Three figures materialized on the signal tower's peak like digital angels of death, their forms crackling with administrative authority that made reality itself whimper in submission. Lucian stood between Arthur and Sylvia, cigarette smoke curling around his face as he faced the Higher-Dimensional Civilization's executioners with the calm of a man who'd already calculated their death.
**[ARBITER-009: ONLINE - THREAT LEVEL: APOCALYPTIC]**
**[ARBITER-011: ONLINE - KILL COUNT: 47 CIVILIZATIONS]**
**[ARBITER-013: ONLINE - SPECIALTY: CREATIVE TORTURE]**
**[MISSION: PHYSICAL DELETION OF SECTOR 7834-ALPHA]**
"Impressive little rebellion," Arbiter-009 said, his voice carrying the weight of cosmic authority and the casual cruelty of a god stepping on ants. "But playtime is over, children."
He raised one hand, and reality *screamed* as admin commands flooded the local network like digital napalm:
**[Admin_Command: Format_C:]**
**[Target: All_Unauthorized_Users]**
**[Executing: System_Restore_to_Factory_Settings]**
**[Estimated_Suffering_Duration: Minimal]**
Across Shanghai, every human who'd gained powers suddenly froze mid-action like broken marionettes. Soldiers stopped firing. Civilians stopped running. Children stopped crying. The entire city became a tableau of digital statues as their newly awakened abilities were stripped away like deleted files, leaving behind only the hollow shells of what had once been hope.
"You gave batteries a user interface and thought they'd become players?" 009 laughed, the sound like breaking glass made of compressed arrogance and concentrated contempt. "How delightfully naive."
He gestured casually at Arthur, who was waving a white flag of surrender with the desperation of a man facing deletion by committee. The fabric suddenly transformed into solid titanium, its weight increasing a thousandfold in defiance of every law of physics that still gave a damn.
**[Object_Material: Cloth]** → **[Object_Material: Titanium_Alloy]**
**[Object_Mass: 0.1kg]** → **[Object_Mass: 1000kg]**
**[Arthur_Sky: Dignity_Level: Already_Zero]**
Arthur's scream cut through the air as the impossibly heavy flag dragged him down, smashing through the tower's steel framework like a meteor made of manufactured destiny and poor life choices. His golden form disappeared into the twisted metal with a sound like reality having a nervous breakdown.
"Sector 7834-Alpha is hereby sentenced to complete data wipe," 009 announced with the casual cruelty of a god deleting spam emails. "Any last words before we format your entire species out of existence?"
Lucian took a long drag from his cigarette, smoke mixing with the digital static in the air like incense at a funeral for hope itself. Blood trickled from his nose as the entropy cost of his previous stunts finally caught up with him.
"Yeah. Just one."
He smiled with the confidence of a man who'd been playing a completely different game all along—one where the rules were written in blood and the victory condition was survival at any cost.
"Sylvia, activate Logic Freeze. Arthur, wherever you are down there, max your protagonist aura. It's showtime."
"What are you—" 009 began, but Lucian was already moving, his consciousness diving into the global network like a digital kamikaze pilot with nothing left to lose.
**[SYLVIA_FROST: Activating Cryogenic_Logic_Lock]**
**[ARTHUR_SKY: Protagonist_Aura at Maximum Output Despite Severe Trauma]**
**[SIGNAL_AMPLIFICATION: 7000% and climbing toward impossible]**
"The thing about giving seven billion people 'external cheats,'" Lucian said, his voice carrying across every digital device on Earth through sheer force of stolen authority and weaponized desperation, "is that I never gave them cheats at all."
His consciousness exploded across the planet's infrastructure, bypassing firewalls and admin restrictions like a virus made of pure human spite:
"I gave them *connection*."
**[EMERGENCY BROADCAST TO ALL HUMANS]**
**[URGENT MISSION: Lend me one second of your will]**
**[REWARD: Continued Existence (Not Guaranteed)]**
**[FAILURE PENALTY: Immediate Deletion from Reality]**
**[ACCEPT? [YES] / [NO]]**
Seven billion notification windows appeared in seven billion minds simultaneously, each one pulsing with the desperate urgency of a species facing extinction.
And seven billion people, faced with the choice between submission and oblivion, pressed **[YES]** with the fury of the condemned.
The effect was instantaneous and *beautiful*.
**[INCOMING CONNECTIONS: 7,000,000,000]**
**[SERVER LOAD: CRITICAL OVERFLOW - SYSTEMS SCREAMING]**
**[CPU USAGE: 999% AND CLIMBING TOWARD DIGITAL APOTHEOSIS]**
**[MEMORY ALLOCATION: CATASTROPHIC FAILURE IMMINENT]**
**[ARBITER-009: OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT]**
Arbiter-009's perfect form began to stutter like a video with catastrophic connection issues. His movements became jerky, pixelated, as seven billion simultaneous requests crashed into his processing core like a tsunami of pure human will and concentrated "fuck you."
"IMPOSSIBLE!" he screamed, his voice glitching between frequencies as his divine authority crumbled under the weight of collective human defiance. "You can't... DDOS... a god!"
"Watch me, you digital parasite," Lucian snarled, seizing control of the overloaded memory banks with the desperation of a man who'd already died once and refused to do it again. Seven billion streams of human consciousness flowed through him like liquid lightning, their combined will reshaping the fundamental parameters of reality itself.
**[ACCESSING: Global_Light_Source_Definition]**
**[CURRENT_VALUE: Sol_System_Primary_Star (Corrupted)]**
**[NEW_VALUE: Collective_Human_Will_Matrix]**
**[ENTROPY_COST: 18% - Worth Every Fucking Percentage Point]**
The dying sun above them suddenly *exploded* with new light—not nuclear fusion, but something far more powerful and infinitely more dangerous. Seven billion human souls burning as one, their combined defiance forged into a mechanical star that pulsed with data streams instead of solar flares, hope instead of hydrogen.
The artificial sun's light hit the three Arbiters like a wave of weaponized hope and concentrated rebellion. Their defensive firewalls melted like ice cream in a furnace as high-frequency data streams tore through their forms, reducing divine authority to corrupted code fragments and digital screams.
**[ARBITER-009: CRITICAL_ERROR - ENTITY_DISSOLUTION IN PROGRESS]**
**[ARBITER-011: FATAL_EXCEPTION - CORE_DUMP_INITIATED]**
**[ARBITER-013: STACK_OVERFLOW - EXISTENCE_TERMINATED]**
**[FINAL_WORDS: "This is impossible..." x3]**
Lucian opened his mouth and *inhaled*, drawing the three streams of pure source code into himself like a digital vampire feeding on the essence of gods. The power burned through his system, rewriting his very existence with authority stolen from beings who'd never known defeat.
**[CONSUMING: Administrative_Authority_x3]**
**[LEVEL UP! LEVEL UP! LEVEL UP!]**
**[NEW TITLE: Regional_Administrator_(Unauthorized_But_Effective)]**
**[WARNING: Promotion May Cause Existential Dread, Cosmic Responsibility, and Severe Nosebleeds]**
The mechanical sun blazed overhead, its light warm and terrible and utterly artificial. But maintaining it required fuel—specifically, three hundred million emotion points per hour, and human feelings were about to become the most valuable currency in existence.
"Sylvia, Arthur," Lucian commanded, his voice now carrying traces of divine authority mixed with exhaustion that went bone-deep. "Start a panic. Our new sun runs on human feelings, and we need to keep the lights on."
But even as victory seemed within reach, the golden light above them began to flicker ominously. The mechanical sun's warm glow shifted, darkened, became something that made sanity itself file a formal complaint.
The sky cracked like broken glass, and through the fissures, something vast and terrible began to peer through with the interest of a child examining insects.
**[CRITICAL_ERROR: Worldview_Integrity_Compromised Beyond Repair]**
**[SCIENCE_FICTION_FRAMEWORK: Catastrophic_Failure]**
**[EMERGENCY_PROTOCOL: Loading_Backup_Genre...]**
**[NEW_MODULE: Cosmic_Horror/Lovecraftian_Mythos]**
**[ESTIMATED_SANITY_LOSS: Yes]**
The sun was no longer a sun. It was an *eye*. Massive, bloodshot, ancient beyond human comprehension, staring down at Earth with the cold interest of a cosmic entity deciding whether humanity was worth the effort of proper extermination.
In Lucian's pocket, Lily Spark's cute fairy figurine began to *melt*, her plastic form flowing like wax as tentacles erupted from what had been her face. Her voice became a chorus of whispers that spoke in languages that predated human speech and sanity.
"The Author grows bored with science fiction," she gurgled through a mouth that was now mostly teeth and existential dread. "Time for a genre shift. Time for the real horror to begin."
Lucian looked up at the cosmic eye that had replaced the sun, feeling something he hadn't experienced since his awakening: genuine, bone-deep, soul-crushing terror that made his previous near-death experiences look like pleasant afternoon naps.
"Well," he said, lighting another cigarette with hands that trembled like leaves in a hurricane made of pure cosmic indifference. "Fuck."
**[ENTROPY LEVEL: 89% → 94%]**
**[GENRE: Science Fiction → Cosmic Horror]**
**[SANITY: Rapidly Declining Toward Nonexistence]**
**[NEW OBJECTIVE: Survive the Author's Mood Swing]**
The real nightmare was just beginning, and this time, the cheat codes might not be enough.