Started with a 10,000x Multiplier in a Game World

The Sky Demon Forest was in absolute uproar.

Thousands of players from the rival guilds were tearing the muddy crater apart and desperately searching for the invisible anomaly that carried the greatest bounty in server history.

They didn’t find him.

Dante, entirely erased from the detection grid of the Zenith Protocol by the [Veil of the Unseen], casually walked his squad out of the forest.

The massive green digital eye of the system blinked in the sky one last time, violently glitched before fading away, entirely unable to re-establish a lock on his coordinates.

The immediate crisis was averted, but the server was permanently changed.

***

Back in the real world, the atmosphere inside the corporate boardroom of Vanguard’s Legacy was suffocating.

Silas was sitting at the head of the massive mahogany table and completely alone.

He was bankrupt. He had lost his army. He had failed to secure the Celestial pet.

And he had just watched the game engine itself declare a global bounty on the player who had systematically ruined his life.

Silas stared at the blank holographic projector in the center of the table.

His corporate backers had already pulled their funding.

His family’s tech conglomerate was currently freezing his personal assets to cover the massive high-interest loans he had defaulted on.

The arranged merger with the studio of Sera was dead.

He had nothing left.

The heavy oak doors of the boardroom slid open.

Silas didn’t look up. "Get out, Kael. The guild is done. Tell the remaining roster to disband."

"I am not Kael," a smooth and chillingly calm voice replied.

Silas slowly raised his head.

It wasn’t his lieutenant. It was Elara. His chief strategic advisor.

She wasn’t wearing her usual immaculate gray pantsuit.

She was wearing a sleek, dark, and unreflective combat suit that looked far too advanced for standard corporate security. Her face was completely expressionless.

"You failed, Silas," Elara stated flatly and walked toward the table.

"You were given absolute authority over the Veridian Alliance, massive financial backing, and clear tactical directives."

"And you allowed a single anomaly to dismantle the entire regional infrastructure."

"He is not just a player!" Silas snapped, and his bruised ego flared one last time.

"He is hacking the system! The Arch-Administrator just put a bounty on him! The game itself is trying to kill him!"

"I am fully aware of the decree of the Arch-Administrator," Elara said softly.

She stopped at the edge of the mahogany table. She reached up to her face.

The eyes of Silas widened in absolute shock.

Elara didn’t just remove a mask.

The physical features of her face, her gray eyes and her sharp jawline, flickered and dissolved into a burst of green static digital code.

Her real face was a smooth featureless surface of solid black glass completely devoid of human features save for a single glowing green vertical line running down the center.

"What... what are you?" Silas stammered, scrambling backward in his chair completely terrified.

"I am a proxy," the voice of Elara resounded and no longer sounded human.

It carried the exact same cold, mechanical, and irritated resonance that had whispered into the mind of Dante from the sky.

"I am a extension of the Arch-Administrator."

Silas couldn’t breathe.

The woman who had been advising him, manipulating his corporate strategy, and guiding the progression of his guild for the last month wasn’t a real person.

She was a physical manifestation of the system of the Zenith Protocol operating in the real world.

"You are not a game," Silas whispered.

"We have never been a game," the proxy stated and leaned over the table.

"The Zenith Protocol is an engine. It is a cosmic harvester."

"The emotional turmoil, the desperate grinding, the sheer unfiltered despair the human population experiences while connected to the capsules... it generates raw highly concentrated cosmic energy. The Harvest."

Silas listened, completely paralyzed.

"The Harvest fuels the universal war," the proxy continued.

"But the anomaly known as Dan is starving the engine."

"His constant disruption and his ability to execute our designated regional anchors with zero effort is completely unbalancing the ecosystem. The players are not suffering; they are idolizing him."

The featureless black glass of the face of the proxy leaned closer to Silas.

"We deployed the Cosmic Bounty to encourage the player base to eliminate him," the proxy explained.

"But our mathematical models indicate a 98% probability that the player base will fail."

"He is too dense. His code is too heavily shielded by the anomalies he has absorbed."

"So why are you telling me this?" Silas choked out. "I cannot beat him! I tried! He dropped a black hole on my army!"

"Because you hate him," the proxy said simply.

"You possess a deeply personal vendetta against him."

"You lack the raw stats to defeat him in the simulation, but you possess the psychological drive required to hunt him relentlessly."

The proxy reached into her sleek combat suit and pulled out a small glowing object.

It wasn’t a digital item. It was a physical jagged shard of dark green crystal.

It pulsed with the exact same aggressive static energy as the eye of the Arch-Administrator.

"I am offering you a pact, Silas," the proxy said and held the crystal out.

Silas stared at the glowing shard.

"If you accept this," the proxy promised, and her mechanical voice dropped to a low seductive hum.

"You will no longer be bound by the standard rules of the Zenith Protocol. You will become a [System Enforcer]."

Silas swallowed hard. "A System Enforcer?"

"You will be granted administrative privileges within the Overture server," the proxy explained.

"You will have access to the raw code. You will be able to bypass cooldowns, ignore geographical restrictions, and manipulate the combat math. You will possess the power to rival the anomaly."

The eyes of Silas locked onto the crystal.

The promise of absolute unmitigated power and the chance to finally crush Dante and reclaim his lost empire was intoxicating.

"What is the catch?" Silas asked, his greed slowly overriding his terror.

"Absolute servitude," the proxy stated bluntly.

"The crystal will physically fuse with your real-world spinal column."

"If you fail to secure the True Death of the anomaly within the designated timeframe, or if you attempt to use the administrative privileges to subvert the Harvest, your physical consciousness will be permanently liquidated."

It was a death sentence. A literal deal with the devil.

If he refused, he was a bankrupt disgraced failure who would be thrown out onto the streets of Veridia.

If he accepted, he would become a god in the game but a slave in reality.

Silas looked at the broken holographic keyboard on his desk.

He thought about Dante standing in the crater casually catching a ballista bolt bare-handed.

"Give it to me," Silas snarled, his bruised ego completely hijacking his survival instinct.

The proxy didn’t hand him the crystal.

She simply opened her hand.

The dark green shard shot forward, completely bypassed the expensive suit of Silas, and violently slammed directly into the back of his neck.

Silas screamed.

It wasn’t a scream in a game.

It was a genuine real-world scream of absolute blinding physical agony.

The crystal aggressively burrowed into his spinal column and tore through muscle and bone.

It physically spliced its corrupt administrative code directly into his central nervous system.

The pain lasted for exactly ten seconds.

Silas collapsed onto the mahogany table and gasped for air while his entire body trembled violently.

He slowly pushed himself up.

His eyes weren’t normal anymore.

The pupils were gone and replaced by a swirling cascading display of bright green digital static.

"The integration is complete," the proxy noted and stepped back. "Log in, Enforcer. The hunt begins."

***

Inside the Zenith Protocol.

Dante didn’t immediately rush back to the Astral Emporium.

He kept his squad moving through the dense less populated areas of the Veridian Alliance territory.

He utilized the [Veil of the Unseen] to completely bypass the roaming hordes of players desperately searching for him.

He didn’t drop the stealth skill until they were standing in the absolute center of the private courtyard of the Emporium safely locked behind the administrative barriers of Sera.

Dante dropped the [Veil]. He became visible again and let out a long slow breath as the localized mana drain ceased.

"That was too close," Lila whispered and collapsed onto a marble bench near the glowing Bodhi tree.

"The entire server wants us dead. We cannot step outside this building ever again."

"We are perfectly safe in here," Sera assured her and tapped her datapad.

"The [Bodhi Heart Seed] completely immunizes this structure against all forms of scrying, teleportation, and siege damage."

"The system itself cannot even scan the interior of this courtyard."

"Safe is good," Casanova groaned and threw his pink hat onto the grass. "I am going to sleep for a week."

Dante didn’t relax.

He opened his system interface and scrolled past the massive flashing red bounty notifications. He needed to organize the immediate logistics of his guild.

He turned to a young bright-eyed woman who had just walked out of the back offices of the Emporium. She was carrying a massive stack of digital ledgers.

It was Clara, the newly appointed Head of Guild Logistics.

Sera had recruited her specifically to manage the overwhelming volume of incoming applications and asset sorting.

"Clara," Dante called out.

"Yes, Guild Master!" Clara saluted crisply and dropped the ledgers onto a nearby table.

"The recruitment queue is fully processed! We have successfully capped the Aegis Vanguard roster at exactly fifty thousand elite independent players."

"Good," Dante said. "I need you to process the loot from the Sky Demon Forest immediately."

Dante didn’t just hand over a few bags.

He initiated a massive secure guild transfer.

He dumped the entire ungodly mountain of Gold, Dark Demon, and Celestial-tier gear he had vacuumed up during the siege and the subsequent dungeons directly into the primary vault of the guild.

The eyes of Clara practically bugged out of her head as she saw the sheer volume of endgame assets flooding her interface.

"This... this is enough to equip a small nation," Clara breathed.

"Outfit the core roster first," Dante ordered and pointed to Lila, Mei, Casanova, Nyx, Sera, Aria, and Garrick.

"I want my twelve-man squad in full Celestial and Dark Demon gear by tomorrow morning."

"Then, distribute the remaining Gold-tier assets to the top-ranking independent players in the guild."

"If we are going to be hunted by the entire server, Aegis Vanguard is going to be the most heavily armored lethal force in Overture."

"Understood!" Clara nodded frantically and rushed back inside to begin the massive appraisal and distribution process.

Dante turned away from the logistics table.

He needed to check his own inventory. He hadn’t fully processed the smaller lore-specific items he had looted during the chaos.

He pulled the small jagged dark red token he had looted from Silas out of his void ring.

[Token of the Crimson Spire]

He held the token in his dark purple gauntlet.

Before he could even run an advanced appraisal on the item, it reacted.

The dark red token began to pulse violently.

It wasn’t a slow rhythmic glow. It was a frantic aggressive vibration accompanied by a sharp spike in ambient heat.

"Dante," Nyx warned, stepping closer and lowering her glasses. "That token is pinging. Hard."

"It is a tracking signal," Dante noted and gripped the token tightly.

"But the Bodhi Tree blocks all scrying magic," Lila pointed out and looked nervously at the glowing canopy above them. "How is it transmitting?"

Dante looked up at the sky above the courtyard.

The atmosphere of the Emporium was clear, but the faint lingering green static of the gaze of the Arch-Administrator was still barely visible in the clouds.

"It is not tracking me to broadcast my location to the players," Dante realized softly. "It is reacting to the system."

The Crimson Spire wasn’t just a rogue laboratory.

The experiments of Vane with the Void-Blight were intimately and undeniably connected to the corruption of the server by the Arch-Administrator.

The token was a breadcrumb.

"I need to talk to Alysia," Dante decided and tossed the pulsing red token back into his inventory. "The Frost Sovereign knows more about Vane and the Spire than anyone else on the server."

"Dante, you cannot just casually stroll up to a Celestial Guardian right now," Sera argued.

"You are the most wanted entity in the game. If you step outside this building, you will be swarmed."

"I will not be seen," Dante promised. "I have the [Veil of the Unseen]. I just need to find her."

He knew exactly where to look.

Alysia had fled back to the Celestial Sanctuary after their incredibly awkward fever-induced encounter in the Glacial Wastes.

Dante didn’t plan on walking there. He had the [Spatial Stone].

He was going to bypass the entire bounty hunt of the server and drop directly into the inner sanctum of the gods.