NABC Chapter 219: Boarding the Null-Ship, Broken Physics
Chapter 219: Boarding the Null-Ship, Broken Physics
Chapter 219: Boarding the Null-Ship, Broken Physics Alvian didn’t answer. He simply reached to his side and equipped the [Voidpiercer]. The legendary dagger materialized, its dark blade humming with the promise of deletion.
"I’ll make a door," Alvian said.
He slashed a perfect rectangle into the flesh. The [Reality Sever] passive didn’t cut the meat; it simply commanded the code of the wall to cease existing. The slab of flesh vanished into grey static, revealing a sprawling, dimly lit corridor beyond.
They stepped through the threshold. Instantly, the universe broke.
"Whoa," Valeria staggered, her heavy boots suddenly flying off the floor. She flailed her arms, drifting upward until her shoulder slammed against the ceiling. "Alvian! Gravity just inverted!"
"Not inverted," Alvian corrected, his own feet remaining firmly planted thanks to the [Greaves of the Tide-Runner]. He looked down the hallway. "Shattered."
The interior of the Null-Ship was a localized nightmare of broken physics. The corridor ahead twisted like a corkscrew, looping back on itself in an endless, impossible M.C. Escher painting. To their left, a waterfall of black liquid was flowing steadily upward, cascading into a grate on the ceiling. To their right, a pile of shattered bones floated lazily in mid-air, completely untouched by gravity.
[System Warning: Environmental Sanity Hazard.]
[Applying continuous Mental Damage.]
A sharp, agonizing spike of pain lanced through Alvian’s temples. It wasn’t a physical attack. It was the sheer, mind-bending wrongness of the geometry actively trying to scramble his brain’s ability to process visual data.
"Argh!" Seraphina dropped to her knees, clutching her head. "My eyes! My brain feels like it’s being put through a cheese grater!"
Valeria groaned from the ceiling, squeezing her eyes shut. "It hurts to look. It literally hurts to keep my eyes open."
Alvian grit his teeth. His [Chaos Body] and high mental stats were fighting the corruption, filtering out the worst of the logical paradoxes, but it was still a heavy drain.
"Do not look at the corners," Alvian ordered, forcing his voice to remain steady. "The geometry here is non-Euclidean. Your brains are trying to render 4D space on a 3D engine. It causes a fatal processing error."
"Great advice, boss," Seraphina wheezed. "How exactly are we supposed to walk through a hallway if we can’t look at it?"
"We don’t rely on standard vision," Alvian said. He walked over to Seraphina, pulling her up by the arm. "Seraphina. Your [Mistress of Whispers] class. You don’t see light; you see data. You see the code. Can you filter the environment?"
Seraphina blinked, her organic eye squeezed shut, while her mechanical [Chrono-Eye] whirred violently. "I... I can try."
She tapped the side of her mechanical eye. The iris glowed a blinding, solid white.
Seraphina gasped, her posture instantly straightening. The pain in her face vanished, replaced by a look of absolute, focused clarity. To her, the sickening, twisted hallway of rotting meat and obsidian stopped looking like a physical space. It broke down into wireframes, glowing lines of green and red binary data floating in an empty black void.
"Oh, wow," Seraphina breathed, stepping forward confidently. "That is so much better. It’s a mess of spaghetti code, but I can see the structural paths."
"You are the navigator," Alvian said, pulling Valeria down from the ceiling and anchoring her to the floor by transferring a tiny fraction of his [Tablet of the Earth Core] density into her armor. "Lead the way. Keep us on stable coordinates."
"Follow my exact footsteps," Seraphina instructed, pointing down the hall. "Don’t step on the black tiles. They aren’t tiles. They’re open spatial rifts disguised as flooring. And duck under that floating archway; the time dilation there will age you fifty years in a second."
With Seraphina acting as their guide dog through the digital hellscape, the trio moved forward. It was a slow, agonizingly careful advance. Valeria kept her eyes firmly fixed on Seraphina’s back, refusing to look at the water falling upward or the walls that seemed to breathe.
They navigated through three twisting corridors, entirely bypassing a room where gravity shifted on the beat of a silent metronome.
"Hold up," Seraphina suddenly whispered, throwing a hand back to stop them.
They had reached a large, circular chamber. The walls here were made of smooth, polished obsidian that reflected no light. In the center of the room stood a massive, sealed blast door pulsing with dark energy.
"We found the elevator to the core," Seraphina said, her mechanical eye zooming in on the door. "But we have a problem."
"Traps?" Valeria asked, tightening her grip on her claymore.
"No," Seraphina said, her voice dropping to a tense whisper. "Pests. And they aren’t fully rendered."
——
The obsidian chamber was silent, but the air felt impossibly thick, vibrating with a high-pitched, almost imperceptible hum that set Alvian’s teeth on edge.
"I don’t see anything," Valeria whispered, her back pressed against Alvian’s as she scanned the empty room. Her grey eyes darted from corner to corner, but the dark, polished walls reflected nothing but their own tense figures.
"They aren’t here yet," Seraphina replied, her mechanical eye glowing bright white as she stared at the empty space in the center of the room. "They’re... bleeding in. From outside the standard axes."
As she spoke, the empty space in the room began to fold.
It was a sickening visual. The air didn’t tear or shimmer; it simply folded over itself like a piece of origami paper, revealing a depth that hadn’t been there a second before. From within these impossible, tesseract-like folds, figures began to step out.
They were humanoid, but their proportions were horrifyingly wrong. They wore robes of shifting grey static, and their bodies seemed to flicker, existing in multiple overlapping states simultaneously. Sometimes they had three arms, sometimes none. Sometimes they were five feet tall, and a blink later, they stretched to the ceiling.
[Target Identified: Cultist of the Deep Dark]
[Level: 65]
[Status: 4D Entity / Unbound by Physics]
"Four-dimensional enemies," Alvian analyzed, his mind immediately parsing the threat. "They exist partially outside our spatial plane. This is highly problematic."
"They’re just cultists," Valeria grunted, her confidence returning at the sight of a physical enemy. "I’ve smashed cultists before."
"FOR THE MASTER!" one of the shifting entities shrieked. The sound came from everywhere at once, completely lacking a localized origin point.
The Cultist lunged at Valeria. It moved without walking, simply translating its coordinates from the center of the room to directly in front of her. It held a jagged blade of compressed dark matter.
Valeria didn’t flinch. She stepped into the attack, bringing her massive [Aegis of Terra] up in a brutal shield bash aimed perfectly at the creature’s center of mass.
"Titan’s Bash!"
The heavy, uranium-lined shield swung forward with enough kinetic force to level a building. It struck the Cultist dead center.
And passed right through it.
"What?!" Valeria stumbled forward, thrown off balance by the complete lack of physical resistance. Her shield hit nothing but empty air.
At the exact same moment, the Cultist’s dark matter blade sliced downward. It didn’t pass through her. It struck her golden pauldron, sparking violently and carving a deep gouge into the Mythical armor.
[-4,500 HP!]
Valeria cried out, rolling away before the entity could strike again. "I can’t hit it! It’s like swinging at a hologram!"
"Seraphina!" Alvian called out, dodging a sudden thrust from a second Cultist that had materialized behind him. He spun, swinging the [Edge of Entropy], but his spear of deletion also phased harmlessly through the creature’s shifting torso.
"They aren’t holograms!" Seraphina shouted, wildly throwing three poisoned daggers. The blades sailed right through a Cultist’s face and clattered uselessly against the obsidian wall. "Their hitboxes are misaligned! They are attacking us on the Z-axis, but their physical bodies are currently residing on a W-axis we can’t interact with! It’s a one-way mirror!"
"They can hit us, but we can’t hit them," Valeria summarized grimly, raising her shield to block another flurry of strikes that felt terrifyingly heavy despite the attackers’ ghostly appearance. "Alvian, we need a fix. Now."
Alvian retreated to the center of the room, his mind racing. They couldn’t win a fight where their damage output was mathematically zero. He watched the Cultists flicker. He watched the way the ambient light of the room distorted around them.
They were 4D entities. They had depth, width, height, and an extra spatial dimension that allowed them to step out of the physical plane.
"If a 3D object casts a 2D shadow," Alvian muttered, his eyes tracking the strange, dark smudges moving across the obsidian floor beneath the hovering Cultists, "then a 4D object must cast a 3D shadow."
He looked at the floor. The shadows weren’t just absences of light; they were the physical anchors of the entities in this specific dimension.
"I have a solution," Alvian announced, his voice ringing with absolute authority. "But I need them grounded."
He raised his left hand, the [Thundergod Bracers] flaring not with lightning, but with the heavy, crushing weight of the Void.
"System. [Void Sovereign: Gravitational Shear]. Maximize Area of Effect."