The Great Plains – The Tower of Agony
The laws of physics were not being broken; they were being rewritten by a toddler with a crayon.
The entity that had been a Skeleton Centurion was now a swirling vortex of raw geometry. Polygons lashed out like tentacles, stripping the texture off the air itself. Where they touched the ground, the grass didn't die—it reverted to gray, flat plains of unrendered data.
[Admin Command: > DELETE Object_Gravity]
Ainz felt his weight vanish.
One moment he was floating; the next, he was hurling toward the stratosphere, his own mass having no purchase on the world.
Cheat codes! They're using cheat codes!
"Cheap tricks!" Ainz roared externally, his voice amplified by mana. "Is this the dignity of the Administrators? Flailing about like amateurs?"
Internally: Ohgodohgod I'm going to space. Fly! Casting Fly doesn't work if gravity is zero! I need propulsion!
He twisted his body, aiming the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown behind him.
"[Maximize Magic: Explode Mine]!"
He detonated the spell against his own boots. The blast force—which still existed—rocketed him back toward the earth. He crashed into the corrupted soil, tumbling through the wireframe grass.
"Stubborn," the Administrator's voice echoed, sounding less like a woman now and more like grinding metal. "Why fight, Satoru? The corruption is spreading. If I don't excise you, the Sector crashes. Everyone dies. Nazarick dies."
"Don't you dare," Ainz hissed, pulling himself up. The green light of emotional suppression flickered, struggling to keep up with his rage. "Don't you dare speak their name. You abandoned this world! You abandoned us!"
The vortex loomed over him. A massive, pixelated hammer formed in the sky.
[Admin Command: > FORMAT Sector_7]
The sky turned red. A wall of erasing light began to descend.
Ainz looked at it. He couldn't stop a deletion command with fireball. He couldn't tank a server wipe with HP.
But Ainz Ooal Gown was a gamer. And gamers knew that every code had a latency period.
"You treat this world like data," Ainz said, spreading his arms. "But in this world, data has a name. It is called Mana."
He didn't cast a spell at the Admin. He cast it at the connection.
"[Triplet Maximize Magic: Astral Smite]!"
Three lances of blue-white energy erupted, but Ainz didn't aim them at the monster. He aimed them at the shimmering blue tear in reality hovering behind the monster—the connection point to the "Lifeboat."
"No!" The Admin screamed.
The spell struck the rift. The feedback loop was instantaneous.
If the Admin was using bandwidth to channel commands, Ainz just flooded the router with raw magical noise. The "Format" hammer shuddered, froze, and then shattered into a million harmless shards of light.
[Connection Unstable.]
[Packet Loss: 98%.]
The swirling vortex of polygons screamed. The Skeleton Centurion shape returned, collapsing onto its knees, smoke pouring from its joints.
"You... you brute," the voice crackled, fading. "You've locked... the partition... we can't..."
"Good," Ainz said. He walked forward, the Staff tapping against the ground. He loomed over the avatar of the creator. "This world is mine. If you want it back, you'll have to grind for it. Level 1. No cheats."
He raised his hand.
"[Grasp Heart]."
A spectral heart appeared in the Centurion's chest. Ainz crushed it.
There was no resistance check. With the connection unstable, the Admin was just a mob again. The Centurion crumbled to dust.
The blue interface window shattered. The silence of the plains returned.
Ainz stood alone in the crater. Black smoke rose from his shoulders—a visual glitch effect that wasn't fading. He looked at his hand. It was flickering slightly, his thumb phasing in and out of existence.
"I won," he whispered.
Then he checked his MP bar. nearly empty. And he still felt the nausea of the 'corruption.'
"Ainz-sama!"
A scream tore from the sky. A black comet crashed next to him.
Albedo rose from the impact crater, her face twisted in a rictus of horror and fury. Behind her, Shalltear and Cocytus landed, weapons drawn, ready to murder the gods themselves.
"Who did this?" Albedo screeched, looking at the glitching smoke rising from Ainz. "Who dared scar your supreme form?"
Ainz froze. Crap. I'm glitching. They'll think I'm broken. Weak.
"Albedo, stay back," Ainz ordered sharply.
She stopped, trembling. "My lord?"
"The enemy... used a forbidden art," Ainz improvised, turning his back to hide the flickering of his hands. "I have absorbed the toxicity of their attack to prevent it from spreading to the earth. This corruption... it is contained within me."
Shalltear gasped, covering her mouth. "You... you took the poison meant for the world? Into your own body?"
"Naturally," Ainz said, praying the glitch effect would stop soon. "If I had allowed it to touch the ground, Nazarick might have been compromised. I am simply... processing the data."
"Sasuga!" Cocytus bellows, slamming the butt of his halberd into the ground. "A. King. Who. Bleeds. For. His. People. Is. The. Truest. King."
"We are unworthy!" Albedo fell to her knees, sobbing. "We should have shielded you!"
"Rise," Ainz said wearily. He really just wanted to go to bed. "The immediate threat is neutralized. But the war has just begun."
He looked up at the sky, where the fake stars were slowly flickering back into position.
"They will return. And next time, they will bring patches."
Eryuentiu – The Floating Castle of the Eight Greed Kings
Miles above the surface, where the air was thin and cold, a dragon coiled around a massive sword.
Tsaindorcus Vaision, the Platinum Dragon Lord, did not sleep. He did not eat. For centuries, he had guarded the Guild Weapon of the Eight Greed Kings, ensuring the players who destroyed the world four hundred years ago never returned.
He had felt the disturbance.
It wasn't magic. Dragon Lords used Wild Magic, the power of the soul and the world itself. Tier Magic was a foreign corruption brought by Players.
But this... this was something else.
"The fabric tore," a voice creaked.
Tsaindorcus shifted his gaze to the old woman sitting on a bench nearby. Rigrit. The Necromancer. Former member of the Thirteen Heroes.
"You felt it too?" the dragon asked. His voice was telepathic, resonating directly in her mind.
"The whole world felt it, you old lizard," Rigrit chuckled, though her hand shook as she packed her pipe. "The mana screamed. Someone slammed the door on reality."
Tsaindorcus uncoiled, his platinum scales shifting with the sound of sliding coins. He controlled an armor suit remotely usually, but today, he moved his true body.
"The Sorcerer King," Tsaindorcus said. "His power is escalating. He fought something today. Something that made the world buckle."
"Or maybe he was fighting for the world?" Rigrit mused. "The feeling I got... it felt like an intrusion was stopped."
"Don't be naive. Players are cancer." Tsaindorcus's eyes narrowed. "They warp reality to fit their desires. If Ainz Ooal Gown is becoming strong enough to tear the sky, the balance is gone."
He looked at the Guild Weapon. The Staff of the Eight Greed Kings pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light.
It was synchronizing.
"The waves are bringing more," Tsaindorcus rumbled. "The barrier is failing. More Players will come. Or... the old ones are waking up."
"What will you do?"
Tsaindorcus looked out the archway, toward the distant south—toward the Slane Theocracy. He hated them. They were human supremacists who killed his kin. But they possessed a World Item.
"I cannot fight Ainz Ooal Gown alone," Tsaindorcus admitted, the words tasting like bile. "And I cannot trust the other Dragon Lords. Cure Elim is insane. The Deep Darkness Lord hides in his cave."
"You're going to the Theocracy," Rigrit realized, stopping her pipe. "Tsa, they'll kill you on sight."
"No. They are terrified. I can smell their fear from here."
The Platinum Dragon Lord spread his wings. The gust of wind knocked Rigrit's hat off.
"I make a promise to this world, Rigrit. Before the sun sets on this age, I will scour the Players from existence. Even if I have to ally with the murderers of my kin to do it."
"An alliance of desperate monsters," Rigrit murmured. "Sounds like a tragedy in the making."
"Better a tragedy than an empty page," Tsaindorcus replied.
With a thunderclap that shattered the sound barrier, the Platinum Dragon Lord took flight. He flew not as a guardian, but as an avenger.
The Dragon's Promise was made. War was coming to the absolute ruler of death.
Nazarick – 10th Floor – The Library
Ainz stood before a mirror in the library, away from the prying eyes of the NPCs.
The glitch effect had faded, mostly. Occasionally, a black pixel would float off his shoulder like dandruff, but he could hide it with a illusion spell.
He held the smartphone he had confiscated.
The "Admin" had called this world a lifeboat. A server backup for a destroyed Earth.
If that was true... then everyone in Nazarick—Albedo, Demiurge, Shalltear—was just code. Preserved data.
And he? Satoru Suzuki?
[User Status: Corrupted.]
He stared at his reflection. The red lights in his eye sockets stared back.
"If I am a file," Ainz whispered to the silent room, "then I decide how I am read."
The smartphone buzzed.
Ainz nearly dropped it. He fumbled with the sleek black device, his heart seizing. A signal? Had the admin reconnected?
No. It wasn't a call. It was a proximity alert from the Yggdrasil Connect app.
[Nearby Friend Detected.]
[ID: TouchMe]
[Distance: 400 Kilometers. Moving East.]
[Status: Hostile.]
Ainz stared at the word. Hostile.
Why was his best friend marked as hostile?
Ainz griped the phone until the screen cracked slightly.
"Demiurge!" Ainz's voice roared, abandoning the need for an intercom.
A moment later, a Shadow Demon materialized from the floor. "My Lord?"
"Assemble the Pleiades. Get me a location on the Re-Estize/Empire border." Ainz's panic was gone, replaced by a desperate, clawing need for answers. "There is a... a VIP moving East. A silver knight."
"Shall we kill him?"
"No," Ainz said, draping his cloak over his shoulder. "We are going to capture him. If he scratches a single one of my children... I will burn the Empire to verify it."
Ainz strode toward the door. The game was over. The reunion had begun.