The North Gate of the Iron Bastion was completely buckling under the pressure.

The transparent red energy dome flickered wildly. It flashed a sickly yellow as millions of Void beasts slammed their shifting dark matter bodies against it. The sheer weight of the monster army was physically pushing the barrier inward.

Up on the heavy iron battlements, Commander Richter was sweating through his pristine white and blue tactical armor. The Level 70 Vanguard looked down at the absolute nightmare unfolding right outside the city walls.

"Keep firing!" Richter roared into his comms. "Do not let them breach the gate! Pour everything you have into that frontline!"

Two hundred elite members of the Praetorian Guard were lined up along the wall. These were highly paid and max-leveled corporate mercenaries. They did not use rusty iron swords or cheap wooden bows. They carried heavy military-grade plasma rifles, shoulder-mounted rocket pods, and high-tier energy sniper rifles.

They pulled their triggers and unleashed an absolute storm of firepower down into the mud.

Bright pink plasma bolts, jagged blue ice spears, and heavy armor-piercing tungsten rounds rained down on the charging Void beasts. It looked like a massive and highly coordinated light show. It was enough raw damage to wipe out an entire sector of normal players in seconds.

But it did absolutely nothing.

The heavy tungsten bullets slammed into the shifting bodies of the Abyssal monsters and just passed right through them. The physical rounds buried themselves uselessly into the wet dirt.

The super-heated plasma bolts hit the dark matter and simply fizzled out. They turned into harmless sparks that did not even drop a single point of health.

"Commander, it is not working!" A heavy gunner screamed and frantically slammed a new thermal magazine into his massive rifle. "The damage numbers aren’t even registering! The system says their defense stat is unreadable!"

Richter gritted his teeth. He slammed his fist against the stone wall. He knew exactly what the problem was.

These were not normal game mobs. They were Abyssal entities. They operated on corrupted server logic that entirely bypassed standard physical and elemental damage. Unless a player was actively wielding a weapon forged from highly volatile Void-Ore, they were just throwing spitballs at a brick wall.

And the Praetorian Guard did not have a single piece of Void-Ore gear.

"Keep shooting anyway!" Richter yelled. He was desperate to keep the morale from completely shattering. "Use the kinetic impact to push them back! Just buy the Warlord some time!"

Down in the clean stone courtyard of the city, Declan let out a heavy and incredibly annoyed sigh.

He was standing near the massive iron forges. He had his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pitch-black Predator’s Coat. He was not looking at the terrifying army of millions of monsters trying to break into his house.

He was looking up at the wall and watching the Praetorian Guard completely waste their ammunition.

The loud booming of the rocket launchers and the high-pitched whining of the plasma rifles were giving him a serious headache. Worse than that, the sheer amount of visual effects flooding the screen was making his digital interface lag.

"Hey," Declan called out.

His voice was not loud. He did not yell. But his vocal cords carried a heavy and unnatural bass. The sound completely bypassed the noise of the battlefield and echoed perfectly in Richter’s ears.

Richter looked down from the wall.

"Turn the guns off," Declan ordered casually.

Richter’s eyes went wide behind his tactical visor. He stared at the Warlord as though the guy had just lost his mind.

"Are you insane?!" Richter yelled back. He pointed a heavy armored finger at the endless sea of dark matter trying to rip the gates off their hinges. "There are millions of them! If they get past the barrier, they will slaughter every single low-level worker in this city! You cannot solo an entire server wipe event!"

"Turn them off," Declan repeated. His pitch-black eyes filled with swirling purple energy and narrowed slightly. "You guys are ruining my frame rate. And you are messing up my aggro pulls."

Richter just stared at him. The Warlord was not looking at an apocalyptic monster invasion designed to permanently delete their avatars. He was looking at a giant and squirming pile of free Origin Points. And he was annoyed that someone else was trying to tag them.

Declan did not wait for the corporate commander to issue a cease-fire. He turned his back to the safe zone and faced the heavy iron gates.

He did not pull out a magic spellbook to cast a massive shield. He did not pull out a health potion. He just completely dropped his relaxed posture.

Declan let the full and oppressive weight of his Abyssal Sovereign class bleed directly into the physical reality around him.

The air instantly warped. The dark and toxic rain that had managed to slip past the failing energy dome froze in mid-air. The droplets were caught in the terrifying and unnatural gravitational pressure radiating off Declan’s body.

The stone pavement beneath his +10 Spiked Striders groaned and cracked. It spider-webbed outward under his sheer data density.

The front line of the Void beasts that had just broken through the gate slammed into his invisible aura. They instantly slowed to a pathetic crawl. The game engine physically struggled to process the sheer difference in stats between a Level 20 trash mob and a Level 70 Warlord.

"Alright," Declan smiled. "Let’s farm."

He did not run. He just leaned forward and blurred into motion.

With his ninety base Agility completely unchecked and multiplied by his class traits, he crossed the fifty-yard courtyard in a fraction of a millisecond. He plunged directly into the thickest part of the dark matter horde pouring through the gates.

He reached into his digital inventory and pulled out the +40 Eclipse Severance. The heavy dark matter halberd dropped perfectly into his grip.

He did not swing hard. He did not try to use proper martial arts forms. He just let the broken system mechanics do all the heavy lifting.

He swung the massive weapon horizontally in a wide and lazy arc.

The Spacetime Laceration trait activated effortlessly. The razor-thin blade holding a spinning black hole in its center hummed with violent static. It sliced cleanly through the air.

It did not hit the monsters’ physical hitboxes. It just deleted the spatial coordinates they were currently standing in.

A massive and jagged black tear ripped through the server’s fabric right at chest height. Hundreds of Void beasts were instantly cut in half. Their glitching bodies froze in place and let out a distorted screech of dial-up modem static before violently dissolving into bright blue pixels.

↳ [Multiple Enemies Defeated!]

Origin Points +15,000

Declan laughed. It was a dark and highly satisfied sound.

He spun on his heel and used the momentum to bring the heavy blunt side of the halberd down in a brutal vertical arc.

The Weight of the Warden trait triggered. The game engine registered the downward swing and instantly increased the weapon’s mass by five hundred percent. The ceremonial polearm became a four-hundred-pound meteor of solid dark matter.

It crashed directly into the center of the monster pack.

The kinetic shockwave was so massive it completely bypassed the monsters’ conceptual armor. It physically blew them apart and sent a massive geyser of blue digital blood and crushed code shooting fifty feet into the air.

The ground caved in to form a massive crater in the mud right outside the city walls.

[Multiple Enemies Defeated!]

↳ Origin Points +12,500

He was a teleporting industrial meat grinder.

Every time a monster tried to swipe at him, their glitching claws hit the invisible and swirling red barrier of his Sanguine Engine over-heal shield. They could not even scratch his actual health bar. The massive barrier just absorbed the hits and pushed them back.

Declan did not stop moving. He chained his attacks perfectly and cleared out massive chunks of the horde with every single swing. The blue system notifications spammed his vision so fast they just looked like a solid white blur of text.

His Origin Point bank was rocketing upward. Tens of thousands of points flooded his treasury every few seconds.

Up on the wall, the Praetorian Guard slowly lowered their heavy plasma rifles. They watched the guy in the black trench coat casually dismantle a world-ending event by himself.

They were not a corporate army fighting a war anymore. They were just an audience watching a Warlord take out the trash.