Allen buzzed through the air with the world whistling past his faceplate, skirting the bay on his way to Hatula's headquarters and away from the purple cloud of death growing behind him, using small drones to try and follow the advance of the monster that ruined his home for the past few months, the gargantuan starburst dragon avatar seemed to be out of control, after blowing up the mountain and somehow being enlarged to epic proportions she flew in a straight line to him leaving total devastation of the most densely populated guild claimed area in the whole game, whole cities turned to dust in a single breath.
The world flickered, for an infinitesmal moment Allen floated in utter nothing and thought it was his end before finding himself plummeting out of the sky when time moved forward, realigning himself with the ground he blasted forward and skirted just above the roofs of a small town, only a few more minutes to reach the tower where Kyatha held her command center.
Another blackout had him smashing head first into the ground just as he realised how stupid it was to draw the monster to his own allies, pain started blooming throughout his body as his armor didn't have enough time to set collision defenses when the game lagged.
Allen couldn't remember in his thousand years of life any time when the actual game was ever lagged enough to effect the Player, NPCs or enviroment like that, something the insane oversized Meroa did took so much processing power that it literaly blanked the world servers for the first time since going online.
Getting up took effort with his mangled limbs and being buried underground from the crash, overclocking the armor servos let him push through and then realign his broken body so the healing process didn't start from scratch.
A bell rang in his ingame HUD and he looked as crystal scales with the size of tower shields rammed by his drone, which put the monster only about ten minutes away from him, replacing broken pieces from the armor was faster than trying to fix them, blood gushed from his wounds when he removed his chestplate and hind legs, not wanting to look at the damage he just equipped the new armor and lifted off on its blasters.
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Using manual controls so he could push it to overdrive, Allen turned toward the pirate armada and flew in a straight line, his remote sensors showed how the monstrosity turned to intercept and he was just happy that he had turned this holocaust creature against the invaders and not his own allies, lamenting the few ships and small towns that were now in its path he didn't have long to worry as flak cannons started blasting at him and he needed every bit of concentration to stay ahead of the lines of fire.
Barrel to pivot turned into a standup and out for a dive, converging bullet lines tried to anticipate his next move and he let some of the internal routines to take over with a randomiser for the motion, a double barrel saved him when they thought he was going for a dive and then the world turned black for more than a microsecond.
In the darkness there was a doorway, Allen could feel every strained muscle and broken bone screaming in his mind, he remembered a time when he could block those senses, but that time was over when Devo hacked his blockers, now they were both dead for so long he was probably the only person that knew the man was a menace to society in his life, leaving behind a legacy of bloodshed and social manipulations manifested in the current weakling heading the free guild alliance.
Anger pushed him beyond the pain, let him focus on his other senses from when he was last floating in the void as a being inside a crystal, though the dragon body was distracting he could still access the basic compiler and start reading through the errors in the system, as it appeared the biggest problem was that Meroa's breath caused too many effects on each partical in touched, so he redifined its parameters and removed the randomness by applying NPCs to the different entities created by the breath, the system knew how to handle billions of NPCs, just not random effected particles that switched the effect when generated, breaking the loop had a very peculiar effect, like a huge sigh from behind a screen.
Flickering back to reality Allen found himself underwater surrounded by wrecked ships from the week long battle that raged in the bay while he was fixing the now ruined overlords, a pang of guilt and remorse hit him when he thought about all his friends and coworkers that perished when he ran away at Meroa's command.