted from beneath Vahn’s jacket. The sound of shattering glass echoed loudly through the massive cathedral.

The black rune on his chest didn’t just fade away. It exploded violently. It was reduced to a shower of harmless dead pixels that drifted to the floor like gray snow.

The suffocating weight vanished completely. The paralyzing lag in his limbs evaporated. The fifty points of base Agility he had painstakingly cultivated flooded back into his physical muscles with a terrifying coiled intensity.

Vahn rolled his shoulders. A deep genuine sigh of relief escaped his lips. He looked down at his chest. The skin was perfectly clear now. The tether was completely severed.

"Impossible," Pierce breathed out.

His sapphire eyes went wide with complete shock. His jaw nearly dropped.

"That was a Duke’s brand. That was divine code. You cannot just delete it!"

"Your definition of divinity is remarkably low," Vahn replied.

His voice shed its strained edge and returned to the crisp confident cadence of the Architect. He looked at Pierce, and his smile sharpened into something incredibly dangerous.

He thought of Hana standing perfectly straight in their apartment. He thought of Aria and her delicate hands glowing with desperate warmth as she tried to save him.

He was entirely done playing defensive today.

Vahn reached to his hip. His hand closed around the dark shadowy hilt of the Soul-Bound Shadow Blade.

The legendary dagger elongated instantly. It hummed with a violent hungry violet energy that eagerly drank in the ambient light of the room.

"Now," Vahn said. He dropped into a flawless and relaxed combat stance. "Let us talk about this tribute you want to collect."