Chapter 75: [75] : Absolute Devastation, The Level Cap

The dark purple clouds high above Sector 4 were violently ripped apart.

It did not happen slowly.

A massive and burning circle appeared in the atmosphere. It looked like a second sun had just ignited directly over the Ashen Bog, casting harsh and blinding shadows across the Iron Bastion.

The sheer heat radiating from the sky was so intense that the climate changed instantly.

The toxic mud outside the city walls boiled. The puddles of green acid instantly evaporated into dry and cracked clay.

The Dune Leviathan sensed the anomaly!

The massive and mountain-sized sandworm paused its descent. It was less than fifty feet away from crushing the red energy dome of the city.

But the sudden and overwhelming spike in atmospheric temperature made its survival instincts kick in. It twisted its giant armored body, trying to look up without any eyes.

It let out a confused and rumbling screech that vibrated the fillings in Declan’s teeth!

It was far too late.

The celestial debris broke through the cloud cover.

It was an actually massive chunk of a destroyed orbital space station. It was easily the size of a commercial football stadium, made of highly condensed titanium, steel beams, and solar panel arrays.

It even had the faded and scorched logo of Apex Paradigm painted on the side.

Declan’s spell had not just pulled it down from orbit. The mutated ’Meteoritic Pull’ had accelerated the massive object to terminal velocity, completely ignoring atmospheric drag.

He had turned a useless piece of corporate space junk into a literal kinetic warhead!

"Brace!" Declan yelled loudly.

His voice cut sharply through the blind panic of the courtyard. He did not run away.

He just crossed his arms over his chest and planted his +10 Spiked Striders firmly into the stone pavement. He let the Frictionless Movement trait anchor his boots perfectly to the ground.

The meteor hit the Leviathan.

There was no sound at first. The speed of the impact completely outpaced the server’s audio rendering engine. The visual happened a full second before the noise followed.

The white-hot and stadium-sized projectile slammed directly into the back of the giant worm.

The impenetrable dark brown armor of the Leviathan had completely ignored heavy artillery fire and magic earlier. But now, it behaved like wet tissue paper!

The massive space station punched straight through the center of the boss.

It did not just cut the monster. It essentially deleted the middle section of the worm’s body, splitting the massive creature perfectly in half before driving both halves straight into the dirt.

Then, the sound finally arrived.

BOOM!

It was an apocalyptic crack of thunder!

The noise physically pushed the air out of the courtyard. It was so incredibly loud it bypassed the eardrums and just shook the bones.

Players were thrown flat onto their backs. They grabbed their heads and screamed silently as their hearing was temporarily wiped out by the sheer decibel level.

The meteor drove the millions of tons of dead monster meat deep into the ground outside the city.

The resulting explosion was catastrophic.

A massive dome of pure fire, displaced dirt, and kinetic force expanded outward. It swallowed the entire horizon in a fraction of a millisecond.

The shockwave hit the red energy dome of the Iron Bastion right after.

The sub core barrier shrieked loudly. The red light flickered wildly, dropping to a dim and almost invisible hue. The metal walls groaned and bent slightly under the absurd pressure of the blast wave.

"Hold!" Bram roared from the forge.

The old Level 30 Artificer did not care about the noise at all. He slammed his obsidian metal hand onto the control console.

He grabbed a massive crate filled with hundreds of raw mana crystals and dumped every single one of them directly into the intake valve of the generator.

The machine screamed as it rapidly burned the raw currency to feed the shield.

The barrier held. Barely!

Outside the red dome, the world was completely erased.

The heat blast glassified the entire desert. The bubbling toxic mud, the dead trees, and the rocky ridges of the Ashen Bog were instantly superheated.

The terrain melted and fused together into a perfectly smooth and glowing sheet of orange glass that stretched for miles in every single direction.

The shockwave rattled the entire server. Every player in every sector felt the ground shake, from the snowy peaks of Sector 2 all the way to the deep oceans of Sector 9.

The Dune Leviathan did not even have time to let out a final death cry.

The kinetic impact and the sheer heat completely obliterated its physical model. The game engine did not leave a massive corpse behind for players to harvest.

Instead, chunks of cooked and house-sized worm meat rained down from the sky. They crashed heavily against the new glass desert, sizzling and dissolving into blue pixels.

Then, the fire faded and the dust settled.

Absolute and ringing silence fell over Sector 4.

Declan slowly lowered his arms and checked his clothes. His Coat was not even dusty.

He stood at the edge of the transparent shield and looked out at the total devastation he had just caused.

The mountain-sized boss was gone. The monster horde was gone. The toxic swamp was gone.

There was absolutely nothing left outside the city walls but a massive and glowing crater of orange glass and a few burning pieces of twisted corporate metal.

Declan smirked and cracked his neck, feeling a deep sense of satisfaction.

’Now that is an Area of Effect attack,’ Declan thought to himself. ’Fifteen Origin Points well spent.’

The system finally caught up with the math. The server could not handle rendering the exact damage numbers. The impact was too large, the mass too heavy, and the speed too fast.

It just skipped the combat logs entirely and went straight to the reward phase.

A deafening and triumphant chime rang out in Declan’s head. It was so loud it echoed in his physical brain back in the real world.

[World Boss Alert: The Abyssal Tide Zenith Defeated!]

[Experience Points Gained: 14,500,000]

Declan’s vision went completely white. The level up notifications did not just spam his interface. They exploded like a virus popping up on an old computer.

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

The chimes blurred into a single and continuous note of pure progression. The raw energy flooded his avatar. He felt his digital muscles tighten and condense.

His mana pool expanded massively, rushing through his veins like a river breaking a dam. The sheer power coursing through his system felt like holding a live power line with wet hands, but without the pain!

He could feel the synchronization rate pulling this new data right into his real body sitting in the dive pod.

The notifications finally stopped scrolling. The white light faded from his eyes.

[Biological State]

↳ Level : 60

[System Resources]

↳ Stat Points Available: 400

Declan blinked. He pulled up his player profile and just stared at the numbers.

Level 60! He had jumped about ten levels in a single kill!

He was a walking god in a server full of people who were still excited about finding a rusty iron sword that gave plus two damage.

Four hundred stat points! If he dumped those into Strength and Agility, his Abyssal Sovereign class multipliers would turn him into a human wrecking ball.

He would not even need the halberd anymore. He could probably just punch a mech to death!

Behind him, the players in the courtyard were slowly standing up.

They brushed the dirt off their clothes. They looked out through the red barrier at the glowing glass desert in absolute and stunned silence.

Nobody cheered. Nobody clapped. They were too terrified to even breathe properly.

They had just watched a guy look at a boss the size of a skyscraper, point a finger at the sky, and drop a space station on its head!

The jaws of everyone in the courtyard dropped as they stared at Declan as though he had run mad!

They realized that the Warlord leading them was not just a strong player with good gear. He was a walking natural disaster. He was a glitch that was actively breaking the universe to get his way.

Suddenly, the sky above them did not return to the dark and bruised purple of the Grid.

It flashed a brilliant and blinding gold.

A massive server-wide notification unrolled across the heavens. It was so large that it blocked out the clouds. It was visible to every single surviving player on Earth, both inside the game and out in the real world streets.

[Global Server Announcement!]

↳ Player V has reached the Mortal Cap.

↳ Mortal Limits Reached. Class: Eclipse Sovereign.

↳ Ascension Trial Unlocked.

Declan stared at the golden text floating in the sky. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets.

Ascension Trial. Thatcher, the blind NPC in the vault, had told him exactly about this. This was the key to taking his power to the absolute limit.

The Mortal Cap meant his body could not naturally hold any more data. To push past Level 60, he had to prove he was no longer human.

This was the path to surviving the Great Convergence fully. If he cleared the trial, his real world synchronization rate would hit the threshold he needed to completely ignore the megacorps and the Abyssal monsters forever.

Declan looked up at the digital sky. A dark and bloodthirsty smirk spread across his face. The reflection of the golden letters shone brightly in his pitch-black eyes.

He did not feel fear. He did not feel hesitation. He just felt hungry for more points.