Chapter 291: The Red Door, The Keyboard of Genesis
Sebastian let out a long, ragged exhale. He pushed his hands against the dead entity’s chest, violently ripping himself off the rusted spikes.
"GAAAAAH! Fuck!" Sebastian roared, stumbling backward and falling onto his ass on the stone floor. He clutched his bleeding ribs, coughing up another splatter of blood.
He looked over at Valerie. She was leaning against the wall, clutching her bleeding shoulder, but she was alive. She forced a strained, exhausted smile.
"Four down," Valerie wheezed, dropping her bent iron pipe.
"Four down," Sebastian agreed, his chest heaving.
He slowly crawled back over to the dead Pillar of Death. He reached down and grabbed the hilt of the massive, rusted broadsword. He placed his heavy boot on the center of the blade and yanked upward with a brutal, sharp pull.
*CRACK!*
The massive sword shattered exactly in half.
Sebastian stood up, gripping the jagged, heavy hilt-and-half-blade in his bloody right hand. The weapon was ugly, unbalanced, and heavy as sin. But it was sharp, and it was solid iron.
He limped over to Valerie, offering his bloody, uninjured hand to pull her up.
She took it, wincing as she stood. She looked at the jagged sword in his hand, then looked at the massive, towering blood-red iron doors pulsing with white light at the end of the hall.
"You look like a horror movie villain right now," Valerie muttered, leaning heavily against his good side.
"Good," Sebastian growled, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the red doors. "Because management is about to have a really bad day."
***
The blood-red iron doors loomed at the absolute end of the corridor, towering thirty feet into the dark stone ceiling. They were completely unadorned, lacking any handles, keyholes, or decorative carvings. Pure, blistering white light bled fiercely through the microscopic seam between the two massive slabs of metal. It wasn’t the warm light of a sun. It was the clinical, sterile glare of an operating room.
Sebastian stood before the threshold.
He was a complete, horrifying mess. His black leather tactical coat was shredded into ribbons, soaked entirely in thick black motor oil and his own bright crimson blood. Deep, jagged puncture wounds from the Pillar of Death wept freely onto his ribs, staining his shirt. His left arm hung completely useless at his side, fractured and throbbing with a dull, sickening heat.
In his right hand, he tightly gripped the shattered, jagged remains of the rusted broadsword. The heavy iron hilt was slick with his own blood, slicing into his palms where the metal dug into his skin.
Valerie stood half a step behind him, clutching her bleeding shoulder. She looked incredibly fragile without her glowing blue Earth-mana, just a bruised, soot-stained woman in torn mechanic’s overalls. But her jaw was set in a line of absolute, unbreakable steel.
"Are you ready, Princess?" Sebastian asked, his voice a low, ragged scrape of metal and exhaustion.
"I’ve been ready to file my grievances for a year, Seattle," Valerie wheezed, offering a grim, blood-stained smile. "Open the damn door."
Sebastian didn’t knock. He didn’t search for a control panel.
He shifted his weight onto his good leg, lifted his heavy, steel-toed combat boot, and forcefully kicked the exact center of the seam with every ounce of kinetic density his body could muster.
*KRA-BANG!*
The impact sounded like a cannon shell detonating inside a bank vault. The heavy, blood-red iron doors didn’t just swing open; they violently buckled inward, the thick locking mechanisms snapping with a deafening screech. The massive slabs of metal slammed against the inner walls of the chamber, shaking the entire foundation of the mega-structure.
The blinding, sterile white light of the throne room flooded into the dark corridor.
Sebastian stepped through the threshold, dragging the jagged broadsword across the stone floor behind him.
*SCRAPE. SCRAPE.*
The room inside was impossible. It was an absolutely massive, perfectly circular chamber made entirely of flawless, glowing white marble and polished gold accents. There were no grinding gears here. There was no soot, no oil, and no dust. The air was chillingly crisp, smelling of absolute, artificial sterilization.
It was the literal antithesis of everything Sebastian had fought through to get here.
In the exact center of the room sat a massive, circular console forged from pure, glowing gold. It wasn’t a magical runic array or a glowing orb. It was a literal, colossal mechanical keyboard, measuring twenty feet across, covered in thousands of glowing, intricate keys.
And sitting at the console was the Prime Architect.
He wasn’t a towering, faceless pillar of white light like his avatars. He looked human. He was a flawless, flawlessly proportioned man completely clad in a seamless suit of brushed gold armor. He didn’t wear a helmet. His face was impossibly symmetrical, his eyes glowing with a terrifying, vacant white light.
"You are bleeding on my floor," the Prime Architect stated.
The voice didn’t echo. It was perfectly crisp, carrying the flat, arrogant tone of a CEO addressing a cockroach that had wandered into a board meeting.
"I’m going to bleed on your face in a minute," Sebastian growled, gripping the rusted broadsword tightly. "Turn off the Genesis Protocol. Cancel the format. Now."
The Prime Architect didn’t stand up. He didn’t summon a weapon. He looked at Sebastian, then looked at Valerie, his expression a mask of pure, unadulterated apathy.
"You have survived the outer layers of the Hardware Level by relying on the permanent, biological alterations of your synchronization," the Architect noted smoothly. His fingers hovered casually over the massive golden keyboard. "It is an impressive display of primitive, physical persistence. But you fail to understand your environment. You are in the core. I am the administrator of this physical reality. I do not fight with swords, Variant 001. I type."
The golden entity pressed a single, glowing key on the console.
*CLICK.*
The reaction was instantaneous.
Sebastian’s knees instantly buckled.
"GAAAAH!"
The gravity in the room didn’t just increase. The Prime Architect edited the localized gravitational coefficient to fifty times the normal atmospheric pressure—but he only applied it along the horizontal X-axis, pushing aggressively backward toward the doors.
It felt like getting hit by an invisible, solid wall of moving concrete.
Sebastian crashed hard onto his back, his heavy boots skidding across the polished white marble. He desperately drove the jagged edge of his shattered broadsword into the pristine floor just to anchor himself, the rusted iron screaming as it carved a deep trench into the marble.
*SCREEECH!*
Valerie was thrown completely backward, tumbling violently across the room until she slammed into the red iron doors with a sickening thud.
"Valerie!" Sebastian roared, struggling to lift his head against the crushing horizontal pressure.
*CLICK. CLACK.*
The Architect casually pressed two more keys.
Suddenly, the air in the room completely vanished.
There was no sound of wind. The oxygen in the massive, sterile chamber was simply deleted.
Sebastian gasped, his mouth opening wide, but his lungs met absolute vacuum. His eyes bulged, and a wave of pure, suffocating panic hit his system. His chest heaved frantically, his biological steel muscles straining against the impossible weight of the gravity, but he couldn’t breathe.
"You see, Anomaly," the Architect’s voice broadcasted directly into Sebastian’s mind, completely bypassing the need for an atmosphere to carry the sound waves. "You cannot punch a mathematical constant. You are organic matter. You require oxygen. You require balanced gravity. I simply remove your requirements, and you expire. It is clean. It is efficient."
Sebastian was choking. His vision was swimming with dark, fuzzy spots. He looked over at the door. Valerie was slumped against the iron, clutching her throat, her face turning a terrifying shade of blue. She was suffocating.
They had less than a minute before their brains suffered irreversible hypoxia.
"No," Sebastian thought, absolute, unyielding rage flooding his dying mind.
He didn’t try to stand up. The gravity was pushing him horizontally backward.
Sebastian dug the broken broadsword deeper into the floor. He gripped the hilt with his bloody right hand. He pulled.
His thirty-percent physical synchronization was pushed completely past its biological breaking point. The muscles in his right arm literally tore, snapping with tiny, agonizing pops as he forcefully dragged his hyper-dense body forward against the crushing, fifty-times gravity.
*SCREEEAAAK.*
The iron sword gouged a deep, ugly scar into the perfect white marble.
He pulled himself one foot forward.
The Prime Architect looked down from the console, a flicker of genuine, uncalculated surprise breaking his flawless expression. "This is mathematically impossible. Your biological framework should be pulverized under this kinetic load."
Sebastian didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He dragged the sword forward again, stabbing it into the marble.
*SCREEEAAAK.*
He pulled his body forward another two feet. Blood poured freely from his nose and mouth, hovering in the vacuum before being smeared across the pristine white floor. His left arm dragged uselessly behind him. His stitched right leg screamed in pure agony as the wound tore completely open again, leaving a thick, wide trail of dark crimson blood staining the flawless utopia of the throne room.