Started with a 10,000x Multiplier in a Game World

The tablet shattered in the gauntlet of Dante. It dissolved into a stream of thick aggressive red code that shot upward to completely bypass the volcanic rock of the dungeon ceiling.

There was no explosion. The ambient heat of the cavern didn’t shift.

But across the entire Overture server, the Zenith Protocol reacted with terrifying absolute authority.

A massive blaring multi-tonal klaxon echoed across every single zone from the beginner forests to the high-tier capital cities.

It was the sound of a fundamental systemic override.

A massive blood-red notification box violently overwrote the obnoxious pink broadcast of Ryujin in the sky.

[CRITICAL SYSTEM EDICT: ADMINISTRATIVE BLOCKADE]

[Target Faction: Sakura Nation]

[Status: Absolute Account Lockout Initiated.]

[Duration: 24:00:00]

[Effect: All registered members of the Sakura Nation faction are hereby forcibly disconnected from the Zenith Protocol. Reconnection protocols are temporarily suspended. Access denied.]

[Authorized by: Dan]

Dante stood in the sweltering heat of the volcanic tunnel and read the red text hovering in his peripheral vision.

"Well," Dante murmured and dusted off his gauntlet. "That solves the racing problem."

"Boss," Casanova breathed and stared at the sky in absolute horror. "You did not just lock them in a zone this time. You literally kicked an entire country off the server."

"It is a twenty-four-hour ban," Dante corrected him smoothly. "They can use the time to touch grass."

***

Back in the pristine white marble resurrection plaza of Aethelgardia, the situation was catastrophic.

Ryujin had barely finished reading his own pink broadcast and waited with a smug victorious smile for Dante to crumble under the sheer weight of public opinion.

He fully expected the anomaly to accept the bet or at least respond with a desperate defense on the global chat.

Instead, the sky turned a blinding aggressive red.

Ryujin read the system edict.

The smug smile completely evaporated and was replaced by a look of sheer unadulterated primal terror.

"No," Ryujin whispered, and his voice trembled violently. "No, no, no! You cannot do this! This is a competitive server! You cannot just ban a faction!"

He didn’t get to finish his complaint.

The system didn’t offer a polite countdown timer or a graceful logout animation.

The avatar of Ryujin violently glitched. The pristine premium crimson samurai armor fragmented into a blur of gray static.

Across the entire plaza and across every single zone on the server, millions of players wearing the Sakura Nation tabard simultaneously turned to gray static.

They were instantly and forcibly ejected from the Zenith Protocol.

Their avatars completely vanished and returned their physical consciousnesses to their VR capsules in the real world. The massive server was left feeling incredibly abruptly empty.

The thousands of neutral players and rival guild members standing in the Aethelgardia plaza were completely silent.

They stared at the empty spaces where the Sakura Nation players had just been standing.

"Did... did Dan just ban them?" a stunned paladin whispered to his party member.

"He literally unplugged them," a mage replied, and her voice was filled with absolute awe.

The regional chat of the Veridian Alliance didn’t explode with laughter this time. It was entirely silent.

The sheer overwhelming administrative power required to forcefully disconnect an entire geopolitical faction from a server was too terrifying to mock.

Silas was still standing on the staging plateau of Mount Ignis. He watched the Sakura players vanish around him.

The Guild Master of Vanguard’s Legacy slowly lowered his broadsword. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.

He looked at the glowing purple portal leading into Fire Roc’s Last Wish.

He had brought his elite highly paid mercenaries to contest the dungeon. He had planned to out-DPS Dante and steal the Celestial pet.

But watching Dan casually and effortlessly ban millions of players from the game entirely broke the resolve of Silas.

He finally fundamentally understood that he wasn’t competing against another player. He was competing against an entity that actively rewrote the rules of the system.

"We are leaving," Silas ordered, his voice barely a whisper.

"Sir?" the lead mercenary tank asked and was confused. "The dungeon is right there. We have the DPS."

"I said we are leaving!" Silas shrieked, and panic completely hijacked his vocal cords. "Recall to the Capital! Now! Before he decides he does not like our tabards either!"

Silas crushed an emergency extraction talisman to completely abandon his massive financial investment.

He fled the staging area in a burst of blue light.

The elite mercenaries realized they weren’t getting paid to fight a system administrator and quickly followed suit.

***

Deep inside the volcanic tunnels of Fire Roc’s Last Wish, the squad of Dante was completely unaware of the cowardly retreat of Silas.

They were busy processing the massive pile of loot Dante had just dumped onto the iron grating.

Because Dante had executed Ryujin in an open-world zone with aggressive intent, the system had applied the maximum PvP death penalty.

The Guild Master of the Sakura Nation hadn’t just dropped a few silver coins. He had dropped a highly valuable artifact from his active inventory.

Dante hadn’t bothered to appraise it during the standoff.

But now in the relative safety of the dungeon entrance, he pulled the heavy glowing scroll out of his void ring.

It was forged from incredibly thick dark parchment and sealed with a brilliant blinding white wax emblem.

[Item Appraised: All Lives Are Equal Scroll]

[Tier: Saint Destroyer]

[Type: Ultimate Equalizer Consumable]

[Description: A highly restricted system-balancing artifact. Upon activation, the user targets a single hostile entity.]

[For exactly 30 seconds, the total Level, Base Stats, and Passive Mitigations of the target are forcefully reduced to perfectly match the current baseline of the user.]

[Bypasses all immunities, cosmic weight, and divine scaling. Limit: One use per scroll.]

Dante stared at the description.

Saint Destroyer tier. It was the exact same rarity as the [Bow of the Eclipse].

"That is a completely broken mechanic," Nyx whispered and leaned over his shoulder to read the prompt through her dark glasses.

"It literally scales down a boss. You could walk up to a Level 100 God-tier entity, pop that scroll, and it instantly becomes a Level 72 mob for thirty seconds."

"It removes the mathematical advantage of high-tier encounters," Sera agreed as her business mind rapidly calculated the value. "It turns an impossible raid into a fair fight."

"I do not really do fair fights," Dante noted smoothly and stored the massive scroll securely in his infinite inventory.

"But it is a fantastic insurance policy. If we hit a boss that completely ignores the damage scaling of my [Asura Vanguard], we can just bring it down to my level."

"Ryujin was definitely saving that for the final boss of this dungeon," Lila said and shivered slightly in the sweltering heat. "He must have bought it off a black-market data broker for an absolute fortune."

"And now it is ours," Mei grinned and spun her massive frying pan. "Thanks for the donation, God-King!"

"Alright, enough gloating," Dante ordered and turned away from the loot.

"We have an ultimate 24-hour event dungeon to clear, and we need to do it before the system realizes I just banned a million paying customers."

He led the twelve-man squad deeper into the volcanic tunnel.

The environment was brutal.

The air was incredibly dense and smelled heavily of sulfur and scorched earth.

Rivers of bright orange magma flowed sluggishly beneath the heavy iron grates they walked on. They cast long erratic shadows across the dark stone walls.

[Zone Alert: The Flame Cave]

[Hazard Detected: Extreme Volcanic Activity.]

[Warning: magma traps and sudden thermal vents are highly active. Proceed with caution.]

"Keep your eyes open," Dante warned the squad. "This is not a linear hallway. It is a maze, and the traps here are not going to be obvious pressure plates."

He didn’t rely on the low-level recruits to spot the danger.

Dante activated the secondary passive on his new [Evil Dragon Helmet].

[Skill Executed: Dragon’s Insight]

The visual transition was immediate.

The sweltering orange-lit cavern didn’t fade, but an overlapping highly detailed grid of glowing blue and red data streams superimposed itself over his vision.

He had True Vision.

He didn’t just see the physical rocks. He saw the underlying code of the architecture of the dungeon.

"Stop," Dante commanded and held his hand up.

The squad halted immediately.

Dante looked at the heavy iron grate exactly ten feet in front of them.

To the naked eye, it looked completely normal. But through [Dragon’s Insight], the grate was glowing with a harsh aggressive red warning light.

"Magma vent," Dante stated. "If we step on that grate, it triggers a eruption."

He pointed to a narrow jagged ledge carved into the stone wall to their right.

It was unlit and extremely treacherous, but the system grid showed it as a safe path.

"We take the ledge," Dante ordered.

For the next twenty minutes, Dante navigated the treacherous winding tunnels of the Flame Cave with absolute flawless precision.

He used [Dragon’s Insight] to systematically bypass every single environmental trap the dungeon had to offer.

He sidestepped hidden pressure plates that would have dropped crushing stone blocks. He avoided false floors that opened directly into magma rivers.

He completely ignored the obvious wide-open corridors. He frequently led the squad through narrow hidden crawlspaces that safely bypassed massive kill-zones.

"You are a human cheat code," Casanova muttered and carefully squeezed through a narrow gap in the rocks. "How do you even know this path exists?"

"I have good intuition," Dante lied smoothly.

They reached the end of the labyrinthine tunnels.

The narrow path opened up into a massive sprawling subterranean cavern.

The room was breathtaking.

It was a massive circular caldera filled with a bubbling lake of pure lava.

In the absolute center of the lake and completely surrounded by fire was a towering jagged peak of black obsidian.

The ambient temperature was suffocating. But the [Ultimate Guardian Halo] of Aura and the [Frost-God Constitution] of Dante effortlessly mitigated the environmental damage.

Dante used [Dragon’s Insight] to scan the central peak.

He didn’t see a massive heavily armored monster. He didn’t see a corrupted beast.

Resting at the very top of the obsidian peak and bathed in the orange light of the magma was a massive glowing nest.

And sitting next to the nest and curled into a tight defensive ball was a figure.

It wasn’t a hostile entity.

It was a translucent glowing spirit.

It took the shape of a massive incredibly majestic bird entirely forged from dark iridescent purple flames.

Its feathers looked like shifting galaxies. But the light radiating from its form was incredibly dim and flickered weakly.

[Entity Identified: Soul of the Fire Roc]

[Faction: Divine Emperor (Fallen)]

[Level: 50]

"A Level 50 Divine Emperor," Sera whispered and stared at the massive spirit. "Dante, that is not a boss. That is a lore entity."

The Fire Roc slowly raised its head, and its glowing purple eyes locked onto the squad standing at the edge of the caldera.

It didn’t shriek. It didn’t cast a spell.

"Outworlders," the Fire Roc spoke. Its voice was incredibly soft and echoed with a profound sorrow that reverberated through the cavern. "You have braved the flames. You seek the prize."

Dante didn’t draw a weapon. He recognized a non-combat lore sequence.

He triggered [Meteor Stride] and teleported across the magma lake to materialize perfectly on the obsidian peak right next to the massive glowing spirit.

"We are here for the dungeon clear," Dante stated calmly.

The Fire Roc looked at him.

The eyes of the massive bird slowly tracked over his dark purple armor and lingered heavily on the small intricate insignia etched into his shoulder.

The [Zenith Epaulet].

The glowing spirit let out a long shuddering sigh of absolute relief.

"The Conqueror of the Abyss," the Fire Roc murmured and bowed its majestic head.

"The system has sent a true Vanguard. I will not test your strength, Champion. I have no power left to fight."

Dante crossed his arms. "What happened to you?"

"I was the warden of this peak," the Fire Roc explained and its voice trembled. "I guarded the nest. But I was betrayed."

"A abomination, the Scarlet Flame Wyrm, breached the sanctum. It devoured my physical form. It seeks to consume my unborn daughter to steal her cosmic weight."

The Fire Roc looked desperately at the glowing nest behind her.

"I am merely a remnant clinging to the code to protect her," the Fire Roc pleaded and looked back at Dante.

"Please, Outworlder. I beg of you. Bypass the trial. Enter the inner cave and slay the Wyrm before it breaches the nest. Save my daughter."

[Hidden Quest Triggered: The Fire Roc’s Last Wish]

[Objective: Enter the Inner Sanctum and slay the Scarlet Flame Wyrm.]

Dante didn’t hesitate. He accepted the quest.

"I will handle the Wyrm," Dante promised. "Your daughter is safe."

The Fire Roc smiled and showed a expression of pure unadulterated gratitude.

"Thank you, Champion," the spirit whispered.

The massive purple bird completely dissolved into a shower of bright warm light and faded entirely from the server as her duty was finally complete.

Dante turned toward the massive dark archway leading into the final chamber of the volcano.

He didn’t need to check his stats. He didn’t need to prep his buffs.

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