He didn't bother looking for a target yet. He raised his right hand and extended his thumb and middle finger. He channeled 5 points of his mana into his fingertips and snapped.
Snap!
Fzzzt...
A tiny, pathetic ember no larger than a match strike popped into existence above his thumb. It flickered weakly for half a second before fizzling out into a wisp of gray smoke.
For a microsecond, nothing happened. The woods remained silent.
"Let's see what happens when you feed a spark the power of a sun," Sebastian whispered.
Then, the system registered the action!
Sebastian's vision was violently assaulted by a cascade of overlapping system notifications. The translucent blue windows popped up so fast they sounded like a slot machine paying out a jackpot.
[Action Registered: Cast Basic Spark.]
[Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.]
[Ding! Basic Spark leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!]
[Skill Evolution Available. Basic Spark evolves to Tier 1: Fireball!]
[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Fireball leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!]
[Skill Evolution Available. Fireball evolves to Tier 3: Pyroblast!]
[Proficiency Overflow Detected! Pyroblast leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!]
[WARNING: Concept Threshold Breached. Constructing Law of Fire...]
[Evolution Complete. Pyroblast evolves to Conceptual Law: Forbidden Spell Solar Flare.]
Sebastian staggered back half a step. He clutched his head as the localized server data was violently downloaded directly into his cerebral cortex!
The knowledge wasn't just numbers. It was the fundamental understanding of heat, atomic friction, and stellar ignition. He felt the terrifying, crushing weight of a dying star settle neatly into his spell hotbar.
He opened his skill menu, blinking away the red warning errors that the game's anti-cheat system was helplessly throwing at him before being bypassed by the glitched code.
══════════════════════════════════════
[Solar Flare] (Forbidden Tier)
↳ Level: MAX
↳ Cost: 90 Mana
↳ Damage: Immeasurable (5,000% Base Magic Damage)
↳ Description: You do not cast fire; you command the concept of nuclear fusion. Condenses the essence of a star into a single point of devastation to incinerate all matter within the target zone.
══════════════════════════════════════
Sebastian stared at the description. Cost 90 Mana.
He had 100. He could cast a god-tier spell at Level 1 with 10 mana to spare. It was so fundamentally broken that a dark, predatory smile carved itself onto his face, followed by a genuine, albeit deeply unhinged laugh!
A low, vibrating growl cut his laughter short.
Grrr...
From the thick brush surrounding the clearing, six pairs of glowing yellow eyes emerged. Hungry eyes.
They were Demon Wolves. They were massive, hulking beasts with pitch-black fur and maws dripping with corrosive saliva.
[Monster: Demon Wolf]
[Level: 5]
[HP: 400]
To them, the unarmored Level 1 Drifter standing in the clearing in rags wasn't a threat. He was a walking buffet!
The alpha wolf stepped forward. Its muscles coiled like steel springs. Drool dripping from its jaws, it bared its fangs, ready to leap and tear Sebastian's throat out in a single bite.
Sebastian didn't draw back. He didn't adopt a defensive stance. He didn't run.
"You're in my damn way," he whispered.
He raised his right hand again. He didn't bother aiming. He didn't need to. He allocated 90 mana from his pool and snapped his fingers.
"Solar Flare."
Click.
The world went white.
There was no sound at first. The explosion was so violently sudden that it created a vacuum, sucking the oxygen out of the clearing.
A sphere of pure, blinding, white-hot plasma dropped from the digital sky directly onto the center of the wolf pack! It wasn't a ball of fire. It was a miniature sun.
BOOM!
Then came the noise. It was a pressure wave of pure thermal annihilation!
The shockwave hit Sebastian. The spell's innate programming prevented him from taking friendly-fire damage, blowing his ragged tunic back.
The heat, however, was visceral. The six Demon Wolves didn't yelp or howl. They didn't have time to process pain.
In the span of 0.1 seconds, the moment the plasma touched them, their digital flesh and blood flashed into vapor. Their bones turned to ash, simply erased from the server's database!
The surrounding century-old trees snapped like toothpicks, catching fire instantly. Their sap boiled and exploded like fragmentation grenades.
Sizzle...
The earth beneath the blast radius glowed a furious, molten orange. It instantly liquefied into glass under the million-degree heat.
The miniature sun vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving behind an apocalypse in miniature.
Sebastian lowered his hand. The clearing was gone.
In its place was a perfect, smoking crater of glowing melted glass twenty meters wide! It radiated waves of distortion into the air.
The physics engine of The Ethereal Plane was struggling. The edges of the crater flickered slightly with wireframe polygons as the server desperately tried to calculate the catastrophic terrain deformation caused by a Forbidden Spell in a tutorial zone.
[Ding! You have killed Demon Wolf (Lv 5) x6. EXP +300.]
[Ding! Overkill Bonus! EXP doubled.]
[Massive Experience Gained!]
↳ [Ding! Congratulations! You have reached Level 2.]
↳ [Ding! You have reached Level 3.]
↳ [Ding! You have reached Level 4.]
Sebastian dismissed the leveling notifications with a flick of his wrist. He looked down at his hand, and then at the molten glass crater.
The absolute devastation was intoxicating, but his tactical mind was already breaking down the flaws.
He was down to 10 mana. If a seventh wolf had been hiding in the woods, he would have had to punch it to death with his bare hands.
The spell was an ultimate trump card, but he couldn't rely on it for sustained combat. He needed more skills.
He needed passives. He needed to abuse the Nexus Glitch on physical combat, movement, and stealth.
"Too slow. One step at a time," Sebastian muttered to himself.
He stepped carefully around the edge of the cooling glass crater to collect the meager, slightly singed loot drops the wolves had left behind.
He had the power of a god but the mana pool of a peasant. It was time to find Old Man Clay and start stealing everything not nailed down to the server floor!