Chapter 52: [52] : Reality Enhancement, Hacking the Physical World

Declan stood in the middle of the dark and damp warehouse.

The air smelled of burnt gunpowder and fresh blood. Eleven highly trained corporate mercenaries lay scattered across the concrete floor. They were groaning in pain or completely unconscious.

Although he has taken them far away from his warehouse before they regained consciousness.

The squad leader was a crumpled mess in the corner, nursing a shattered helmet and a massive concussion.

The heavy titanium riot shield felt perfectly light strapped to Declan’s left forearm. It was now the plus 20 Black Aegis.

He flexed his right hand. His knuckles were totally fine. He had just punched a solid steel I-beam and shattered it.

His fifteen percent synchronization rate was already crazy. But hitting thirty percent after consuming the Spire Master’s core? That put him on an entirely different level!

He was walking around with the raw physical density of an Ascendant-tier player in the real world.

Declan looked down at his clothes. The orange jumpsuit he had stolen from the debtor’s facility was completely ruined.

It was torn at the shoulder where the Flesh-Stalker had scratched him. It was also full of shallow bullet holes from the mercenaries’ armor-piercing rounds. He looked like a walking target.

"I need a wardrobe upgrade," Declan muttered to himself.

He walked over to the closest unconscious mercenary. The guy was wearing a sleek and matte-black tactical jacket over his Kevlar armor.

It looked waterproof and incredibly durable. Declan grabbed the collar and lifted the heavy man with one hand like he was a ragdoll. He effortlessly stripped the jacket off him. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

He dropped the merc back onto the floor and slipped the jacket on. It fit perfectly over his broad shoulders.

It was infinitely better than the orange suit, but it was still just regular Earth clothing.

Declan looked at the scattered assault rifles on the ground. These were high-end corporate weapons.

They were suppressed, fully automatic, and chambered in armor-piercing rounds. Against a normal human, they were lethal. Against a Level 40 Grid monster? They were about as useful as a toy water gun!

But Declan wasn’t playing by normal physics anymore.

"If the system recognizes a mundane titanium riot shield," Declan whispered into the quiet warehouse. "What else does it recognize?"

He reached down and picked up one of the sleek black assault rifles.

It was heavy and made of cold steel and polymer. He held it in his hands and focused his mind.

He didn’t have his VR sensory halo. He wasn’t in the dive pod. But the connection to the Primordial Grid was burned directly into his DNA now.

When he got back to his warehouse.

He willed his digital interface to open.

A faint and glowing blue screen materialized directly in his optic nerves. It hovered in the air right in front of his face and illuminated the dark warehouse with a soft light.

[Grid Inventory Access Granted.]

[Current Treasury Balance: 2,400,000 Origin Points.]

Sloane was definitely doing her job back in the Iron Bastion. The toll booth and the auction house sales were printing money faster than he could spend it.

Two point four million points! He had the funds to test a very crazy theory.

Declan looked at the physical gun in his hands.

"System," Declan said out loud. "Assess this item."

A small blue scanning laser shot out from his eyes and swept over the assault rifle. A second later, a new prompt popped up.

[Item Recognized: Apex Paradigm Standard Issue Assault Rifle.]

↳ Tier: Unranked (Mundane Physical Object)

↳ Damage: 15 to 20 (Piercing)

↳ Description: A basic projectile weapon utilizing chemical combustion. Highly ineffective against Grid Entities above Level 5.

Declan grinned. The system recognized it!

It gave it a trash tier, but it recognized it as an item. And if it was an item, the rules of his SSS-Rank Talent applied to it.

"System," Declan commanded. "Apply Boundless Enhancement. Push this gun to plus twenty."

He didn’t care about the cost. He didn’t care that he was upgrading a piece of completely non-magical technology. He wanted to see what happened when you forced a video game progression mechanic onto a real-world object.

[System Enhancement Initiated.]

↳ Cost per level for Unranked Item: 50 Origin Points.

It was dirt cheap. Declan watched his massive point balance drop by a microscopic fraction.

A blinding white light erupted from the assault rifle in his hands. It was so bright it cast long and sharp shadows against the warehouse walls.

The familiar chimes of the enhancement system rang out directly inside his head.

[Rifle +1... +5... +10.]

The standard red warning box popped up and violently flashed in his vision.

[Notice: Item lacks the conceptual density to sustain further enhancements. Structural collapse and explosive detonation imminent.]

Declan didn’t even blink. He just let his talent do the work.

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

[Rifle +11... +15... +19... +20.]

[Triggering Conceptual Mutation...]

The bright white light shifted into a deep and aggressive purple. The physical shape of the assault rifle began to violently warp and twist in his hands.

The cheap polymer plastic melted away and was replaced by a dark metallic alloy. It looked exactly like the material of his Warden’s Halberd.

The barrel elongated and thickened. It turned from a standard cylindrical tube into a rectangular rail-gun design.

The magazine well fused directly into the receiver and glowed with a bright blue energy. It didn’t hold bullets anymore. It held raw and concentrated mana!

The light faded. Declan held the new weapon up to his eye level.

It was beautiful. It looked like a piece of heavy artillery ripped straight out of a sci-fi movie.

A new stat screen floated over the gun.

[Item Mutated: Apex Annihilator Rifle +20]

↳ Tier: Forged (Mutated Reality Object)

↳ Damage: 300 to 450 (Energy or Piercing)

↳ Trait Unlocked: Infinite Magazine.

↳ Functionality: This weapon no longer requires physical ammunition. It passively draws ambient mana from the surrounding environment to generate hyper-kinetic energy slugs. Fire rate is completely unrestricted. Recoil is nullified.

Declan stared at the text. He read it twice.

"Infinite ammo," Declan laughed. "And it shoots pure kinetic energy."

He needed to test it. He turned toward the far end of the warehouse.

There was a massive and rusted industrial boiler sitting against the concrete wall. It was easily ten feet tall and made of solid heavy-duty iron.

Declan raised the mutated rifle. He didn’t even aim down the sights. He just pointed it from the hip and pulled the trigger.

Pew! Pew! Pew!

It didn’t sound like a gun. It sounded like a laser cutting through glass. Three bright blue bolts of pure energy shot out of the rectangular barrel.

They crossed the warehouse in a fraction of a millisecond.

They hit the massive iron boiler.

BOOM!

The impact was devastating. The three energy slugs didn’t just pierce the iron. They exploded on contact!

The entire front half of the boiler was completely vaporized. It caved inward and sent shrapnel flying into the brick wall behind it. The sheer kinetic force of the impact shook the dust off the warehouse ceiling.

Declan lowered the rifle. He looked at the smoking and melted hole in the heavy iron.

"Okay," Declan nodded slowly. "That works."

He willed the rifle into his digital inventory. It vanished into a swirl of blue pixels and slipped perfectly into his expanded storage space thanks to his Mythic ring.

He stood alone in the quiet warehouse. The implications of what he just did were staggering.

The megacorporations thought they had an advantage because they had guns, drones, and armies in the real world. They thought the Grid was just a simulation they could turn off.

But Declan was walking around with a system that let him hack reality itself!

He could pick up a rock, spend a few Origin Points, and turn it into a bomb. He could pick up a car door and turn it into a magical shield.

The world was changing. The sky outside was literally tearing open and dropping monsters into the streets of Sector 7.

The Great Convergence was happening. Earth and the Primordial Grid were violently crashing into each other. Society was going to collapse in a matter of days.

But Declan wasn’t scared. He felt completely at home.

He was an Ascendant-tier Abyssal Sovereign with thirty percent real-world synchronization. He owned a massive and impenetrable fortress inside the game, and he had millions of points to spend!

He just needed to make sure his people were safe.

He closed his inventory menu and opened the communication tab. It was completely insane that he could access a video game chat room while standing in a dirty warehouse. But the reality bleed was making everything possible.

He opened the communication tab. It was completely insane that he could access a video game chat room while standing in a dirty warehouse, but the reality bleed was making everything possible.

He selected the Party Chat channel.

[Player V: Sloane. Kendra. You guys alive in there? What happened after I disconnected?]

He waited. He watched the blinking cursor on his internal interface. A few seconds later, text scrolled across his vision.

[Kendra: Declan! Oh my god, you’re awake! Yes, I’m alive. When you ate that core and vanished, the whole Spire started collapsing!

The system gave us a ’Critical Error: Forced Evacuation’ warning and automatically logged us out. I escaped after i woke up in my pod just as the city sirens started going off.

I’m hiding in the basement of my apartment building right now. The news says monsters are everywhere!]

Declan breathed a small sigh of relief.

Kendra was safe for now. The system had booted them to save their avatars when the dungeon broke.

[Player V: Stay there. Do not go outside. If anything breaks through the door, use your plus 10 Sniper Bow. It works in the real world now. Just shoot through the walls.]

[Kendra: It works here?! Okay. Okay, I won’t move.]

Declan waited for Sloane to reply. Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. The silence was starting to make him annoyed.

[Player V: Quartermaster. Report.]

Another long pause. Finally, a messy, frantic message popped up.

[Sloane: Declan! I’m trapped! I’m at Sector 7 General Hospital! After the game booted us, I saw the news feeds going crazy about portals in the sky. I knew it was the Grid, so I ran straight from my apartment to the hospital to get my sister before things got worse. But I was too late!]

Declan frowned. He typed back quickly using just his thoughts.

[Player V: Calm down. What do you mean by too late?]

[Sloane: The hospital is completely overrun. The moment the server chime hit in the real world, half the patients in the trauma ward mutated. They turned into those gray things.

Flesh-Stalkers! And some of them turned into bigger things. The security guards are dead. Their guns didn’t do anything!]

Sloane’s sister. The whole reason she was in debt in the first place. The reason she almost took the Weaver’s deal in the Crimson Spire.

[Player V: Are the doors holding?]

[Sloane: For now. But there’s something huge out in the hallway. It’s banging on the metal. It’s going to break through in a few minutes. Declan, I’m terrified. I don’t have my healing staff in the real world! I don’t have anything!]

She didn’t have a high enough synchronization rate to pull her Grid inventory into reality. Only players who had consumed high-tier cores or leveled up massively could pull items through the dimensional gap.

Sloane was completely defenseless.

Declan cracked his neck. The bones popped loudly in the quiet warehouse.

[Player V: I’m on my way. Do not open that door for anyone but me.]

He didn’t wait for her to reply. He closed the interface.

He looked at the stolen corporate dive pod sitting in the middle of the floor. It was his anchor. It was the most important piece of hardware he owned.

He walked over to the heavy steel door he had blown off its tracks earlier. He grabbed the edge of the massive metal slab with one hand, hauled it up, and forcefully jammed it back into the doorway.

He bent the thick iron frame to lock it in place. It wouldn’t stop a tank, but it would keep the scavengers out.

Declan turned around and walked to the back exit of the warehouse. He kicked the emergency door open and stepped out into the night.

The toxic rain of Sector 7 hit his face. The city was screaming.

It was time to go to work.