Chapter 103: [103] : The Praetorian Threat, Sector Merges

Declan and Morgan were exactly halfway up the rocky, ash-covered slope of the shattered crater.

Suddenly, the sky changed color!

The dark, chaotic clouds of the Level 65 hazard zone completely stopped swirling and the toxic wind died instantly.

The air grew perfectly and uncomfortably still.

A fraction of a second later, a massive and deafening bell chimed.

BONG!

It was not a normal system notification. The sound did not just ring in their ears like a standard game alert.

It vibrated directly against their digital brain stems.

The noise was so incredibly loud and abrupt that Morgan actually stumbled on the loose dirt.

The top-tier corporate assassin had to grab a jagged, glowing rock just to keep her balance.

She gasped and clutched the side of her helmet.

Declan did not flinch and he did not cover his ears. He just stopped walking and looked up at the sky.

A massive holographic banner unrolled across the heavens.

The text was a glaring, violent red. It threw a bloody and oppressive light over the entire ruined wasteland of the Shattered Expanse.

[Global Announcement!]

[50,000 players deleted in Sector 6.]

[Sector 6 and Sector 7 will fully merge in 72 hours.]

[Prepare for territory expansion.]

Declan read the text twice.

Sector 6 was another world also possessed by this evil game.

He stood there with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pitch-black Predator’s Coat.

Fifty thousand players deleted. That was a completely insane number!

Even for a death game, that was a massive casualty rate for a single notification.

Sector 6 was clearly going through an absolute meat grinder right now.

A fifty thousand player drop meant entire massive guilds were getting wiped off the map permanently. The system was just cleaning house.

"A server merge." Morgan breathed as she stared up at the red letters.

She looked absolutely terrified.

"Seventy-two hours. The borders are coming down."

"Looks like we are getting new neighbors," Declan noted casually.

He cracked his neck. The dense, mutated bones popped loudly in the quiet air.

He didn’t care about Sector 6. He cared about his own territory.

He turned his back on the glowing sky and kept walking up the crater.

His heavy +10 Spiked Striders crunched loudly against the digital dirt. He completely ignored the steep incline thanks to the Frictionless Movement trait.

Morgan hurried to catch up with him.

Her high-end corporate tactical suit was still ripped at the seams from their brutal wrestling match earlier.

She looked like she had been dragged through a mud pit!

But her health bar was completely full thanks to his mutated healing item.

"You don’t understand," Morgan said quickly as she jogged to keep pace.

They both have studied about the other worlds ever since they realised the game was not built by the megacorps.

"Sector 6 is a heavy military zone. It is entirely controlled by private security firms. It is not like Sector 7. There are no civilians over there. Just mercenaries and corporate armies."

"And?" Declan asked without looking back.

"If the borders drop, they are going to flood into Sector 7 to claim the land," Morgan warned him.

"They have thousands of heavily armed players. They are going to want your Sanctum Core to establish a new forward operating base."

"Let them try." Declan smiled and a cold, dark look flashed in his eyes.

"I could use the extra Origin Points. Building a city is expensive."

They walked in silence for the next twenty minutes.

They finally crossed the invisible boundary line separating the Level 65 hazard zone from the rest of the ruined city.

The moment they stepped out of the Shattered Expanse, the environment shifted.

The dry, cracking earth turned back into wet asphalt. The atmosphere changed back to the familiar, toxic slums of Sector 7.

The smog was incredibly thick, and the rain was cold and oily.

In the distance, the towering black iron dome of the Iron Bastion glowed with a bright, pulsing purple light.

It was a massive beacon of safety sitting right in the middle of a literal apocalypse.

Declan walked right up to the transparent energy shield.

The system recognized his administrative signature instantly.

A ten-foot section of the barrier hissed open to let him inside.

He stepped through, and Morgan followed right behind him like a lost shadow.

The courtyard of the Iron Bastion was loud, chaotic, and busy.

Thousands of players were walking around. They were carrying scavenged weapons, trading low-level gear, and hauling bloody monster parts to the central forge.

The massive iron furnaces roared with intense heat.

Bram’s automated turrets were being assembled piece by piece on the heavy anvils.

Down by the main gate, Sloane was sitting behind her large mahogany desk.

She had three different glowing holographic screens open at the same time.

She was furiously tapping on them, swiping through endless lists of inventory logs. She looked like a highly stressed retail manager dealing with a holiday rush.

Kendra was standing right next to her.

The archer was holding her +10 Sniper Bow, keeping a very close and paranoid eye on the crowd of players lined up to pay their taxes.

"Boss!" Sloane yelled when she saw him walk in.

She waved a glowing digital clipboard in the air.

"You are back. We have a serious inventory issue."

"What is the problem, Quartermaster?" Declan asked as he walked over to the desk.

"The hunting parties are bringing in too much junk," Sloane complained as she rubbed her temples.

"I am running out of digital storage space in the town bank for all these rat pelts and broken iron swords."

"We need to upgrade the vault capacity, but it costs way too many Origin Points."

Sloane stopped talking. She finally noticed the woman standing quietly behind Declan.

Morgan looked like a total mess, but her posture was rigid and professional.

Her eyes were sharp, scanning the courtyard for threats. She looked exactly like a highly trained corporate killer, even covered in mud.

"Declan." Sloane narrowed her eyes.

She pointed a pen at the assassin. "Why did you bring a stray into the city? And why does she look exactly like someone who will try to shoot us?"

"She is an independent contractor now," Declan said smoothly.

He walked past the desk and headed toward the crafting zone. "She lost her job. Just give her a corner to sit in. Don’t let her touch the treasury."

Morgan just glared at the back of Sloane’s head, but she didn’t argue.

She knew she was completely out of her depth here.

She walked over to a stone bench near the wall and sat down quietly, crossing her arms over her ripped tactical suit.

"Whatever you say, boss," Sloane sighed as she shook her head.

She tapped her screen again, bringing up a new spreadsheet.

"But seriously, we need to offload some of this raw material. Bram says he needs higher quality metals for the next batch of wall turrets. The low-level iron is not going to cut it against heavy siege weapons."

Declan stopped walking. He opened his own digital inventory.

He had completely forgotten about the massive haul of raw Void-Ore he had mined back in the Bone-Ash Wastes.

He had over fifty pounds of the volatile, dark purple rock sitting right in his storage slots.

It was exactly what Bram needed to build the heavy artillery!

"I have the high-quality metal right here," Declan said. "But it is completely unregistered. It came from an extreme hazard zone."

"So just drop it on the floor for Bram," Kendra said as she lowered her bow slightly.

"I can’t," Declan explained.

"If I just drop fifty pounds of raw Void-Ore on the floor of a Level 1 safe zone, the system might flag it as a spatial anomaly."

"The anti-cheat mechanics will likely just delete the ore before Bram can even put it in the forge."

"So how do we process it?" Sloane asked.

"I need to run it through a neutral server terminal," Declan said as he closed his inventory.

"I need a black-market broker to scrub the item tags and register the ore to this sector. Then I can safely transfer it to Bram’s forge."

"There is a neutral terminal about three blocks away," Sloane said as she checked her local sector map.

"It is an old underground subway station. The system still registers it as a safe trade hub. The monsters usually avoid it."

"I will be right back," Declan said.

He didn’t bother resting.

His real-world synchronization rate was sitting at a massive eighty percent.

His physical body felt like it was made of solid titanium. His stamina pool was practically overflowing. He wasn’t tired at all!

He turned around and walked right back out of the Iron Bastion.

The heavy toxic rain hit his black Predator’s Coat as he jogged down the ruined streets.

The slums were mostly empty right now. The low-level Flesh-Stalkers knew better than to come near the glowing purple dome of the city.

He found the subway entrance exactly where Sloane’s map said it would be.

It was a wide, crumbling concrete stairwell leading down into the pitch-black underground.

Declan walked down the stairs into the dark station. The air down here smelled like stagnant water and ozone.

The terminal was a heavy metal kiosk bolted to the tiled wall. It had a single, glowing green screen and a wide data-port slot.

Declan walked up to it and tapped the dirty glass.

The screen flickered. A highly pixelated, floating digital face appeared on the monitor. It was a standard AI Broker program.

"Welcome to the neutral exchange," the AI’s robotic voice buzzed through the cheap, static-filled speakers.

"Insert items for tag scrubbing. Standard fee applies."

Declan opened his inventory. He selected the massive stack of Void-Ore and initiated the digital transfer to the terminal.

The green screen suddenly flashed a glaring, blindingly bright red!

The digital face of the AI Broker warped and distorted heavily. The pixels stretched and tore across the monitor.

[Warning! Warning!]

"Player V!" the AI voice suddenly shrieked.

It didn’t sound robotic or bored anymore. It sounded completely and utterly panicked!

"Cancel the transaction! You need to leave this location immediately!"

Declan frowned. He didn’t cancel the transfer. He kept his hands in his pockets.

"Why?" Declan asked. "Is the ore too heavy for your server? I can upload it in smaller batches."

"It is not the ore!" the AI frantically replied.

The red warning boxes flashed so fast they blurred together.

"Your biometric signature just pinged the global network when you connected to the terminal! You are being tracked!"

"Tracked by who?" Declan asked. His voice was calm.

"Apex Paradigm doesn’t have any hit squads left in this sector. I turned them all into scrap metal."

"Not Apex!" the terminal buzzed loudly, making the speakers pop from the volume.

"Sector 6! The Praetorian Guard!"

Declan remembered the global announcement from earlier. The fifty thousand deleted players. The sector merge.

"The Praetorian Guard is an elite, militarized player faction," the AI explained rapidly, throwing up a heavily redacted guild profile on the screen.

"They survived the Sector 6 Purge Wave by butchering their own people for resources. They are heavily geared." 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

"They just bought a massive batch of tracking scrolls off the dark web. They are hunting you right now!"

"Why me?" Declan asked casually. He leaned against the concrete wall next to the terminal.

"Because of the merge!" the AI screamed.

"The borders drop in 72 hours. They want your city! They want the Iron Bastion!"

"They tracked your specific neural code to this exact terminal when you logged in. They are right outside!"

Declan didn’t look panicked. He didn’t rush to hit the Void Blink skill to teleport away. He didn’t pull out a weapon.

He just smiled. It was a cold, dark, and deeply terrifying expression.

"Good," Declan said. "I was getting bored of fighting mindless zombies anyway."

He finally hit the cancel button on the ore transfer.

He turned his back on the screaming terminal, walked away from the flashing red screen, and slowly walked up the concrete stairs back to the surface.