Chapter 184: [184]: The System Hounds, The Elite Guards

H He reached out and forcefully plunged his digital fingers into the invisible, localized network connecting the System Hounds to the Archons’ command server.

His vision was instantly flooded with thousands of lines of rapidly scrolling, complex red code. It was the Hound’s foundational AI script. He ignored the targeting parameters. He bypassed the damage output numbers. His eyes darted across the digital matrix until he found the exact string he was looking for.

[Parameter Located: Absolute Loyalty Subroutine.] [Target Entity: Grand Archons.]

"Let’s do a little rewriting," Sebastian smirked.

He mentally grabbed the line of code and violently ripped it out of the Hound’s brain.

The massive cybernetic beast froze mid-air, mere inches from Sebastian’s face. Its three jaws snapped shut. Its glowing red interior lights flickered wildly, turning a confused, pale yellow as its primary driving directive was suddenly deleted.

But Sebastian wasn’t done. He pulled the [Loyalty Subroutine] into his [Code Compiler].

"Multiplier," Sebastian commanded.

The 10,000x Nexus Glitch aggressively woke up. It grabbed the simple concept of loyalty and forcefully shoved it through ten thousand simulated lifetimes of absolute, fanatical devotion. It twisted the code, refined it, and fundamentally broke its original parameters.

[Loyalty Subroutine Mutated. New Target Required.]

Sebastian forcefully pasted his own ’Anomaly Zero’ tag into the target slot.

Then, he reached out and shoved the heavily modified, glitched block of code right back into the frozen Hound’s AI matrix. He didn’t stop there. He rapidly copy-pasted the new, corrupted routine and wirelessly broadcasted it directly into the receivers of the other two Hounds bounding up behind the leader.

[System Override Successful. Allegiance Reassigned.]

Time snapped back to normal.

The lead Hound dropped from the air, landing heavily on all four chrome paws right at Sebastian’s feet. The heavy impact cracked the marble.

Up in the ceiling, the Archons’ voice boomed with triumphant certainty. "TEAR HIM APART!"

The Hounds didn’t move.

The glowing red light bleeding from the seams of their chrome armor slowly shifted, fading into a deep, loyal blue. The lead Hound lowered its three massive, faceless heads and let out a soft, subservient whine, practically nuzzling its cold, metal snout against Sebastian’s ruined leather coat.

Sebastian slowly reached down and patted the center head. The metal was warm and hummed with a comforting, purring vibration.

"Who’s a good boy?" Sebastian asked, a genuinely amused, utterly psychotic smile spreading across his face. "Yes, you are. You’re a very good glitch."

High above, the absolute silence from the Archons’ intercom was deafening. The sheer, unadulterated shock of watching their apex executioner beasts turn into lapdogs had clearly broken their administrative brains.

"IMPOSSIBLE!" the synthesized voice finally shrieked, entirely losing its godly composure.

"THEY ARE HARD-CODED! THEY CANNOT BE TAMPERED WITH! GUARDS! SEND IN THE ELITE GUARD! KILL THE ANOMALY AND DESTROY THE DEFECTIVE UNITS!"

The heavy blast doors on the far side of the room violently hissed open.

A flood of heavily armored, pristine white-and-gold Vanguard Elite Guards poured into the chamber. There were at least fifty of them, all Level 75, wielding crackling plasma halberds and heavy kinetic repeaters. They moved with perfect military precision, forming a firing line and raising their weapons at Sebastian and his new pets.

Sebastian just stood there, casually scratching the robotic ear of the massive, three-headed murder-dog beside him.

He looked at the firing line of Elite Guards. He looked down at the three System Hounds, who had all turned their faceless heads toward the approaching soldiers, their blue lights suddenly flaring back to a violent, aggressive red.

Sebastian pointed a black-gloved finger at the Vanguard army.

"Fetch," Sebastian commanded simply.

The three System Hounds exploded into motion. They launched themselves across the room and slammed into the Vanguard shield wall like a barrage of heavy artillery shells.

CRASH!

The pristine white armor of the Elite Guards shattered like cheap glass under the sheer, concussive force of the cybernetic beasts.

"FIRE! SHOOT THE BEASTS!" the Vanguard captain screamed, his voice cracking with panic.

The guards unloaded their kinetic repeaters.

Hundreds of tungsten slugs tore through the air, sparking wildly as they ricocheted off the indestructible liquid chrome plating of the Hounds. The bullets did absolutely nothing.

The executioner beasts were designed to ignore standard damage.

The slaughter that followed was visceral, messy, and entirely one-sided.

The lead Hound grabbed a heavy, armored tank by the waist with its center jaw. The massive hydraulic bite force simply crunched through the golden breastplate.

SNAP! SQUELCH!

The guard shrieked as he was violently bitten in half, a fountain of digital blood and pixelated intestines spraying across the pristine white marble. The Hound violently shook its head, tossing the severed upper torso across the room like a discarded chew toy. It slammed into a marble pillar with a wet, heavy thud.

The other two Hounds tore through the ranks with their razor-sharp chrome claws. They didn’t use magic. They just used raw, heavy physics. A swipe from a massive paw decapitated three guards simultaneously, their helmets flying into the air in a spray of red mist.

"AGGHH! MY LEGS!" a mage screamed as a Hound pinned him to the floor, its three heads systematically ripping his limbs from their sockets.

Sebastian casually walked forward, following behind his new pets as they cleared the path. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

He stepped over the mangled, twitching corpses of the Vanguard Elites, his boots squelching in the rapidly expanding pools of blood.

He strolled through the horrific meat grinder, entirely unbothered by the wet tearing sounds and the desperate, gurgling screams of the dying men around him.

"Good boys," Sebastian praised, stepping over a severed arm clutching a plasma halberd. "Make sure you chew your food."

In less than a minute, the entire fifty-man Vanguard Elite squad was reduced to a chaotic, bloody mess of crushed armor, severed limbs, and dissolving grey ash.

The three System Hounds stood amidst the carnage, their chrome bodies painted entirely red. They panted heavily, digital steam rising from their glowing joints, before trotting back to Sebastian and sitting obediently at his feet.

Sebastian looked up at the ceiling, his silver eyes completely cold.

"Your dogs aren’t very well trained," Sebastian called out to the silent, terrified Archons listening through the intercom. "But I think they like me better anyway."

He turned his gaze forward, looking through the massive, now-open archway at the end of the hall.

Looming in the shadows were the towering, impossibly thick platinum doors of the Inner Sanctum. The true heart of the server.

"Stay here, boys," Sebastian told the Hounds, giving the leader one last pat on the head. "I’m going to go have a quick chat with management."

He stepped over the threshold, leaving the bloody slaughterhouse behind, and walked toward the final lock. It was time to pull the plug.

Sebastian walked away from the absolute bloodbath, the wet squelching of his boots against the marble floor fading as he entered the long, pristine corridor leading to the Inner Sanctum. Behind him, his newly adopted, heavily blood-stained System Hounds sat perfectly still, guarding his flank like three loyal, multi-headed gargoyles.

He cracked his neck.

The adrenaline from surviving the River of Code and rewriting the executioner beasts was settling into a cold, terrifyingly focused absolute certainty.

He reached the end of the corridor and stopped.

Looming before him were the platinum doors of the Archons’ throne room.

They were a monument to impossible, arrogant security. The doors were easily forty feet tall, forged from flawless, unblemished platinum that seemed to absorb the ambient light. There were no handles. There were no keypads or glowing runic scanners for biometric data.

Through his [True Sight], Sebastian saw the terrifying reality of the barrier. The doors weren’t locked by a spell. They were locked by the foundational, underlying logic of the Ethereal Plane itself. Millions of lines of absolute, unyielding server code wrapped around the metal, stating a simple, mathematical fact: These doors cannot be opened by a player.

To the game’s physics engine, the doors were a fixed, immovable environmental asset.

They were a wall at the edge of the map.

"Cute," Sebastian whispered, crossing his arms and staring up at the massive barrier.

"You can’t pick a lock if the concept of a key doesn’t exist."

Normally, this would be the part where a hero had to complete an impossible, multi-stage quest to acquire a legendary artifact just to scratch the paint. Or, they would have to gather the combined magical power of an entire army to try and brute-force the ward.

Sebastian didn’t have an army. He didn’t have a legendary artifact.

But he did have ten million units of raw, assimilated Source Code pulsing through his digital veins, and a 10,000x multiplied [Code Compiler] that had just successfully digested four entire worlds.

BING!

[System Update: Progression Threshold Shattered.] [Entity: Zero (Sovereign of Laws) has accumulated sufficient Foundational Data.] [New Privilege Unlocked: ROOT SERVER OVERLOAD.]

Sebastian read the text. He read it again.