GLOBAL AWAKENING: My 10,000x Exp Multiplier-Chapter 36: []The Hourglass Anomaly, Gathering the Vanguard
She wore a simple black turtleneck and tactical cargo pants, but strapped to her left arm was the massive, heat-radiating obsidian kite shield Vahn had forged for her. In her right hand, she held a gleaming short-sword. She was breathing heavily, a slight cut on her cheek, but her silver-grey eyes were locked in absolute, predatory focus.
"Target secured," Sia barked, stepping into the room and adopting a flawless defensive stance. Behind her, in the hallway, the pulverized remains of two Slag Hounds slowly dissolved into blue pixels. "Commander. Sovereign City is entirely overrun. The military police are routed. I tracked your neural coordinates through the guild registry before the servers collapsed."
"Efficient," Vahn noted, a faint smile touching his lips.
"Move!" a voice shrieked from the hallway. Aria pushed past Sia, her pink-gold hair an absolute mess. She was wearing civilian clothes, but the Crimson-Lotus Vestments flickered over her form like a digital ghost. She practically tackled Vahn, her hands instantly glowing with healing magic as she pressed them against his chest, checking the curse. "You’re burning up! The ambient mana in this world is too thin to support your baseline infrastructure!"
"I am functioning," Vahn assured her, gently wrapping his hand around her wrist to pull her back. "But we cannot stay here. Kora?"
"Ate them," a sassy, telepathic voice echoed in their minds.
A tiny, crimson-haired girl with jagged obsidian horns stepped over the threshold, wiping molten ash from her mouth. She looked completely out of place in the mundane apartment hallway, but the terrifying aura radiating from her made the air warp. She looked up at Vahn, her slit-pupils wide. "Tasted like burnt garbage. I want better snacks, Master."
"We will find a buffet shortly," Vahn promised, stepping past his team and into the ruined hallway.
The building was in chaos. Civilians were desperately trying to flee down the stairwells, only to be butchered by the low-level anomalies spawning in the shadows. To the elite guilds, these monsters were fodder. To standard humans, they were apex predators.
"Sia. Vanguard formation. Kora, clear the flanks. Aria, protect Hana," Vahn ordered, his tone shifting into the absolute authority of the Architect. "We are pushing out to the streets. I need to locate a specific temporal anomaly."
"What anomaly?" Sia asked, slamming her shield into a lunging Slag Hound and turning it to ash in a burst of kinetic redirection.
"The [Chronos Hourglass]," Vahn explained, following in her wake. He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t need to. He simply altered the localized gravity around any monster that slipped past Sia, crushing them flat against the concrete with a flick of his wrist. "It is a Mythic-tier environmental anchor. If I secure it, I can establish a permanent, localized safe zone where the system’s chaotic code cannot reach. It will act as our base of operations."
They hit the ground floor and spilled out into the pouring rain of the city streets. It was absolute pandemonium. Cars were flipped and burning. The sky above was a swirling vortex of abyssal energy.
A group of twenty terrified civilians, mixed with a few low-level players wielding rusty beginner swords, were backed against a shattered storefront, surrounded by a pack of Shadowstalkers.
"Help us!" one of the players screamed, swinging his weapon wildly at the smoke-like panthers.
Vahn didn’t break stride. "Kora. Eat."
The dragon-girl’s eyes gleamed. She unhinged her jaw, inhaling sharply. A violent localized vacuum formed, aggressively stripping the Shadowstalkers of their digital code and sucking them directly into her mouth. She burped softly, a puff of black smoke escaping her lips.
The civilians stared in absolute, paralyzing shock at the tiny girl and the man with glowing green eyes orchestrating the slaughter.
"You," Vahn pointed to the highest-level player in the group, his voice cutting through the rain. "Take these people. Head exactly three blocks east to the abandoned subway terminal. The environmental rendering is thickest there; the monsters cannot spawn underground yet. Wait for my signal."
The player just nodded numbly, too terrified to argue, and began herding the civilians away.
"Commander, I have a massive energy spike dead ahead," Sia warned, raising her shield against the blistering wind.
Vahn looked up. Two blocks away, hovering inside the shattered lobby of the Sovereign National Bank, was a glowing, golden artifact. It was a massive hourglass, its sand flowing upward, distorting the physical reality of the building around it.
"The Hourglass," Vahn murmured.
But as he took a step forward, the Calamity Curse violently rebelled. A sickening pulse of black magic tore through his chest. Vahn gasped, his legs buckling as he crashed heavily to the wet asphalt. The world spun, his fifty points of physical Agility suddenly feeling like dead weight.
"Vahn!" Aria screamed, dropping to her knees in the puddles beside him. She poured a blinding amount of pink-gold mana into his chest, her tears mixing with the rain. "The data drain is critical! Your base stats are hitting zero! You cannot fight whatever is guarding that artifact!"
Vahn coughed, tasting copper. He looked up at the bank. The air around the Hourglass was shimmering, revealing the twisted, corrupted architecture of a hidden realm overlapping with their reality.
"I don’t have to fight it," Vahn whispered, his voice incredibly strained, but his eyes burning with absolute, terrifying clarity. "The curse is a beacon. It’s pulling me to the source. The cure isn’t in this world, Aria. It’s in the ghost of this city."
He slowly pushed himself up, leaning heavily on the Priestess. He looked at the shimmering portal surrounding the Hourglass. The sandbox was gone. It was time to enter the Abyss.
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The shattered lobby of the Sovereign National Bank was a battleground of conflicting physics. The physical marble and steel of the real world were violently glitching, phasing in and out of existence to reveal a dark, ash-choked architecture beneath. At the center of this anomaly floated the [Chronos Hourglass], its golden sand flowing upward in defiance of gravity, stabilizing the tear between dimensions.
Vahn Ryker stood at the precipice of the shimmering, corrupted portal. He was breathing heavily, his right hand clutching his chest where the [Calamity Curse] pulsed with a sickly, necrotic rhythm. His base stats were plummeting dangerously close to absolute zero.
"Commander, tactical assessment dictates a full party breach," Sia Vance stated firmly. She stood directly in front of the portal, her massive obsidian shield radiating a protective, thermal heat against the chilling wind spilling from the void. "The threat level inside that anomaly is unquantifiable. You cannot enter alone in your current state."
"She’s right," Aria pleaded, stepping up to his side. The rain had soaked her civilian clothes, but her glowing [Crimson-Lotus Vestments] stubbornly projected over her, keeping her warm. She gripped her wooden staff so tightly her knuckles were white. "Vahn, let me come with you. My localized healing aura is the only thing keeping your mana pathways from completely unspooling."
Vahn looked at the two women, then at Hana, who was standing a few feet back, holding Kora’s hand to keep the feral dragon-girl from attempting to eat the portal. The older brother in him wanted to keep them close, to protect them. But the System Administrator knew the math.
"The Hourglass is an anchor, but it is fragile," Vahn said, his voice quiet but carrying an absolute, unyielding authority. "If the ambient monsters in this city destroy the artifact, the portal collapses, and the safe zone fails. I need a Vanguard to hold the physical perimeter. And I need a Healer to ensure the survivors we sent underground do not bleed out."
He reached out, his hand gently brushing Aria’s cheek, wiping away a mixture of rain and tears. He didn’t mask the action with clinical terminology. "I need you here, Aria. Keep my sister safe."
Aria’s breath caught, her emerald eyes wide. She leaned slightly into his touch, her heart hammering against her ribs. She couldn’t argue with that tone. "If you die in there," she whispered fiercely, "I will figure out how to resurrect you just so I can kill you myself."
"Statistically improbable," Vahn offered a faint, tired smile. "But noted."
He turned away, pulling his hand back, and stepped directly into the shimmering portal.
The transition was violent. It wasn’t a seamless glide through starlight. It felt like being dragged through shattered glass. When Vahn opened his eyes, the rain was gone. The noise of the dying city was silenced.
He stood in the "Ghost of Sovereign City"—a hidden, abyssal realm mirroring his own world. The skyscrapers here were constructed of jagged black iron and pulsing red veins of corrupted data. The sky was an endless, suffocating void. Ash drifted down like snow, settling on streets paved with crushed bone.
The Calamity Curse on his chest flared violently, acting as a twisted compass needle. It was pulling him forward, toward the center of the dark metropolis.
Vahn walked. He didn’t summon the [Soul-Bound Shadow Blade]. The ambient mana here was too thick, too hostile; drawing his weapon would drain his remaining latency in seconds. He relied purely on his heavily degraded Agility and the [Verdant Chronos-Sight] mapping the invisible environmental hazards.
He moved through the silent, dead city until he reached the central plaza. Where the Academy should have been, a massive, towering cathedral of dark data loomed. Its doors were already open.
Vahn stepped inside.
The interior was vast, illuminated by floating orbs of golden light. And standing at the far end of the cathedral, casually examining a holographic projection of Earth’s collapsing grid, was a man.
He was massive—nearly six foot six—possessing an over-the-top, comic-book muscular physique perfectly encased in blinding, flawless Platinum-Tier armor. His golden blonde hair was perfectly styled, and his sapphire blue eyes burned with cold, absolute arrogance.
Pierce Valerius. The Alpha.
"I wondered how long it would take the rats to find their way into the walls," Pierce’s voice boomed, echoing through the cathedral with an unnatural, forced resonance. He slowly turned around, his cape of woven starlight fluttering behind him. "But I didn’t expect a dying insect."
Vahn didn’t stop walking. He approached the center of the cathedral, his hands resting casually in his jacket pockets. He looked at Pierce, his [Chronos-Sight] instantly breaking down the man’s data.
Pierce wasn’t struggling with the Convergence. He was thriving in it. He radiated an oppressive, suffocating aura of pure, localized dominance that physically cracked the stone beneath his boots.
"You seem remarkably comfortable in a decaying server, Valerius," Vahn observed dryly, stopping ten meters away. "Did the Galactic Market offer you a corner office in exchange for selling out your own species?"
Pierce threw his head back and laughed, a dark, booming sound that lacked any genuine humor. "Sell them out? I am saving them! The Spire is a test, peasant. The Overlords demand a tribute of data to spare this world from total deletion. I am the Guardian. I alone possess the strength to gather the core and present it to the Vanguard."
