At an altitude of fifty meters, the wind ceased to be mere air. It became a blade. Oliver clung to the Frost Giant’s face like a parasite on the hide of a rhinoceros. His mechanical left hand was driven deep into the glacial layers shielding Sloth’s cheek, his mithril fingers locked in a death grip to prevent the storm from sweeping him into the abyss. Below him lay a vertical drop to certain death. Above him, a sky filled with divine fury. Oliver’s breath crystallized the moment it left his lips. His lungs felt as though they were inhaling shards of broken glass. Every gasp was a desperate struggle against the hypothermia already shutting down his vital organs one by one. Beep... Beep... His artificial heart throbbed weakly. An indicator in his retina flashed a violent red, warning him that his core temperature had plummeted below the threshold of survival. [Core Temperature: 32°C] [Status: Stage 2 Hypothermia] [Advice: Seek immediate heat source]

The storm had passed. All that remained was a deafening silence and the sound of dripping air. Drip... drip... drip... The iceberg that had once been Sloth’s body was melting at an unnatural speed. Small streams formed in the crater left by the explosion, carrying shimmering pale-blue water, remnants of mana. Oliver sat on a jagged rock protruding from the snow. He was no longer wearing his coat. His upper body was bare, revealing pale skin covered in blue burn marks, Mana Burn, slowly fading as his system’s regeneration worked. But the most striking feature was his left eye. The Golden Eye. It did not blink. Its vertical pupil kept moving, processing every dust particle, every drop of air, every heartbeat around him. To Oliver, the world was no longer a visual image, but an endless stream of data. “Ver...” Claire’s voice broke the silence. She stood five meters in front of him. Her rifle was slung over her back, but her hands trembled at her sides.

That final step didn’t feel like stepping into a room. It felt like stepping out of reality. The pull of gravity on Oliver’s legs vanished instantly. The howling of the blizzard, the cracking of ice, even the sound of Claire’s breathing beside him... all gone. ZING. The world blinked. Blinding white, then... black. Oliver opened his eyes. He was standing on a floor of black marble, smooth and reflective like a mirror. But the floor had no edge. It stretched endlessly, perfectly flat, flawless. And above them... there was no ceiling. No pyramid roof. No red sky of Purgatory. There was only Nothingness. A vacuum filled with dead stars millions of light-years away. Nebulas of violet and gold drifted slowly in the distance, forming hypnotic spirals. This wasn’t a physical room. This was the center of a pocket universe. A dimension within a dimension. “Crazy...” Claire whispered. Her voice didn’t echo. There were no walls here to reflect sound. “Where are we, Ver? I

That sound was not an explosion. Not a scream. It was the sound of an Error. ZIIIIIIIIING! It rang like a microphone pressed too close to a speaker, feedback sharp enough to shatter glass. High-pitched, piercing, drilling straight into the brainstem. The moment Oliver jammed O’Neil’s Data Chip into the neural port at the back of his neck, he did not feel ordinary pain. He felt himself being erased. It was like a computer virus injected into his bloodstream. Corrupt binary code, broken and filled with rage, surged through him, attacking the orderly system Lucyan had embedded over years. “ARGHHHHH!” Oliver convulsed violently. His back arched, rigid like a bow about to snap. The wooden chair flipped over, throwing him onto the cold black marble floor. In Oliver’s eyes, the world was no longer a beautiful cosmos. It shattered. The stars flickered wildly, on, off, on, off. The purple nebula shifted into a painful neon green, then dissolved into gray static like a broke

The white light was not warm. It was not cold either. It was… sterile. It felt like walking inside a massive fluorescent tube. There was no up, no down. Gravity was only a faint concept maintained by the last fragments of Oliver’s sanity. He staggered forward. Every step he took left behind a trail of shattered pixels in the empty air. His body… his body was no longer flesh. He looked at his own hands. His skin was transparent, revealing a skeletal structure of light beneath. His fingers flickered in and out of existence like a bad television signal. Zero Logic had given him the power of a god, but the cost was his existence as a human. He was being erased, slowly, by a universe trying to correct an error. But what hurt more than his collapsing body was the feeling inside him. “Bravo, Little Ace…” Lucyan’s applause still echoed in his ears. Clear. Mocking. Oliver had won. He had defeated the Demon King at his own table. He had bent reality, turned absolute defeat i