The mechanical hand descended like the wrath of a digital god, each finger crackling with administrative authority that could erase civilizations with a thought. Reality screamed as the appendage tore through dimensional barriers, its surface writhing with code that hurt to perceive directly.
Lucian stood in the smoking ruins of Sky Tower's penthouse, watching five hundred of the city's elite dissolve into pixels like sugar in acid rain. Their screams cut off mid-note as their bodies fragmented into digital snow, scattered by winds that tasted of ozone and deleted dreams.
"Magnificent, isn't it?" Sylvia's voice carried an almost sexual satisfaction as she watched the carnage unfold. Ice crystals bloomed around her feet in fractal patterns, her awakened power responding to the cosmic horror above. "The cleanup protocol in all its terrible glory."
**[ENTROPY LEVEL: 47%]**
**[CRITICAL WARNING: Reality Modification Overload Imminent]**
**[Cognitive Fragmentation Risk: 73%]**
**[Recommendation: IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF ALL ACTIVITIES]**
Blood streamed from Lucian's nose in a steady crimson river, his hands trembling from digital overexertion that felt like his brain was being slowly microwaved. But he couldn't look away from the beautiful destruction.
From the wreckage of marble and twisted steel, a golden figure emerged like a phoenix birthed from nuclear fire. Arthur Sky crawled out of the debris, his ten-thousand-dollar tuxedo shredded into expensive rags, his perfect hair matted with blood and concrete dust.
But his eyes... Christ, his eyes blazed with manic, religious triumph.
"YES!" Arthur threw his arms wide, laughing like a man who'd found God in the flames of hell. "I KNEW IT! The heavens themselves have descended to collect their chosen son!"
He staggered to his feet, pointing at the massive hand with the fervor of a prophet witnessing the apocalypse. "Do you see, you pathetic virus? Do you SEE what happens when mortals challenge the divine order? The gods have come to take me HOME!"
Lucian exchanged a glance with Sylvia, his grin sharp as a scalpel. "Should we tell him?"
"Let the golden boy figure it out himself," she purred, her smile promising winter and death. "The revelation will be... *educational*."
The mechanical hand paused in its systematic destruction, sensors the size of skyscrapers focusing on Arthur's flickering aura. For a heartbeat that lasted eternity, the air itself held its breath.
Then a crimson beam lanced down from the palm like the finger of an angry god, bathing Arthur in blood-red light that made his skin glow translucent.
**[SCANNING TARGET...]**
**[CLASSIFICATION: DEFECTIVE NARRATIVE CONTAINER]**
**[STATUS: CORRUPTED BEYOND SALVAGE PARAMETERS]**
**[CONTAMINATION LEVEL: CRITICAL]**
**[INITIATING GARBAGE COLLECTION PROTOCOL]**
Arthur's triumphant laughter died like a strangled bird. "What... what does that mean? I'm the protagonist! I'm the CHOSEN ONE!"
The red light intensified, and Arthur's body began to *peel*—not his skin, but something infinitely more fundamental. His flesh became translucent as glass, revealing a network of glowing code-veins beneath, pulsing with corrupted data streams that looked like digital cancer.
"No, no, NO!" Arthur clawed at his dissolving form as the truth hit him like a freight train made of pure horror. "This isn't ascension! This is—"
"Garbage disposal," Lucian finished, stepping out of the shadows with the casual confidence of a man who'd just figured out the universe's biggest joke. "You're not the chosen one, golden boy. You never were. You're just a broken USB drive that outlived its warranty."
Arthur's **[SSS Rank]** tag flickered violently, hairline cracks spreading across its surface like a mirror struck by lightning. The red beam began lifting him off the ground, his body stretching like digital taffy being pulled apart by invisible hands.
"HELP ME!" Arthur screamed, reaching desperately toward Lucian with fingers that were already half-transparent. "Please! I'll give you anything! EVERYTHING!"
*Now that's what I call a business opportunity.*
Lucian felt Sylvia's ice-cold warning hand on his arm, her grip tight enough to leave bruises. "Don't even think about it. The entropy cost will liquify your brain."
"Will it?" Lucian's eyes fixed on Arthur's dissolving form with the intensity of a predator spotting wounded prey. "Because that's not just a broken protagonist up there, Sylvia. That's a *portable narrative battery* with enough juice to power a small war."
**[ENTROPY LEVEL: 47% → 52%]**
**[CRITICAL WARNING: Approaching Cognitive Fragmentation Threshold]**
**[Estimated Time to Mental Collapse: 00:04:33]**
Lucian ignored the screaming alerts and dove into the code like a man diving into molten lava. Arthur's parameters floated before him in streams of corrupted light, half-dissolved but still tantalizingly accessible:
**[Physical_Density: 1.0_kg/m³]**
**[Mass_State: Standard_Human_Biology]**
**[Gravitational_Resistance: Minimal]**
**[Deletion_Progress: 67%]**
His fingers flew through the digital interface with desperate precision, rewriting the laws of physics themselves:
**[Physical_Density: ∞]**
**[Mass_State: Neutron_Star_Core_Equivalent]**
**[Gravitational_Resistance: NULL_VALUE]**
Arthur's ascending form suddenly *plummeted* like a golden meteor, his infinite density creating a localized gravity well that spider-webbed the penthouse floor with stress fractures. The red beam flickered and died, its grip shattered by impossible physics.
The mechanical hand *shuddered*, its quantum processors struggling to parse the paradox Lucian had just created.
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!" Arthur gasped from the crater he'd punched through three floors of reinforced concrete, his body flickering between flesh and raw code like a broken hologram.
Lucian walked to the edge of the crater, looking down at the broken golden boy with the satisfaction of a cat that had just caught the world's most expensive canary.
"I'm stealing you, you magnificent bastard."
He raised his middle finger toward the mechanical hand, his grin wide enough to split his face in half. "Hey, admin! FUCK your cleanup protocol!"
Then he dove back into Arthur's code, this time targeting something infinitely more fundamental—his very existence:
**[Species_Classification: Homo_Sapiens]** → **[DELETE]**
**[Entity_Type: Sentient_Being]** → **[Entity_Type: Portable_Equipment]**
**[Narrative_Role: Protagonist]** → **[Narrative_Role: Power_Source]**
**[Consciousness_Level: Sapient]** → **[Consciousness_Level: Device]**
Arthur's **[SSS Rank]** tag exploded into ten thousand golden fragments, the pieces swirling through the air before reforming into something that made Lucian's heart sing with dark joy:
**[ITEM: Portable Narrative Charger (Damaged)]**
**[Battery Level: 73% Remaining]**
**[Output: 50,000 Narrative Energy/Hour]**
**[Compatibility: Universal Systems]**
**[Warning: Extremely Volatile - Handle with Caution]**
Arthur's eyes went wide with existential horror as he felt his humanity drain away like water through a broken dam. "What... what am I? WHAT AM I?!"
"My new equipment," Lucian said, hoisting the now-unconscious Arthur over his shoulder like a sack of golden potatoes. "Congratulations, golden boy. You've been downgraded from protagonist to *luggage*."
The mechanical hand *convulsed*, its logic processors overloading from the classification paradox Lucian had created. How do you delete something that's no longer technically alive? How do you recycle garbage that's been reclassified as treasure?
**[ERROR: TARGET RECLASSIFICATION DETECTED]**
**[ERROR: DELETION PROTOCOL INVALID FOR NON-SENTIENT OBJECTS]**
**[ERROR: LOGIC LOOP DETECTED - INFINITE RECURSION]**
**[SYSTEM INSTABILITY RISING TO CRITICAL LEVELS]**
"Time to make our exit," Sylvia said urgently, ice forming beneath her feet as she surfed toward the emergency shaft. "The whole building's about to become a very expensive crater!"
Lucian followed, Arthur's limp form bouncing on his shoulder like the world's most valuable backpack. Behind them, the mechanical hand began to *glitch*, its movements becoming erratic as conflicting commands tore through its quantum architecture like digital cancer.
They dove into the maintenance shaft just as the hand's frustration reached critical mass. The entire Sky Tower folded in on itself like origami made of steel and broken dreams, collapsing into a singularity of twisted metal and shattered glass.
In the blessed darkness of the sewer tunnels, Lucian's phone erupted with alerts that painted his face in hellish red light:
**[CRITICAL ESCALATION DETECTED]**
**[THEFT OF HIGHER-DIMENSIONAL ASSETS CONFIRMED]**
**[THREAT CLASSIFICATION UPDATED: APOCALYPTIC]**
**[DEPLOYING EXTINCTION-CLASS CORRECTION PROTOCOLS]**
**[ESTIMATED ARRIVAL TIME: 00:17:42]**
"Well," Lucian panted, adjusting Arthur's dead weight on his shoulder. "That escalated quickly."
A sound like reality being torn in half echoed through the tunnels—the scream of dimensions being forcibly separated. A jagged rift split the tunnel wall like a wound in the world, revealing a hellscape of rust-red sand and broken machinery stretching to a blood-orange horizon where three suns burned like dying eyes.
**[DIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED]**
**[LOCATION: Wasteland Dungeon (Post-Apocalyptic Earth - 2077)]**
**[DIFFICULTY RATING: NIGHTMARE+++]**
**[RECOMMENDED PARTY SIZE: 50+ Level 80 Players]**
**[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.003%]**
Sylvia peered through the rift, her breath misting in air that suddenly tasted of radiation and despair. "A dungeon portal. They're trying to trap us in a death maze designed for endgame raids."
Lucian looked at the unconscious Arthur, then at the hellscape beyond the portal. His grin was sharp enough to cut through diamond and twice as dangerous.
"Perfect. I was wondering where I could field-test my new power bank." He hefted Arthur higher on his shoulder like a prized trophy. "Time to see how much juice this golden boy has left in his batteries."
**[ENTROPY LEVEL: 67%]**
**[NARRATIVE ENERGY: 2,847/10,000]**
**[PORTABLE CHARGER: Ready for Deployment]**
**[WARNING: Dungeon Entry Will Void All Warranties]**
As they stepped through the rift into the wasteland beyond, Lucian's laughter echoed across dimensions—the sound of a man who'd just stolen fire from the gods and was planning to use it to burn down heaven itself.
The hunt for the Old World Source Code was about to begin, and he had the perfect weapon to fuel his war against reality.