Chapter 114: The 150% Multiplier

She didn’t raise her staff. She just stood there, her gray cloak whipping in the sudden vacuum of air.

Zero.

Absolute Zero detonated.

There was no sound. All the audio in the game completely cut out.

A shockwave of pure, blinding white death exploded outward from Kaelen’s greatsword. It washed over the entire platform in a fraction of a millisecond. The black ice instantly vaporized. The air itself shattered like glass.

The white wave hit Isolde.

Because she had used her Anomaly power to displace Levi out of bounds, she took the full, unmitigated brunt of the system’s wipe mechanic.

[-999,999 True Damage]

The massive, terrifying red number exploded over her head. It was so large it actually clipped outside the standard UI rendering box.

A normal player would have been instantly deleted. Their character model would have shattered, and they would have been booted straight to the respawn screen.

But Isolde was a God-fragment. She wasn’t a normal player.

Her massive Anomaly health pool, which had been sitting at 52,620 before the blast, instantly plummeted.

The system tried to delete her. The code violently clashed.

Isolde didn’t shatter into blue polygons. Her avatar physically fractured. Massive, glowing green cracks spread across her face, her arms, and her gray cloak. She let out a horrific, digital scream that sounded like a dial-up modem being crushed in a hydraulic press.

Thousands of weeping green pixels bled out of her wounds, floating up into the white light.

Her health bar crashed through the floor. It hit 10,000. 5,000. 1,000.

The math of the game engine finally gave up trying to calculate the anomaly. It stopped her health bar at exactly 1%.

[Isolde HP: 526]

The white light from the explosion faded. The audio slowly returned to the VR engine, sounding muffled and distant.

Isolde collapsed. She fell straight forward, her knees hitting the remaining black ice, and then she slumped completely flat against the floor.

Her wooden staff rolled out of her hand.

She didn’t move. Her avatar began to rapidly turn translucent. The solid colors of her cloak and skin started fading, showing the dark ice right through her body.

From his frozen spot outside the boundary box, Levi watched her fall. The glitch holding him in place finally corrected itself, recognizing his character model again. The invisible wall snapped.

Levi fell forward, crashing hard onto the edge of the platform.

**

Levi hit the black ice hard. His shoulder smashed against the frozen platform, sliding a few feet before he finally dug the heel of his Gold-tier boot into the ground to stop his momentum.

The system had finally corrected the boundary glitch. He was back in the bounds of the arena.

Levi scrambled to his knees. He didn’t check his own health bar. He didn’t look at the boss. He immediately looked up at the center of the platform.

Isolde was lying perfectly still on the ice.

Her avatar was ninety percent translucent. He could clearly see the black floor right through her back. She looked like a ghost. Her health bar was aggressively flickering, bouncing rapidly between 1 HP and 0 HP as the server actively attempted to delete her corrupted code.

"Isolde!" Levi yelled.

He didn’t bother standing up. He practically crawled across the ice, tossing his Platinum scythe aside. He reached her and dropped to his knees. He reached out to grab her shoulder, but his armored hand literally passed straight through her body. There was no physical collision. The server wasn’t registering her as a solid object anymore.

Isolde slowly turned her head. Her face was covered in jagged, glowing green cracks. Her gray eyes were incredibly dim, lacking their usual bright static.

She looked up at him. A faint, extremely human smile crossed her glitching, translucent face.

"Operational efficiency maintained," Isolde whispered. Her voice was incredibly quiet. It sounded like a bad radio signal cutting out. "Your survival probability is now optimal."

Levi stared at her. His chest hitched.

For three years in his past life, he had treated everything as a cold, hard math problem. He never cared about anyone. He never attached himself to anything. He just survived.

But seeing this girl—this AI, this God-fragment, whatever she was—smiling at him while she was actively being deleted just so he could live... something inside Levi snapped completely.

The rational gamer brain turned off. Pure, unadulterated rage flooded his system.

He looked up from Isolde and stared down the platform.

Kaelen, the Night King, landed softly on the black ice. The boss’s wipe mechanic was on cooldown. But the fight wasn’t paused.

A green aura flared around the Night King’s armor.

[+100,000 HP] [+100,000 HP]

The boss was regenerating. As part of his final phase, Kaelen passively healed 100,000 health every single second. His health bar, which had been sitting at 1.5 million, was rapidly ticking back up. 1.6 million. 1.7 million.

Levi didn’t have time to mourn. He had exactly sixty seconds before Isolde’s code was completely flushed from the server’s cache. If he didn’t kill the boss and get the core before then, she was gone forever.

Levi stood up. He didn’t grab his scythe yet. He just opened his skill menu with a violent swipe of his hand.

He stared at the glowing, black-and-gold icon at the bottom of the list. He hadn’t used it yet. He knew the cost was insane.

He didn’t care.

Levi tapped the icon.

"Abyssal Overdrive," Levi snarled.

The system instantly recognized the command. The massive cost triggered immediately.

Fifty percent of his current health was violently ripped from his body. His HP plummeted from 26,180 straight down to 13,090. His mana pool was drained by a massive 1,000 points, dropping from 4,500 to 3,500.

The VR pain engine hit him with a sickening, hollow feeling, like his stomach had just been carved out.

But the buffs activated instantly.

A terrifying, towering aura of black flames erupted from Levi’s avatar. It looked exactly like the dark energy that had surrounded the Hollow King in the murals. The flames licked up his arms, completely engulfing the Obsidian Carapace armor.

The system threw the new math directly into his combat log.

[Speed +100% Active.]

[Level Suppression Nullified: 0% Penalty.]

[Final Damage +150% Active.]

His Speed was 1,736. The 100% buff instantly doubled it.

His new Speed was 3,472.

He was no longer moving fast. He was moving at speeds the server physically could not render properly.

Levi bent down and grabbed the haft of the Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse.

He didn’t run. He just vanished.

He moved at 3,472 Speed. The game engine hitched. Levi completely blurred out of existence and instantly reappeared directly in Kaelen’s face, thirty yards away, before the boss even registered his movement.

Kaelen tried to swing his dark magic greatsword. He was swinging at empty air.

"Hollow’s Guillotine," Levi whispered.

The Platinum scythe erupted in a blinding, terrifying mixture of black fire and gold light. Levi twisted his hips and brought the blade up in a massive cone that smashed directly into Kaelen’s chest plate.

The math broke.

Levi’s Total Attack was 7,104. The skill multiplier was 3.5. That gave him a base skill damage of 24,864.

Kaelen’s Defense was sitting at 7,500 from his enrage buff. The scythe dropped the effective armor to 5,250.

24,864 minus 5,250 left exactly 19,614 raw damage.

Previously, the Level Suppression penalty would have choked this number down. But Abyssal Overdrive completely nullified it. There was zero penalty.

Now, the final buff applied. The Overdrive granted +150% Final Damage. That was a 2.5x multiplier applied at the very end of the equation.

[-49,035]

A massive, screen-shaking red number exploded over the Night King’s head.

The boss didn’t just stagger. Kaelen was physically lifted off his feet and thrown backward across the ice. The armor-shred debuff popped up, ripping away 20% of the boss’s remaining defense.

Levi didn’t give him a single frame to recover.

He stayed glued to the boss’s chest. Moving at nearly 3,500 Speed, Levi started swinging basic physical attacks. He frame-linked every single swing, canceling the recoil animations completely.

The basic attack math was just as absurd.

7,104 Base Attack minus the newly shredded armor. Multiply the result by the 2.5x Overdrive buff.

[-22,342] [-22,342] [-22,342] [-22,342]

Levi was hitting for over twenty-two thousand damage a swing. With his attack speed, he was easily landing five hits a second.

He was pumping out well over 111,000 DPS. He completely overwhelmed the boss’s 100,000 HP per second regeneration.

Kaelen tried to fight back. He swung the greatsword in a desperate horizontal arc. It actually clipped Levi’s ribs.

[-4,123]

Levi’s health dropped to 8,967.

But it didn’t matter. Levi was dealing over a hundred thousand damage a second. His 25% Lifesteal from the Platinum scythe was feeding roughly 27,000 health back into his pool every single second.

He was taking 4,000 damage and instantly healing for 27,000.