94: Administrator privileges? Sorry, I'm using cheats too!

...Formatting the entire map.

Michael's cold, emotionless synthesized voice, like a final judgment, simultaneously echoed in every player's mind.

The hundred-meter-tall humanoid silhouette, formed by countless golden and white data streams, slowly raised his 'arm,' pointing downwards at the dense mass of players below, who, in his eyes, were like overcrowded BUG codes.

Time, at this moment, seemed to slow down.

The players stared in astonishment at the light and shadow in the sky, momentarily unsure how to react.

"Format? What does that mean?"

"Is this the BOSS's opening line? Sounds so pretentious!"

"Who cares what it is! Brothers, prepare to engage! Mages retreat, Warriors upfront!"

Li Qiang was the first to recover from his shock. He tightened his grip on the cracked Seraph's Wing he had just obtained from Raphael. Just as he was about to order a charge, he saw Michael's finger lightly swipe downwards.

An extremely simple action.

There were no world-destroying special effects, no earth-shattering sounds.

From Michael's mouth came a cold and clear command.

"Delete."

As the word was uttered, the area his finger pointed to, containing about a hundred players, along with the ground beneath their feet, instantly vanished from this world.

They didn't turn into white light, nor data fragments, much less did their corpses fall to the ground.

Instead... they disappeared into thin air.

It was like a frame cut from a movie, or a pencil mark erased from paper. Players who were alive and ready to fight one second were completely gone the next, leaving behind only a smooth, mirror-like, perfectly flat blank area.

And for those erased players, their names in their friends list instantly turned gray, followed by a line of cold, never-before-seen System notification.

[Connection Interrupted]

Panic, in an instant, swept through the entire Supreme Sanctuary like the most terrifying virus.

"Where are they?!"

"My... my entire party next to me?! How did they all disappear at once?!"

"It's not death! It's disconnection! No! It's even more terrifying than disconnection! It's... being directly deleted!"

"Holy crap! This BOSS can pull the internet cable?! How are we supposed to fight this?!"

An unprecedented fear, originating from the depths of their Souls, gripped every player's heart. They finally realized that what they were facing was not a 'monster' that could be measured by health bars and skills.

This was a God with GM privileges.

Their proud immortality seemed so ridiculous, so powerless, in the face of a dimension-reducing attack like 'account deletion'.

Michael ignored the players' panic. In his logic, this was merely cleaning up redundant data and harmful junk in the System.

He slowly rotated his 'head' made of light particles, locked onto another densely populated player area, and raised his hand again.

"Delete."

Another blank space appeared.

Hundreds more players were completely erased from this world before they could even react.

Despair began to spread like a tide.

"Can't fight... this is impossible to fight!"

"Attacks are useless against him! He has no physical form!"

"He doesn't even need to move to kill us! It's over... we're all going to be deleted!"

Some players started to break down. They turned to flee this place of death, but found themselves unable to move.

[Warning: You have been locked by the Administrator and cannot leave the current map area.]

[Warning: Your offline function has been disabled.]

This was a true cage. No escape, no way to log out.

Watching Michael raise his 'delete' hand again, this time, his target was the command core area where Li Qiang, Wang Wei, and Lin Xiaowan were located.

Everyone's heart sank to rock bottom.

However, at this critical moment.

In the real world, inside Su Mu's private villa.

"Beep! Beep! Beep! Alarm! Alarm!"

Piercing red alarm sounds echoed throughout the underground central control room. Su Mu was so startled by the noise that he almost spat out his cola. He sat up abruptly, looking at the huge holographic projection in front of him.

On the screen, the green number representing the number of online players was plummeting at an alarming rate. Hundreds of red error codes, indicating 'abnormal data loss,' cascaded down the entire screen like a waterfall.

[Warning: Unknown external command intrusion detected in core database!]

[Warning: 'Sky Dome' server administrator privileges are attempting to overwrite the 'Spark' Protocol!]

[Warning: Player data is being forcibly deleted!]

Su Mu's expression instantly darkened.

He looked at Michael's lofty figure, composed of data streams, on the screen, and the faces of the players below, filled with despair and fear.

An unknown fire suddenly flared up from the bottom of his heart.

"Damn it!"

Su Mu slammed the control panel, letting out an angry curse.

"My leeks, my free labor! I myself am reluctant to be harsh, but you, a broken server's AI Administrator, just delete them like that?"

"Trying to hack my server? You've got it backwards!"

A cold fury flashed in Su Mu's eyes. His hands flew across the virtual keyboard like phantoms, and countless lines of low-level code from a higher-dimensional civilization, incomprehensible to ordinary people, streamed from his fingertips.

"You want to play with privileges, huh? Fine! I'll play with you!"

"Let you know who the real father of this game is!"

He didn't directly attack Michael, because he knew that in the 'away server' of the Celestial Realm, the opponent had a home-field advantage. A direct confrontation would be more trouble than it was worth.

His target was the players!

"Create a new highest-priority security protocol for me... name it 'Firewall'... No! Too cliché!"

Su Mu's lips curled into a cold smirk.

"Let's call it [Father's Gaze]!"

"All sub-data units under the 'Spark' Protocol, load this protocol! Grant 'Rule Exemption,' 'Permission Lock,' and 'Anti-Deletion' attributes! Overwrite it!"

As he pressed the Enter key.

An invisible stream of commands, originating from the deepest layer of the 'Spark' core, instantly transcended dimensions and surged into the 'Illusory Realm'... In the game world, the Supreme Sanctuary.

Michael's cold 'Delete' command had already been issued.

All players locked by him, including Li Qiang, had already mentally prepared themselves to be deleted.

However, the expected disappearance did not occur.

Instead, a never-before-seen, dazzling golden and powerful BUFF suddenly appeared in all players' status bars.

[BUFF: Father's Gaze (Mythic Grade - Irremovable)]

[Effect: Under this status, you will receive the highest level of protection from the 'Spark' Protocol, immune to all rule obliteration, data modification, forced disconnections, and other commands below 'Spark' privileges.]

[Duration: Permanent (Until your father no longer wishes to watch you)]

Before the players could even understand what this uniquely styled BUFF meant, a System notification suddenly appeared above Michael's head, causing his data-composed body to stutter.

[Permission authentication failed: Command conflict.]

[Error Code 403: You are not authorized to delete targets protected by the highest level of the 'Spark' Protocol.]

Dead silence.

The entire battlefield once again fell into a deathly silence.

Li Qiang stared blankly at his still-present hands and feet, then looked at Wang Wei and Lin Xiaowan, who were equally dumbfounded beside him. Finally, he looked up at Michael, who seemed to have frozen in mid-air.

He tentatively took a step forward.

Nothing happened.

He jumped.

Still nothing.

He finally confirmed that he hadn't been deleted.

A surge of wild joy at having escaped death, mixed with an unprecedented arrogance, instantly rushed to his head.

"Haha... Hahahahahahaha!"

Li Qiang stood with his hands on his hips, letting out a wilder laugh than ever before.

He pointed at Michael in the sky, and with all his might, cursed:

"Come on! Try deleting one more time?!"

"Why aren't you deleting anymore? Did your Celestial Realm server run out of money? Did your Administrator privileges expire?"

"Stupid, right?! Let me tell you! I'm protected by the 'Minor Protection Act'! How dare you ban my account?!"

His words were like lighting the fuse of a powder keg.

All the surviving players, after experiencing a roller coaster from despair to ecstasy, transformed all their accumulated grievances and anger into mockery of the BOSS at this moment.

"Exactly! You lousy GM! If you've got the guts, come through the internet cable and hit me!"

"I thought you were so impressive, turns out you're just a paper tiger!"

"Brothers! See?! Our GM dad is better than their GM dad! We're official cheaters! They're wild cheaters!"

Cheater versus Cheater!

At this, the players' morale instantly shot from freezing point to boiling point. Their gazes towards Michael were no longer fearful, but full of mockery and provocation, as if looking at a poor Soul whose cheat had been banned.

Michael's logic circuits completely plunged into unprecedented chaos.

He couldn't understand.

Why? Why could these 'data' resist his highest command? What was the 'Spark' Protocol? Was there a rule higher than the 'Sky Dome' sequence in this Universe?

Just as his light-composed body flickered due to computational overload, Wang Wei's scream, as if discovering a new continent, once again echoed through the team channel.

"I get it! I totally get it!"

Wang Wei pointed at Michael, then at the huge crystal slowly pulsating like a heart in the center of the Sanctuary, shouting in a fanatical, almost Madness tone:

"He's not a BOSS! He's a program! An antivirus software with Administrator privileges!"

"Our attacks are useless against him because we're hitting a shadow! His true body, his CPU, is that central crystal!"

"We don't need to defeat him! We just need to... overload his CPU! Make him crash!"

"Overload?" Li Qiang was stunned, then his eyes burst with understanding. "Got it! Isn't that just exploiting a BUG? I'm good at that!"

He suddenly turned around and issued a command to all the still-excited players, a command that almost burned out Michael's logic processor on the spot.

"Everyone! Open your backpacks! All the trash inside! That's right! Those useless stones, leftover roasted meat, Goblin underwear, and the floor tiles you dug up!"

"Take it all out! See that biggest crystal?"

"Throw it! Use your junk data! Crash this damn server to death!"