Chapter 90: [90] : The Great Convergence, The Final Merge

The master server console was not just a desk. It was a massive semi-circular command center that took up half of the ruined executive boardroom.

It was covered in dozens of glowing red holographic screens. It hummed with the immense terrifying power required to run the Primordial Grid across billions of dive pods worldwide.

Declan stood in front of it. He rested the heavy dark matter shaft of his +40 halberd against the edge of the sleek metal desk.

The screens were flashing violently with frantic error messages. The system was completely freaking out.

It was desperately trying to calculate the sudden deletion of the entire corporate board of directors. To the server’s core logic, twelve high-level administrative accounts had just been physically erased from the room in a fraction of a second.

Declan did not care about the corporate alerts. He ignored the red warning boxes spamming the displays. He reached out and tapped the center of the main screen.

[System Prompt]

↳ Access Denied. Root Administrator Privilege Required.

"Let’s fix that," Declan muttered.

He did not search the room for a severed hand to fool a biometric scanner. He did not look around for a retinal terminal. He did not need to guess Director Sterling’s passwords.

The guy was currently a compressed golf-ball-sized cube of meat sitting on the wet carpet a few feet away, so asking him for the login details was not an option anyway.

Besides, Declan had something vastly superior to standard corporate security clearance.

He had the Ascendant Core.

Declan placed both of his pale hands flat on the glowing red glass of the console. He did not push down physically. He did not try to break the screen. He pushed his data.

He closed his pitch-black eyes and focused his mind. He tapped directly into the sixty percent synchronization rate currently running through his real-world veins. The Abyssal Sovereign aura instantly flared to life around him.

Thick dark purple energy spilled out of his hands. It did not just cover the glass. It spider-webbed directly into the sleek terminal, literally invading the physical hardware of the machine.

The console shrieked!

It was a horrible high-pitched mechanical sound. It sounded exactly like an old dial-up internet modem being forced through an industrial meat grinder.

The pristine red screens across the desk instantly flickered. They glitched and turned a deeply corrupted aggressive purple.

Declan was physically injecting his Sovereign-tier administrative privileges directly into the real-world server bank. He was hacking the absolute core of the game using his own body as the virus.

[System Alert]

↳ WARNING: Unauthorized Data Intrusion.

↳ Attempting Firewall Block...

↳ Block Failed. Entity Mass Exceeds System Parameters.

Declan gritted his teeth. The server fought back hard. It threw up massive walls of defensive code to reject his overwrite command.

He felt a sharp heavy pressure build up right behind his eyes as the entire global network tried to push him out of the system.

"You belong to me now," Declan growled. His voice vibrated with an unnatural heavy resonance that shook the broken glass on the floor.

He pushed harder. The dark corrupted mana veins on his neck bulged visibly as he forced the raw unadulterated power of the Ascendant Core straight into the machine’s processor.

The physical cables underneath the desk started to smoke. The smell of burning plastic filled the air.

[System Notice]

↳ Root Access Overwritten.

↳ New Administrator Recognized: Player V.

The console stopped screaming. The screens completely stabilized. All the frantic red error messages vanished in an instant, replaced by a calm steady golden interface.

It was the exact same color as the divine system prompts from the Ascension Trial.

Declan smiled and pulled his hands back. He had the keys to the kingdom.

He quickly navigated through the master menus. The amount of data at his fingertips was staggering. He could see the live feeds of billions of players and he could see the corporate bank accounts.

He did not care about the player logs or the transaction histories. He swiped past all of it and went straight to the territorial control tab.

He wanted to pull Sector 4 completely offline.

Director Sterling had tried to starve his city by cutting the local power grid. Declan was going to make sure they could never touch his property again.

He wanted to officially sever his Iron Bastion from the rest of the game network and lock it down permanently in the real world. He wanted his city fully independent.

He found the Sector 4 root file. He pulled it up and selected the main dimensional anchor tethering the zone to the servers and hit delete.

Instantly, the console flashed a blinding brilliant white.

Declan snatched his hands back and took a quick step away. The heat coming off the terminal was intense enough to singe his eyebrows. The entire desk sparked wildly.

[System Error]

↳ CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR.

↳ Anchor Severed. Reality Parameters Unstable.

↳ Dimensional Overlap Reaching 100%.

Declan frowned as he stared at the golden text floating above the smoking terminal. "Wait. What did I just do?"

He had not just deleted a zone. He had not just made his city independent.

By forcing his Ascendant-tier data into the master server and violently severing the main anchor, he had completely shattered the delicate coded balance between the game and Earth.

The server was not crashing. It was opening the floodgates!

A massive and deafening bell chimed.

BONG!

It was unbelievably loud. It was louder than the World Boss announcement back in the swamp. It was louder than the start of the Ascension Trial.

The sound did not just ring inside his digital neural link. It physically shook the entire Apex Paradigm skyscraper.

The remaining shards of glass in the broken boardroom windows shattered completely and rained down onto the streets below.

The sound echoed across the entire planet. Eight billion people heard that massive bell toll at the exact same moment. It did not matter if they were sleeping, fighting, or hiding. The system made sure everyone heard it.

A massive golden text box unrolled across every single screen in the boardroom. Declan did not even need to look at the monitors to know what it said. He knew it was unrolling across the actual sky outside as well.

[Global Server Announcement!]

↳ Master Anchor Severed. Simulation Parameters Terminated.

↳ Phase 3: The Great Convergence Initiated.

Declan slowly walked over to the shattered window. He ignored the rain blowing into the room and looked out over the sprawling neon-lit city of Metropolis.

The sky was literally tearing apart.

Massive jagged fissures of glowing purple light ripped through the dark smog-choked clouds. The sky looked like a giant broken mirror that someone had just smashed with a hammer.

Behind the massive cracks, the swirling chaotic dark cosmos of the Primordial Grid was clearly visible.

It was not a game interface anymore. It was not a hologram. It was real.

Behind him, the massive terminal started rapidly printing out hidden lore files. The system was dumping the deeply classified truth of the corporate developers directly onto the glowing screens.

Declan glanced back over his shoulder and read the scrolling text.

[Project Primordial]

↳ The VR pods were never rendering a virtual space. They were quantum tethers. The human mind was used to slowly map and stabilize the dimensional overlap. The game was an acclimatization tool to prepare the human nervous system for the physical integration of the Grid.

Declan let out a low whistle. The megacorps had not built a video game.

They had built a bridge between two dimensions. They had used billions of gamers as cheap labor to slowly merge an alien universe with Earth so they could harvest the magic and control the new reality.

And Declan had just blown the bridge up. He had completely severed the safety protocols and forced the two sides to violently and instantly crash into each other.

’They were just getting us used to the physics,’ Declan thought to himself as he looked back out the ruined window. ’And I just skipped the tutorial for the whole planet.’

Down in the streets, absolute chaos erupted.

The purple cracks in the sky widened into massive gaping chasms. The dimensional overlap hit one hundred percent, and the Grid began dropping its environment directly onto the real world.

Massive chunks of alien terrain started falling from the sky. Declan watched a towering heavily fortified gothic castle from Sector 2 drop straight out of the clouds.

It smashed directly into the downtown financial district. It crushed half a dozen sleek corporate bank skyscrapers like they were made of wet cardboard. Plumes of dust and concrete shot hundreds of feet into the air.

Over to the east, the sky ripped open again. A massive boiling river of bright orange lava from the Bone-Ash Wastes poured out of a portal like a waterfall.

It flooded the city’s main highways. It instantly melted the abandoned cars and turned the asphalt into bubbling black sludge.

And the monsters poured out with the terrain.

It was not just the low-level Flesh-Stalkers creeping out of the alleyways anymore. The big stuff was finally allowed to cross over.

Declan saw massive winged dragons with scales the color of dried blood diving out of the purple rifts. They swooped down over the panic-stricken city.

One of them easily snatched a fleeing commercial helicopter right out of the air. It crushed the metal chassis in its jaws before tossing the burning wreckage into a building.

He saw towering fifty-foot stone golems marching through the commercial district. They were blindly stomping through the intersections, treating buses and police cruisers like annoying stepping stones.

The real-world military finally tried to respond.

A squadron of fighter jets screamed past the Apex Paradigm building. Their afterburners glowed bright orange in the dark apocalyptic sky. They locked onto one of the massive dragons and fired a volley of heavy air-to-air missiles.

The missiles hit the beast perfectly. They exploded in a massive barrage of fire and shrapnel.

But when the smoke cleared, the dragon was completely unharmed. It just kept flying right through the blast zone and completely ignored the physical damage.

It did not have a health bar that responded to standard explosives. It operated on Grid logic, and the military had not read the patch notes.

Standard human weapons were officially useless. Guns, tanks, and missiles were entirely obsolete against conceptual armor and magic stats.

The old world was gone. The game was reality now.

Declan stood calmly in the ruined boardroom. The toxic wind whipped his black Predator’s Coat around his legs. He did not look panicked. He did not look worried about the giant monsters destroying the city outside.

He looked down at his right hand. He looked at the double-edged +40 Eclipse Severance halberd resting easily in his grip. The tiny black hole in the blade hummed, eager to delete something.

He had his Warlord stats. He had his impenetrable city waiting for him in Sector 7. He had his immortal Shadow Legion ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.

He had completely broken the system’s rules, and now the system was his to command.

He watched a massive Abyssal demon pull itself out of a portal and casually tear a commercial skyscraper in half just a few miles away.

Declan adjusted himself. He gripped the dark matter shaft of his Warlord weapon tightly.

"Alright," Declan said to the burning city. "Let’s play."