Dante stood in the center of the shattered white marble altar.

His breathing was heavy. It echoed loudly in the dead silence of the subterranean pantheon.

The oppressive and gravitational weight that had suffocated the room was completely gone. The air felt thin and light again.

In his right hand, he held the sword.

It was a jagged and ugly piece of black metal.

Without the terrifying cosmic aura projecting from it, the weapon just looked like a piece of industrial scrap that had been violently ripped from a larger machine.

The dark bone hilt was cold against his iron-plated gauntlet.

The three empty circular sockets in the crossguard looked like hollow dead eyes.

Aura floated down from the air. She landed softly on the shoulder of Dante. She let out a small and exhausted chime.

"Yeah, I am okay," Dante said. His voice was raspy. He wiped a thin trail of blood from his nose with the back of his hand. "That was entirely too close."

He looked down at the sword.

It was completely silent now. The roaring and multi-layered voices that had tried to tear his mind apart were gone.

By physically ripping it from the altar and overpowering its predatory ego, Dante had forced the weapon into submission.

It was no longer a sentient parasite trying to consume him.

It was just an item.

"Let us see exactly what almost killed me," Dante muttered.

He gripped the hilt tightly and activated his appraisal skill.

Normally, the system interface popped up instantly. It generated a neat blue box with the name, tier, and base stats of the item.

This time, the system hitched.

The air in front of Dante glitched. It sparked with red and black pixels.

A loading bar appeared in his vision. It struggled to process the code of the weapon he was holding.

It hung at ninety-nine percent for a full ten seconds.

Finally, with a loud and static crack, the prompt forced itself open.

The text wasn’t the standard blue or gold. It was a dark and bruised purple.

[Item Appraised: Voidsever (Incomplete)]

[Tier: Cursed]

[Type: Primordial Greatsword]

Dante frowned. "Cursed?"

In the Zenith Protocol, Cursed-tier items were a massive gamble.

They usually offered incredible power in exchange for crippling debuffs.

A Cursed sword might double your attack power but drain your maximum health every time you swung it.

He kept reading the prompt.

[Status Warning: Voidsever is critically damaged. The weapon is missing its three core cosmic fragments (Chaos Orbs). Until the fragments are located and socketed, the base attack power of the weapon is restricted to 1.]

Dante stared at the number.

One.

The rusty iron sword he had spawned with in Outpost 404 had a base attack power of ten.

He had just fought a mental war against an ancient and world-ending parasite. The reward was a sword that hit as hard as a wet napkin.

"You have got to be kidding me," Dante sighed.

He almost threw the ugly black blade back onto the ruined altar. But his eyes caught the next section of the text block.

[Due to its Cursed state, Voidsever possesses zero stat scaling. However, the weapon retains its primordial passives.]

[Passive 1: Absolute Severance]

[Description: Voidsever exists partially outside of standard digital reality. Attacks made with this weapon ignore 100% of the physical and magical armor of the target. Defense stats are rendered entirely void.]

Dante stopped breathing.

He reread the text three times.

"Ignore one hundred percent," Dante whispered.

The math of the Zenith Protocol was built on mitigation.

A tank survived because their heavy armor reduced incoming damage by eighty or ninety percent.

Bosses survived because their massive defensive scaling required entire raid groups to slowly chip away at their health pools.

If Voidsever ignored armor entirely, it meant every single hit dealt raw and unmitigated true damage.

The base attack power of one didn’t matter.

The own base attack power of Dante was currently sitting at 1,850. This would bypass any shield, any magical barrier, and any defensive aura in the game.

He quickly scrolled down to the second passive.

[Passive 2: Inevitability]

[Description: The blade bends localized space to meet its target. Attacks made with Voidsever cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried by standard evasion mechanics. The hit rate is a guaranteed 100%.]

Dante let out a short and disbelieving laugh. "This is broken. This is literally developer-level broken."

In high-level PvP, rogues and assassins survived by stacking agility and evasion stats. They effectively made themselves impossible to hit.

Voidsever completely deleted that playstyle. If Dante swung the sword, it hit. Period.

Then he reached the final passive on the list.

[Passive 3: Doom’s Echo]

[Description: A residual trait from the cosmic origin of the weapon. Every successful strike possesses a fractional and microscopic chance to trigger an echoing multiplier.]

[Current Echo Rate: 0.00001%]

[Effect: If triggered, the total damage of the strike is multiplied by up to 1,000,000,000%.]

Dante just stared at the purple text box.

One billion percent.

The number was so stupidly large it felt like a typo. It was the kind of number a little kid made up on the playground.

If he hit a target for a standard 1,000 damage, and Doom’s Echo triggered, the damage output would instantly spike to ten billion.

It was a one-hit kill for literally anything in the Zenith Protocol.

It would instantly vaporize a Calamity-tier boss. It would probably delete the server node hosting the boss.

"The trigger chance is functionally zero," Dante noted. He tried to apply logic to the insane item sheet.

At a 0.00001% chance, he could swing the sword a million times and never see the multiplier trigger once.

It was a lottery ticket.

It was a mechanic designed to exist entirely on paper. It was a chaotic variable that the system kept suppressed with microscopic odds.

But Dante wasn’t a standard player.

He pulled up his own character sheet and looked at his hidden stats.

[Hidden Stats: Luck (100)]

The [Band of the Void-Walker] granted him a flat hundred points in Luck.

He didn’t know exactly how the system calculated the math behind the scenes. But he knew that stat wasn’t useless.

A hundred points of raw and cosmic luck heavily skewed those microscopic odds.

"I will take those odds," Dante said.

He dismissed the system prompt and looked at the black blade.

The [Crimson Edge] was a great weapon, but Voidsever was a game-ender.

Dante tapped the [Band of the Void-Walker]. He attempted to store the massive greatsword in his infinite inventory.

The ring flashed red.

[Error: Primordial entities cannot be stored in standard spatial dimensions.]

"Of course you cannot," Dante muttered.

He couldn’t exactly walk around Outpost 404 carrying a giant and jagged black sword that looked like it belonged to a final boss.

It would draw an insane amount of unwanted attention.

Before he could figure out a solution, Voidsever reacted.

The dark bone hilt suddenly grew incredibly hot. Dante didn’t drop it.

He watched as the black metal of the blade began to liquefy. It didn’t melt like steel. It dissolved into thick and shifting black ink.

The ink flowed rapidly down the hilt and spilled over his iron gauntlet.

It bypassed the metal armor completely and sank directly into the digital flesh of his right wrist.

It burned like a white-hot branding iron. Dante gritted his teeth. He held his arm steady as the entire mass of the massive greatsword poured into his skin.

The burning sensation stopped as quickly as it started.

Dante pulled off his iron gauntlet and looked at his right wrist.

Etched into his skin was a pitch-black and jagged brand. It looked exactly like the shattered blade of Voidsever.

The tattoo faintly pulsed in time with his own heartbeat. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

[Voidsever is now soul-bound to user: Dan.]

[Weapon can be materialized and dismissed at will.]

Dante focused his intent.

He held out his empty right hand and flexed his fingers.

A burst of black smoke erupted from his palm. Voidsever instantly materialized and perfectly balanced in his grip.

The transition was completely seamless.

There was no equip timer. There was no physical weight until the blade fully formed.

He relaxed his grip and willed it away.

The sword dissolved back into black smoke and vanished into the brand on his wrist.

"That is incredibly convenient," Dante said and flexed his hand again.

He had an unblockable and armor-piercing weapon hidden literally under his skin.

Silas and his Enforcers were running around the server looking for a guy with a red sword.

They wouldn’t even know he had changed his loadout until the black blade was already through their chest.

A loud and deep mechanical grinding noise suddenly echoed through the dark pantheon!

Dante snapped his head up.

The white marble altar he had ripped Voidsever from was sinking. The shattered stone was actively retracting into the floor.

As it sank, massive geometric lines began to glow across the entire stone floor of the subterranean hall.

The lines were a brilliant and blinding blue. They rapidly connected and formed complex runic circles that spanned hundreds of feet across the room.

The entire pantheon began to violently shake! Dust and debris rained down from the unseen ceiling above.

Aura let out a panicked chime and darted behind the head of Dante.

"I think we triggered the exit," Dante yelled over the grinding noise.

The altar disappeared completely into the floor.

In its place, a massive and concentrated pillar of blue light shot upward. It illuminated the entire center of the runic array.

[Dormant Teleportation Matrix Activated.]

[Warning: Coordinates uncalibrated. Initiating emergency surface ejection.]

Dante didn’t have time to walk over to it.

The blue light expanded violently and washed outward like a tidal wave!

It slammed into Dante and Aura and completely engulfed them in a blinding flash.

The sensation of gravity inverted instantly.

Dante wasn’t falling anymore. He was launched.

He shot upward through the absolute darkness at a terrifying speed.

The blue light wrapped around him like a protective cocoon. It shielded him from the solid bedrock and dirt he was currently being fired through.

It felt like being loaded into a cannon and shot directly into orbit.

The acceleration was so intense Dante couldn’t even keep his eyes open.

The roaring sound of the earth parting around him drowned out everything else.

Three seconds later, the pressure vanished.

The blue light shattered like glass!

The boots of Dante slammed hard into solid ground.

His momentum carried him forward and forced him to drop into a roll to absorb the shock.

He tumbled across loose dirt and gravel and finally came to a stop on one knee.

He looked up and blinked the blinding light from his eyes.

He was breathing fresh air.

He wasn’t in the suffocating heat of Embercraig Canyon. He wasn’t in the freezing fog of the Whispering Chasm.

The sky above was the vibrant and standard violet of the Outpost 404 region.

He was kneeling in a small and grassy clearing surrounded by towering pine trees.

He had been ejected completely out of the death zones and back into the beginner forest.

Dante stood up and brushed the dirt off his gold armor.

Aura popped into existence next to his ear and let out a happy and relieved chime.

He checked his brand. The black tattoo of Voidsever was resting quietly on his wrist.

He checked his inventory. He still had the ten Sunflare Orchids.

Dante took a deep breath of the cool forest air.

"Alright," Dante said. A cold smile touched his lips. "Let us go cash out."