Chapter 117: [117] : The Ten-Minute Timer, Unfazed Warlord

The noise inside the central plaza was absolutely deafening.

Forty thousand players all talking, shouting, and loading weapons at the exact same time sounded like a packed football stadium right before the kickoff.

The Sector Annihilation Protocol had forcibly dragged every single online member of the Neon Syndicate right into the combat zone.

They were crammed into the sprawling black concrete square, surrounded on all sides by towering cyberpunk skyscrapers. The neon pink and bright green lights from the building advertisements reflected off thousands of polished armor plates and humming energy swords.

They formed a massive and thick ring of corporate muscle.

But they could not attack yet.

Separating the forty thousand players from the absolute center of the plaza was a towering and glowing yellow cylinder of system code. It was the prep-phase barrier. It stretched hundreds of feet into the rainy sky, completely impenetrable until the system allowed the match to begin.

A giant digital timer hovered high above the city, glowing in glaring red numbers.

[Combat Phase begins in: 09:45]

Declan stood entirely alone in the center of the yellow ring.

The dark toxic rain of the city pattered against his black Predator Coat, instantly sliding off the mutated fabric. He looked at the massive digital timer, then lowered his eyes to look at the army surrounding him.

"Load the EMP grenades!" a squad leader barked from the left side of the barrier. "If he has energy shields, we short them out on the first volley! Nobody fires until the tanks push up!"

"Snipers, target his joints!" a voice echoed from a rusted fire escape on a nearby building. "Slow him down! Do not let him use that teleporting cheat!"

Declan casually shoved his hands into his coat pockets. He had over nine minutes to kill.

"Legion," Declan commanded in his mind.

He tapped directly into his massive Ascendant-tier mana pool. The dark ink-like shadows beneath his spiked boots violently rebelled against the bright neon lights of the plaza.

The shadows bubbled, hissed, and rapidly spread outward in a perfect geometric circle.

One hundred figures made entirely of dense swirling dark matter rose from the wet concrete. They materialized in complete and terrifying silence.

They wore the exact same high-collared trench coat as Declan. They held massive shadowy replicas of his +40 Eclipse Severance halberd. Their faceless heads featured only two glowing purple eyes that immediately locked onto the surrounding army.

The sudden appearance of the shadow clones made the front row of the Neon Syndicate flinch. Several heavy knights actually took a step backward and raised their tower shields in panic.

But then, a guy holding a heavy plasma cannon in the second row started laughing.

"Is that it?" the player yelled, his voice echoing across the square. "A hundred shadow summons? Hey guys, look! He brought a hundred pets to fight forty thousand of us!"

The tension in the crowd instantly broke. The entire corporate army erupted into cruel and mocking laughter.

"Do the math, idiot!" another player screamed from the barricades, banging his energy sword against his shield. "We outnumber your little shadows four hundred to one! You are dead meat!"

"I call dibs on his coat!" a rogue shouted from the back, waving a pair of glowing green daggers. "I am selling that thing on the auction house the second he deletes!"

Maybe they didn’t know he almost killed their leader.

Declan ignored them completely.

He did not yell back. He did not try to look intimidating. He did not even bother drawing his own weapon.

He looked around his enclosed space and spotted a small decorative concrete bench sitting near a broken holographic streetlamp. He casually walked over and sat down.

He crossed his legs, leaned back, and rested his arm on the back of the bench.

He opened his digital inventory.

With a flick of his wrist, a cheap scavenged-tier health potion materialized in his hand. It was just a small glass bottle filled with generic red fruit juice. It healed exactly twenty hit points over ten seconds.

For a Level 70 Abyssal Sovereign with millions of health points, it was completely useless. It would not even heal a papercut on his current stat sheet.

But he was thirsty, and it tasted like cherry.

He popped the cork with his thumb and took a slow and relaxed sip.

The players closest to the yellow barrier stopped laughing. They just stared at him.

"Is he... is he taking a break?" a heavy knight asked, lowering his shield slightly in pure confusion. "The match starts in seven minutes."

Declan took another sip of the red juice. He raised his left hand and swiped his fingers through the air. The glowing golden interface of his system menu popped up in front of his face.

He navigated straight to the Global Leaderboards.

"Look at him!" a Neon Syndicate officer screamed, pointing a finger at the yellow barrier. "He is opening his menus! The coward is trying to find a log-out button! He is trying to run!"

Declan did not even blink. He scrolled through the server rankings.

He wanted to see where the system placed Kato after the Guild Master had his arm chopped off and lost his massive corporate loadout.

"Rank thirty-two," Declan muttered to himself as he finally found the completely ruined character profile Kato had on the list. "Not bad for a guy who just lost half his body weight and his best gun."

Declan closed the leaderboard. He tapped the glass bottle against his knee to a slow and silent rhythm.

"Hey!" the same Syndicate officer screamed. His face was turning bright red with anger. He marched right up to the yellow barrier and stopped inches away from the transparent code. He pointed a plasma pistol directly at the head of Declan. "Are you ignoring us?! Look at me when I am talking to you, glitch!"

Declan paused. He lowered the glass bottle.

He did not stand up. He just turned his head and looked at the furious officer standing on the other side of the barrier.

"You guys are really loud," Declan said smoothly. His voice was not yelling, but his mutated physical density carried the sound perfectly across the plaza.

"I will melt your face off!" the officer raged, slamming his fist against the invisible prep wall. "When this timer hits zero, I am going to personally rip your character file to pieces!"

Declan took one last sip of his cherry juice. He rested his elbows on his knees and looked at the massive furious army surrounding him.

His dark eyes swirling with Abyssal purple energy swept over the front lines. He looked at the heavy tanks, the snipers, and the mages.

"You have exactly six minutes left to exist," Declan stated. His voice was completely calm. "If I were you, I would spend it messaging your families. Or transferring your bank accounts to a friend. Not yelling at me."

The crowd went quiet for a second before erupting into another wave of furious shouting.

"You are bluffing!" a mage yelled from the back, waving a staff that crackled with lightning. "Your little shield is going to drop, and we are going to vaporize you in one second!"

Declan just smiled. It was a cold and empty expression that did not reach his eyes.

"I do not bluff," Declan said. "I do math."

He looked at the hundred dark matter clones standing in perfect and rigid formation around his bench.

The corporate guild was relying on standard game logic. They thought forty thousand attacks hitting at once would overwhelm his defense stat. They thought the action economy would easily stagger him to death.

But they did not know how his glitched skills worked.

The shadow clones did not have health bars. They did not have physical hitboxes. They could not be stunned, staggered, or killed by physical or magical damage. They were immortal concepts of pure dark matter.

And every single one of those one hundred clones held a weapon that completely ignored the game durability coding. A weapon that deleted the spatial coordinates of anything its blade touched.

Forty thousand players was not an army to Declan.

It was just forty thousand perfectly lined-up targets waiting to be harvested.

Declan tossed the empty glass bottle onto the concrete. It shattered with a sharp clink that echoed loudly in his immediate vicinity.

He leaned back again and stared directly at the digital timer in the sky.

[03:15]

[03:14]

Slowly, the Neon Syndicate stopped yelling. The arrogant taunts and the insults died out.

The sheer unnatural calm radiating from the guy sitting on the bench was deeply unsettling. He was not acting like a cornered player who was about to lose his account and his real life. He was not pacing. He was not buffing himself with last-minute spells.

He was acting like a guy waiting for a bus to arrive.

The psychology of the mob started to shift. The front line tightened their grips on their weapons. The heavy tanks braced their tower shields and dug their boots nervously into the wet asphalt.

The mages on the rooftops began pre-casting their ultimate spells. Their staffs were glowing with highly volatile and unstable energy.

[01:00]

"Charge your weapons!" an officer roared over the open comms channel of the guild. "The second that yellow wall drops, unleash everything! Do not hold back! Fire until your mana pools are completely empty!"

The high-pitched whine of thousands of plasma rifles charging up simultaneously filled the plaza. The sound was deafening.

The air grew incredibly hot and thick with raw digital energy. The smell of ozone and burning metal overpowered the scent of the toxic rain.

Declan finally stood up.

He dusted off the front of his black coat. He stretched his neck from side to side, listening to the dense and heavily synchronized bones pop loudly.

He raised his right hand.

The air in front of his palm distorted violently. The game engine physically struggled to render the item he was pulling from his storage.

The heavy dark matter shaft of the +40 Eclipse Severance halberd materialized perfectly into his grip. The razor-thin blade made of the night sky hummed loudly.

The tiny black hole spinning in the center of the axe head vibrated with a hungry and static energy that actually pulled the raindrops toward it.

Declan rested the massive weapon casually on his shoulder.

He walked away from the bench. He walked to the very edge of the yellow barrier.

He stood exactly one inch away from the glowing wall. Directly on the other side, a row of massive Juggernauts in heavy armor stared down at him.

Their eyes were wide behind their tactical visors. They could feel the terrifying gravitational pull coming off the halberd.

Declan looked up at the sky.

[00:10]

"Ten seconds," Declan whispered.

[00:05]

The entire square held its breath. Forty thousand people stopped moving. The only sound was the whining of the plasma rifles ready to fire.

[00:03]

[00:02]

[00:01]

[Combat Phase Initiated.]

The glowing yellow wall shattered into a million tiny sparks of harmless light.

The barrier was gone. There was nothing standing between Declan and the entire Neon Syndicate.

"Kill him!" forty thousand voices screamed at once.