Chapter 292: The Flaw in Perfection
He was drowning in gravity. He was suffocating in a vacuum. But he was moving.
CLICK. CLACK. CLICK.
The Architect began typing faster, his golden fingers flying across the keys. He increased the atmospheric pressure. He dropped the temperature to absolute zero. Frost instantly covered Sebastian’s torn leather coat, his sweat freezing to his face.
But Sebastian kept pulling.
*SCREEEAAAK.*
He closed the gap to ten feet. Then five feet.
He reached the base of the massive golden console.
Sebastian let go of the broadsword. He reached up with his bloody, trembling right hand and grabbed the edge of the golden keyboard.
The Architect stopped typing. The golden entity stood up, towering over the bleeding, suffocating human at his feet. The Architect looked disgusted, staring down at the thick smear of blood and grime ruining his perfect console.
"You are a filthy, persistent glitch," the Architect sneered.
The golden god didn’t type. He raised his foot and brought his flawless, golden boot down hard on Sebastian’s hand, aiming to crush his fingers against the keyboard.
Sebastian didn’t let go.
He looked up at the Architect, his silver-tinged eyes burning with a terrifying, absolute hatred through his freezing, blood-stained face.
Sebastian opened his mouth, desperately mouthing the words even though there was no air to carry the sound.
*You don’t know how to bleed.*
With a sudden, explosive burst of his remaining biological steel strength, Sebastian didn’t pull himself up. He violently yanked the edge of the golden keyboard, using his heavy, anchored body weight to flip the massive console completely over.
*KRA-CRASH!*
The massive golden keyboard shattered into a thousand useless pieces.
The moment the console broke, the physical edits to the room catastrophically failed.
The fifty-times horizontal gravity instantly vanished. The oxygen violently rushed back into the room with a deafening *WHOOOSH*.
Sebastian hit the floor, gasping desperately for air. He coughed, violently inhaling the cold, sterile oxygen, his lungs burning like fire. Across the room, he heard Valerie desperately coughing and sucking in deep, ragged breaths.
The Architect stumbled backward as his console exploded, staring at his empty hands in absolute shock. The god of the universe had just lost his keyboard.
Sebastian slowly pushed himself up to his knees, his right hand dripping with fresh blood. He looked up at the golden, flawless humanoid.
"My turn," Sebastian wheezed, baring his bloody teeth. He lunged forward, raising his pulverized right fist, fully prepared to gouge the arrogant god’s glowing white eyes straight out of his skull.
—
Sebastian didn’t leap with the frictionless grace of a digital god. He didn’t teleport. He threw himself forward like a desperate, exhausted bar brawler who had absolutely nothing left to lose.
He lunged at the Prime Architect.
The golden, flawless entity’s eyes widened in genuine, uncalculated shock. For millennia, the Architect had ruled the Ethereal Plane from the comfort of a glowing keyboard. He had typed entire civilizations into existence and pressed the backspace key on billions of lives. He had never actually been in a physical fight.
"System! Command line override! Delete! Delete!" the Architect shrieked, frantically waving his perfectly proportioned, golden hands in the air.
But there was no keyboard left to type on. The massive golden console was shattered into a thousand useless pieces across the pristine white marble.
Sebastian slammed into the Architect’s chest.
*CRASH!*
The impact was brutally physical. They both went flying backward, tangling together before hitting the polished floor hard. The sheer weight of Sebastian’s thirty-percent biological steel density cracked the flawless white marble beneath them.
"Guh!" the Architect gasped, his breath completely knocked out of his lungs.
Sebastian didn’t give him a single microsecond to recover. He scrambled on top of the golden god, pinning the entity’s chest beneath his knees. The pain in Sebastian’s fractured left arm was blinding, a sickening throb that made his vision swim with dark spots, but the sheer, unadulterated adrenaline of pure spite kept him moving.
He raised his pulverized, blood-soaked right fist.
"Error 404, asshole!" Sebastian roared. "Your face is not found!"
*SMASH!*
Sebastian drove his fist directly into the center of the Architect’s perfectly symmetrical, arrogant face.
The golden armor didn’t shatter instantly. It was forged from the base reality of the Core OS, incredibly dense and resilient. The impact sent a terrible, jarring shockwave up Sebastian’s arm, reopening the freshly healed cuts on his knuckles. Bright red human blood splattered across the pristine gold faceplate.
"Get off me, you filthy glitch!" the Architect screamed.
The god thrashed wildly, bucking his hips in a desperate attempt to throw Sebastian off. The Architect possessed an insane amount of base physical strength, but he had absolutely zero technique. He swung his arms in wide, clumsy, panicked arcs.
One of those flailing golden fists clipped the side of Sebastian’s ribs.
*CRACK!*
"FUCK!" Sebastian yelled, spitting a massive wad of blood directly onto the Architect’s chest.
The blow broke another rib, sending a searing spike of white-hot agony straight into his lungs. He swayed, almost falling over, but he aggressively bit his own lip to ground himself in the pain. He grabbed the Architect by the collar of his seamless golden armor and pulled him back down.
"You hit like a middle manager at a corporate retreat," Sebastian hissed, his breath hot and ragged.
Sebastian dropped his heavy fists. Punching the golden armor was just going to shatter his own hands. He needed to get creative. He needed to make it hurt.
He reached down, extending both of his thumbs.
The Architect’s eyes were glowing with that terrifying, vacant white light. They were the only part of his face not entirely covered by the thick golden plating.
"No! System! Purge him!" the Architect babbled, his voice pitching up into a high, terrified whine as he saw Sebastian’s thumbs coming down.
"The system is currently busy," Sebastian deadpanned.
He violently plunged both of his thumbs directly into the Architect’s glowing white eyes.
*SQUELCH!*
The sound was absolutely stomach-turning. It was the wet, popping noise of raw biology yielding to brute force. The blinding white light in the Architect’s eyes violently flickered and died.
"AAAAAAAGGGGHHH!"
The scream that ripped out of the creator of the universe was deafening. It wasn’t a synthesized, majestic hum. It was the horrific, throat-tearing shriek of a living creature experiencing absolute, unfiltered agony for the very first time in its existence.
Thick, glowing golden fluid erupted from the ruined eye sockets, mixing with the gray, sludgy gray matter of the Architect’s highly advanced brain. The liquid poured over Sebastian’s thumbs, scalding his gloves, but he didn’t pull away. He dug deeper, pressing his weight down to maximize the damage.
"You see that?!" Sebastian spat, his voice trembling with sheer, exhausted fury. He hovered his face mere inches from the screaming, blinded god. "You don’t know how to bleed! You built a universe based on pain, and you never even bothered to try a free sample!"
The Architect thrashed like a dying fish. In a surge of blind, panicked strength, the golden entity bucked its hips upward, finally managing to throw Sebastian off his chest.
Sebastian tumbled backward, sliding across the slick, blood-stained marble. He hit his bad shoulder and let out a sharp hiss, rolling onto his back. He lay there for a second, gasping desperately for air.
"Seattle! Get up!" Valerie screamed from the other side of the room. She was leaning heavily against the red iron doors, clutching her bleeding shoulder, her face pale with terror.
Sebastian rolled onto his stomach, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. He spit another mouthful of red blood onto the floor. "I’m up. I’m up. Just taking a breather."
Ten feet away, the Prime Architect was on his knees. The flawless, golden god looked like an absolute nightmare. His face was a ruined, sunken crater of leaking golden fluid and gray sludge. He clawed blindly at the air, his perfect posture completely shattered by the sheer, unadulterated reality of severe physical trauma.
"I will delete your world!" the Architect sobbed, swinging wildly at the empty air. "I will format your timeline! You are nothing but a virus!"
"You’re repeating yourself," Sebastian grunted, slowly forcing himself back to his feet.
His right thigh was screaming. His fractured left arm hung completely useless at his side. He was running on nothing but pure, concentrated spite. He limped forward, his heavy boots dragging slightly on the polished floor.
*DRAG. CLINK.*
The Architect heard the footsteps. The blinded god scrambled backward on his hands and knees, his golden armor scraping against the marble.
"Stay away from me!" the Architect shrieked, blindly waving his arms.
Sebastian didn’t say a word. He closed the gap. He didn’t bother using his fists this time. He raised his heavy, steel-toed combat boot and delivered a brutal, merciless kick directly to the side of the Architect’s golden ribs.
*CRUNCH!*
The heavy gold plating buckled inward. The Architect collapsed onto his side, violently coughing up a thick stream of glowing golden fluid.