Chapter 33: [33] : A One-Man Massacre, Void Surfing

Silas stood at the front of the Apex Hounds formation. He watched the small gap in the black dome open and shut.

He watched the lone figure in the dark trench coat walk out into the mud.

Silas’s cold, professional expression didn’t change, but his eyes narrowed. He looked at the massive, weirdly shaped halberd resting on the player’s shoulder.

"Are you surrendering the Core?" Silas’s magically amplified voice echoed across the swamp.

"I’m keeping the Core," Declan said. He didn’t have a megaphone, but his voice carried easily. "I’m also keeping your cannon. You can leave the armor here too."

The silver-clad soldiers of the Apex Hounds didn’t laugh. They were highly paid professionals. They just tightened their grips on their glowing weapons.

Silas sighed. He tapped a button on his collar. He dropped the customer service act entirely.

"Fire the cannon," Silas ordered flatly. "Obliterate him."

Behind the front line, the massive Mana-Breaker Cannon hummed. The glowing blue glass barrel flared with blinding light.

The air around the machine warped as it sucked in massive amounts of digital energy.

Declan didn’t move. He stood completely still, his eyes locked on the glowing barrel.

BOOM!

The cannon fired. The recoil was so massive it pushed the heavy tank treads two feet backward into the mud!

A colossal beam of solid blue mana, the size of a city bus, tore through the air.

It wasn’t just an attack, it was a wall of pure destructive code designed to shatter the fundamental physics of whatever it hit.

It moved at terrifying speed, screaming directly toward Declan’s chest.

If it hit him, his fifty points of defense wouldn’t matter at all. He would be vaporized.

’Void Blink,’ Declan thought.

The world went pitch black for a fraction of a millisecond.

Declan vanished from the mud just as the massive blue beam scorched the earth where he had been standing.

He materialized fifteen meters directly straight up in the air.

He was falling, but he didn’t panic. He looked down. The massive beam of blue mana was passing directly beneath his boots.

’Void Blink.’

He teleported again. He didn’t aim for the ground. He aimed for the beam itself.

His +10 Spiked Striders slammed onto the solid surface of the magical artillery shell mid-flight!

The kinetic dampener trait in his boots completely absorbed the jarring impact of landing on an object moving at the speed of sound.

For exactly one second, Declan was surfing a massive missile of pure magic!

The Apex Hounds stared in absolute, unfiltered horror.

The entire front line of shield-bearers tilted their heads up, watching a guy in a black coat ride their own super-weapon right over their heads!

Before the beam could crash into the Iron Bastion’s dome, Declan jumped off the back of the glowing shell.

’Void Blink.’

He vanished from the air and teleported another fifteen meters forward.

He completely bypassed the heavy shield wall. He bypassed the spearmen.

Declan materialized directly in the dead center of the Apex Hounds’ backline.

He was surrounded by hundreds of lightly armored mages and the artillery crew operating the cannon.

"He’s behind us!" a mage screamed, dropping his staff in panic.

Declan didn’t give them a single second to cast a spell.

He gripped the heavy dark matter shaft of the +30 Warden’s Halberd with both hands. Because of the Event Horizon trait, the weapon felt weightless to him.

He spun on his heel and brought the massive blunt axe head down in a vicious, sweeping arc directly onto the helmet of the nearest artillery gunner.

The instant the downward swing started, the Weight of the Warden activated.

The weapon’s mass increased by 500 percent. It instantly weighed four hundred pounds.

Combined with the sheer speed of his swing, the air pressure shattered with a deafening sonic boom!

The blunt edge smashed into the gunner’s silver helmet.

CRACK!

It wasn’t just a heavy hit. It was a perfect, dead-center strike.

[Critical Strike!]

The red text flashed in Declan’s vision.

The ultimate mutation triggered instantly.

[Trait: Gravitational Annihilation Activated.]

The tiny black sphere spinning inside the hole of the halberd’s axe head violently expanded.

It didn’t explode outward. It did the exact opposite.

A localized singularity ripped open in the center of the Apex Hounds’ formation.

It was a literal, physics-breaking black hole!

The sound of the battlefield completely vanished, sucked into the void. The light around the singularity warped and bent, plunging the backline into unnatural darkness.

Then, the pulling force hit.

It was absolute chaos. The singularity grabbed everything within a 50-meter radius.

"Hold the line!" Silas shrieked, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of tearing metal.

Three hundred highly-trained, max-geared corporate players were ripped off their feet simultaneously. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

They flew through the air, screaming in terror, completely helpless against the gravitational pull.

They didn’t just get pulled in. They got crushed.

The singularity dragged them all into a single, localized point in space. Heavy silver armor crumpled like tin foil.

High-tier energy shields shattered like glass. Bones snapped and popped in a terrifying, wet destruction.

The players were compressed into a violently spinning ball of scrap metal, digital blood, and terrified avatars.

The game’s physics engine couldn’t handle the sheer amount of mass occupying one coordinate.

The system threw up endless strings of error codes, desperately trying to calculate the damage.

Two seconds later, the singularity collapsed.

The release of pressure was catastrophic.

The compressed ball of players violently exploded outward. A massive rain of crushed, polygonal meat, shattered silver armor, and blue digital pixels showered the entire battlefield.

It rained blood and scrap metal for five solid seconds!

When the dust settled, a massive, fifty-meter crater was carved out of the mud.

Three hundred members of the Apex Hounds were instantly deleted. Not a single one survived the crush.

Declan stood perfectly still at the edge of the crater. The singularity hadn’t affected him.

His pitch-black Predator’s Coat wasn’t even dusty. He rested the heavy halberd casually on his shoulder.

The remaining seven hundred soldiers of the corporate death squad were completely paralyzed.

The shield wall had turned around, their weapons shaking uncontrollably in their hands. They looked at the crater. They looked at the meat raining down on their visors.

Silas stood frozen near the front. His pristine tactical suit was splattered with the digital blood of his elite artillery crew.

His jaw was slack. His professional demeanor was completely shattered.

Declan looked at Silas through the sea of terrified soldiers. He smiled, a cold, bloodthirsty look in his dark eyes.

"Your turn."