GLOBAL AWAKENING: My 10,000x Exp Multiplier-Chapter 19: []Vaporizing the Void, The Engine Glitch

"Now," Vahn said, turning his gaze to Lunara, who was staring at him like he was a literal god descending from the heavens. "About those scouting reports."

The heavy silence of the auction house lobby was absolute, broken only by the ragged, desperate breathing of the paralyzed assassins pinned to the marble floor. Under the crushing weight of Vahn’s fifty-times multiplied gravity domain, they couldn’t even lift their heads.

But a fanatic pushed to the absolute edge of despair does not require physical mobility to strike.

The lead cultist, his iron mask spider-webbed with cracks, let out a wet, bubbling laugh. His fingers, trembling under the immense pressure, brushed against a hidden compartment on his belt. "The Abyss... consumes all data," he choked out, blood leaking from his visor. "If we cannot have the Relic... no one will."

With a sickening crunch, he crushed the small, pitch-black crystal hidden in his palm.

Vahn’s deep purple eyes flared with instantaneous azure light as his [Chronos-Sight] snapped into overdrive. The ambient mana in the room didn’t just spike; it violently inverted. The space directly above the crushed cultist tore open like a piece of cheap fabric, revealing a swirling, localized vortex of absolute nothingness.[WARNING: Unstable Spatial Anomaly Detected.]

[Entity Classification: Void Tear.]

[Threat Level: Catastrophic.]

"Commander!" Sia shouted, her military instincts overriding the sheer terror of the anomaly. She didn’t retreat. Instead, she slammed her heavy iron tower shield directly into the runic marble floor, dropping to one knee to establish an anchor point. She reached back, grabbing Hana’s wrist and pulling the younger girl behind the massive slab of metal.

The gravity domain couldn’t suppress a hole in reality. The Void Tear rapidly expanded, its gravitational pull warping the physical architecture of the Golden Scale. The lavish velvet chairs, the shattered display cases, and the unconscious bodies of the cultists were violently sucked into the vortex, instantly deleted from the game’s rendering engine without a single trace of residual data.

Behind the shattered mahogany counter, the heavy vault doors groaned and buckled. A dozen wealthy Guild Leaders, who had been cowering in the VIP lounge during the raid, screamed in sheer panic as the violent suction began dragging them across the polished floor toward the anomaly.

"Vahn!" Aria cried out, fighting the pull as she anchored herself behind a heavy quartz pillar. "It’s tearing the localized physics engine apart! We have to evacuate!"

"Running is pointless," Vahn said. His voice was entirely calm, completely devoid of the panic echoing around him. He didn’t brace himself against the pull. His fifty Agility, combined with his total control over the localized friction of the floor, allowed him to stand perfectly still as the world around him was ripped to shreds.

He looked at the swirling black hole. It was a chaotic, unscripted event. To a normal player, a Void Tear was an instantaneous game-over, a force of nature that bypassed all defense stats and health pools. But Vahn wasn’t a normal player. He was the Architect.

"System," Vahn commanded internally. "A spatial void relies on the absence of energy to consume matter. Therefore, we introduce an energy density it cannot mathematically process."

He didn’t draw the Soul-Bound Shadow Blade. Instead, he raised his right hand, his palm facing the expanding black hole. He tapped into the colossal reservoir of experience points he had hoarded from the potion conversion.

"Engage [Inferno Nova]. Toggle: [Sun-Aura]."

Vahn didn’t cast the full spell. Detonating a star inside a building would vaporize the entire commercial district. Instead, he isolated the absolute, terrifying heat of the SSS-Rank skill, compressing the 50,000% Base Magic Damage into a sphere the size of a marble resting squarely in the center of his palm.

"Fzzt."

A blinding, pristine white light erupted from Vahn’s hand. It wasn’t fire. It was pure, unadulterated plasma. The temperature in the room didn’t just rise; it instantly bypassed the boiling point and hit absolute thermal devastation.

Vahn thrust his hand forward, violently driving the condensed sphere of plasma directly into the center of the Void Tear.

When an unstoppable force of thermal energy collides with an unscripted void anomaly, the game engine does not respond with a majestic explosion. It simply fails to compute the math.

The world shattered.

For exactly three seconds, the entire tenth floor of the Chronos Spire experienced a catastrophic graphical glitch. The opulent white stone walls of the auction house vanished, replaced by harsh, glowing green wireframes. The artificial twilight sky outside the shattered doors inverted, turning into a cascading waterfall of red binary code. The sound of the screaming void was abruptly replaced by a harsh, deafening electronic dial-up screech.

Sia squeezed her eyes shut, her digital avatar vibrating violently as the localized reality struggled to hold itself together. Aria gasped, feeling the raw, unfiltered code of the universe washing over her skin.

Then, reality snapped back into place.

The wireframes solidified back into marble. The binary sky faded back into a gentle twilight. The deafening screech ceased, leaving behind a profound, ringing silence.

The Void Tear was gone. Vaporized into literal nothingness.

Vahn stood perfectly still, letting out a soft, human sigh as he lowered his hand. A thin wisp of golden smoke curled from his fingertips. He casually brushed a speck of invisible ash from the shoulder of his cheap commoner’s jacket.

"Sloppy," Vahn muttered, rubbing his temples to ease the slight headache blooming behind his eyes. "The heat spread unevenly. I need to tighten the control."

The wealthy Guild Leaders, sprawled unceremoniously across the floor of the ruined lobby, stared at him in absolute, slack-jawed horror. These were men and women who commanded thousands of players, who wore Platinum and Diamond-tier armor, who viewed themselves as the undisputed kings of the lower floors.

They had just watched a man in starter clothes punch a black hole into submission and cause reality to blue-screen.

"By the Founders..." the leader of the Ironclad Vanguard whispered, scrambling to his knees. He looked at Vahn, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and absolute reverence. "You... you saved us. The void would have deleted our avatars permanently. Our guild treasuries, our levels... gone."

The man slammed his fist against his chest, bowing his head deeply. "The Ironclad Vanguard owes you a Life Debt. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, my army is yours."

A chorus of similar pledges echoed through the ruined lobby as the other guild masters scrambled to offer their allegiance, their fortunes, and their absolute loyalty to the terrifying anomaly standing before them.

Vahn didn’t even look at them. "That is not why I am here," he stated flatly, stepping over a chunk of shattered quartz. He walked directly up to the reception desk, where Lunara was slowly peeking over the mahogany counter, her perfectly manicured hands trembling violently.

"The scouting reports, Lunara," Vahn prompted, his tone entirely conversational, as if he were asking for the time rather than demanding intel moments after breaking the universe.

Lunara swallowed hard, her professional composure completely annihilated. She didn’t speak. She simply reached into her jacket and pushed a sleek, silver datapad across the counter.

Vahn picked it up, his purple eyes scanning the glowing text. The coordinates for the origin point of the iPhone were precisely logged. A hidden spatial rift located in a high-level beast zone.

"Floor 12," Vahn murmured, a sharp, calculating smile touching the corner of his lips. He turned away from the desk, slipping the datapad into his inventory.

"Did you really have to break the sky, Brother?" Hana chirped, dusting off her skirt as she stepped out from behind Sia’s shield. She looked entirely unbothered by the near-death experience, a bright, thoroughly entertained grin on her face. She shot a wicked wink at the bowing Guild Leaders. "Though, I suppose making the elites grovel is a nice bonus. Very optimal."

"It was a necessary expenditure of energy," Vahn replied smoothly. He looked at Aria, who was staring at his hand, her emerald eyes filled with intense, fearful curiosity. "Formation ready, Priestess?"

"I... yes," Aria stammered, quickly adjusting her grip on her staff. "But Vahn, that energy... it wasn’t normal magic. That was..."

"That was progress," Vahn interrupted softly. He didn’t wait for further questions. He walked toward the shattered entrance of the auction house, stepping out into the neon-lit streets of the Bazaar. "Come. We are behind schedule."