The world dissolved into a cacophony of groaning steel and shrieking concrete. The Adjuster's attack wasn't a bomb; it was a cancellation notice sent to the building's very existence. The floor beneath Leo's feet didn't just crack—it lost its integrity, crumbling into dust and cascading into the fiery chasm he had created below.
"The stairs!" a voice screamed. It was Ben, the engineer.
Leo didn't need to be told. He grabbed the front of Sarah's coat, hauling her into the rooftop access stairwell as the landing they had been standing on disintegrated. They tumbled inside, slammed the door shut, and were immediately plunged into a hellish, churning chaos.
The stairwell, powerful, resonant energy. "Protocol dictates that all witnesses to a contract void must be sanitized. There are no more rules. There is only the correction of an error. Your error."
The largest ventilation unit, a ten-foot-tall metal box, began to shudder violently. The screws holding its panels in place shot outward like bullets. With a deafening shriek of tearing metal, the panels flew off, revealing the Adjuster standing within, his suit immaculate once more. The physical destruction hadn't touched him; he had simply relocated.
"There is nowhere left to run," the Adjuster said, taking a step onto the roof proper.
The handful of survivors, their courage finally broken, let out a collective moan of despair. Sarah clutched the sleeping Lily tighter, her body shielding the child's.
But Leo wasn't looking at the Adjuster. He was looking past him, at the complex array of communication equipment. His new, higher Intelligence stat allowed him to see it not just as a mess of wires and dishes, but as a system. An interconnected system. A grid.
"Sarah," he said, his voice quiet but urgent. "When I tell you to, run to the far edge of the roof. The side overlooking the main building. Don't stop for anything."
"Leo a solid concrete tube, became a vertical earthquake. The steps buckled. Pipes burst, spraying them with freezing water. The entire structure groaned, tilting at an impossible angle as the wing of the hospital tore away from the main building.
"Hold, what are you going to do?" she pleaded.
He gave her a grim smile. "He says he' on!" Leo roared, his voice barely audible over the noise. He braced himself in the doorway, creating a shield withs a corrector. I'm a janitor. We're in the same business. Let's see who's better at their job."
He turned to face the advancing Adjuster. The being raised its hand, the black his body as Sarah huddled behind him. A shower of concrete dust and debris rained down from above.
Through it all, his mind orb of anti-life forming in its palm again. This time, there would be no fire, no tricks. Just was a sanctuary of cold, system-driven calm. He could feel the structural decay through his Sense Contamination erasure.
Leo held his ground. He focused his will. It was time to unlock the skill he had never understood, the final skill—not as a contaminant, but as a violent void of Order. He could pinpoint the shear lines, the stress fractures promise of his Class. He poured his mana into it, feeding it the raw, desperate need of the moment.
.
"The roof is our only way!" Ben yelled, his face a mask of terror but his eyes sharp with an engineer'The lock shattered.
[Prerequisites Met: Demonstrated mastery over Environmental Manipulation, Hazard Creation, and Systemic Cleansing. Class evolution initiated!]
[Skill Unlocked: [Deep Clean (Lvl 1)]!]
[Description: Purge as desperate calculations. "The stairwell is going to shear off! We have maybe thirty seconds to climb before we're part of the rubble!"
Sarah didn't hesitate. She scrambled past Leo and began climbing the now-c designated area of ALL foreign supernatural influences, energies, and entities. Resets the target area to its 'baseline' state.anted ladder-like stairs, moving with the practiced urgency of an emergency responder. Leo pushed Ben ahead of him and followed, Cost: Massive, scaling with area size and contamination level.]
This was it. The ultimate janitorial power. It wasn't about wiping a stain. It was about resetting the factory defaults.
The Adjuster lunged, the black orb pulsing every upward step a gamble against gravity and total collapse.
They were a frantic, desperate train of survivors. One of the nurses,.
Leo slapped his palm flat against the gritty, tarred surface of the roof and roared the name of his newfound a young man named Rick, hoisted the still-unconscious Lily over his shoulder, her small form terrifyingly still amidst power. "[DEEP CLEAN]!"
His entire mana bar vanished in an instant. A wave of energy, not the chaos. The others followed, their panicked scrambles echoing in the vibrating tube.
Leo was the last one up. blue or gold, but pure, colorless, and absolute, erupted from his hand. It wasn't an explosion. He looked down and saw the bottom of the stairwell peel away into a churning vortex of fire, smoke, and falling debris. The building was tearing itself apart. He climbed faster, his muscles screaming in protest.
He burst through the rooftop It was an anti-explosion. A wave of total, conceptual Null.
It washed across the roof, and everything that was wrong ceased to be.
The Adjuster's black orb? Vanished. The supernatural energy reinforcing access door into blinding, late-afternoon sunlight, gasping in the clean, open air. He helped haul the his body? Stripped away. The technological link that allowed him to speak through the satellites? Severed.
He was still there, a man in a suit, but the immense, untouchable power radiating from him was gone. He stumbled last survivor through just as a final, soul-shaking lurch tore their entire section free. The stairwell behind, a look of genuine shock and disbelief on his face, his body suddenly subject to the boring, mundane laws of physics he them dropped into the abyss with a sound like a giant tearing a mountain in half.
They were alive. They were on the roof. And they were stranded on a dying concrete island, watching in horror as a significant portion of Mercy General Hospital collapsed had so long ignored.
But the Deep Clean did more. It spread across the roof, and the communication arrays, the ventilation into its own foundation, a plume of dust and smoke billowing into the sky like a funeral pyre.
The small systems, the power conduits—every piece of machinery that had been warped or influenced by the System—reverted to their baseline state. They discharged decades of stored, ambient electrical energy in a single, massive surge.
Every wire on the roof, group of survivors—Leo, Sarah, Ben, Rick with Lily, and a tough-looking woman who'd introduced herself as Maria—huddled together on the helipad, staring at the raw, fresh wound in the cityscape they had just escaped including the thick grounding cables for the massive lightning rods, lit up with brilliant, white-hot electricity. An interconnected web of pure, high-voltage power crisscrossed the entire rooftop.
Leo had not just disarmed his opponent. He had,. The noise subsided, replaced by a profound and terrible silence. They had survived. But for the first time, they could truly see the world they had survived into.