Chapter 183: [183]: Betrayal of the Hounds, Fetch

The numbers bounced wildly. The sheer physical toll on Sebastian’s meat-suit was staggering. Even with his thirty-percent Demigod synchronization, his muscles screamed in protest. His veins bulged, pulsing with a dark violet hue as he forced his biological limits past the breaking point.

"You guys have the worst fucking customer service in the universe!" Sebastian yelled, his voice echoing in the cramped, boiling dark. "I just wanted to file a complaint!" 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

A tiny drop of the white-hot static managed to breach the ceiling. It dripped down, landing squarely on the shoulder of his black leather coat.

ZAAAP!

"GAH!" Sebastian hissed, violently flinching.

The anti-virus instantly deleted a perfectly circular chunk of the leather and bit directly into his digital flesh. It felt like being stabbed with an icicle made of battery acid.

He quickly shifted his stance, funneling more stone to patch the tiny breach.

This couldn’t last forever. He was essentially trapped in a digital blender, manually holding the blades back with his bare hands. If he slipped up for even a fraction of a second, the River of Code would wash over him, and he would be permanently uninstalled.

"I need to break the cycle," Sebastian muttered, his breathing ragged and heavy.

"They’re just going to keep pouring this shit until I run out of floorboards to throw at them."

Outside the dome, the Archons watched the security feeds with mounting frustration. The Anomaly wasn’t melting. The Glitch was stubbornly surviving by cannibalizing their own pristine architecture.

"THE VIRUS IS ENTRENCHED," the synthesized voice of the Archons echoed through the flooded chamber. "ANTI-VIRUS FLUID IS INSUFFICIENT. DEPLOYING ACTIVE HUNTER-KILLER SUBROUTINES."

Inside his dark, crumbling bunker, Sebastian heard the mechanical groaning of heavy gears shifting out in the flooded room. The torrential, hissing sound of the River of Code abruptly began to slow down.

The system prompts in his vision shifted.

[Warning: Environmental Deletion Receding.] [New Threat Detected: Multiple Hostile Entities Approaching.]

Sebastian let out a long, exhausted sigh. His arms were shaking so badly he could barely keep his hands flat against the ground. He had survived the flood, but the landlords were finally sending in the eviction squad.

"Good," Sebastian whispered, his pitch-black eyes narrowing into cold, predatory slits. "I was getting really tired of playing defense."

He slowly stood up, wiping the sweat and grime from his face. He cracked his neck, the satisfying pop echoing loudly in the tiny stone dome. He didn’t know what was waiting for him outside, but he knew one thing for certain.

Whatever it was, he was going to break it.

"Drop it," Sebastian commanded the system.

With a heavy, grinding crunch, he released his hold on the [Terramancy] law. The massive, half-melted dome of marble and steel fractured and collapsed outward, exposing Sebastian to the blinding red emergency lights of the central platform once again.

He stepped out of the rubble, rolling his shoulders, fully prepared to teach the System exactly why you don’t corner a Sovereign of Laws.

The blinding white waterfall of the River of Code had receded, draining back into the geometric vents in the ceiling, leaving the floor a scarred, half-melted mess of ruined architecture.

Sebastian stepped out from the crumbled remains of his makeshift bunker. His black leather coat was scorched, and a perfectly circular hole on his shoulder exposed a patch of red, raw, glitching pixels where the anti-virus had managed to bite him. He brushed a layer of grey dust off his chest, his silver-tinged eyes immediately locking onto the new threat.

The heavy blast doors on the far side of the massive chamber hadn’t opened. Instead, three massive, swirling portals of jagged red error code tore open directly in front of the pathway leading to the Inner Sanctum.

"HUNTER-KILLERS DEPLOYED," the Archons’ unified, booming voice echoed from the ceiling. "ERADICATE THE GLITCH."

From the red portals stepped the System Hounds.

Sebastian didn’t flinch, but his highly optimized, Demigod-tier brain took a fraction of a second to genuinely appreciate the sheer, terrifying aesthetic of the monsters.

They were massive, standing easily eight feet tall at the shoulder. They were cybernetic wolves, but calling them wolves felt like an insult to nature. Their bodies were composed entirely of jagged, interlocking plates of liquid chrome that rippled and shifted with every step. They didn’t have organic muscle; beneath the metal, thick cables of glowing red deletion code acted as their sinew and veins.

But the worst part was their heads. Each Hound had three distinct, angular, faceless heads. They didn’t have eyes or mouths.

They just had smooth, mirrored visors that suddenly split open vertically, revealing horrific, glowing red maws dripping with the same white-hot anti-virus fluid that had just tried to drown him.

[Entity Identified: System Hound (Executioner Beast)] [Level: 85] [Status: Absolute Loyalty. Purge Protocols Active.]

"Cybernetic Cerberus," Sebastian muttered, keeping his hands loose at his sides. "You guys really lack originality. Did you just copy-paste the underworld mythology and slap some neon lights on it?"

The three System Hounds let out a horrific, high-pitched screech of dial-up static that physically vibrated the broken marble beneath Sebastian’s boots.

They moved with terrifying, ungodly speed.

They bounded across the fifty-yard gap in massive, frictionless leaps, their heavy chrome claws tearing deep gouges into the floor.

"Alright, let’s see how good your anti-cheat is," Sebastian whispered.

He didn’t pull his heavy, concrete-encrusted Earth Sword. He didn’t drop a [Gravity Domain] to crush them. He didn’t want to destroy them. The Archons were watching.

He wanted to humiliate them.

As the lead Hound launched itself into the air, all three of its massive, red-glowing jaws snapping open to tear Sebastian’s head off, time seemed to slow to an absolute crawl.

With his physical synchronization and his completely unbound digital processing speed, the beast’s terrifying leap looked like it was moving through thick syrup.

Sebastian calmly raised his right hand, his fingers glowing with the familiar, chaotic green static of his Administrator UI. He didn’t aim a spell at the Hound’s physical body. He aimed directly at its digital brain.

[Action Registered: Access Code Compiler.] [Skill Activated: Concept Extraction.]