**Chapter 81: Collateral Damage**
**Day 1,261.**
**Location: The Deep Void (Coordinates Unstable).**
**Current Status: Outscaling the Server.**
**Mood: Concerned.**
There is a specific feeling you get when you are playing a game on a computer that can't quite handle the graphics settings. The frame rate drops. The fans spin up until they sound like jet engines. The textures start to pop in and out, and the physics engine begins to make questionable decisions about gravity and collision.
The universe was lagging.
I threw a right hook.
It was a simple punch. Standard form, hip rotation, follow-through. But backed by the fresh 10% compound interest of Day 1,261, the kinetic energy transfer was roughly equivalent to flinging a neutron star at a windowpane.
The Void King caught it with a blade formed of solidified event horizons.
**CRACK.**
The sound wasn't auditory; it was structural.
A shockwave of gold and grey energy erupted from the point of impact. It rippled outward, tearing through the Deep Void. It didn't just push the dust away; it deleted the concept of "distance" for a split second.
We were thrown apart, skidding across the nothingness.
I dug my heels into the vacuum—imposing friction where none should exist—and came to a halt. Steam rose from my knuckles. The heat of my own exertion was enough to ignite a localized atmosphere if there had been one.
The Void King stabilized a thousand miles away. His form was tattered, the swirling vortex of his face spinning violently. He was regenerating, stitching his existence back together with threads of dark matter, but he was slower than me.
I was winning.
Mathematically, I was finally ahead of the curve. Day 1,260 had been a struggle. Day 1,261 was a dominance.
"Is that it?" I shouted, my voice carrying over the impossible distance. "I thought you were the End of All Things! You're hitting like a mid-tier raid boss!"
The Void King didn't answer immediately. He raised his hand. The darkness around him twisted, forming a spear the size of a continent.
*// ARROGANCE IS BLINDNESS. //*
He hurled the spear.
I didn't dodge. I wanted to test my new durability. I simply slapped the spear aside with the back of my hand.
The weapon shattered.
But as the shards of pure entropy flew past me, they didn't just vanish. They kept going.
I turned my head to watch them.
One shard, a jagged bolt of black lightning, flew deep into the background. It pierced the veil of the Void, punching through the barrier that separated this dimension from the "real" universe.
Through the tear, I saw a star system. It was a peaceful, spiraling cluster of yellow suns and green planets.
The shard hit the primary star.
It didn't explode. The star simply… winked out.
It was instantaneous. One moment, a life-giving sun. The next, a hole in the sky. The planets orbiting it were instantly cast into freezing darkness, their gravitational tethers severed, flinging them into the cold dark.
**[System Alert: Anomaly Detected.]**
**[Civilization Lost: The Veridian Republic.]**
**[Casualties: 14 Billion.]**
The notification floated in my vision, red and stark.
I froze.
My breath caught in my throat.
Fourteen billion lives. Gone. Because I slapped a spear away.
I looked back at the Void King.
He wasn't attacking. He was watching me. The vortex of his face seemed to slow, expanding as if he were smiling.
*// DO YOU SEE NOW? //*
His voice was inside my head, cold and heavy like a tombstone.
*// YOU CLAIM TO BE A BUILDER. AN ARCHITECT. BUT YOU ARE TOO BIG FOR THE ROOM, SHIGU. //*
He gestured around us.
*// EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE CRACKS THE WALLS. EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE SUCKS THE AIR FROM LESSER LUNGS. YOU FIGHT TO SAVE REALITY, BUT YOUR VERY EXISTENCE IS A THREAT TO IT. //*
"Shut up," I growled.
But my voice shook.
The universe was a fragile cage, and I was a growing giant trapped inside it. Every time I leveled up, the cage got smaller.
*// LET US CONTINUE, //* the Void King taunted. *// STRIKE ME. USE YOUR FULL POWER. LET US SEE HOW MANY GALAXIES BURN FROM THE SHOCKWAVE OF YOUR VICTORY. //*
He charged.
He wasn't trying to kill me anymore. He was trying to make me miss.
He teleported directly in front of me, unleashing a flurry of blows. I blocked them instinctively.
*Boom. Boom. Boom.*
Each impact sent ripples through the fabric of space-time.
**[Warning: Reality Integrity at 65%.]**
**[Warning: Dimensional Bleed Detected in Sector 7.]**
I saw cracks appearing in the air around us. Not metaphorical cracks—actual, jagged fissures where the rendering engine of the universe was failing. Through the cracks, I could see glimpses of other worlds. A water world boiling away. A city of glass shattering from a sonic boom that originated in another dimension.
I was killing them.
I was the hero of this story, and I was killing everyone just by being present.
"Stop!" I shouted, grabbing the Void King's wrist.
I pulled my punch. I held back. I tried to restrain the infinite energy compounding in my cells.
But holding back against the Void King was suicide.
He saw my hesitation. He exploited it.
His free hand drove into my stomach.
It wasn't a physical strike; it was a conceptual injection. He poured raw entropy into my gut.
I gasped, coughing up golden ichor. The pain was blinding. It felt like swallowing a black hole.
*// HESITATION IS DEATH. //*
He hammered me downward.
I crashed through the floor of the local spatial layer, tumbling into a lower strata of the Void. I managed to right myself, gasping for air, clutching my stomach. My regeneration kicked in, burning away the entropy, but it took a full second.
A second is a long time when you move at the speed of light.
The Void King was on me again.
He was forcing me to choose.
Die, and let him erase the universe.
Or fight back, and destroy the universe myself in the process.
It was the ultimate checkmate. The Troll Trolley Problem.
"Ren," I projected my thought-voice, reaching out across the dimensions to the City of the Unyielding.
The connection was full of static. The psychic link was fraying.
"Boss!" Ren's voice came through, panic-stricken. "Where are you? The readings are going haywire! The City… the walls are vibrating! We're taking structural damage just from the echoes of your fight!"
"How bad is it?"
"The shields are at 20%! And Shigu… the stars in the skybox… they're going out. Real stars. We're getting reports from the Galactic Council. Entire sectors are reporting gravitational anomalies. You're shaking the jar too hard!"
I closed my eyes for a microsecond.
I felt the power of Day 1,261 humming in my veins. It was desperate to be let out. It wanted to explode. It wanted to dominate.
But if I let it out here, there would be nothing left to rule.
"Ren," I said, my voice calm despite the chaos. "I need you to hold the fort."
"What? What are you doing?"
"I'm taking this outside."
"Outside? Outside of what?"
"Everything."
The Void King descended upon me, a comet of absolute negation. He was preparing a finishing blow—a sphere of concentrated silence that would erase me and the surrounding ten light-years.
I didn't block.
I opened my arms.
**[Skill Activation: Admin Privilege.]**
**[Sub-routine: Glitch.]**
I let him hit me.
The sphere of silence struck my chest. It tore through my flesh, burning my ribs, seeking my heart.
But I didn't push it away. I clamped my arms around him.
I hugged the nightmare.
The Void King froze. He hadn't expected an embrace.
*// WHAT IS THIS? //*
"You want to see what happens when I stop holding back?" I whispered into his ear (or the place where an ear would be if he wasn't a terrifying abstraction). "You want to see the End?"
I locked my grip. My fingers dug into his robes, sinking into the dark matter of his body.
I ignited my aura.
But I didn't direct it outward. I directed it *down*.
I wasn't trying to break him. I was trying to break the floor.
**[Passive: Mass Increase.]**
**[Current Mass: Infinite.]**
I became heavier than the universe. I became a singularity so dense that the laws of physics didn't just bend; they snapped.
The Void beneath us groaned.
The white static screamed.
*// RELEASE ME! //* The Void King realized what I was doing. He started to thrash. He unleashed torrents of energy, blasting chunks of flesh from my back.
I just healed through it. My health bar flickered wildly, up and down, a strobe light of mortality.
"No," I gritted out, blood pouring from my mouth. "We're going on a trip."
I stomped my foot.
**CRUNCH.**
It felt like breaking a spine.
The bottom of the Void dropped out.
We weren't falling into space. We weren't falling into a dimension. We were falling through the substrate of reality itself. We were punching a hole in the bottom of the bucket.
The colors vanished. The white mist was gone. The stars were gone.
There was only the rush of passing through the "Un-Space." The raw code. The backstage.
*// YOU FOOL! //* The Void King shrieked, his voice distorting as we left the boundaries of sound. *// THERE IS NOTHING BEYOND THE VOID! IT IS NON-EXISTENCE! WE WILL BE UNMADE! //*
"Speak for yourself!" I roared.
We plummeted.
The pressure was unimaginable. It wasn't atmospheric pressure; it was existential pressure. The universe was trying to keep us in, and we were tearing our way out.
It stripped away my shirt. It stripped away my skin. I was a skeleton of golden light holding onto a shadow of pure darkness, falling through a tunnel of impossible geometry.
And then… we popped through.
***
**Location: Unknown.**
**Current Status: Outside the Box.**
**Mood: Terrified.**
Silence.
Absolute, terrifying silence.
We stopped falling. There was no gravity here to pull us.
I let go of the Void King and kicked myself away. We floated apart in the new environment.
I looked around.
This wasn't the Void. The Void was white static, a place of potential and erasure.
This place was… Blank.
There was no color. Not black, not white. Just the absence of visual data. It was like staring at a monitor that had been turned off, but darker.
But then, I saw the shapes.
Floating in the distance were massive, translucent spheres. Bubbles.
I looked closer at the nearest bubble.
Inside it, I saw swirling galaxies. I saw a familiar nebula. I saw the Void I had just left, looking like a tiny, contained snow globe.
"We're outside," I breathed.
I was floating in the space *between* universes. The Multiversal foam.
The Void King righted himself. He looked at the bubbles. He looked at his own hands. He seemed smaller here. In the Void, he was the King. Here, he was just another speck of dust.
*// YOU… //*
His voice was thin. There was no medium for it to carry, so he projected it directly into my mind.
*// YOU DRAGGED US INTO THE HYPER-REAL. //*
"I couldn't fight you in the living room anymore," I said, my body knitting itself back together. The mana here was strange—thick, ancient, and hard to breathe—but my Day 1,261 physiology adapted instantly. I sucked in the raw power of the space-between-spaces. "Too much furniture to break."
I cracked my neck. The sound didn't echo. It just happened.
I pointed at the bubble we had just fallen out of.
"That," I said, pointing to the swirling universe inside the sphere. "That is my home. That is where my friends are. That is where I keep my stuff."
I turned back to the Void King.
My eyes began to glow. Not blue, not gold. They burned with a stark, blinding white light that matched the nothingness around us.
"And out here?" I smiled, and it was a smile of pure, unadulterated relief. "Out here, there is nothing to break."
I clenched my fists.
For the first time in three years, I didn't have to calculate the blast radius. I didn't have to worry about tectonic plates or atmospheric ignition. I didn't have to worry about killing billions by accident.
I could go 100%.
No.
I checked the internal clock.
**[Day 1,261: 12:00 PM]**
I could go 110%.
The Void King sensed the shift. He looked at the contained universe behind me, then back at me. He realized the tactical error he had made.
He had assumed my restraint was weakness. He hadn't realized it was the only thing keeping him alive.
*// THIS PLACE… //* The Void King summoned his blade again, but it flickered. The entropy he wielded was a force of the universe inside the bubble. Out here, his laws didn't apply as strongly. *// MY POWER IS DIMINISHED HERE. //*
"And mine isn't," I said softly. "My power comes from me. It comes from the clock."
I vanished.
I didn't use speed. I simply decided to be in front of him.
I punched him in the face.
**BOOM.**
The impact was glorious.
There was no shockwave to dissipate the energy. All of it—every single joule of force—went directly into his face.
The Void King flew backward, crashing into the "wall" of a distant universe-bubble. He bounced off the membrane of another reality, flaring with light.
He screamed.
It was a sound of genuine, confused agony.
I flew after him.
"Get up!" I yelled, laughter bubbling up in my chest. "We have the whole omniverse to play in! Don't you dare die on me yet!"
I grabbed him by the leg and swung him overhead. I slammed him down into the emptiness so hard that a new dimension briefly sparked into existence from the friction before collapsing.
He tried to fight back. He fired beams of erasure, he summoned claws of non-existence. But out here, I was the anchor. I was the most real thing in a sea of unreality.
I tanked a beam to the face. It burned, but it didn't delete.
"My turn," I said.
I pulled back my fist. I concentrated.
I accessed the deep reserves. The mana I hadn't touched since Day 1. The compound interest of a thousand days of restraint.
**[Active Skill: The Big Crunch.]**
I compressed the space between my fingers.
I hit him in the center of his chest.
The Void King folded.
He didn't just bend; he imploded. My fist drove through his chest, through his back, and out the other side.
He gasped, clutching my arm.
*// IMPOSSIBLE… //*
"Nothing is impossible," I said, looking him in the eyes. "It just takes enough time."
I ripped my hand free.
The Void King floated there, a hole in his chest. He looked at the wound. He looked at the bubble of our universe floating peacefully in the distance.
He looked at me.
The swirling vortex of his face slowed down. It stopped.
For a moment, I saw a face. Not a mirror. Not a monster. just a tired, old face. Ancient and gray.
*// THE SILENCE… //* he whispered. *// I JUST WANTED… THE SILENCE. //*
"I know," I said, my rage fading into a dull ache. "Noise is annoying. But the music is worth it."
I raised my hand for the final blow.
But before I could strike, something happened.
The "sky" of the Outside—the blank nothingness—ripped open.
It wasn't a tear like the one I made. It was a clean, precise incision. Like a scalpel cutting through skin.
A light poured through. It wasn't the light of a star. It was the light of a laboratory. Clinical. Cold. Artificial.
A voice spoke. It didn't speak in my mind. It spoke *over* the reality. It was a voice coming from a speaker system.
**"Test Subject 819 has breached Containment Layer 4."**
I froze. The Void King froze.
We both looked up at the slit in the sky.
**"Anomaly confirmed,"** the voice continued. It sounded bored. Human. **"Infinite scaling parameter has exceeded simulation boundaries. Initiating System Reset."**
My blood ran cold.
"Simulation?" I whispered.
**"Pause Simulation."**
The world stopped.
The Void King froze in mid-death throe. The bubbles of the universes stopped spinning. The mana in my veins turned to slush. I couldn't move. I couldn't blink.
I was a statue trapped in the space between worlds.
Through the slit in the sky, I saw something that terrified me more than the Void, more than the entropy, more than the death of stars.
I saw a giant eye.
Looking down through a lens.
**"Looks like the Shigu unit is bugged again,"** the voice said, echoing like thunder from the heavens. **"He broke the boss script and clipped out of bounds."**
**"Should we delete him?"** a second voice asked.
**"No. His data is valuable. Just patch him. Cap his growth and wipe his memory of the last twenty-four hours. Put him back in the City."**
**"Understood. Initiating Patch 6.0."**
A cursor—a massive, white arrow the size of a galaxy—descended from the slit.
It clicked on me.
**[System Override.]**
**[Memory Wipe Initiated.]**
**[Power Cap: Applied.]**
NO.
I screamed against the paralysis. My mind raced. They were the ones watching. The real heavy hitters. The "Devs."
They thought I was a bug. They thought they could just reset me.
But they forgot one thing.
I was on Day 1,261.
And my willpower had leveled up too.
"System!" I roared inside my own frozen mind. "Reject Update!"
**[Error: Admin Access Denied.]**
**[Forced Shutdown in 3... 2...]**
I looked at the cursor. I looked at the eye in the sky.
"You want to see a bug?" I thought, focusing every ounce of my infinite energy into a single, mental point. "I'll give you a crash."
I didn't try to move my body. I moved my *code*.
I pushed the 10% growth into the System itself. I flooded the interface with raw, unadulterated integer overflow.
**[1...]**
**[Error. Error. Variable 'Shigu Strength' exceeds memory allocation.]**
**[Critical Failure.]**
**[Blue Screen of Death.]**
The clinical white light fractured. The eye widened in shock.
The universe didn't reset. It shattered.
And as the darkness took me, as the simulation crashed around my ears, I grinned.
I wasn't a character anymore.
I was the virus.
**Chapter 81 Ends.**