Chapter 46: [46]: Slaughtering a God, The Apostle’s Core

Declan walked slowly across the shattered stone of the cathedral floor. The heavy dark iron shaft of the plus 30 Warden’s Halberd scraped loudly against the rock behind him.

He didn’t need to run. He didn’t need to dodge.

Malthus, the First Apostle of Rot, was completely immobilized. The Level 50 Spire Master was pinned entirely flat against the ground.

The 500x gravity edit from Declan’s Absolute Sovereign Domain was holding the Entity down with the physical weight of a commercial skyscraper!

"You are breaking core protocol!" Malthus gurgled.

Golden digital blood bubbled out of the boss’s mouth, staining the clean stone beneath his chin. The sheer physical pressure of the gravity well was actively crushing his organs.

"Apex Paradigm will wipe your neural signature!" Malthus hissed, his pitch black eyes flickering with lines of erratic static. "You cannot execute a Spire Master with raw physical data! The server hierarchy forbids it!"

"Watch me," Declan said flatly.

He stopped right next to Malthus’s flattened head.

Declan didn’t pull out a fancy spellbook. He didn’t use a special active skill. He didn’t even bother triggering the Gravitational Annihilation trait on the halberd. He absolutely did not want to accidentally suck the boss’s high tier loot drops into a localized black hole and ruin his payday.

He just needed raw brutal blunt force trauma.

Declan hauled the heavy halberd up over his right shoulder. Thanks to the Event Horizon trait, the massive weapon felt as light as a wooden broomstick in his hands. But the moment he started the downward swing, the physics engine violently corrected itself.

The Weight of the Warden trait activated.

The mass of the weapon increased by five hundred percent in a fraction of a millisecond. An eighty pound ceremonial weapon instantly became a four hundred pound block of solid dark matter.

It tore through the localized gravity well, creating a sharp whistling sonic boom that made the air physically warp.

It smashed directly into the back of Malthus’s skull!

CRUNCH!

The sound was absolutely sickening. It didn’t sound like a standard video game attack. It didn’t have a cool magical sound effect. It sounded exactly like dropping a heavy car engine onto a ripe watermelon.

Malthus’s head was driven another three inches into the solid stone floor.

A massive spray of golden blood erupted outward, splashing heavily against Declan’s pitch black Predator Coat. The fifty points of flat defense on the mutated trench coat repelled the liquid instantly, sliding off the fabric and keeping him perfectly clean.

[Critical Hit! 14,500 Physical Damage!] 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

The bright red damage numbers popped up in the air, but the boss’s health bar was still rendering as a string of confused question marks. The Grid’s core programming was actually struggling to calculate how he was generating this much raw kinetic force.

Malthus let out a high pitched glitching shriek. His rotting legs kicked out weakly against the crushing gravity.

"Still alive?" Declan grunted, resting the heavy halberd back on his shoulder. "Good. That means I get to swing again."

"Wait!" Malthus hissed. The Entity’s gray robes were torn, and his spine was visibly caved in. "I can offer you a seat! I can make you an Overseer of the new world! You do not have to be a player! You can be a god!"

"I already have a city," Declan said coldly. "And I don’t share power with computer viruses."

He didn’t pause for another villain speech. Declan brought the halberd down again like a tired lumberjack chopping a very stubborn and ugly log.

SMASH!

[Critical Hit! 15,200 Physical Damage!]

Malthus’s shoulder blade shattered completely. More golden blood sprayed across the floor, pooling into a thick glowing puddle that hissed against the stone.

Over by the heavy iron entrance doors, Sloane and Kendra were watching the execution in stunned silence. They were sitting perfectly safe inside the edge of Declan’s silver domain barrier, completely untouched by the boss fight.

"He’s literally tenderizing a god," Kendra whispered. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to put her plus 10 Sniper Bow down on the floor. "He isn’t even fighting it. He’s just doing construction work on its face."

"I am so glad I work for him," Sloane muttered, tightly gripping her green healing staff. She couldn’t take her eyes off the violence. "If he ever asks me to pay a toll, I am giving him my actual real world bank account details. I am never crossing that guy."

Declan didn’t hear them. He was entirely focused on the mangled mess beneath his boots.

He checked the glowing silver timer in the corner of his vision.

[Domain Duration: 5 Seconds Remaining]

He raised the halberd a third time. Malthus was barely twitching now. The Entity’s code was actively unraveling. The dark rotting veins on his pale skin were turning into floating gray pixels, struggling to maintain a physical form.

"System," Declan said out loud, completely ignoring the game’s remaining safety warnings flashing in his periphery. "Drop the hammer."

He swung the weapon down with every ounce of his massive base strength.

CRACK!

The blunt iron edge obliterated what was left of Malthus’s upper back. The stone floor beneath the boss finally gave way, spiderwebbing with deep trenches before completely shattering into a crater of loose gravel.

Malthus was officially reduced to a smear of golden blood and mashed gray code.

The question marks on the boss’s health bar suddenly glitched. They turned into a solid red bar that instantly emptied to absolute zero.

[Spire Master: Malthus, The First Apostle of Rot (Level 50) Defeated!]

The golden system chime rang out so loudly it physically rattled Declan’s teeth!

Instantly, the silver bubble of the Absolute Sovereign Domain flickered and collapsed. The thirty second timer had hit zero. Normal physics rushed back into the room. The oppressive 500x gravity lifted, but it didn’t matter anymore. The toxic Decaying World was completely gone because the caster was dead.

Malthus’s flattened body began to rapidly dissolve. Millions of bright gold and dark green pixels floated up toward the red glass ceiling of the cathedral, leaving the stone floor completely bare.

Then, the experience points hit.

[Experience Points Gained: 5,000,000]

Declan’s vision turned entirely gold. A massive cascade of level up notifications spammed his interface faster than his brain could even read them.

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

The chimes overlapped into a single continuous note of pure progression. Declan felt a massive rush of raw unadulterated energy flood his avatar. His digital muscles tightened. His senses sharpened to a terrifying degree. The heavy fatigue in his bones vanished instantly.

[You are now Level 50!]

[Stat Points Available: 260]

Declan let out a long heavy breath. He planted the base of the halberd on the ground and leaned heavily against the shaft.

Level 40 to Level 50 in a single kill. It was absurd! His base stats were going to be absolutely untouchable now. With his Eclipse Sovereign class multipliers, he was walking around with the raw physical power of a military tank battalion.

"Holy crap!" Sloane’s voice echoed loudly across the empty room.

Declan turned around. Sloane and Kendra were staring at their own floating system interfaces. Both of them were glowing with the exact same bright golden light of repeated level ups. Because they were officially in his party, they got a flat percentage of the base experience points.

"I just jumped from Level 18 to Level 22!" Sloane yelled. She dropped her staff and grabbed her own hair in pure disbelief. "Kendra is Level 22! We just skipped a month of hardcore grinding by standing near a door!"

"I didn’t even shoot an arrow," Kendra said softly, staring at her hands like they belonged to a stranger. "I am the highest leveled archer on the server, and I literally did nothing."

"You’re welcome," Declan called back.

He willed the heavy Warden’s Halberd into his digital storage. The massive weapon vanished into a flurry of blue pixels.

He didn’t care about their levels right now. He didn’t even care about allocating his own 260 stat points. He only cared about the loot.

He walked over to the center of the shattered crater where Malthus had died. There were no useless iron swords or basic armor pieces lying in the dirt. Spire Masters didn’t drop vendor trash.

Sitting perfectly still in the center of the golden pixel dust was a single unique item.

It was about the size of an apple. It didn’t look like a crystal or a piece of forged metal. It looked like a literal beating heart made entirely of glowing shifting green code. It pulsed with a slow heavy rhythm that synced perfectly with Declan’s own heartbeat.

He knelt down and picked it up. It felt strangely warm and slick against his palm.

[Item Retrieved: Apostle’s Core]

A new information panel popped up in his vision. Declan read the text, his dark eyes tracing every single word. This was exactly what he came here for.