Jin hit the decking exactly where Sebastian had been standing a moment before. The sheer kinetic force of the impact violently buckled the thick iron plating, cratering the dock and sending a massive shockwave of displaced dust and rust outward.

But Jin’s body couldn’t handle the trauma.

His desiccated flesh and brittle, aged bones possessed absolutely zero elasticity.

The Cyber-Monk exploded.

He shattered into thousands of dry, brittle pieces. Shards of mummified skin, broken cybernetic gears, and jagged fragments of bone sprayed violently across the platform. It sounded like a massive pane of glass being dropped from a skyscraper.

A heavy, severed cybernetic arm clattered across the metal grating, coming to a stop just inches from Sebastian’s boots. The silver plating was heavily tarnished, the internal wires sparking weakly before finally dying.

Sebastian looked down at the arm. He let out a slow, exhausted breath.

The heavy, oppressive hum of the Law of Rotting Gravity slowly began to fade. With the entire Holy Crusade deleted and the last remaining threat shattered on the floor, Sebastian mentally deactivated the conceptual law.

He didn’t want to accidentally age his own boots.

The absolute, deafening silence of the Juncture returned. The ash of ten thousand players continued to drift lazily down from the sky, coating the ruined outpost in a fresh layer of gray snow.

Sebastian stepped forward. He walked directly into the center of the shallow crater where Jin had impacted.

Lying in the center of the debris, remarkably intact, was the mummified upper half of Jin’s skull. The cybernetic eye was dead, and the jaw was missing, but the smooth, pale dome of the bone stared up at the dark sky.

Sebastian didn’t gloat. He didn’t offer a final, villainous quip. He was just a guy trying to clean up a very messy room.

He raised his heavy, steel-dense boot and brought it down squarely on the center of the skull.

CRUNCH.

The bone turned instantly to powder under his heel.

[Target Eliminated. Boss Defeated.]

[Notice: Experience Gain Negated by Level Cap.]

[Loot Dropped: Cyber-Monk Core (Legendary), 10,000 Silver Coins.]

Sebastian didn’t even bother looking at the loot prompt. He just swiped it away with an annoyed flick of his eyes. He didn’t need silver. He didn’t need another core right now.

He stood alone on the edge of the docking bay, surrounded by the absolute, catastrophic devastation he had just caused. He had successfully lured the most powerful, arrogant army in the outer servers to his doorstep, and he had completely deleted them without taking a single point of damage.

He was the Anomaly. He was the Glitch. And he had just proven that the server belonged to him.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his comm-link. He tapped the side of the heavy, military-grade radio.

"Seattle. Corbin. You can come out now," Sebastian broadcasted, his voice returning to its normal, slightly raspy human tone. "The exterminators have been exterminated."

Static hissed over the line for a long moment before Gwen’s shaky, disbelieving voice replied.

"Are you... are you serious? The whole fleet?

Sebastian, what the hell did you do?"

"I did the math," Sebastian said simply, turning his back on the void and walking toward the ramp leading back down into the leviathan’s skull. "Now get the skiff ready. We have a Regional Core to plant, and I have a Princess to wake up."

Saint Grigori, the Warlord of the Heavens, was having a very bad day.

Just a few minutes ago, he had been standing on the pristine, golden observation deck of his massive dreadnought, preparing to glass a filthy Juncture slum from orbit. He had ten thousand elite, heavily armored zealots at his back. He had the absolute backing of the System Senate. He had a planet-cracker cannon warming up to turn an annoying little glitch into a smudge of radioactive code.

Now, he was falling through a terrifying, apocalyptic rain of rusted metal and screaming men.

"No! No, this is mathematically impossible!"

Grigori shrieked, his charismatic, booming voice completely cracking as he tumbled through the dark, toxic smog of the Juncture.

All around him, the pride of the Holy Crusade was disintegrating. Massive, city-sized chunks of his dreadnoughts were aggressively rusting, crumbling into brown and orange powder before his very eyes. The screaming of his Level 80 and Level 90 followers echoed in the void as their indestructible armor turned into heavy, suffocating iron maidens that dragged them down to the ocean of debris below.

Grigori was terrified, but he was still a Level 95 Paladin. Survival instincts overrode his absolute panic.

"Holy Aegis! Wings of the Seraph!" Grigori chanted frantically, his hands glowing with a desperate, blinding white light.

He dumped almost his entire mana pool into a single, high-tier survival skill. A pair of massive, feathery wings made of pure, condensed holy energy erupted from his back. The wings beat violently against the vacuum, catching the ambient magical currents of the Juncture. His rapid, terrifying descent violently slowed to a halt.

He hovered in the air, panting heavily, his pristine white armor heavily pitted and flaking from the lingering effects of the Anomaly’s gravitational rot.

He looked down. He couldn’t see his brother, Jin. He couldn’t see his fleet. There was just an endless, swirling cloud of gray ash and bone dust settling over the rusted docks of Outpost Rust.

The Warlord of the Heavens finally understood the horrible truth. He hadn’t brought an army to execute a glitch. He had brought a buffet to feed a monster.

"I need to leave. I have to warn the Grand Archons," Grigori muttered to himself, his hands shaking violently as he pulled up his digital interface.

He completely abandoned his majestic, righteous persona. He didn’t care about the three-planet bounty anymore. He just wanted to get back to the safety of the System Senate. He tapped frantically at his UI, pulling up his emergency warp protocols.

[System Command: Emergency Transit.] [Target Destination: The System Senate, Administrative Hub.] [Warning: Transit requires 10 seconds of uninterrupted channeling.]