Chapter 31: [31] : Upgrading the Arsenal, Gravitational Annihilation

Sloane sat behind her mahogany desk. She stared at her glowing admin interface as if she had seen a ghost.

The Iron Bastion was perfectly secure for the moment. The black iron dome held strong against the Purge Wave outside.

Millions of Flesh-Stalkers were still throwing themselves against the Thorned Aegis walls. They turned themselves into digital meat paste, but the noise had faded into a dull background hum.

Declan walked across the clean stone courtyard. He tapped his knuckles on Sloane’s desk.

"Report," Declan demanded.

Sloane slowly looked up with wide eyes. "Declan. We are filthy, disgustingly rich."

"Give me the numbers."

"Between the entrance tolls, the raw materials we liquidated on the Global Auction House, and the sheer amount of junk dropped by the Vanguard and the Purge Wave monsters..." Sloane took a deep breath. "The treasury is sitting at 412,000 Origin Points."

Declan raised an eyebrow. That was a lot of zeros.

Normal players were currently stabbing each other in the mud over ten Origin Points. A hundred points was an absolute fortune to a newbie. Four hundred thousand points was an entirely different economy!

It was the kind of money that major real-world corporations spent months trying to farm with thousands of employees.

"Transfer 300,000 to my personal inventory," Declan ordered.

Sloane didn’t even argue this time. She just tapped her screen.

"Done. Boss, what are you going to do with all that? You can buy an entire fully-kitted army from the auction house."

"I don’t need an army," Declan stated. "I just need a bigger stick."

He walked away from the desk and headed over to the crafting zone. Bram, the Level 30 Master Artificer, was busy hammering a piece of glowing red iron on his massive anvil.

His new black Obsidian Prosthetic arm moved perfectly, swinging a heavy blacksmith hammer with terrifying hydraulic force.

"Heyy," Bram grunted without looking up from his work. "We have a problem."

"I just solved our money problem," Declan replied. "What is your problem?"

Bram tossed the hammer aside and grabbed a pair of tongs. "The dome is great. The spiked walls are great against brainless zombies. But if a real force shows up, this place is a sitting duck."

Bram sighed and continued. "We don’t have automated turrets online yet. We don’t have spell-wards. If a guild brings actual siege weapons, they will just stand out of range and blast the barrier until it cracks."

"Let them try," Declan smiled smoothly.

"You don’t get it," Bram spat as he turned to face him. "The megacorps are not going to let you keep this zone. You hijacked a World Boss. You claimed Sector 4. They will send the big guns. You need to let me build heavy artillery to fire back."

Declan just smiled. He didn’t want to wait around for Bram to build standard cannons. He already had the ultimate weapon sitting right in his pocket. It just needed a little more funding.

He opened his digital storage and pulled out the +10 Dull Warden’s Halberd.

The massive eighty-pound polearm dropped into his hand. It was dark, heavy, and brutal. At plus ten, it had gained the ’Weight of the Warden’ trait, temporarily increasing its mass by 500 percent on a downward swing. It hit like a falling truck!

But a falling truck wasn’t going to cut it against the top-tier corporate guilds.

He pulled up the enhancement interface.

[Current Origin Points: 304,850]

"System," Declan commanded in his mind. "Enhance the Warden’s Halberd to plus twenty. Do not stop for the safety warnings."

The cost for upgrading a Relic-tier weapon past the normal limits was absurd. Up to plus ten, it cost 50 points a level. But breaking past the plus ten cap triggered an exponential system penalty. It cost 5,000 points per level after the plus ten mark.

Declan didn’t care at all. He watched his balance drain instantly. Fifty thousand points vanished in a single second.

A blinding white light erupted from the halberd. The system chimes hammered inside his skull, loud and frantic.

[System Enhancement Initiated]

↳ Warden’s Halberd +11... +13... +15...

The familiar glaring red warning box popped up, screaming at him that the item was about to shatter and destroy his avatar’s neural link.

His SSS-Rank talent activated automatically. It completely crushed the game’s core safety logic.

[Talent: Boundless Enhancement activated. Cap removed. Safety protocols bypassed.]

↳ Warden’s Halberd +17... +19... +20.

[Item has reached +20.]

[Triggering Conceptual Mutation...]

The bright white light shifted into a deep, crushing purple. The air around the halberd suddenly felt incredibly heavy.

The gravity in a five-foot radius around Declan warped, pulling the loose dust and ash off the cobblestones and sucking it toward the blade.

The physical shape of the weapon changed. The leather grips dissolved, replaced by a smooth, cold, dark matter alloy. The blunt axe head grew wider, and the center of the blade hollowed out, leaving a perfectly circular hole.

Inside that hole, a tiny sphere of pure black energy slowly spun. It looked like a weapon designed to murder planets!

Declan looked at the new stats.

[Item Information]

↳ Name: Warden’s Halberd +20

↳ Tier: Relic (Double Mutated)

↳ Damage: 800 to 1,200

↳ Trait 1: Weight of the Warden. (Mass increases by 500% on downward swing).

↳ Trait 2 Unlocked: Event Horizon.

↳ Functionality: The weapon generates its own localized gravitational field. The user is entirely immune to the weapon’s weight penalty. Attack speed is no longer restricted by the Strength stat.

Declan let out a low whistle. The game had just tried to restrict him with a stat penalty because he didn’t have the 20 Strength required to swing it properly.

His new mutation just told the physics engine to go screw itself! He could swing this massive block of iron as fast as a kitchen knife.

"Keep going," Declan spoke out loud.

Bram took a step back, his eyes wide in fear. "Boy, what are you doing? That much energy is going to cause a dimensional tear!"

"System," Declan completely ignored the NPC. "Push it to plus thirty."

This was uncharted territory. No player had ever seen a plus thirty item. It wasn’t just impossible, it was mathematically prohibited by the developers.

The system tried to fight him. The Origin Point cost skyrocketed to 10,000 points per level. A hundred thousand points drained from his account.

[Notice: Critical Error. Item density exceeding server parameters.]

[Talent: Boundless Enhancement overriding error.]

↳ Warden’s Halberd +21... +25... +29... +30.

The halberd didn’t just glow this time. It screamed!

A high-pitched frequency pierced the air. The tiny black sphere inside the axe head expanded, pulsing with a terrifying, destructive rhythm. The space around the weapon literally distorted, making the air look like wavy glass.

[Item has reached +30.]

[Triggering Ultimate Conceptual Mutation...]

The system text didn’t appear in blue or gold. It appeared in pitch black, outlined in glaring red.

[Warden’s Halberd +30]

↳ Damage: 2,500 to 4,000

↳ Trait 3 Unlocked: Gravitational Annihilation.

↳ Functionality: On a critical strike, the blade generates a localized singularity. The singularity instantly pulls in all enemies, projectiles, and loose terrain within a 50-meter radius, crushing their physical models into a single point of mass. Effect lasts for two seconds.

Declan stared at the text. He read it three times to make sure his brain was processing the words correctly.

A localized singularity.

A black hole!

If he hit someone hard enough to trigger a critical strike, the weapon would literally rip a hole in the server’s physics engine and suck everything within half a football field into a meat grinder.

Declan gripped the dark matter shaft. Thanks to the Event Horizon trait, the weapon felt as light as a feather in his hands. He could swing it effortlessly.

He looked at Bram. The old mechanist was trembling, staring at the halberd like it was a live bomb.

"You were saying something about needing heavy artillery?" Declan smiled. His dark eyes locked onto the black sphere spinning in the center of his blade. "I think we are fully equipped."

Before Bram could respond, a blaring, deafening alarm echoed across the entire Iron Bastion.