SSS-Tier Extraction: From Outcast to Overgod!-Chapter 80: The Phage Deeps

Stepping through the portal was like diving headfirst into a painting that was still wet and being actively smeared by a giant, angry toddler. The world on the other side didn’t make sense.

One moment, Ryan’s foot landed on what looked like solid, grey rock. The next moment, the rock dissolved into a swarm of purple butterflies that fluttered away and then turned back into rock a hundred feet in the air before crashing down.

The sky above them was a swirling mess of colors, shifting from a fiery orange to a deep, sickly green and back again. There was no sun, just a chaotic, pulsing light that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The air itself felt thick and buzzed against their skin like a thousand tiny insects.

"Okay," Hale, the Crimson Banner medic, said, his voice impressively calm as he looked at a nearby mountain that was currently upside down. "This is... unusual."

Griz, the giant Iron Wolf, just grunted and tightened his grip on his shield. "Doesn’t matter what it looks like," he rumbled. "If it bleeds, we can kill it."

"That’s the problem, Griz," Scarlett said, her eyes wide as she scanned the shifting landscape. "I don’t think anything here bleeds."

She was right. The first "creature" they encountered wasn’t really a creature at all. It was a shifting, glitching mass of black and red pixels that floated towards them, looking like a piece of a corrupted video file.

It had no face, no mouth, no limbs. It was just a shape of pure wrongness.

This was a Reality Phage.

Ryan’s "Lore Scanner" went haywire trying to analyze it. The information flickered and changed every second.

[Anomaly Detected: Reality Phage (Level 9)]

[Threat: Unstable... Deconstructive... ERROR... Cannot compute stable data.]

The Phage drifted closer, and a strange feeling washed over them. It felt like they were being forgotten. Ryan felt the memory of that morning start to fade. Hale couldn’t quite remember what his favorite color was. It was a terrifying, disorienting attack on their very minds, on their existence.

Then, the Phage "attacked." It didn’t fire a laser or swing a claw. It just... looked at a large boulder near Hale. The boulder shimmered for a second, then simply vanished.

It didn’t explode. It didn’t crumble. It was just gone. One moment it was there, the next it wasn’t. It had been "unmade."

"Nope!" Ryan said, his mind snapping back into focus. "We are not letting that happen to us."

He knew conventional weapons wouldn’t work. How do you shoot something that can just decide your bullet doesn’t exist anymore? He had to fight this thing on its own terms. He had to fight reality with reality.

He focused his mind, drawing on his new "god Architect" powers. He pointed his hand at the glitching Phage. "Haste!" he commanded, using his Chrono-Manipulation. The Phage, which had been drifting slowly, suddenly zipped forward at incredible speed.

"Ryan, what are you doing?" Scarlett yelled in alarm.

"Fighting fire with fire!" he shouted back. He then pointed at a patch of empty space right in front of the speeding Phage and used his "Temporal Field Generation" skill. He created a small bubble where time was slowed down to a crawl.

The fast-moving Phage slammed into the slow-motion bubble. The result was bizarre. It was like watching a car crash in super slow motion. The Phage’s glitching form smeared and stretched as it entered the field, its chaotic energy fighting against the ordered time bubble. It let out a silent, screeching wail of pure static.

"Now!" Ryan roared.

This was a new kind of enemy, and it called for a new kind of teamwork. Hale threw a special Precursor grenade that didn’t explode with fire, but with a wave of pure, stabilizing energy. The wave hit the struggling Phage, and its form flickered, becoming slightly more solid for a split second.

In that second, Griz charged. He didn’t aim for the Phage itself. He aimed for the ground underneath it, smashing his giant energy hammer into the strange, shifting rock. The impact sent a shockwave of ordered, physical force up into the chaotic creature.

The Phage convulsed violently. The combination of being sped up, slowed down, stabilized, and then physically shaken was too much for its unstable existence. It flickered wildly, like a dying television screen, and then with a final pop of static, it dissolved into nothing.

The team stood there, breathing heavily. They had won, but they hadn’t even thrown a real punch.

"I think I need to lie down for a minute," Hale said, rubbing his temples.

"No time," Scarlett said, pointing. "Look."

More Phages were starting to form in the distance, drawn by the disturbance. They had to keep moving.

Their journey to the Sunken Foundry was a nightmare trek through a land of insanity. They learned to fight the Phages, their teamwork becoming a strange, beautiful dance of reality-bending powers.

Ryan would use his time skills to trap a Phage. Hale would use his stabilizing grenades to make it solid. Griz would hit it with pure, physical force. And Scarlett, with her incredible speed and aim, would pick off the smaller, faster ones before they could get close.

They finally reached the coordinates the Weaver had given them. The Sunken Foundry was even worse than they had imagined. It was a colossal Precursor factory, but it looked like it had been half-melted.

Towers drooped at impossible angles, and walls flowed like slow-moving waterfalls of metal. The entire structure was half-sunk into a shimmering lake that wasn’t made of water, but of pure, swirling spatial energy.

As they approached the main entrance, new enemies rose up to meet them. These were not Phages. They were Golems, but they were horribly wrong. They were the Foundry’s original security force, but they had been twisted and corrupted by the Reality Schism.

These were the Schism Golems.

One Golem’s arm would flicker in and out of existence. Another’s legs were walking a full second behind the rest of its body. A third seemed to be made of solid shadow one moment and blinding light the next.

Their attacks were just as unpredictable. A laser blast might turn into a shower of angry bees halfway to its target. A swinging fist might suddenly gain ten times its mass and hit with the force of a meteor.

The fight to get inside the Foundry was a brutal, chaotic slog.

"System Override!" Ryan shouted, pointing his gauntlet at a Golem whose head was currently on backwards. He tried to seize control of it, but it was like trying to grab smoke.

The Golem’s programming was so corrupted that there was nothing to hold onto. The override failed, and the Golem fired a missile that turned into a bouquet of flowers before harmlessly bouncing off Griz’s shield.

"Well, that was pretty," Griz grunted, before smashing the Golem with his hammer.

They fought their way through the twisted, shifting hallways of the Foundry, deeper and deeper into the heart of the madness. Ryan used his "Ultimate Infinite Extraction System" on the wreckage of every Schism Golem they destroyed.

He wasn’t getting normal materials like metal plates or power cores. He was getting something new.

[Extraction Complete: You have gained ’Unstable Reality Code’ (x5)]

This new "material" was dangerous. Just holding it in his system’s inventory made his vision flicker. But as he gathered more of it, he felt a strange change.

His mind was starting to adapt. He was beginning to see the patterns in the chaos, the method in the madness. His body was building a resistance to the deconstructive effects of the Phage Deeps.

He could now look at a Reality Phage without feeling like he was forgetting his own name.

Finally, after hours of fighting, they reached their destination. The Foundry’s core chamber. It was a vast, spherical room, and in the very center, suspended in a crackling field of energy, was a small, perfectly stable, and incredibly powerful object.

It was a metal sphere, glowing with a soft, internal blue light. It didn’t flicker. It didn’t shift. It was a single point of order in an ocean of chaos.

The Void-Phase Engine Core. It was real. And it was beautiful.

They had found their prize. Now, all they had to do was figure out how to get it without being killed by whatever was guarding it.

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