The transit gate to Helheim didn't deposit Joseph into a majestic fantasy landscape. It dropped him directly into the mouth of a digital hellscape.
Helheim—one of the strict nine realms of YGGDRASIL—was a world defined by endless darkness, freezing temperatures, and a suffocating atmosphere. While much of the realm was a frozen wasteland of the dead, its deepest, unexplored trenches consisted of pitch-black, pressurized water and toxic, boiling thermal vents. For human or demi-human players, simply existing here required high-tier magical lungs, heavy pressure-resistant armor enchantments, and constant movement-buff spells just to counteract the simulated aquatic drag.
But for Joseph's optimized Heteromorphic layout, it was a frictionless playground.
Shiraori's massive, white spider abdomen was naturally buoyant in the toxic currents, and her six chitinous legs cleaved through the dark water with terrifying, biomechanical grace. Behind her, floating in a rigid, vertical stack like torpedoes in a submarine bay, came his eight macro-driven alt accounts.
Because Joseph had specifically chosen aquatic, undead, or non-living Heteromorphic races for his farming slaves, the environmental penalties of Helheim's abyss were completely nullified. The deep-sea Sahaugin tank webbed through the current with passive agility; the Golem and the Automaton rifleman, lacking lungs or flesh, sank like massive, iron anchors until their feet slammed into the volcanic silt of the ocean floor, completely unfazed by the crushing pressure.
Joseph opened his mini-map overlay. In the center of the deep sea trench, a massive, blinking purple icon pulsed with a terrifying aura.
[WORLD ENEMY: Hydra of the Vast Abyss — Level 100+]
In YGGDRASIL, a World Enemy wasn't just a raid boss; it was a localized cataclysm. They possessed millions of hit points, multiple independent AI brains, and absolute immunity to low- and mid-tier status effects. A standard top-tier guild would require an alliance of three full, thirty-man raiding parties—complete with dedicated tank rotations, specialized healers, and specific World Items to counter the boss's structural unique traits—just to stand a thirty percent chance of victory.
Joseph was a single corporate worker sitting on a throne of empty soup cans in a cramped apartment. But he wasn't fighting fair.
"Deploying perimeter macro grid," Joseph muttered, his fingers blurring across his real-world keyboard, executing a highly complex, synchronized script.
The eight alts instantly went to work, moving with the eerie, telepathic synchronization that had traumatized the [Trinity] guild.
The Golem and the Sahaugin tank marched straight toward the mouth of the boiling abyss, positioning themselves exactly forty meters apart—the precise threshold required to split a boss's initial aggro cone. The Automaton rifleman and the Gargoyle took up high-altitude sniper positions on the adjacent thermal spires, loading heavy, armor-piercing kinetic ammunition designed to shred oceanic scales.
Meanwhile, Joseph scuttled across the jagged basalt cliffs surrounding the Hydra's lair. Using his new Divine-Plus scythe, The Eraser of Worldly Flesh, he didn't just spin spider silk—he wove an entire industrial grid of hyper-compressed, darkness-infused [Cutting Thread] nets across the chasm.
He wasn't trying to catch the Hydra. He was building a localized cage. If the Hydra tried to thrash or retreat, its massive kinetic momentum would force it to slice its own limbs against his monomolecular wires.
ROOOOOOOAAAAR—!
The ocean floor buckled. The thermal vents erupted in a violent surge of blinding white steam and boiling sulfur as the trench opened wide.
From the dark, suffocating depths of the abyss, the Hydra emerged. It was a monstrous, colossal mountain of abyssal flesh, covered in jagged, iron-hard obsidian scales that absorbed the ambient light. Nine separate, serpentine heads snake-coiled into the water, each one easily the size of a standard guild ship, their jaws dripping with a green, highly concentrated acid that instantly began to corrode the structural durability of the surrounding rock faces.
A world-spanning system prompt flashed in a violent, bloody crimson across Joseph's vision:
[RAID EVENT: The Calamity of the Abyss has awakened. Prepare your souls.]
"Target locked," Joseph's voice dropped into a cold, rhythmic drone. "Execute script: God-Killer."
The battle initiated with zero human dialogue.
The Automaton alt fired first. Thoom-thoom-thoom! A continuous, frame-perfect stream of heavy, kinetic rail-slugs tore through the water, leaving trailing cavitation bubbles before slamming directly into the Hydra's central eyes.
The Hydra roared in algorithmic fury, its aggro meter instantly spiking to maximum. Three of its massive heads lunged forward, jaws open to swallow the tiny metal sniper whole.
But right before the teeth could close, the Golem alt executed a perfect, macro-timed [Shield Slam] onto the ocean floor, triggering a localized shockwave skill that forced the Hydra's heads to violently veer off course, dragging their teeth through the dirt. Simultaneously, the Sahaugin tank activated [Abyssal Taunt], locking the boss's directional AI loop onto their high-defense, potion-chugging bodies.
The coordination was flawless. Joseph was micromanaging nine separate coordinate planes down to the millisecond. If a human player delayed a button press by an eighth of a second, the Hydra's area-of-effect acid spew would wipe the entire squad. But lines of automated script don't experience input lag.
For forty-five minutes, the trench was a chaotic symphony of boiling steam, kinetic gunfire, and catastrophic thuds. The Hydra's massive health bar, which looked like a solid, endless mountain of red blocks, was slowly, systematically being chipped away by the relentless, mechanical optimization of the alts.
[Hydra HP: 42%]
[Hydra HP: 31%]
But a World Enemy wasn't a static target. The moment its health bar dipped below thirty percent, its hidden phase trigger activated.
The remaining six heads of the Hydra suddenly snapped backward, their obsidian scales flaring with a violent, purple magical light. The water around the trench began to spin, forming a massive, crushing underwater maelstrom that completely disrupted the pathfinding algorithms of Joseph's mining and defensive alts.
"Warning," Joseph's console beeped. "Unit Three (Golem) pathfinding corrupted by regional displacement. Unit Five (Automaton) stability at 12%."
The Hydra's central, dominant head opened its maw, gathering a massive, blinding sphere of abyssal energy—an ultimate, un-blockable World Enemy wipe skill: [Tears of the Dying Sea]. If that spell executed, the entire regional zone would be wiped clean, and Joseph's three weeks of preparation would vanish into the digital graveyard.
"I don't think so," Joseph whispered.
He didn't order his alts to run. He ordered them to do the exact opposite.
The four defensive alts—the Golem, the Sahaugin, the Gargoyle, and the Automaton—simultaneously threw themselves directly into the Hydra's jaws. They weren't trying to deal damage; they were using their physical asset hitboxes to manually block the Hydra's throat, forcing the boss's casting animation to glitch and stall for a brief, critical three-second window.
[Unit 1 Slain.]
[Unit 3 Slain.]
[Unit 5 Slain.]
As his hard-earned alts shattered into brilliant showers of useless data crystals, Joseph launched himself from the basalt ceiling.
He plummeted through the crushing, pressurized water like a white meteor, his eight compound eyes locked entirely on the base of the Hydra's massive, central neck. In his hands, The Eraser of Worldly Flesh gleamed with an ominous, absolute grey aura.
He landed directly on the World Enemy's crown.
The Hydra thrashed violently, its environmental AI trying desperately to shake the spider off, but Joseph's [Wall Crawling] passive was completely locked into the boss's obsidian scales.
"You are just a very large collection of data," Joseph said, his voice a chilling, feminine hiss that cut straight through the roaring maelstrom. "And I am the system deletion."
He raised the Divine-Plus scythe high above his head, channeling every single point of his remaining Mana Pool, his Agility, and his specific class levels into a single, absolute execution.
[Rot Attack — World Decay]
He drove the crescent blade deep into the Hydra's central skull.
The impact didn't trigger a standard explosion of fire or lightning. Instead, an eerie, absolute silence fell over the entire trench.
From the point of the blade, a wave of pale, monochromatic grey decay erupted outward. It didn't care about the Hydra's millions of hit points. It didn't care about its World Enemy status immunities. The Divine-Plus material granted by the Caloric Stone perfectly absorbed the catastrophic, lethal feedback that would have instantly vaporized Joseph's avatar, channeling the absolute erasure entirely into the target.
The Hydra's massive, mountain-sized body instantly froze.
The obsidian scales began to turn to brittle ash. The flesh rotted away into nothingness, collapsing into a fine, grey sediment that floated listlessly in the water. The decay didn't stop at the boss; it rippled outward in a perfect, fifty-meter radius circle, instantly disintegrating the basalt cliffs, the white-hot thermal vents, and the dropped data crystals of his dead alts into absolute, un-renderable static voids.
The system struggled to process the sheer volume of data being deleted simultaneously. Joseph's screen glitched, flashing green and gold as the entire server node violently lagged.
Then, the final calculation cleared.
[World Enemy 'Hydra of the Vast Abyss' has been completely erased.]
[EXP Gained: Overflowing...]
[System Notice: Due to the properties of 'The Eraser of Worldly Flesh', zero loot or materials have been dropped by the target.]
Joseph stood alone in a massive, fifty-meter wide, perfectly spherical void of empty digital space. His health bar was completely full. His mana was empty. But his level counter was ticking upward at an astronomical speed.
[Level Up: 85]
[Level Up: 89]
[Level Up: 94]
[Level Up: 98]
[Level Up: 100]
A brilliant, blinding pillar of golden light engulfed Shiraori as she hit the absolute level cap of YGGDRASIL.
Joseph sat back in his real-world corporate chair, his hands finally dropping from the keyboard. The soup cans beneath him rattled slightly as he took a deep, shaky breath of the stale, air-conditioned room.
He had done it. He was a max-level player, possessing a weapon that could erase the very geometry of the game, supported by an entire automated shadow network of alts.
But as he stared at his pristine, level 100 character sheet, a new, golden notification icon flashed at the bottom of his holographic terminal. It wasn't a standard regional notice. It was a server-wide system broadcast affecting the entirety of the World Tree.
[WORLD SERVER BROADCAST: The Tournament for the Title of 'World Champion' has officially been announced by DMMO-RPG Administration. Registration is now open across the 9 Realms.]
Joseph's crimson eyes narrowed, a slow, terrifying smile returning to his face.
In YGGDRASIL, there were exactly nine World Champion titles—one corresponding to each of the nine realms. It was the ultimate mark of individual combat prestige.
"World Champion?" Joseph whispered into the dark, empty apartment. "How inefficient. Why settle for one realm, when I have eight other accounts?"