The first volley of attacks from the Exterminators didn't come in the form of fire or steel. It was a wave of Harmonic Dissonance. The golden cubes began to vibrate at a frequency that targeted the molecular bonds of everything in a five-mile radius. Below, in the streets of Jamsil, the asphalt began to turn into fine gray powder. The glass of the surrounding buildings didn't just shatter; it atomized.
[WARNING: MOLECULAR STABILITY AT 64%]
[THE ARCHITECT'S 'RESET' PROTOCOL IS ACTIVE]
[HOST IS BEING TARGETED BY: CONCEPTUAL DISMANTLING]
Si-woo felt his skin begin to flake away, turning into the same violet static that defined his eyes. It was a strange sensation—not exactly pain, but a terrifying lightness, as if the universe was forgetting he existed.
"So this is how you clean a planet," Si-woo whispered, his voice vibrating in sync with the destruction. "You don't fight the people. You just delete the laws of physics that allow them to hold together."
He looked down at his hands. His fingers were blurring, the edges of his physical form bleeding into the gray sky.
"Too bad for you," he growled, "I've always been good at being nothing."
Instead of fighting the vibration, Si-woo accelerated it. He leaned into the void. The Entropy Engine in his chest, usually a low hum, roared into a high-pitched scream that rivaled the Exterminators' frequency.
[SKILL ACTIVATED: 'NULL-POINT RESONANCE']
[COST: 1,200,000 MANA]
[EFFECT: MATCHING TARGET FREQUENCY... INVERSION INITIATED.]
Suddenly, the flaking of his skin stopped. The violet static didn't disappear; it solidified, turning into a set of jagged, obsidian-like plates that fused to his forearms. He wasn't being dismantled anymore. He was absorbing the dismantling.
Si-woo lunged.
He didn't fly; he simply wasn't "here" and then was "there." He appeared directly in front of the lead Exterminator—a massive, rotating dodecahedron that glowed with a blinding white light.
The machine tried to pivot, its geometric faces shifting to fire a beam of pure information. But Si-woo was faster. He didn't use his blade. He reached out and grabbed the edge of the machine with his bare hand.
"Subtraction," he said.
[DELETING: Y-AXIS]
The effect was instantaneous and horrifying to behold. The three-dimensional machine suddenly lost one of its dimensions. It didn't explode; it became a two-dimensional plane, a flat, flickering image of a machine that had no thickness. Without a third dimension to hold its internal mechanisms, the Exterminator's logic collapsed. It fluttered in the wind like a piece of paper before disintegrating into nothingness.
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
[MANA RECLAIMED: +8,000,000 UNITS]
The other five thousand pods in the sky stalled. Their central hive-mind was processing a variable it had never encountered in ten billion years of planetary harvesting: Dimension Stripping.
The View from the Ground: The First Disciple
While Si-woo turned the sky into a graveyard of geometry, a different kind of miracle was happening in the ruins of the Association Plaza.
Lee Jin-chul, a former C-Rank "Shield-User" who had lost his magic when the Clockwork Heart was consumed, was huddled under a piece of fallen debris. His "Pulse" was gone. He felt hollow, like a bell that had lost its clapper. He expected to die when the Exterminators began their molecular dismantling.
But as the violet wave of Si-woo's 'Redistribution' washed over the city, Jin-chul didn't turn to dust.
He felt a cold, sharp spark ignite in the center of his stomach. It wasn't the warm, sunny glow of the Architect's mana. It felt like a shard of ice, or a piece of the night sky, lodged in his soul.
He looked up and saw an Exterminator drone—a smaller, scout-class cube—descending toward a group of terrified civilians. The drone fired a golden laser.
Without thinking, Jin-chul jumped in the way. He didn't have a shield. He didn't have mana. He just had that cold spark.
"Get back!" he roared, throwing his hand up.
Instead of a golden shield, a wall of absolute blackness manifested in front of him. The golden laser didn't bounce off; it hit the black wall and was simply extinguished. It was as if the light had never existed.
Jin-chul stared at his hands. Small, violet embers were dancing between his fingers.
"I'm not... I'm not a Hunter anymore," he whispered.
Above him, the voice of the Sovereign echoed in his mind, and the minds of thousands of others who were feeling the same cold spark.
"The sun has set on the age of debt," Si-woo's voice resonated, cold and absolute. "You are no longer the livestock of the Designers. You are the shadows that will swallow them. Rise."
Across Seoul, the first "Void-Awakeners" began to stand. They weren't fighting with fire or light; they were fighting with the absence of it. The "Shadow Guild" was being born in the middle of an apocalypse.
The Star-Eater's Arrival
Back in the stratosphere, Si-woo was a whirlwind of deletion. He had already reduced three hundred Exterminator pods to two-dimensional scraps. But the Designers weren't done. They were efficient, and if a scalpel didn't work, they used a sledgehammer.
The sky, already gray, suddenly turned a deep, bruised crimson.
Si-woo stopped his assault and looked up. Far beyond the atmosphere, something was blocking out the moon. It was a creature that looked like a serpent made of nebulae, its body stretching for thousands of miles. Its "head" was a concentrated ball of gravity that sucked in the surrounding starlight.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL THREAT DETECTED]
[NAME: THE STAR-EATER (RANK-SSSSS)]
[TYPE: PLANETARY DISPOSAL UNIT]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 14 MINUTES]
The Star-Eater didn't care about Si-woo. It didn't care about the Exterminators. Its purpose was to swallow the sun of this system, plunging the Earth into a frozen death so the "crop" could be frozen and collected later.
"They're really going to burn the house down because I broke a window," Si-woo muttered, his white hair whipping violently as the atmospheric pressure began to drop.
Yoo Seol-ah appeared beside him, her feet barely touching the roof of the tower. Her silver hair was glowing with a faint blue light—the last of her "Chronos Protection."
"Si-woo, you can't fight that," she said, her voice filled with a rare note of panic. "That thing has consumed entire galaxies. Even in my 411 lives, I've never seen a Star-Eater arrive this early. You've pushed them too far."
"I haven't pushed them far enough," Si-woo replied. He turned to her, and for a second, a flicker of the old scavenger—the man who would do anything to save his sister—appeared in his eyes. "If I don't eat it, it eats us. It's a Zero-Sum game, Seol-ah. I thought you of all people would understand that."
"But your Level... you're only Level 78! You need at least Level 500 to even stand in the presence of a Star-Eater without your soul being crushed!"
Si-woo looked at the "Engine" notification in his peripheral vision.
[MANA RESERVES: 1,200,450,000]
[SATIETY: 98%]
[UNLOCKED FUNCTION: 'FORCED ARCHITECTURE']
"Levels are just numbers the Designers invented to keep us feeling small," Si-woo said. He stepped off the edge of the building, not falling, but ascending.
He didn't use a skill. He used a Command.
"System," he said, his voice dropping into a register that made the entire planet tremble. "Open the 'Abacus' menu."
[ABYSSAL ABACUS: INTERFACE OPENED]
In front of Si-woo, a giant, translucent grid appeared, stretching across the horizon. It looked like the skeletal structure of the world—the lines and dots that determined where gravity was strong, where light was bright, and where life was allowed to exist.
"Seol-ah," Si-woo called out as he began to move the "beads" on the cosmic abacus with his mind. "You said you've seen the world end 411 times. Tell me... in any of those lives, did you ever see someone re-write the sky?"
Before she could answer, Si-woo grabbed two of the golden lines of the world's lattice and snapped them together.
The Great Deletion
The Star-Eater, miles above the Earth, opened its maw to begin the Solar Collapse. A beam of gravitational fire, capable of melting the core of the moon, began to form in its throat.
But the beam never fired.
Instead, the space around the Star-Eater began to fold.
Si-woo wasn't attacking the monster. He was editing the coordinates of the space it occupied. On the Abacus, he was moving the beads from 'Existence' to 'Hypothetical.'
[SKILL: 'GEOMETRIC EXILE']
[COST: ALL REMAINING MANA]
[EFFECT: REMOVE TARGET FROM THE CURRENT VERSION OF REALITY]
"I'm not going to kill you," Si-woo whispered, sweat—violet and glowing—beading on his forehead. "I'm just going to put you in the 'Recycle Bin'."
With a violent, guttural roar, Si-woo shoved the beads on the grid to the far left.
The sky above Seoul didn't explode. It blinked.
One moment, the crimson serpent was there, its massive body casting a shadow over the continent. The next, there was a sound like a wet sponge being squeezed, and the Star-Eater was... gone. It hadn't died. It hadn't been teleported. It had simply been un-defined.
The stars returned. The crimson glow faded back into the dark blue of the night.
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
...
[LEVEL 150 REACHED]
[HIDDEN TITLE EARNED: 'THE ONE WHO REJECTS THE SCRIPT']
Si-woo plummeted.
He had used every ounce of energy in his body. His white hair turned back to a dull, ash-gray, and the runes on his skin flickered out. He fell through the clouds, the air whistling past his ears, his body feeling like lead.
He was falling toward the Han River, certain that the impact would finally be the end of his short, violent reign.
But he didn't hit the water.
A pair of hands caught him. He opened his eyes to see Yoo Seol-ah, her silver hair glowing, her rapier glowing with a soft, protective light as she hovered above the river.
"You're an idiot," she whispered, her eyes wet with tears. "You almost deleted yourself along with it."
Si-woo coughed, a small cloud of violet smoke escaping his lips. He looked up at the sky—the stars were still there. The Designers were silent. For now.
"Did... did I win?" he asked.
Seol-ah looked at the horizon, where the first "Void-Awakeners" were starting to clean up the ruins of the city, their black flames lighting up the dark.
"No," she said, a small, sad smile on her face. "You just started a war that can't be won. But for the first time in 412 lives... I'm not sure how it's going to end."