Gwen slowly lowered her pistols. Her jaw actually dropped.

"Sebastian," Gwen breathed, walking forward and kicking a pile of Saint-level ash with her boot. "Where... where is the fleet?"

"I asked them to leave," Sebastian deadpanned, casually sliding the datapad into his inventory. "They put up a bit of a fuss, so I had to escalate things. But they’re gone now."

Corbin fell to his knees in the ash. He scooped up a handful of the gray powder, staring at it in absolute, unadulterated awe.

"This is... this is durasteel rust. And calcium dust. You... you decayed a fleet! You decayed an entire fleet of Dreadnoughts! That’s mathematically impossible!"

"I’m a very good accountant," Sebastian noted dryly.

Gwen holstered her weapons and walked right up to him. She looked at his calm, entirely unbothered expression. She looked at the faint silver runes glowing on his perfectly healed arms.

Gwen said, her voice a mix of deep respect and genuine terror. "You deleted an army. You are literally a walking extinction event. Please tell me we are done blowing things up today."

"Not quite," Sebastian smiled. It was a dark, dangerous smile that promised a lot more violence.

He pulled up the holographic map he had just downloaded, projecting it from his UI for them to see. He pointed directly at the blinding white icon of the System Hub.

"We have the coordinates," Sebastian announced. "I know exactly where the Grand Archons live. I know where the server rules are written."

Gwen stared at the map. The color instantly drained from her face. "No. No way. You want to go to the System Hub? Sebastian, that’s suicide! That’s where the literal gods of the Ethereal Plane reside! It’s a fortress!"

"It’s a data center," Sebastian corrected coldly. "And my girlfriend is currently stuck in a coma because of their bad programming."

He turned and began walking toward the edge of the dock, where Gwen’s battered, rusted smuggler skiff was still anchored.

"Gwen. Corbin. Get on the boat," Sebastian ordered, the Sovereign of Laws taking absolute command. "We’re going to the Hub.

It’s time to cancel their subscription."

—-

The journey through the Juncture to the absolute center of the Ethereal Plane was not a scenic cruise. It was a tense, paranoid crawl through the darkest corners of the digital universe.

Gwen’s rusted, patched-together smuggler skiff rattled and groaned as it navigated the chaotic currents of the void. The anti-gravity engines whined in constant protest, clearly unhappy about being pushed to their absolute limits.

Inside the cramped, dimly lit cabin, the atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife.

Corbin was pacing back and forth across the grated floor, chewing aggressively on his fingernails. The rogue code-smith hadn’t slept in two days, and the sheer terror of their destination was finally breaking his mind.

"We’re going to get wiped," Corbin muttered rapidly, pulling at his greasy hair. "The Archons don’t just use Void Wardens. They have localized reality scrubbers! They have sub-routines that can delete your entire ancestral lineage! I’m going to be turned into a pop-up ad for cheap potions!"

"Corbin, if you don’t sit down and shut up, I am going to throw you out the airlock," Gwen snapped from the helm. She was gripping the steering runes so tightly her knuckles were white. "I need to focus. The spatial distortions out here are insane. If I miss a coordinate, we fly straight into a deleted server."

Sebastian sat lazily in the co-pilot’s seat, his long legs kicked up onto the dashboard. He was sipping from a newly materialized cup of synthetic coffee, looking entirely unbothered by the impending doom.

He was wearing a fresh, pristine black tactical suit. His Demigod-tier biology was fully stabilized, and his 10,000x [Code Compiler] was humming quietly in the back of his mind, ready to be unleashed.

"Relax, guys," Sebastian said deadpan, taking a sip. "It’s just a server farm. We walk in, we talk to management, we rewrite a few fundamental laws of existence, and we leave. Easy in, easy out." 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Gwen shot him a glare that could melt steel.

"You are completely unhinged, Seattle. You know that, right? You literally don’t feel fear anymore."

"I deleted my pain receptors," Sebastian corrected smoothly. "I still feel annoyance. And right now, the fact that we aren’t there yet is very annoying."

"Well, you’re about to be thrilled," Gwen muttered, pulling back hard on the main throttle. "Dropping out of warp... now."

VWOOOSH!

The chaotic, swirling purple smog of the Juncture violently parted as the skiff decelerated. The dark, depressing void vanished, instantly replaced by an overwhelming, blindingly pure light.

Sebastian lowered his feet from the dashboard and stood up, his silver-tinged eyes narrowing as he looked out the reinforced glass window.

They had arrived at the System Hub.

It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t a floating piece of fantasy architecture like the Spire. It was a breathtaking, terrifying monument to absolute, sterile perfection.

Hovering in the center of the void was a Dyson sphere. But unlike the dark, corporate dystopia of Server 112, this sphere was entirely constructed of flawlessly smooth, blindingly white hard-light constructs. It was massive—easily the size of a small star.

There were no continents, no oceans, no cities visible on its surface. It was just a perfect, unbroken shell of mathematical geometry.

"Holy mother of code," Corbin whispered, pressing his face against the glass. "It’s beautiful. It’s completely flawless."

"It looks like an Apple store threw up in space," Sebastian grunted, utterly unimpressed by the sterile aesthetic.

But it was the defenses that caught Sebastian’s true attention.

Surrounding the massive white sphere were three colossal, rotating rings of pure, liquid gold energy. The rings spun in intersecting orbits, completely encasing the Hub in an intricate, moving cage.

Through his [True Sight], Sebastian didn’t just see golden light. He saw billions of lines of the most complex, aggressive firewall code he had ever encountered.

Stop the ship," Sebastian ordered sharply.

Gwen immediately killed the engines.