Free Web NovelChapter 209: [213]: The Hunt Begins, Cosmic Compass
Chapter 212: The Remnant Warlords, Dying Suns
"My Lord Kaelen," the scout reported, his voice shaking slightly. "The telemetry from Sector Alpha is confirmed. The System Hub has been completely deleted. The Grand Archons are offline. Their digital signatures have been erased from the multiverse registry."
Kaelen didn’t flinch. His expression remained a mask of carved stone.
"And Grigori’s fleet?" Kaelen asked softly.
"Gone, sir," the scout swallowed hard. "The entire Vanguard armada was wiped out. The localized physics engine registered a catastrophic chronological decay event. They... they rusted to dust in a matter of seconds."
A murmur of absolute horror rippled through the dozens of elite officers standing behind Kaelen on the bridge. These were Warlords who had conquered worlds, men and women who had slaughtered millions in the name of the Void. But the idea of an entire armada being deleted by a single entity shook their fanaticism to its core.
"Silence," Kaelen commanded.
The single word instantly killed the murmuring. The bridge went dead silent, save for the low, agonizing hum of the dying sun chained to the back of their ship.
Kaelen turned around, his heavy diamond boots clanking against the floor. He looked at his officers. He didn’t see gods. He saw terrified soldiers who needed to be reminded of their purpose.
"Grigori was a fool," Kaelen stated flatly. "He was a politician playing dress-up. He flew ten thousand men into a confined sector and expected an Anomaly to surrender out of respect for his shiny armor. He relied on the Hub’s firewalls to protect him. He relied on the system’s rules."
Kaelen raised a heavy, armored hand, pointing a thick finger at the terrified crowd.
"The rules are gone!" Kaelen roared, his voice suddenly echoing with pure, militant fervor. "The Archons are dead! The Hub is broken! The game we have been playing for millennia has just been unplugged!"
He let the reality of his words sink in. He watched the fear in their eyes morph into desperate attention.
"But we are the Star-Killers," Kaelen continued, lowering his voice into a dangerous, lethal growl. "We do not rely on safe zones. We do not rely on invincible NPCs to fight our battles. We are the apex predators of the Juncture. We harvest planets. We chain stars to our ships!"
He turned back toward the viewport, staring out into the dark, swirling void.
"The Glitch thinks it has won," Kaelen sneered. "It thinks because it locked Earth away behind a firewall, it can just sit in the Juncture and act as the new administrator. It thinks it is untouchable."
Kaelen gripped the hilt of his broadsword, his knuckles popping beneath the diamond gauntlets.
"But I have read the localized telemetry," Kaelen said, a cruel, predatory smile finally cracking his stoic face. "The Anomaly used an ungodly amount of Error code to delete the Archons. It is unstable. It is not a god. It is a bleeding, fragmented piece of malware currently desperately trying to hold itself together."
He looked at the tactical map glowing on the central console. A single, bright blue beam of light was registered, punching through the dark void and connecting directly to the isolated coordinates of Server 894.
"It has a tether," Kaelen noted, his eyes narrowing. "A localized signal keeping it anchored to reality. It relies on that connection."
Kaelen pulled his broadsword from the deck and hoisted the massive weapon onto his shoulder.
"We are not going to arrest the Anomaly. We are not going to monologue. We are going to sever its tether, and we are going to harvest its core," Kaelen commanded, his voice ringing with absolute authority.
"Helm!" Kaelen barked. "Lock coordinates on the blue signal. Spin up the solar drives. Prepare for an immediate warp jump!"
"Yes, Lord Kaelen!" the navigation officer shouted, frantically typing at the console.
The massive dreadnought shuddered as the enslaved sun at its rear was forcefully drained of a massive surge of plasma. The space in front of the fleet began to violently warp and fold, a jagged, blood-red portal tearing open in the dark.
"All ships," Kaelen broadcasted to the entire fleet. "We are going hunting. The Glitch bleeds. And today, we collect the bounty."
The twenty colossal dreadnoughts surged forward, plunging into the red tear in reality, racing straight toward the Sovereign of Laws.
——
The Juncture was supposed to be empty. It was the digital graveyard of the Ethereal Plane, a dark, swirling abyss where deleted servers and broken source code went to rot in absolute silence.
But right now, it felt incredibly crowded.
Sebastian floated in the pitch-black nothingness. He wasn’t a man anymore. Not really. He was a compressed, terrifying humanoid silhouette made entirely of shifting black static and deep, bruised-purple error codes. Jagged, neon-green wireframes snapped in and out of existence around his limbs. Weeping red runes were carved deeply into his chest, constantly bleeding thick, oily digital ash into the vacuum.
He didn’t have a face beneath his cracked porcelain mask, just a swirling void of pure, unadulterated malware. He was the Sovereign of Laws. He was the Glitch. And he was currently very, very annoyed.
A low, sickening vibration began to ripple through the underlying fabric of the void. It wasn’t the mindless, clicking hunger of the Void Locusts he had just compressed into a bowling ball. This vibration was organized. It was mechanical. It was the heavy, rhythmic thrumming of massive anti-gravity engines tearing their way through the cosmic smog.
"They really just don’t know when to quit, do they?" Sebastian muttered.
His voice didn’t travel through the air, because there was no air. The sound simply bypassed physical reality, vibrating directly into the foundational code of the sector. It sounded like a mix of grinding metal, a skipping audio track, and pure television static.
He focused his [True Sight], the silver light of his empty eye sockets piercing through the dark purple clouds of the Juncture. Far off in the distance, millions of miles away, he saw it.
A massive, terrifying energy signature was carving a path straight toward his sector. It wasn’t a single ship. It was an armada. The tactical data flooded his glitched, green Administrator UI. Hundreds of colossal dreadnoughts. Tens of thousands of high-level entities.
The Star-Killers had arrived.
"Boss?" a heavily distorted voice crackled in his mind.
Sebastian tapped the side of his porcelain mask. The connection was shaky, fighting through layers of cosmic interference, but the warm, brilliant blue beam of astral light anchoring him to Earth held firm.
"I’m here, Valerie," Sebastian replied, consciously forcing the metallic distortion out of his voice so he sounded somewhat human. "How’s the weather back home?"
"Clear skies," Valerie’s voice came through. She sounded completely exhausted, her breathing ragged and heavy. The Astral Spire she was using to project her connection was literally tearing her physical body apart, but she refused to drop the line. "The barrier is holding. Sanctuary is secure. But Wraith is looking at the deep-space telemetry. He says you’ve got incoming. Massive incoming."
"Yeah, I see them," Sebastian sighed, crossing his arms. The digital static on his sleeves crackled. "Looks like the Vanguard’s backup team decided to show up. They call themselves the Star-Killers. Apparently, they missed the memo where I deleted their Grand Archons and turned their entire religion into a 404 error."
"Sebastian, you need to fall back," Valerie urged, a spike of genuine panic breaking through her corporate, CEO tone. "You just fought off a billion Void Locusts. You took a system wipe to the chest. Your base code has to be hanging by a thread. Get back to the barrier. We can hold them off from inside the dome."
"No," Sebastian said flatly.
"What do you mean, ’no’?!" Valerie yelled, coughing weakly into the comms. "It’s an entire armada!"
"And if I sit on the porch and let them shoot at the house, eventually they might chip the paint," Sebastian reasoned, his tone dropping into a cold, terrifying calm. "They think they are the apex predators of the Juncture. They think because I locked Earth away, I’m hiding. I’m not hiding, Princess. I just wanted to make sure my stuff was safe before I went out to play."
Sebastian rolled his shoulders. The heavy, biological steel density of his new avatar hummed with the ten million units of raw Source Code he had assimilated. He didn’t feel tired. He didn’t feel fear. The deletion of his pain receptors had left him with nothing but a cold, calculating desire to completely break the game.
"Keep the comms open," Sebastian ordered.
"Sebastian, if you go out there into the deep Juncture, you’ll lose your spatial orientation," Valerie warned. "There are no stars to guide you. There is no gravity to anchor you. You will just drift in the dark until your code unravels."
"That’s why I need you," Sebastian said softly. He looked back over his shoulder. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
Millions of miles behind him, Earth hovered like a beautiful, glowing golden marble. The blue beam of light connecting the planet to his chest was a lifeline
