Awakening a 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier in the Apocalypse-Chapter 65: []: The Digital Plague, Deep Code Purge

Sebastian sprinted through the damp sewer tunnels, his heavy boots splashing violently through the stagnant water. Wraith was a silent shadow keeping pace right beside him. The Level 25 Assassin didn’t ask questions. He just ran.

"Talk to me, Valerie! Give me a sit-rep!" Sebastian barked into his comm-link, his lungs burning as the physical exertion tested the limits of his twenty percent synchronization.

"It’s a slaughterhouse up here!" Valerie’s voice was barely audible over the chaotic background noise of screaming civilians and the heavy, mechanical clanking of the Scrap Golems. "People are just snapping! They’re sleepwalking! Their eyes are rolled back, their faces are completely slack, and they are drooling this thick, black liquid!"

"The Void virus." Sebastian cursed under his breath. "The Apostle didn’t just brainwash those cultists. He used the local network to broadcast a corrupted data packet directly into the neural implants of anyone who had their VR interfaces on standby."

"They’re picking up tools, knives, pieces of rebar!" Valerie shouted. "They’re butchering their own families in their sleep! The Golems are trying to contain them, but they’re mixed in with the uninfected! If I order a lethal sweep, the Golems will crush half our population!"

"Hold the line. Do not issue a kill order." Sebastian commanded, his voice flat and focused. "Lock down the inner Citadel. Keep the blast doors sealed. I’m three minutes out."

He shoved the comm-link into his coat pocket. "Wraith. Get to the courtyard. Support the Golems. Use non-lethal takedowns if you can. Hamstring them. Break their knees. Just stop them from killing the healthy ones."

"Understood." Wraith nodded. He instantly activated his [Shadow Step], completely vanishing from the tunnel and teleporting toward the surface.

Sebastian didn’t go to the courtyard. He couldn’t punch a digital computer virus to death, and he couldn’t slice a corrupted network signal with a sword. He needed a completely different kind of weapon.

He burst out of the sewer access hatch and sprinted directly for the heavily armored doors of Warehouse 4’s primary server room.

He slammed his hand against the biometric scanner. The heavy titanium doors hissed open.

The room was bathed in the harsh, pulsing blue light of the Storm Core battery. The massive elemental heart beat with a terrifying electrical rhythm, powering the VR pods lined up against the wall.

Sebastian threw his leather coat off. He didn’t bother wiping the sweat from his brow. He threw himself into the primary command pod and yanked the heavy black VR helmet down over his face.

The cold neural needles bit sharply into the back of his neck.

He didn’t say "Link Start." He wasn’t logging into the standard Ethereal Plane interface.

"Admin Override. Access Deep Code architecture. Execute." Sebastian commanded.

VWOOSH!

His consciousness wasn’t pulled into a vibrant fantasy world or a bleak void. He was forcefully pushed into a fast tunnel of raw, blinding green and black data streams. It felt like his brain was being dragged across a cheese grater made of pure math.

He materialized in a place that had no physical geometry.

He was standing in the "Deep Code." It was the foundational basement of the server’s reality. There were no skies, no grounds, and no textures. There were just infinite, towering pillars of scrolling alphanumeric sequences. It looked like the matrix, but infinitely more unstable.

And it was currently infected.

Massive, throbbing veins of neon-purple corruption were aggressively wrapping around the green data pillars. The Void virus was rewriting the localized behavior protocols of the human NPCs and the synchronized beta testers.

"Alright, Clippy." Sebastian gritted his teeth. "Let’s debug."

He opened his digital inventory. He completely ignored the god-tier weapons and the elemental magic. He scrolled down to the absolute bottom of his trash loot pile.

He pulled out a tiny, practically disintegrating grey pamphlet. He had looted it from a low-level scribe NPC on his first day.

[Item: Basic Code Edit]

[Tier: 0 Utility Skill]

[Effect: Allows the user to fix minor typos in player-generated text logs. Highly useless.]

It was a skill meant for fixing spelling errors in guild charters.

Sebastian crushed the fragile pamphlet in his fist.

"Let’s see you handle a typo." he whispered.

[Action Registered: Learn Basic Code Edit.] 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

[Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.]

The system interface completely freaked out. The deep code around him violently shuddered as the 10,000x multiplier forcefully injected ten thousand lifetimes of programming mastery directly into Sebastian’s digital avatar.

[Basic Code Edit leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!]

[Evolution Requirement Met. Basic Code Edit evolves to Tier 1: Script Manipulation!]

[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Script Manipulation leveled up to 10/10!]

[Evolution Requirement Met. Script Manipulation evolves to Tier 3: System Override!]

[Proficiency Overflow Detected! System Override leveled up to 10/10!]

[WARNING: Fatal Logic Error Detected.]

[Concept Threshold Breached. Administrator Law Unlocked.]

[System Override evolves to Conceptual Law: Data Manipulation / Reality Hack.]

Sebastian gasped, clutching his head as a terrifying clarity washed over his mind. He didn’t just see the code anymore. He felt it. He could grab a string of binary, twist it, and fundamentally alter the physical state of the universe.

He raised both of his hands toward the towering pillars of data that were currently choking on the purple Void virus.

He didn’t type on a keyboard. He physically reached his glowing, silver-tinged hands into the raw data streams.

"Purge." Sebastian commanded, his voice echoing with the absolute authority of a server god.

He clamped his hands onto the purple corruption and violently ripped it backward!

SKREEEEECH!

The Deep Code shrieked like a dying animal. A massive shockwave of pure, blinding white holy mana exploded from Sebastian’s avatar. It washed over the infinite data pillars like a digital tsunami.

The white light hit the purple virus. It didn’t just delete it. It violently scrubbed it from existence, rewriting the infected code back to its base state.

In the real world, the effect was absolutely horrific.

Up in the courtyard of Sanctuary, a sleepwalking man with a slack jaw and drooling mouth was raising a rusted iron pipe, preparing to cave his own daughter’s skull in.

Suddenly, the man froze.

The Reality Hack hit his infected neural implant. The server forcefully purged the corrupted data from his wetware. But the human brain was not designed to handle a sudden deletion of localized logic.

"G-GAAAHK!" the man screamed and dropped the pipe.

His eyes rolled into the back of his head. The synapses in his brain violently overloaded. POP! POP!