Chapter 64: [64] : The +40 Halberd, Conceptual Armor

The massive floating obsidian hand with its six long fingers remained raised.

The Abyssal Herald did not blink. It had hundreds of glowing red eyes plastered across its floating geometric blocks. Every single one of those eyes was staring directly at Declan.

It had just offered him a job. It had just offered him a seat as an Overseer to manage the human livestock on Earth.

Declan had basically told it to screw off.

The dark purple energy crackling between the Herald’s black pyramids and silver rings flared wildly. The entity did not yell. It did not get angry like the human guild leaders did. It operated on cold and simple server logic.

Declan had rejected the code. Therefore, Declan was a virus that needed to be scrubbed from the system.

"You reject the intended limits." The Herald’s voice echoed directly inside Declan’s mind again.

It felt like a block of ice sliding down his spine.

"You carry a heavy weapon. You possess a localized gravity well. But physical mass cannot harm a concept. You are trying to break a steel wall with a heavy rock. It is useless."

Declan ignored the telepathic headache. He gripped the heavy dark matter shaft of the +30 Warden’s Halberd. The tiny black hole spinning inside the center of the blunt axe head hummed with a violent and destructive frequency.

He didn’t bother using Void Blink. He wanted to test the system mechanics right here and now.

He planted his boots on the bone platform and hauled the massive weapon over his shoulder. He swung it forward in a brutal horizontal arc.

The Weight of the Warden trait triggered.

The weapon’s mass multiplied by five hundred percent. The four hundred pound block of dark matter tore through the air, creating a deafening sonic boom that rattled the fleshy walls of the subway cavern.

He aimed right for the central core of the Herald.

CLANG!

The sound was totally wrong. It didn’t sound like metal hitting a monster. It sounded like a baseball bat hitting a completely solid and unbreakable pane of bulletproof glass.

Declan felt the kinetic feedback shoot up his arms. It was so intense it actually pushed him backward. His +10 Spiked Striders dug deep trenches into the bone floor as he skidded to a halt.

He looked up.

The massive halberd had stopped completely dead in mid air, about two feet away from the Herald’s central block. There was no physical shield there. There was no magical barrier glowing with energy.

The weapon had just hit a literal wall of game code.

A blue system panel appeared over the Herald’s head.

[Target is immune to physical damage.]

[Target is immune to elemental damage.]

[Conceptual Armor active.]

’Well, that is annoying.’ Declan muttered. He rested the heavy halberd back on his shoulder.

"Your physical attacks rely on the concept of mass and velocity." The Herald projected into his mind. "I am an Entity of the Grid. I am not made of mass. I am made of rules. The rule of my existence dictates that I cannot be touched by physical objects. Your weapon is a physical object. The math is absolute."

Declan sighed.

’Of course it is. Level 50 bosses always have a stupid gimmick. You can’t just hit them really hard. You have to play their little puzzle game.’

The Herald raised its six fingered hand again. Dark matter began to pool in its palm, swirling into a dense and terrifying sphere of deletion magic. It was preparing to wipe his avatar from the server entirely.

"Unfortunately for you," Declan smiled as his dark eyes glowed with the purple energy of his Abyssal Sovereign class. "I don’t do puzzles. And I really hate playing by the rules." 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

He didn’t drop his weapon. He didn’t run away. He just pulled up his system interface with a quick mental command.

The glowing blue screen materialized in his vision. He ignored the health bar. He ignored the party chat. He went straight to the treasury tab.

He had just spent hours speed running the Crimson Spire and farming the Bone Ash Wastes. He had slaughtered dozens of Level 30 Cave Crawlers and wiped out an entire camp of heavily armed cultists. He had absorbed the massive drop from the Level 45 Obsidian Death Stalker.

His Origin Point balance was sitting at a completely absurd number. He had over three million points sitting in his digital bank. It was enough currency to buy out the entire Global Auction House three times over.

He looked at the +30 Warden’s Halberd in his hand. It was already a physics breaking nightmare. But against conceptual armor, a black hole just wasn’t cutting it. He needed to push the game engine past its absolute breaking point.

"System," Declan commanded out loud. "Open the enhancement menu."

The upgrade window snapped into place.

"Select the Warden’s Halberd. Enhance it. Push it to plus forty. Do not stop for the safety warnings."

The system actually hesitated for a fraction of a second. Upgrading a Relic tier weapon past plus thirty was not something the developers had ever coded for. The point scaling was completely insane.

[System Enhancement Initiated. Calculating cost...]

[Warning: Point requirement exceeds standard player limits.]

↳ Cost per level for +31 to +40: 250,000 Origin Points.

Two hundred and fifty thousand points per level. For ten levels. That was two and a half million points. A normal player would have cried. A top tier guild leader would have fainted.

Declan just grinned. "Take it all. Just give me the upgrade."

The points drained from his account instantly. His massive fortune vanished in a single heartbeat.

The reaction was crazy.

A blinding and violent white light erupted from the halberd in his hand. It was so bright it completely drowned out the sickly purple glow of the cavern. The fleshy walls of the temple actually shrieked and pulled away from the sheer output of energy.

The system chimes didn’t ring normally. They sounded like a fire alarm going off inside a tin can.

[Warden’s Halberd +31... +33... +35...]

The heavy red warning boxes completely flooded Declan’s vision. They stacked on top of each other and flashed frantically.

[CRITICAL ERROR!]

[Item density exceeding spatial limits!]

[Server physics engine unable to process object mass!]

[Immediate item shatter imminent! Severe neural corruption guaranteed!]

"Shut up," Declan growled.

He gritted his teeth against the massive splitting headache that slammed into his skull. The game was actively trying to stop him. It was trying to delete the weapon before it broke the sector.

His SSS Rank talent did not care what the system wanted.

[Talent: Boundless Enhancement overriding error.]

[Safety protocols bypassed. Cap removed.]

The red warning boxes shattered into thousands of tiny digital pieces, completely bulldozed by his unique cheat code.

[Warden’s Halberd +37... +39... +40.]

The bright white light shifted. It turned into a deep and consuming black void that was outlined in jagged red static. The physical shape of the halberd violently warped and twisted in Declan’s grip.

It didn’t look like a normal polearm anymore. The dark matter shaft lengthened, covered in glowing red runes that looked like bleeding error codes. The massive blunt axe head didn’t just get sharper. It flattened out, turning into a perfectly smooth and razor thin blade that looked like a slice of the night sky.

The tiny black hole that had been spinning in the center of the axe head expanded. It fused with the edge of the blade, wrapping the entire cutting surface in a localized singularity.

The air around the weapon didn’t just warp. It literally tore. Tiny black cracks appeared in the empty space around the blade, revealing the green binary code of the Grid’s background architecture.

[Item has reached +40.]

[Triggering Ultimate Conceptual Mutation...]

The system text in his vision glitched out. It didn’t appear in blue or gold. It appeared in pure and glaring white text surrounded by a black box. It looked like a developer’s backdoor prompt.

[Weapon Mutated: Eclipse Severance]

↳ Tier: Sovereign (Glitch Variant)

↳ Damage: N/A

↳ Trait 1: Weight of the Warden

↳ Trait 2: Event Horizon

↳ Trait 3: Gravitational Annihilation

↳ Trait 4 Unlocked: Spacetime Laceration

↳ Functionality: This weapon no longer calculates physical damage numbers. The edge of this blade ignores all physical, magical, and conceptual durability. It literally cuts the fabric of the server’s local space. Any target struck by the edge is forcibly severed from the game’s coordinate plane.

Declan stared at the text. He read the functionality trait twice. He let out a low and dark laugh that echoed across the bone platform.

It didn’t deal damage anymore. It didn’t need to bypass armor. It just cut the server space where the enemy happened to be standing. It was a literal delete button attached to a stick.

It was exactly what he needed.

The Abyssal Herald stopped floating forward. Its hundreds of red eyes locked onto the jagged blade in Declan’s hand. For the first time since it had stepped out of the portal, the Level 55 Entity looked confused.

"That item does not exist in the database," the Herald projected. Its telepathic voice suddenly sounded very loud and very defensive. "You cannot hold an object with a null damage value. The physics engine forbids it."

"I told you," Declan said casually.

He gripped the dark matter shaft of the Eclipse Severance with both hands. The blade hummed, leaving a trail of black static in the air as he moved it.

"I don’t play by the rules."

He stepped forward. His +10 Spiked Striders clicked against the bone floor. The headache was completely gone. His stamina bar was full. He had five Eclipse Charges fully stacked from standing in the dark shadows of the fleshy cavern.

He didn’t need the damage multipliers anymore, but he liked having them anyway.

The Herald didn’t wait. The massive sphere of dark matter in its six fingered hand pulsed violently.

"You will be purged," the Entity commanded.

Declan just smiled. He raised the +40 halberd high above his shoulder. The blade literally cut a small hole in the ceiling of the cavern just by existing.

"Let’s see how your conceptual armor handles this," Declan said.