Chapter 36: [36] : The Spoils of Corporate War, Base Defense

The Ashen Bog was a graveyard of digital pixels.

Where an army of a thousand elite corporate soldiers had stood just ten minutes ago, there was now only empty mud, a massive fifty-meter crater, and hundreds of piles of dropped loot.

Declan willed his Carnage Cleaver back into his digital storage.

He rolled his shoulders and winced slightly.

His health bar had refilled entirely thanks to the two level-ups he got from killing the Wendigo, but the phantom pain of the monster’s bite still lingered in his arm.

"Good workout," Declan muttered to himself.

He didn’t care about the hundreds of silver swords, shields, and armor pieces scattered across the battlefield.

The Apex Hounds had dropped some high-tier gear when they died, but Declan didn’t need any of it.

His mutated Scavenged items were mathematically superior to anything the game could naturally generate.

He only had eyes for one thing.

Sitting safely behind the massive crater, completely untouched by the fighting, was the Mana-Breaker Cannon.

Declan walked over to it. Up close, the siege weapon was even more intimidating.

The heavy tank treads were sunk deep into the mud.

The twenty-foot-long barrel made of glowing blue glass and dark steel hummed with a low latent energy.

It was a Relic-tier piece of artillery designed specifically to break safe zone barriers.

It was exactly what he needed to secure his city.

Declan placed his hand on the cold steel of the cannon’s chassis. His Mythic-tier ring, the [Ring of the Void-Hoarder], glowed with a faint silver light.

"Store," Declan commanded.

The massive multi-ton cannon instantly vanished, sucked into the vast dimensional space of his ring.

He didn’t feel a single ounce of weight added to his character. The ring’s five hundred inventory slots didn’t care about size or mass.

Declan turned around and faced the black dome of the Iron Bastion.

He tapped a command into his admin interface. A ten-foot-wide section of the dark energy shield hissed open, waiting for him.

Declan walked through the gate.

The moment he stepped back inside his city, the barrier snapped shut behind him.

The courtyard of the Iron Bastion was completely packed.

Over three thousand players were crammed together between the glowing furnaces and the makeshift merchant stalls.

But despite the massive crowd, you could hear a pin drop.

Every single player was staring at him!

They had all watched the fight through the transparent barrier.

They had seen him surf a magic missile, drop a localized black hole on an army, and decapitate a Level 40 boss in a fistfight.

They parted like the Red Sea as Declan walked through the center of the city.

Nobody spoke. Nobody dared to even breathe too loudly. They just stared at him with a mixture of absolute awe and sheer terror.

Declan ignored them. He walked straight toward the crafting zone.

Bram, the Level 30 Master Artificer, was standing by his heavy iron anvil. His jaw was hanging open.

He was staring at Declan like the young player was an alien.

"You’re back," Bram finally managed to say, his voice rough.

He looked at his own new black obsidian mechanical arm and then back at Declan. "You actually wiped the Apex Hounds. You broke a corporate guild by yourself."

"I told you I just needed a bigger stick," Declan said casually.

He raised his right hand. The air in front of the forge distorted, and the massive Mana-Breaker Cannon materialized out of his ring.

It hit the stone paving of the courtyard with a heavy metallic crunch.

Bram jumped back, startled. Then, his eyes locked onto the glowing blue barrel of the cannon.

The old mechanist’s eyes went wide with pure unfiltered joy.

"By the core," Bram whispered, walking up to the cannon and running his mechanical hand over the sleek steel.

"A Class-IV Mana-Breaker. This is military-grade siege tech. This is beautiful!"

"It’s yours," Declan said. "I want you to reverse-engineer the power core. Figure out how it generates that anti-magic beam."

"Then, I want you to strip it down and integrate the tech directly into the Bastion’s walls."

"I want automated turrets that can fire that same beam at anyone who gets too close."

Bram looked at Declan with a wild manic grin.

"You want to mount a Relic-tier siege cannon onto an automated defense grid? Do you have any idea how much Origin Point funding that will cost? The mana requirements alone will be astronomical!"

"Money isn’t a problem," Declan said, waving his hand dismissively. "Just build it. I want this city untouchable by tomorrow."

"Consider it done, boss!" Bram laughed loudly, immediately pulling out a set of glowing digital blueprints and going to work on the cannon.

Declan left him to it and walked over to the toll booth.

Sloane and Kendra were sitting behind the mahogany desk. Kendra looked like she was about to pass out from anxiety.

Sloane was frantically scrolling through a glowing yellow interface hovering in the air.

"Quartermaster," Declan called out.

Sloane snapped her head up. "Declan! You’re alive! I mean, of course you’re alive, but still!"

"How is the treasury?" Declan asked.

"We are basically printing money," Sloane said, her capitalist gleam returning in full force.

"We sold so much raw iron during your fight that we broke the local economy. But that isn’t the crazy part."

Sloane swiped her hand, turning the yellow interface around so Declan could see it. It was the Global Server Chat.

The text was scrolling so fast it was almost a blur, but Sloane had frozen a section of it.

"Look at this," she said.

Declan leaned in and read the messages.

[User_Ironclad]: Bro, did you see the stream? The Apex Hounds just got wiped in Sector 4!

[Mage_Girl_99]: Cap. The Hounds don’t wipe. They’re max level devs.

[User_Ironclad]: I’m dead serious! Some guy named Player V dropped a literal black hole on them! He soloed the commander! 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

[GuildLeader_Rex]: Stay away from Sector 4. The whole zone is locked down. Player V built a fortress called the Iron Bastion. It’s an absolute death trap.

[Rogue_Shadow]: Who is Player V? Is he a beta tester? A hacker?

[User_Ironclad]: He’s the Warlord of Sector 4 now. Apex Paradigm just lost an entire sector on day one.

Declan chuckled softly. "Word travels fast."

"Declan, you didn’t just win a fight. You humiliated the developers," Sloane said, her voice dropping to a serious whisper.

"Apex Paradigm isn’t going to let this go. They are a real-world megacorporation. You just stole their digital real estate and murdered their hit squad."

"Let them be mad," Declan said indifferently. He leaned against the desk.

"They built a game where the strong survive and the weak get deleted. They just didn’t expect someone to be stronger than them."

Kendra finally spoke up, her voice small. "What do we do now? If they send a bigger army?"

"Let them," Declan replied.

He gestured to the massive iron dome above them, the spiked walls, and Bram tearing apart the siege cannon.

"By the time they regroup, this city is going to be a fortress. Nobody gets in unless I say so."

Declan looked at his system interface. His stamina was fine, but a dull throbbing ache was starting to build behind his eyes.

It was a completely different kind of fatigue.

It was the real-world bleed. His physical body in the dive pod was exhausted.

Pushing his SSS-Rank talent to rewrite the game’s core code, mutating a class token, and dropping a localized black hole had put a massive strain on his nervous system.

He had secured the zone. He had established his capital. He had the money and the defenses.

It was time to take a break.

"Sloane, Kendra," Declan said, his voice taking on a heavy and authoritative tone.

"You two are officially in charge of the Iron Bastion while I’m gone. Keep collecting the tolls. Keep feeding Bram materials."

"If anyone tries to start a riot inside the walls, use the city’s admin panel to teleport them outside into the mud."

"Wait, where are you going?" Sloane asked, her eyes widening.

"I need to log out for a bit," Declan said, cracking his neck. "I have some real-world errands to run."

He had full control over his new dive pod.

Before they could ask any more questions, Declan pulled up his personal menu. For normal prisoners, the log-out button was permanently disabled. But Warden Cross had deleted Declan’s file, and Declan was currently lying in an unregistered, off-grid pod. The system registered him as a free user.

The ’Manual Disconnect’ button glowed bright blue. He pressed it.

The bustling noise of the Iron Bastion vanished. The dark purple sky faded away. The world dissolved into a blinding white flash.

It was time to see just how much of his new power had bled into reality.