Chapter 339: THe Server Deletion
Rubedo sat back on his throne and brushed a speck of dust from his lapel.
However, the very next second, the sky above the Seventeenth Continent fractured into a blinding dome of white static. The digital corruption slammed down over the coastal borders to seal the entire landmass inside an impenetrable sphere of dead pixels.
The crashing waves of the ocean ceased immediately. Millions of gallons of saltwater evaporated into a blank and colorless void.
Gorak stood on the eastern parapets of Bastion and watched the distant horizon simply vanish. He gripped his war-axe as the ground beneath the fortress trembled. The deletion wave marched inward to scrub the bedrock directly out of the game engine.
Rubedo gripped the obsidian armrests of his throne. His primary monitor flashed a continuous stream of fatal error prompts. The system abandoned targeted strikes to initiate a complete sector quarantine.
The server algorithm intended to wipe his entire empire from the directory. However, for some reason, the population wasn’t affected at all. It was only targeting the structures.
He dragged his hands across the terminal to activate his Modular Geography trait. Billions of Divine Points flooded into the interface.
Rubedo grabbed the dissolving continental crust on the digital grid and forcefully pulled the geometry outward. Fresh granite generated at the borders to replace the erased terrain.
The white static consumed the new rock immediately. Rubedo poured another fifty million points into the console to render a secondary layer of mountains along the coastline.
He fought the server deletion protocol by outbuilding the destruction. The financial cost drained his reserves rapidly while the apocalyptic dome constricted around Bastion.
Glitch bounded onto the control panel and hissed at the flashing monitors. It lashed its tail while staring at the collapsing digital borders. Glitch snapped its jaws at the screen, reacting to the visual feed of the corrupted code.
"Eat the wall," Rubedo ordered.
He opened a spatial rift directly over the shrinking coastline. Glitch dove through the portal and dropped onto the crumbling earth just yards away from the encroaching static. Glitch unhinged its jaw to impossible proportions. An anti-mana vacuum roared to life across the shoreline.
The white quarantine code spiraled into a violent funnel. Glitch swallowed the deleting fabric of reality. The geometric runes along its spine flared with brilliant emerald light during the digestion process. The collapsing dome shuddered under the localized extraction.
Rubedo dragged another massive mountain range into existence to shield the inner cities. His fingers blurred across the keys to micromanage the terrain rendering.
He rebuilt forests and rivers seconds before the static could touch his citizens. Down on the surface, Glitch tore massive holes in the quarantine barrier to feed on the root source of the deletion wave.
The system attempted to patch the breached code. Glitch swallowed the incoming updates whole and burped a cluster of dead pixels onto the dirt.
The combined assault of infinite architectural generation and biological code consumption forced the server to lag.
The blinding white dome flickered violently above the continent.
The deletion wave continued to crawl toward the inner city. The pristine cobblestone streets of Bastion buckled and shattered as the boundary between reality and nothingness dissolved. Rubedo watched the monitors.
The data loss rate climbed past sixty percent. He slammed his palms into the obsidian armrests and forced the Modular Geography interface to accept another massive injection of Divine Points.
Granite erupted from the ground to form a tiered wall. The white static slammed against the new fortification. Rubedo felt the feedback vibration hum through his own spine. He needed more. He needed to buy time for the city’s structural reinforcement to finish.
"Glitch."
The creature’s jaw opened wide to swallow the raw code. He shrieked a sound of ripping reality as it funneled the digital corruption into its digestive tract. The white static bent toward the creature’s mouth, turning into a spiral of dying light.
Rubedo watched the feed, and confirmed that the system deletion percentage stalled.
He pulled up the Ash-Forge Crucible schematics on the primary monitor.
"Divert the entire star-iron stockpile to the Bastion ramparts," Rubedo commanded, his voice booming through the internal communication network. "I want the wall plated in high-density metal before the next wave hits."
Below, the labor crews mobilized. Thousands of Ash-Kin dreadnoughts marched toward the outer perimeter. They carried massive sheets of tempered star-iron. The material hummed with the magical conductivity of the surrounding leylines. They welded the plates directly onto the stone fortification, sealing the granite behind a layer of impenetrable metallic armor.
The white static slammed into the new star-iron wall. Instead of consuming the rock, the corruption slowed as it attempted to process the enchanted alloy. The server engine stalled in a recursive loop while trying to resolve the interaction between the quarantine code and the star-iron material.
"It works," Rubedo whispered. He watched the progress bar for the quarantine retreat. The deletion wave wasn’t just stalling; it was reversing. The server update protocol struggled to calculate the cost of deleting the reinforced wall and opted to shift the quarantine border back toward the ocean.
"Push it," Rubedo ordered.
He activated the secondary cannons of the Bastion’s defensive grid. The massive pneumatic cannons fired bolts of condensed mana directly into the heart of the retreating static.
The projectiles detonated in a blinding spray of golden sparks, forcing the boundary back another five miles.
The white dome flickered as the static retreated past the continental shelf and out into the churning sea.
Rubedo slammed his fist against the console, triggering the final shutdown sequence for the defense grid. The quarantine sphere shattered like thin glass, leaving the continent completely intact.
The Bastion fell into a heavy, exhausted silence. The only remaining sounds were the grinding of cooling gears and the distant crash of returning ocean waves.
Rubedo remained on his throne. He felt the phantom vibration of the server crash lingering in his own nervous system.
"The wall is gone," Rubedo announced.
He looked at the map. The entire 17th Continent now showed green across every sector. His empire occupied every inch of the landmass.
"Start the reconstruction," Rubedo directed. "The war with the system ends here. The war for the rest of the server begins tomorrow."