They Called Me Trash? Now I'll Hack Their World

The towering vaulted ceilings of the Grand Basilica were choked with the heavy, sweet scent of burning myrrh and beeswax.

Sunlight filtered weakly through the tall stained-glass windows, casting long, blood-red beams across the polished white marble floor.

Suddenly, the massive brass doors of the high altar room burst open with a deafening reverberation.

A young priest, his formal white robes stained with road dust and sweat, stumbled into the sanctuary. His breath came in ragged, terrified wheezes as he threw himself down onto his knees, his forehead slamming against the cold stone floor before the grand altar.

"Your Grace! Divine Father!" the priest cried out, his voice cracking with unadulterated panic. "The frontier! The outer provinces—!"

Matthias, the Archbishop of the Holy See, froze. He stood before the towering marble statue of the Goddess, his hands mid-air over a golden censer. Slowly, the cleric turned, his golden-trimmed ivory robes rustling against the flagstones.

"What did you say?" Matthias asked, his voice low, heavy, and echoing through the vast, quiet cathedral.

"It’s true, Archbishop!" the priest rasped, raising his pale, trembling face. "The reports were just confirmed by the courier birds! Massive planar rifts have ruptured along our distant borders! They... they are not monster gates, Your Grace! Demons... an army of true abominations is pouring across the frontier!"

Matthias stood perfectly still. The heavy brass censer slipped slightly in his grasp, its metal chain clinking softly in the dead silence of the hall.

The man’s face drained of color, his sharp, weathered features setting into a grim, terrifying mask. "So..." he whispered, the words slipping from his lips like a funeral shroud. "The Day of Judgment has come?"

Slowly, Matthias closed his eyes.

He tilted his head back toward the ceiling, shutting out the world of flesh and stone. Deep within his soul, he channeled his holy mana, casting his consciousness up toward the divine realm to seek the absolute guidance of the Goddess. He searched for the sacred threads of prophecy, the divine timeline that was supposed to grant them years of preparation before the dark apocalypse claimed the realm.

In his mind’s eye, the brilliant, golden web of destiny didn’t shine.

It was tangled, severed, and burning with dark, chaotic lightning. The ancient sequence had been violently altered; the future he had foreseen was completely erased.

Matthias opened his eyes. The milky softness of age had vanished from his gaze, replaced by a cold, burning light of absolute resolve.

"The timeline has been shattered," Matthias spoke, his voice ringing out like a thunderclap against the stone pillars. "The hands of fate have been forced forward."

He gripped his golden papacy staff tightly, slamming its iron-shod base into the stone floor with a reverberating BANG.

"Raise the holy banners!" Matthias commanded, stepping past the kneeling priest toward the high balcony. "Light the divine beacon fires along every border province! Mobilize every Paladin, every cleric, and every knight under the Church’s cross!"

He looked out over the sprawling holy city below, his chest heaving with heavy, solemn purpose.

"Prepare for war," the Archbishop declared softly into the rising wind. "If we endure this trial, humanity survives. If we fall... our realm crumbles into eternal darkness."

Aria lay in the mud, her breath coming in shallow, agonizing rattles.

Blood dripped continuously from her nose and lips, staining the torn silver embroidery of her robes.

The agonizing strain of pouring every remaining drop of her holy magic into that final, desperate explosion had ruptured her internal mana pathways.

The blast had successfully blasted the demon back into the shadow veil, but the kinetic shockwave had thrown her like a ragdoll through the dense forest, slamming her repeatedly against stone and ironwood before dumping her into the mud.

She should have died right there.

On her bruised, blood-slicked collarbone, a delicate platinum necklace hummed with a faint, rhythmic pulse of pale blue light. The artifact worked silently, steadily trickling micro-doses of passive mana back into her hollowed-out core, keeping her beating heart from completely seizing up.

With trembling, mud-caked fingers, Aria dragged her broken body a few inches forward. Clutched tightly in her palm was a small, cracked communication crystal that still glowed with a faint, dying amber light.

I sent the signal... she thought frantically, her vision blurring behind a sticky film of her own blood.

She tried to push herself up using a nearby tree root, but her legs felt like sacks of wet sand. Her knees completely buckled, and she fell face-first back into the dirt, her body refusing to obey another command.

Rustle!

The surrounding bushes hissed. The damp, earthy smell of the forest was instantly overwhelmed by the pungent stench of raw sulfur and rotting flesh.

Aria’s breath hitched. She forced her head up, her eyes widened with horror as figures emerged from the tree line.

Surrounding her was a pack of six grotesque, six-legged beasts, their skin like charred hide and their jaws unhinged to reveal rows of needle-like teeth.

Walking lazily behind them was a low-ranking demon, a slender, grey-skinned creature with twisted black horns and a cruel, jagged sword slung over its shoulder.

The demon paused, tilting its head as it looked down at the bleeding, helpless girl. A wide, disgusting grin split its face, revealing black gums.

No... Aria’s mind screamed into the empty forest, a visceral, suffocating wave of despair washing over her.

Not like this. I survived the gate...Is this where my life ends? Eaten by lesser scavengers in the mud?

She tried to summon even a flicker of divine light to her wand, but her hands only twitched uselessly against the stone.

"Look at this," the demon hissed, its voice sounding like grinding stones. "A high-born human prize, practically broken for us. Don’t leave a single bone intact, boys. Feast."

The pack of beast-monsters snarl-growled in unison, their crimson eyes flashing as they lunged forward, claws tearing through the dirt as they closed the distance to shred her to pieces.

Aria squeezed her eyes shut, pulling her arms over her chest in a final, helpless instinct.

BOOM!

A blinding comet of dense, golden-white aura shot down from the heavens like a falling star, striking the earth directly between Aria and the leaping horde with apocalyptic force.

The shockwave tore the surrounding trees from their roots, blowing back the thick forest mist and shattering the bedrock into a million flying stone fragments. The beasts mid-air didn’t even get the chance to scream, the sheer atmospheric pressure pulverized them into red paste before they even touched the ground.

CRACKLE!

A massive, ten-foot crater smoked in the center of the clearing, surrounded by spiderwebbing cracks of molten stone.

As the dense cloud of dust and divine static slowly settled, a towering figure stood upright in the center of the crater.

He wore heavy, dark blue archmage robes trimmed with gold silk, sweeping backward in the wind like a battle banner. In his right hand, he held an ornate staff carved from the heart of a World Tree, topped with a swirling, volatile core of compressed mana that hummed so loudly it vibrated the air itself.

His silver hair cut sharp against his weathered, severe face, and his piercing golden eyes glowed with an absolute, terrifying rage.

Headmaster Corwin had arrived.

"You vile, wretched dirt," Corwin rumbled, his voice carrying the crushing weight of a grandmaster.

He didn’t even look at the surviving low-ranking demon, who was currently pinned to the ground by the pressure wave, gasping for air as its bones cracked beneath the Headmaster’s aura.

Corwin simply raised a single finger, and a spear of pure, localized spatial magic instantly impaled the demon through the skull, reducing the creature to black ash before it could utter a sound.

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