Chapter 18: The God-Slayer Protocol
The penthouse of the Spire was no longer a symbol of human achievement; it was a jagged tooth of glass and shattered tungsten biting into a sky that had gone fundamentally wrong. Below, the sprawling megalopolis of Aegis Prime was a mosaic of fire and chaos. The "First Breach" had left the atmosphere ionized, thick with the scent of burnt electricity and something ancient—the damp, heavy smell of wet earth from a grave that had been opened from the inside.
Kaelen Thorne leaned against a cracked marble pillar, his breath coming in ragged, shallow hitches. His left arm was a numb, dead weight at his side, the bones reduced to splinters by the Mirror-Blight's karmic recoil. He could feel the **Admin-Strike** code still humming in his veins—a cold, clinical power that didn't care about his agony, only about the efficiency of the next deletion.
**[Warning: Multiple High-Energy Signatures Detected.]**
**[Classification: Aegis 'God-Slayer' Division - Heavy Interceptors.]**
**[Protocol Status: ACTIVE. Rules of Engagement: Total Erasure.]**
**[Note: Collateral damage to Sector 1 has been pre-authorized by the Security Council.]**
From the lead black ship—a predatory vessel shaped like a jagged obsidian shard—a series of crimson beams erupted. They weren't aimed at the Unlabeled entities tearing through the docks. Instead, they focused on the Spire itself. They weren't destructive lasers; they were "Aether-Suppression Spikes." They slammed into the building's foundation with the force of falling stars, and Kaelen felt the mana in his own body jerk and pull, like a fish being hauled in on a barbed hook.
"They're not just shooting at me," Kaelen muttered, his vision swimming as he watched the red light bleed through the walls, turning the air itself into a thick, mana-conductive soup. "They're grounding the entire sector's Aether. They're turning the Spire into a giant lightning rod to fry the Glitch."
"Kaelen, you have to get out of there! NOW!" Elara's voice crackled through the comms-link, nearly buried under a mountain of static. "The God-Slayer ships aren't using standard mana-cannons. They're firing 'Null-Shells'. They use a synthetic, stabilized version of the Abyss to cancel out *everything*—monsters, hunters, and whatever the hell you've become! If one of those shells hits the Spire's structural core, the whole building won't just collapse; it'll be deleted from reality!"
"I'm a bit pinned down, Elara," Kaelen replied, his teeth gritted as he watched two figures drift down from the darkening sky, hovering just outside the shattered 100th-floor window.
They weren't wearing the polished white-and-gold of the Seraphim. These men were clad in obsidian-matte plating that seemed to absorb the light around them, making them look like holes in the air. Their visors were blank, glowing with a malevolent, artificial red light that pulsed in time with their heartbeats.
**[Identification: God-Slayer Units 01 & 02.]**
**[Rank: SYSTEM-EXEMPT (Classified).]**
**[Ability: 'Void-Cutter' – Monomolecular blades that ignore Mana-Shields and Physical Armor.]**
"The Glitch," the lead unit spoke, his voice a distorted, metallic growl filtered through a voice-box that stripped away all humanity. "You have been deemed a Tier-1 Existential Threat. Under the God-Slayer Protocol, your right to exist has been revoked by the Security Council. We are the correction."
"I revoked my own right to follow your rules a long time ago," Kaelen said, pushing himself off the pillar with a grunt of pain. He gripped *The King's Spite* with his one good hand. The violet runes on the lunar-etched blade began to flicker and dim as the suppression spikes outside drained the ambient mana from the room.
The first God-Slayer didn't move like a normal human. He didn't fly; he 'warped'—a short-range spatial jump that left a trail of red static and the smell of ozone. He appeared instantly behind Kaelen, his twin obsidian daggers humming with a high-frequency vibration that made Kaelen's very soul feel like it was being unraveled.
*SHINK.*
Kaelen barely twisted in time. The daggers sliced through his violet shoulder plating as if it were wet parchment, carving a line of fire across his back.
**[Vitality: 22/35.]**
**[Warning: Wounds inflicted by 'Void-Cutter' weapons are 'Static Wounds'. They cannot be healed by standard MP-Regen.]**
"Too slow," the Slayer whispered, his red visor inches from Kaelen's ear. "You're just a bug in a cage."
"System," Kaelen thought, his vision blurring as the blood loss started to hit. "Calculate the frequency of their warp. They aren't moving through the Void; they're using a mechanical anchor. I need a window."
**[Analyzing... God-Slayer warp relies on a 'Red-Aether' anchor point. Re-calculation delay: 1.4 seconds. Window opens in 3... 2... 1...]**
Kaelen didn't wait. He didn't use his blade. As the second God-Slayer warped in front of him to deliver a finishing blow, Kaelen lunged forward, leading with his shattered, limp left arm. The God-Slayer moved to impale him through the throat, but Kaelen's eyes flared with an incandescent, blinding gold.
"**Admin-Strike: Lock Anchor!**"
Kaelen's glowing left hand—the fingers broken but moving under the system's command—grabbed the Slayer's helmet. The white code of the Admin Access didn't just burn the soldier; it rewrote the coordinates of his internal warp-drive in real-time.
"W-What are you—? My HUD is crashing!" the soldier gasped, his armor sparking violently.
"You're going to the docks," Kaelen growled, his face inches from the red visor. "Tell the Unlabeled I said hello. And tell them you're a snack."
Kaelen triggered the soldier's own warp-drive, but instead of a ten-foot tactical jump, he overloaded the core with a massive burst of raw, unformatted Admin data. The God-Slayer vanished in a violent implosion of red and white light, his signature reappearing two miles away, right in the center of the largest Unlabeled cluster at the docks.
A massive explosion of shadow and red static lit up the horizon, followed by the sound of the Unlabeled feasting on a Diamond-level core.
**[Experience Gained: 15,000.]**
**[Level Up!]**
**[Level 24 Reached.]**
**[Stat Point Assigned: +5 Vitality.]**
The first God-Slayer froze, his blank visor scanning the empty space where his partner had been. "You... you can overwrite the Council's hardware? That's impossible. Our gear is hard-coded!"
"I don't control your gear," Kaelen said, his broken arm beginning to knit back together with a sickening series of loud pops and wet crunches as his increased Vitality forced a violent recovery. "I own the operating system. You're just a virus I'm finally getting around to deleting."
But the victory was a fleeting spark in the dark. The lead black ship, the *Aegis-Judgment*, had finished its primary charge. The massive railgun on its underbelly began to glow with a terrifying, light-devouring blackness that made the air around it warp and distort.
"Null-Shell away," a cold, feminine voice broadcasted across all emergency frequencies. "Goodbye, Sector 1."
Kaelen saw it—a sphere of pure, compressed nothingness launched from the ship. It moved slower than a standard missile, drifting with a lazy, inevitable grace, but it carried the gravitational weight of an entire world's end. It was headed straight for the Spire's mid-section.
"Elara! Lyra! If you can hear me, get the Slabs ready for a shockwave!" Kaelen yelled into the comms-link. "The sky isn't just falling—it's being erased!"
Kaelen didn't run for the stairs. He looked at the remaining God-Slayer in the room, who was trying to recalibrate his daggers. "You want to see a real God-Slayer? Watch this."
Kaelen didn't leap toward the ship. He stepped off the jagged ledge of the 100th floor, falling into the open air, straight down toward the incoming Null-Shell.
As he plummeted, the wind screaming past his ears and tearing at his scorched armor, he focused every ounce of his **Level 24** power into *The King's Spite*. He wasn't going to dodge the shell. He was going to use **Sovereign's Tithe** to do the impossible.
**[Warning: Absolute Mana-Saturation detected.]**
**[Current MP: 1,200/1,200 (Overcharging to 180%...)]**
**[Probability of Physical Vessel Survival: 1.4%.]**
"I've had worse odds in a level-one dungeon," Kaelen whispered, the golden light in his eyes turning into a blinding, miniature sun.
He met the Null-Shell at the 50th floor. He drove the tip of his lunar-glaive directly into the center of the black sphere.
The world went silent. No sound of impact, no roar of explosion—just a crushing pressure that felt like the entire ocean was pressing against his chest, trying to turn his bones into dust.
*CRACK.*
The Null-Shell didn't explode. It began to bleed violet-white light. Kaelen was acting as a living bridge, his body the conductor between the weapon's erasure-energy and the earth. His skin began to crack like parched earth, light leaking from his pores.
"SYSTEM!" Kaelen screamed, his voice vibrating through the entire building. "REDIRECT THE PAYLOAD! USE MY SOUL-CORE AS THE LENS! TARGET: THE AEGIS-JUDGMENT!"
**[Command Accepted. Redirecting Null-Energy... Calculating trajectory...]**
**[Warning: Soul-Core Integrity at 12%.]**
In a spectacular, reality-bending reversal of physics, the black sphere turned inside out, becoming a focused beam of pure, redirected erasure. The beam shot upward, bisecting the sky, and struck the *Aegis-Judgment* right in its primary Aether-Core.
The massive, thousand-ton ship didn't explode with fire. It simply *ceased to be*. One moment it was a titan of the sky; the next, there was a perfect, circular hole in the clouds where it used to be. No debris, no survivors. Just nothingness.
Kaelen continued to fall, his body smoking, his armor shattered into fragments. He hit the roof of a lower-tier apartment complex with a bone-shattering thud, rolling through a skylight and landing in the shadows of a deserted hallway.
**[Warning: System Critical.]**
**[Emergency Hibernation Mode: Initiating...]**
**[Estimated recovery time: Unknown.]**
As his vision faded to black, the last thing he saw was the remaining God-Slayer ships breaking formation and retreating in absolute terror. But through the deepening static of his mind, he heard a new voice—not Elara's, not Lyra's, and not the Architect's.
*"Well played, little glitch,"* the voice whispered, deep and ancient, coming from the shadows of the hallway itself. *"But the God-Slayers were just the appetizer to see if you were ripe. I am the Hunger that waits at the end of the long dark. And you... you have finally made yourself worth eating."*
Kaelen's eyes closed as a shadow taller than the Spire itself began to loom over the city, and the true Abyss began to wake.