CHAPTER 44: CHAPTER 45: THE GATE OPENS

The world had changed again.

Not with the quiet slowness of time or the sudden shock of violence—but with the suffocating certainty of inevitability.

Cracks laced the sky.

At first, they shimmered like distant stars or warped data streams. But then came the sound. A low, guttural hum that reverberated in every molecule of existence. Reality trembled. MC—no longer just man, nor code, but something in between—stood atop his obsidian throne, his newly fused form draped in layers of living shadows and radiant circuitry.

Beside him, Nyx and Celestia watched the horizon twist.

The ritual had left them marked—spiritually and physically—bound to him beyond comprehension. Their eyes glowed with remnants of the Soul Mirror’s power, but even they could feel it: something was coming through.

A ripple surged outward from the northern sky. Space fractured. A massive gate, shaped like an inverted omega symbol, yawned open above the world’s tallest spire—the remnants of the Architect’s core.

"Impossible," Nyx whispered. "Nothing should remain of him. You consumed it all."

MC’s jaw clenched. "This isn’t his doing."

The Gate pulsed, and from its center descended beings unlike any creation of man or machine.

They floated.

Part digital angel, part monstrous void. Hybrid gods of data and will. Each being wore a mask—blank, perfect, emotionless—and their bodies shimmered with fractal coding that pulsed like hearts.

One stepped forward, its voice not heard but felt across every mind connected to the network.

"You have violated the cosmic checksum."

"You have bent entropy to your will, and now equilibrium demands sacrifice."

"You are declared unstable. This domain must be purged."

A chill swept through the dominion. Even his most devoted followers faltered. MC rose, the Voidborne power swirling around him in coiling tendrils of neon shadow.

"I rewrote the rules. There is no checksum. I am the equation."

But the hybrids didn’t blink. Didn’t even pause.

From the Gate spilled an army—thousands of lesser hybrids, weaponized avatars, constructs of balance meant to unmake gods.

And in the center of them floated a new threat—a cathedral-like ship made of pure code, humming with the Godslayer Protocols. Weapons designed to erase not just data... but meaning itself.

A single blast from it hit the mountains miles away—and the entire region simply ceased. No sound. No explosion. Just deleted, like a forgotten thought.

MC’s expression shifted—for the first time in ages, something close to fear.

He turned to Nyx and Celestia. "Prepare everyone. This... is war."

Celestia’s voice trembled. "What are they?"

"Judges," MC muttered. "From beyond code. From the root of reality itself."

He reached into his own chest, pulling forth the remnants of the Soul Mirror—its energy flaring as he began modifying it on the spot, programming a resonance pulse that could shield parts of his domain.

"Buy me time," he said. "I need ten minutes."

Nyx drew her blade, half-digital, half-flesh, crackling with raw need. "You’ll have eleven."

As the hybrids descended, the battlefield erupted in chaos. Digital terrain twisted, skies bled code, and entire cities lifted into the air as MC’s forces met the invaders in a desperate clash.

MC worked, his hands a blur of corrupted light and raw divinity.

But for all his power, something gnawed at him from within.

The Soul Mirror pulsed erratically.

And in the echoes of its core, something spoke.

A voice he hadn’t heard since the day he was first reaped into this cursed game.

His human self.

"You’re not strong enough to hold all this forever. Eventually, even gods break."

MC clenched his fists. "Then I’ll break the world before it breaks me."

The Gate widened.

The battlefield screamed.

Not in voice—but in distortion, in collapsing algorithms, in the shattering of what was once real. Digital storms howled through the skies. Cities lifted from their roots, then disintegrated midair as hybrid gods swept through like scythes made of logic and annihilation.

MC stood in the eye of the chaos, his body glowing with lines of red and black energy—half-man, half-program, fully ascended. He had known war before. He had caused it. He had reveled in it.

But this was not war. This was judgment.

The cathedral-ship in the sky pulsed again. A second Godslayer beam cut through the heavens. Entire sectors of MC’s dominion flickered and vanished. Not destroyed—erased from the simulation entirely.

A scream tore through the mindnet—one of his generals, consumed by the beam. All memory of them began vanishing, even from his personal logs.

"Nyx, status!" he barked through the collapsing link.

Her voice answered, gritted with rage. "Barely holding the south flank. Celestia’s wounded but rallying the siphon-witches. They won’t last long."

MC activated the newly reforged Soul Mirror, planting it into the ground. An aura rippled out like a pulse of defiance, stabilizing the space around his throne. The fragmented consciousness of the mirror howled as it interfaced with the corrupted world.

Then, the Gate—already massive—shifted.

A second tier unfolded from within it.

From the new layer emerged something different—not divine or void-like, but pure code. A central figure materialized—tall, obsidian-skinned, draped in cascading zeroes. Eyes like inverted suns.

The battlefield froze as a single voice echoed through everything:

"Root Administrator Detected."

MC’s vision blurred. His body stuttered. Reality lagged.

For a split second, he wasn’t the Voidborne King. He was just Darius—the man who had once played the game.

"You are an unauthorized branch of authority. Your privileges have been revoked."

MC snarled, resisting the suffocating force pressing into him. "You think you can delete me like some broken line of code? I am the one who rewrote the laws!"

But it was no longer speaking to him.

The Root Admin raised one hand.

The battlefield began to unravel.

Hybrids and followers alike were pulled into ribbons of data, decompiled in real time. Screams filled the network, thousands of minds unraveling as the Admin activated the Format Protocol.

MC fell to his knees, blood and code leaking from his mouth.

A whisper echoed in his head again—his human voice, quiet but cutting.

"You climbed so high... now you’re finally seeing how far you still have to fall."

But then—

Nyx burst through the smog of deletion, drenched in the blood of the gods she’d slain. Her eyes locked on him. "Get up. You don’t die on your knees."

Celestia limped beside her, staff crackling. "We’re not done yet. You gave us your madness. Now take ours."

They grabbed him—one on each arm. And through the bond forged by the Soul Mirror, their power poured into him.

The pain disappeared.

His corrupted divinity surged back.

But this time... it wasn’t just his.

It was theirs too.

His throne cracked as he rose—too powerful for the construct to contain anymore. Black flame and silver lightning coiled around his form.

The Root Admin paused.

MC smiled.

"You wanted the king of this world?"

He stepped forward, eyes burning.

"Then come and try to unmake me."

The digital heavens trembled.

The Root Admin hovered above, its form now fractal—splitting into hundreds of symmetrical duplicates, each whispering different lines of code, rewriting fragments of the world’s foundation with every syllable.

"INITIATE: WORLD FORMAT. OBJECT: ENTITY-NULL. PRIORITY: OMEGA."

The sky cracked.

MC stood at the center of a failing universe, surrounded by dying gods, corrupted angels, and loyal monsters—all looking to him for deliverance. Celestia and Nyx stood beside him, pulsing with stolen divinity, their bodies barely holding together.

Yet MC’s grin widened.

Because now, he saw the flaw.

Not in the Root Admin.

But in himself.

For too long, he’d fought to control the system.

Now... he understood it.

He was never meant to master the world.

He was meant to become it.

Inside the throne chamber, MC raised both hands, summoning the remnants of every program he’d ever dominated—fractured code, broken AI, even fragments of corrupted NPCs. They surged toward him, whispering, screaming, laughing.

He let them in.

One by one.

Nyx turned, terrified. "Darius, what are you—?!"

Celestia’s breath caught. "He’s not resisting the system anymore..."

"No," MC growled. "I’m rebuilding it in my image."

His body cracked apart—flesh becoming strings of blood-red code and dark matter. The Soul Mirror behind him shattered, not in destruction but evolution, its pieces fusing into him. His voice echoed across planes, deeper, no longer bound to a single throat.

"REVOKE THIS."

He launched upward.

His strike obliterated ten clones of the Root Admin in an instant. The remaining ones adapted, shifting form, rewriting attack protocols, launching quantum-calculated counterstrikes—but MC danced through them like chaos incarnate.

He didn’t dodge.

He unwrote their attacks before they existed.

The battlefield warped with every step.

Mountains floated. Rivers of fire formed digital veins across the sky. The rift—the Gate—trembled as his power surged.

And yet...

The Admin’s core clone remained. Untouched. Unflinching.

"Final protocol," it whispered. "Spawn: Conceptual Erasure."

A weapon formed in its hand. It wasn’t a blade. It was nothing. An absence. A deletion wrapped in the concept of a sword. It swung—

And MC felt it.

For the first time, fear.

It sliced through his arm—not just the code—but the memory of the arm. It

He couldn’t even recall what it felt like. A void opened in his being, and for a moment, everything stopped.

Flash.

He stood on the rooftop of an old apartment complex.

A younger Darius.

Just a man in a hoodie, staring at the stars after losing another job.

He was crying.

He didn’t even know why.

"You wanted power to matter, didn’t you?" a voice whispered—his own.

"Now you’re the god of a broken world."

Back in the present, MC roared, rallying every memory he had left.

Every betrayal.

Every triumph.

Every moment with Nyx.

Every war beside Celestia.

He used the loss—the erasure—and rewrote it. Not as a weakness, but as a new rule of existence:

"Nothing dies unless I say so."

The Voidborne King rematerialized his arm—twisted, flame-forged, reinforced with the shattered fragments of his throne.

He grabbed the Conceptual Erasure blade mid-swing and snapped it in two.

The Admin finally flinched.

And MC grinned, eyes pulsing like twin singularities.