Chapter 335: Seize and Desist
Rubedo tapped his fingers against the armrest while the digital monitors projected the walls of Bastion and the bristling artillery batteries lining the coast. He looked down at Valerius who was bound by the dark mana chains on the floor.
"It makes absolutely no difference how powerful a native god or their population claims to be. If your peers march onto the Seventeenth Continent, they will die. I control the geography and the industry to break them."
Valerius glanced at the tactical feeds illuminating the room and nodded once. He shifted his legs against the glowing restraints. "You have weaponized the bedrock itself. A conventional invasion would fail."
Rubedo leaned forward and rested his chin on his knuckles. "You knew about this artifact and the spatial rift. You kept quiet about the anomaly when I explicitly asked you for help regarding it."
"The event triggers every century." Valerius kept his gaze locked on the glowing projections. "The core acts as the catalyst to start the cycle. The manifestation changes every single time. A century ago, the land simply fractured, and this spatial tear is a completely new variable. My peers and I discussed the event recently. The timing is entirely wrong since the anomaly spawned five years ahead of the schedule."
Rubedo pulled up a blank diplomatic contract on his primary screen and sent the document toward Valerius with a flick of his wrist. "Tell your peers to refrain from doing anything stupid. We can negotiate a trade agreement and finalize a peaceful deal. I will give them access to the catalyst without a war. They can secure what they want without sacrificing their troops or themselves."
Valerius let out a long exhalation and slumped his shoulders. "They wait an entire century for this cycle, and the obsession clouds their logic. I will bring your terms to their council and attempt to explain the reality of your defenses."
Rubedo snapped his fingers to dissolve the dark mana chains into floating pixels. Valerius climbed to his feet and brushed the dust from his ivory garments before bowing his head slightly toward the throne.
"I apologize for breaching your sanctuary. I know you don’t like it, but it was urgent," Valerius faded into a swirl of golden light and vanished from the room.
SIGH!
Rubedo leaned on his throne and rubbed his face with his hands.
’Why am I getting so desperate for? Is it because now that I have gotten my revenge, I have nothing else to do? Or is it because I found out that there are actual players in the game who lives in the real world? Am I getting too hopeful to return to that world again?’
"No... why should I even be thinking about returning to earth? There is nothing for me... no one waiting for me. I am a god here. I can single handedly destroy continents if I want."
Rubedo accessed his rebate counter and saw the amount.
’Only with this, I can break through the 19th rank and reach 20th. Maybe this is the time for me to stop sand bagging and abuse the ’infinite divine points’ opportunity that’s been handed to me?’
Earlier, Rubedo avoided abusing it because he didn’t want to raise his rank. But now, he needed to be a high-ranking deity to avoid nuisance and other gods to bother him and challenge him foolishly.
"The only issue is that... this is a live service game. What if the developers catch up to this if I abuse the ’infinite divine points’ glitch?" Rubedo wondered. "In a way, I am just a code to them. What if they delete me or something? I need to make sure that doesn’t happen."
Seeing Rubedo stressing out, Glitch rubbed his face on Rubedo’s legs to get attention, and then jumped on his lap.
Rubedo smiled and petted him as he watched the live feed.
Soot coated the back of Marcus’s neck as he hoisted a crate of unrefined iron slag onto the moving rubber belt.
The mechanized conveyor groaned under the mass of materials pouring into the newly constructed Morval foundries. Sparks showered from the upper catwalks where the welding crews fused the structural steel of the industrial complex.
Elena collapsed onto her knees beside the track and dropped a pile of broken armor plates onto the grating.
Rubedo had deemed the Tarnstead dungeon a complete waste of potential labor. Iron-Scale had personally dragged the twenty-four surviving Earthlings from their pitch-black cells and shackled them directly to the automated processing lines.
The continuous cycle of hauling and sorting blistered their hands and broke their posture. Their clothing was now stained with black grease and ash.
A piercing blast from the factory horn signaled a brief rotation for the feeding crews. Ethan caught Marcus’s eye across the conveyor belt and nodded once.
Marcus shoved a rusted shield into the churning gears of the sorting track to jam the machinery. The resulting friction shower blinded the nearest sentries.
Ethan bolted toward the eastern loading bay doors. Marcus sprinted right behind his classmate and vaulted over a stack of concrete rebar. They reached the very edge of the sprawling foundry floor.
Krax stepped out from the shade of a towering silo to block the exit path completely.
"Oho! Going somewhere? You didn’t submit the leave report."
Krax held a newly forged rifled firearm carved from black star-iron. The weapon featured a spiraled barrel and an intricate loading mechanism extracted directly from the corporate memory wipe.
He racked the bolt back and chambered an explosive bio-gas munition.
Ethan scrambled backward and tripped over a stray piece of lumber. Marcus stopped in his tracks and raised his bare hands protectively.
Krax leveled the barrel of the rifle directly at Ethan’s chest and pulled the trigger.
"You are fired!"
The gunshot eclipsed the noise of the entire factory. The projectile tore through Ethan’s ribcage and blew a massive crater through his spine. Blood and pulverized bone plastered the concrete wall behind him.
Ethan hit the floor as a lifeless heap of ruined flesh.
Marcus stared at the gory remains of his classmate. The golden magic that once protected his friends from harm was completely gone. Krax lowered the smoking barrel and inspected the firing mechanism with a satisfied grin.
"The combustion is flawless." Krax kicked a spent brass casing across the floor tiles. "Load the carts and get back to work."