Chapter 185: [185]: Module Unlocked: Root Access, The Executioner Mateo

A slow, genuinely predatory smile carved itself onto his face beneath the dim lighting.

He didn’t need to synthesize a new law of physics to bypass the doors. He didn’t need to trick the server into thinking he was allowed inside.

The System had just officially recognized that he held more raw processing power than the local server itself. He wasn’t just a Demigod playing with localized physics edits anymore.

He had achieved Root Access. He could just tell the UI to stop existing.

"Oh, the devs are going to be so mad about this," Sebastian let out a low, dark chuckle.

He stepped right up to the massive platinum doors.

He simply raised his hands and placed his black-gloved palms flat against the cold, flawless metal.

He closed his eyes and bypassed his mana pool entirely. He reached directly into the new, golden module glowing at the absolute bottom of his interface.

"Root Command," Sebastian whispered, his voice dropping into a heavy, metallic resonance that didn’t just echo in the air—it vibrated through the very bedrock of the Dyson sphere. "Delete environmental asset. Target: Inner Sanctum Doors."

He didn’t push. He just executed the command.

BZZZZT!

The reaction was instantaneous and completely horrifying to the fundamental laws of reality.

The massive, indestructible platinum doors didn’t even make a sound. The millions of lines of absolute server code actively guarding the entrance violently, catastrophically glitched.

The solid metal suddenly turned translucent.

Jagged, shifting squares of green and black static rapidly tore across the pristine surface.

The doors stuttered, flickering in and out of the visual spectrum like a badly compressed video file struggling to buffer.

"Format," Sebastian commanded, applying a fraction of pressure to his palms.

CRACK!

The foundational math holding the doors together simply gave up.

The forty-foot-tall, multi-ton slabs of impenetrable platinum instantly shattered.

But they didn’t break into heavy shards of metal that would crush the floor. The moment the structural integrity code was deleted, the metal reverted to its raw, digital state.

The doors exploded into a billion, tiny, harmless blue pixels.

A gentle, localized breeze washed over Sebastian as the sudden depressurization of the room swept the pixelated dust away, scattering the remnants of the ultimate firewall into the corridor like glowing confetti.

"Knock, knock," Sebastian said casually, brushing a stray blue pixel off the shoulder of his leather coat.

He dropped his hands and stepped over the threshold, walking into the absolute heart of the Ethereal Plane.

The Inner Sanctum was breathtaking. It was a sprawling, circular chamber that seemed to exist entirely outside of normal space and time. There were no walls, just a swirling, endless panorama of the entire multiverse projecting around them like a high-definition planetarium. In the center of the room, floating above a dais of pure, condensed starlight, was the massive, glowing interface terminal that governed the entire simulation.

And standing between Sebastian and the terminal were the creators of the Game.

The three Grand Archons.

They weren’t heavily armored warlords. They didn’t carry massive, glowing weapons. They were towering, faceless entities composed entirely of shifting, blindingly bright white light. They radiated an aura of pure, suffocating logic that made the air in the room feel as heavy as deep water.

They were the absolute apex of the system.

The gods who had designed the meat grinder.

And right now, they looked completely, utterly terrified.

"You... you simply deleted the barrier," the center Archon stammered. Its voice was a unified, overlapping chorus of thousands of synthesized tones, but the sheer panic bleeding through the audio was entirely human. "That code was foundational. It cannot be altered!"

"Yeah, well, your firewall was outdated," Sebastian said flatly, his boots clicking slowly against the starlight floor. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

He didn’t stop walking. He didn’t draw a weapon. He just stared down the literal gods of the universe with the cold, unbothered apathy of a man who was extremely tired of dealing with bad software.

"I’m the new administrator," Sebastian announced, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the glowing entities. "And you guys are fired."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The air inside the Inner Sanctum felt like a complete vacuum of human emotion.

Stepping over the threshold of the shattered platinum doors, Sebastian left the smoking, chaotic ruin of the grand ballroom behind him. The contrast was so sharp it actually gave him a brief wave of digital whiplash.

Behind him was a slaughterhouse of crushed nobles and mangled Vanguard guards.

Ahead of him was a sprawling, circular chamber that seemed to exist entirely outside the normal flow of space and time. There were no walls here. The floor was a continuous slab of polished starlight, and the surrounding environment was a massive, swirling high-definition projection of the Ethereal Plane’s entire multiverse.

Thousands of galaxies slowly spun in the dark void around him, a quiet testament to the sheer scale of the server’s processing power.

"Well," Sebastian muttered, his heavy combat boots clicking against the pristine floor. "At least the graphics card in this place isn’t cheap."

He didn’t draw his Earth Sword. He kept his posture entirely relaxed, his hands casually shoved into the pockets of his ruined, blood-stained black leather coat. The physical synchronization humming in his biological steel muscles made him feel incredibly dense, perfectly anchored to a floor that felt like it was floating in the middle of nowhere.

In the dead center of the room, hovering above a raised dais of pure, condensed mana, were three colossal pillars of blinding white light.

They were the Grand Archons. The creators of the meat grinder. The absolute apex administrators of the Ethereal Plane.

But they weren’t stepping forward to fight him. They just hovered there, pulsing with a deep, vibrating hum that rattled Sebastian’s teeth. They were clearly calculating. They were running billions of algorithmic scenarios, trying to figure out how a Level 42 glitch with zero registered mana had just bypassed their ultimate planetary firewall.

Instead of fighting him themselves, the Archons did what management always did.

They sent their best employee to deal with the angry customer.

From the shimmering starlight of the floor, a new figure slowly rendered into existence.

He didn’t teleport in with a flashy portal, and he didn’t drop from the ceiling. He just compiled, his digital wireframes rapidly filling in with heavy, flawless textures until a towering man stood between Sebastian and the Archons.

"I swear to God," Sebastian sighed, rolling his neck. "If this is another guy who wants to give me a speech about the Grand Design, I’m going to start charging an hourly rate for listening."

The man standing before him was an absolute unit of a player. He was easily seven feet tall, clad in a suit of armor that made Guild Master Regis’s Aegis Suit look like a cheap tin can. The armor wasn’t bulky; it was sleek, form-fitting, and forged from a dark, shifting metal that seemed to actively absorb the ambient light of the room. He didn’t wear a helmet. His face was sharp, aristocratic, and completely devoid of the terrified panic that had plagued the Vanguard elites outside.

In his right hand, he held a massive energy halberd. The shaft was made of deep black iron, and the heavy, curved blade crackled with a terrifying, absolute-zero blue plasma that froze the air around it.

Sebastian’s glitched, silver-tinged eyes narrowed. His [True Sight] bypassed the man’s physical rendering and immediately pulled up the underlying server data.

[Entity Identified: Mateo] [Class: Supreme Executioner] [Level: 99]

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. Level 99. The absolute hard cap of the Ethereal Plane before hitting actual, server-wide godhood.

But it wasn’t the level that caught Sebastian’s attention. It was the specific, glowing gold tag hard-coded directly into Mateo’s baseline avatar file. It hovered over the Executioner’s head like a VIP badge.

[Status: Invincibility Tag Active. Absolute Damage Nullification.]

"You’ve got to be shitting me," Sebastian groaned, letting his head fall back for a second. "An invincibility tag? That’s not even a skill. That’s just lazy programming."

Mateo didn’t smile. He didn’t sneer. He rested the massive, freezing halberd over his shoulder and looked at Sebastian with the cold, clinical detachment of a butcher evaluating a very small piece of meat.

"You are the Anomaly," Mateo’s voice resonated through the room. It wasn’t mechanically distorted like the cyborgs, nor was it dripping with fanatical zeal like the Saints. It was just a heavy, completely flat statement of fact. "You have caused a significant disruption to the server’s processing queue."

"Yeah, well, I had to wait in line for three months while your boy Eldric played rewind with my timeline," Sebastian retorted, taking a slow step forward. "I’m not exactly in a patient mood, Mateo. I’m here for the Archons. Step aside."

"I am the Supreme Executioner," Mateo replied, stepping forward to perfectly block Sebastian’s path to the central dais. "I do not step aside. I do not take damage. I do not lose. I am hard-coded to be the final barrier of the Hub. I am perfect."