Awakening a 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier in the Apocalypse-Chapter 87: []: Man vs. Sage, Looping the Meat-Grinder

The space around them was completely silent and dead.

There was no wind or earth to carry the sounds of a battle.

There was only the heavy pressure of a Level 90 Grand Sage radiating divine authority and the deeply annoyed Level 60 Drifter standing across from him.

Eldric the Timekeeper floated inches above the marble platform. His eyes were twin galaxies of swirling silver light. He held his glowing hourglass staff with the casual grip of a god who had never lost a fight in his entire digital existence.

"Your move, Anomaly." Eldric’s telepathic voice echoed directly into Sebastian’s skull.

Sebastian didn’t say a word nor did he scream a battle cry. He just gripped the hilt of his massive concrete-encrusted Earth Sword and kicked off the marble floor.

With his twenty-percent physical synchronization and his limiters forcefully broken, Sebastian crossed the fifty yards in a fraction of a microsecond.

He moved so fast that the game’s rendering engine left a trail of glitched jagged afterimages in his wake.

He swung the hundred-ton sword in a brutal horizontal arc aimed directly at the old man’s neck. It was a strike backed by the conceptual law of his God-Slayer’s Edge.

It ignored all defense and magic. It was mathematically guaranteed to take the Sage’s head clean off his shoulders.

The blade passed right through Eldric’s neck.

SHLUCK.

The Timekeeper’s head detached. His health bar instantly plummeted to absolute zero.

Sebastian followed through with the swing as his boots skidded against the marble to arrest his momentum. He stood up straight and rested the heavy sword on his shoulder.

"Well, that was incredibly underwhelming," Sebastian muttered and turned around.

But the body of the Grand Sage didn’t fall and it didn’t dissolve into pixels.

TICK.

A deafening ticking sound vibrated in Sebastian’s brain.

The space around Eldric’s ruined avatar violently warped. The digital blood that had sprayed from his neck suddenly froze in mid-air. Then the blood flew backward and sank into the wound. The severed head snapped cleanly back onto the neck.

In less than a second, Eldric was whole again. His health bar instantly snapped back to full.

"Fascinating," Eldric said entirely unfazed. "Your blade ignores all physical and magical barriers. A true conceptual severance. But you cannot sever what has not happened yet."

Sebastian stared at the old man. He let out a long heavy sigh. "Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me. Rollback netcode?"

"I am the Timekeeper, Sebastian," Eldric said softly. "I do not heal. I simply revert my personal timeline to a coordinate prior to the damage. You cannot kill me."

Eldric raised his hourglass staff. "But I can kill you."

A beam of concentrated glowing grey energy shot from the tip of the staff. It didn’t travel through the air. It simply manifested directly on Sebastian’s right arm.

Sebastian didn’t have time to dodge. The grey light washed over his black leather coat and the flesh beneath it.

Instantly his arm began to rapidly age. The leather turned brittle and crumbled into dust. His synchronized steel-dense muscles withered as the skin sagged and turned a sickly grey.

Within two seconds his entire right arm was nothing but a fragile brittle skeleton wrapped in paper-thin skin.

His grip failed. The hundred-ton Earth Sword dropped from his hand and crashed into the marble floor.

CRACK.

The bones in his right arm shattered under their own fragile weight.

It should have been the most excruciating agony imaginable. Having a limb rapidly aged to dust while still attached to your torso would normally send a player into a localized coma of pure shock.

But Sebastian just stood there. He looked at his ruined dusty stump of an arm. He blinked his pitch-black emotionless eyes.

Without his nociception code and without his pain receptors, his brain registered the damage as nothing more than a floating red number on his UI.

[-15,000 HP]

"Huh. That’s annoying," Sebastian said deadpan.

He casually reached over with his left hand, gripped the hilt of the Earth Sword, and hoisted it back onto his left shoulder. He didn’t scream or panic. He just looked at the Grand Sage with the mild irritation of a man swatting away a mosquito.

Eldric’s galactic eyes widened in genuine unfiltered shock.

"You... you feel nothing," the Timekeeper whispered.

"I feel like my time is being wasted," Sebastian corrected.

He lunged forward again. This time he didn’t use the sword. He activated his [Heavenly Steps] and teleported directly above the Sage. He dropped down and drove his heavy leather boot squarely into the center of Eldric’s chest.

CRUNCH!

The Sage’s ribcage caved in. He slammed into the marble and his body completely pulverized.

TICK.

The space warped. The damage reversed. Eldric stood back up completely unharmed.

"You are a stubborn fool," Eldric stated and raised his staff again. "Time Ravage!"

A massive wave of grey energy hit Sebastian square in the chest. His health bar plummeted. His digital flesh rotted and withered. His left leg completely calcified and snapped at the knee.

Sebastian collapsed to the floor. He was a ruined mess.

But he didn’t stay down. Using his one good arm he dragged himself across the marble. He grabbed his rusty iron dagger from his belt and threw it with perfectly calculated precision.

THWIP.

The rusted blade buried itself right between the Timekeeper’s eyes.

TICK.

The dagger flew backward into Sebastian’s hand. Eldric was whole again.

It was a completely unhinged horrifying loop. It was a meat-grinder of epic proportions.

For what felt like hours, the battle raged in space. Eldric killed Sebastian dozens of times over. He aged him to dust. He reversed his blood flow until his heart exploded. He paused time and severed Sebastian’s limbs with chronal blades.

But every single time Sebastian’s health bar hit zero, his glitched digital biology forcefully rebooted itself and anchored to his real-world physical sync. And because he could not feel pain he never hesitated. He never stopped. He was a relentless zombie made of pure math and spite.

Sebastian dragged his bloody broken torso across the marble for the fiftieth time. He left a thick trail of digital gore behind him.

"This is getting really old, old man," Sebastian gurgled and spat a mouthful of black blood onto the floor.

Eldric was floating ten feet away. The Sage actually looked tired. His robes were slightly rumpled and the glow of his hourglass was dimming. Maintaining constant temporal rewinds was draining his massive mana pool.

"Why do you persist?" Eldric asked with his telepathic voice laced with genuine confusion. "You cannot out-damage time itself. Surrender the trial."

"I don’t surrender to bad game design," Sebastian wheezed.

He slowly pushed himself up into a kneeling position. He tossed his dagger aside. He didn’t need a weapon. He couldn’t kill Eldric with damage. The Sage would just hit the undo button every time his HP hit zero.

To beat a broken mechanic you didn’t fight the health bar. You fought the server.

Sebastian opened his glitched inventory. He bypassed the god-tier weapons and the reality-deleting spells. He scrolled down to the absolute bottom of the barrel.

He found a pathetic Tier 0 utility book.

[Basic Haste]

[Effect: Increases target attack speed by 2% for 5 seconds.]

It was a garbage spell meant to help low-level rogues swing their daggers just a tiny bit faster.

"Hey, Clippy," Sebastian whispered to the system. "Let’s see how much math you can process at once."

He crushed the fragile book in his only remaining hand.

[Action Registered: Cast Basic Haste.]

[Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.]

The system interface violently shrieked. The blue windows didn’t just cascade. They exploded across his vision and blinded him with a wall of frantic overlapping text.

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

[Evolution Requirement Met. Basic Haste evolves to Tier 1: Time Dilation!]

[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Time Dilation leveled up to 10/10!]

[Evolution Requirement Met. Time Dilation evolves to Tier 3: Chronal Shift!]

[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Chronal Shift leveled up to 10/10!]

[WARNING: Concept Threshold Breached. Temporal Law Unlocked.]

[Chronal Shift evolves to Conceptual Law: Temporal Overload.]

Sebastian gasped. His digital brain felt like it was being shoved through a jet engine. He didn’t just understand how to move faster. He understood the absolute fundamental limits of the server’s processing power.

He looked up at the floating Grand Sage.

"Let’s see you rewind this," Sebastian growled.

He didn’t target himself. He pointed his trembling blood-soaked hand directly at Eldric.

"Overload."

He forcefully dumped his entire infinite mana pool into the concept and injected ten thousand lifetimes of accelerated temporal data directly into the Sage’s localized timeline.

BZZZZZT!

The space violently stuttered. The visual rendering of the Spire’s top floor tore apart and revealed the raw green code beneath the marble.

Eldric froze. His eyes widened in absolute terror.

The Sage’s hourglass staff began to spin. It didn’t tick. It shrieked. It spun so fast it became a blinding blur of light.

Sebastian hadn’t damaged him. He had forcefully accelerated Eldric’s timeline by ten thousand years in a single microsecond. He forced so much raw multiplied data into the time-stream that the server simply gave up.

"No... wait..." Eldric’s voice glitched and his physical avatar violently vibrated.

The Sage couldn’t rewind. His rollback code was buried under billions of lines of forced acceleration data. The physics engine crashed.

Right before Sebastian’s eyes, the immortal Level 90 Guardian aged a thousand years in a second. His skin turned grey and then translucent. His bones calcified and turned brittle and instantly shattered.

His majestic midnight robes turned to dust.

In less than three seconds, the Grand Sage of the Spire was reduced to a small pathetic pile of grey ash on the marble floor.

The deafening tick of the hourglass faded into absolute silence.

Sebastian collapsed onto his back as his health bar blinked at a terrifying one percent. He stared up at the swirling nebulae of the dead universe.

A single final telepathic whisper echoed from the pile of dust.

"You have broken the rules... You are ready."

Sebastian let out a long exhausted breath.

"Fuck this game," he muttered.