As Julius left the room, his steps were as unsteady as an old server whose cache had just been cleared. Sergei glanced at the fifty-page labor report and casually closed it.

  “Boss, what exactly did you write on that piece of paper you gave him?” Aria emerged from the shadows, still holding half a half-eaten compressed biscuit in her hand. “The way he looked at you was like he was looking at a devil who could stuff his soul into an abacus.”

  “It’s nothing, I just helped him with an asset liquidation. I told him that if the gods are truly omniscient, then his overtime pay, disability allowance, and compensation for emotional distress over the past forty years should all be recorded in the accounts of the divine kingdom. Since the gods didn’t pay them, it means that the gods have breached the contract.”

  Sergei leaned back on the throne, his fingers unconsciously tapping the Black Smart Bracelet on his left wrist. “But in this kind of ‘one-way transparent’ contract, the client will never admit to breaching the contract. They will only think that there is a bug on the execution side.”

  Aria swallowed the biscuit, seemingly understanding, and was about to speak when the light in the hall suddenly distorted without warning. The previously dim purple magical light began to flicker wildly, at a frequency so fast it hurt the eyes. Then, a huge red dialog box popped up in the center of Sergei’s retina, accompanied by a piercing system error message:

  [WARNING: Large-scale external anomalous code injection detected]

  [Coordinates: Northern border of the Demon King's territory]

  [Exception type: Garbage overflow / Forced format command]

  Sergei’s eyes instantly turned cold. “Here it comes,” he said in a low voice. “The forced shutdown was caused by refusing to pay the ‘faith tax.’ That old man Sol has finally decided to write off this ‘bad debt’ directly.”

  Meanwhile, in the Papal States of St. Lawrence, at the Great Cathedral of Saint Radiance.

  Pope Sol stood before the colossal Mirror of Truth, which reflected not a mirror image, but a complex map of magical energy flow spanning the entire continent. Most of the map shimmered with a steady white light, except for the corner symbolizing the Demon King’s territory, which appeared an eerie gray.

  “Your Majesty, the massive high-energy reaction we discovered in the Asgardian wasteland… according to the latest audit results, it was just a false data fabrication.” A clergyman knelt behind him, his voice trembling. “Sergei Starburner used some kind of logic we’ve never seen before to create the illusion of a solid defense. In reality, the underlying structure there is riddled with holes.”

  Pope Sol stretched out his aged hand and gently touched the gray area. “Since we can’t recover the assets, let’s turn them into dead debts.” Sol’s voice was devoid of emotion, like that of a cold-blooded actuary. “Activate ‘Azrael’. Tell the priests at the border to stop all divine spell supply and temporarily transfer the logical access to that area to ‘Remnant’.”

  “Your Majesty! That’s a catastrophic level… what if it gets out of control…”

  “That’s a cleanup procedure,” Sol interrupted him. “When the system is beyond repair, formatting is the only option.”

  The Demon King's Northern Border.

  The once desolate wasteland began to churn like boiling asphalt. The spatial rifts in the sky no longer crawled slowly, but began to frantically spew out black, thread-like substances. The substances that fell to the ground did not turn into dust, but instead rapidly reorganized and multiplied, like a tumor growing in a disorderly manner.

  Standing on the terrace atop the castle, Sergei used the far-field scanning function of the Black Smart Bracelet to clearly see the monster taking shape. It was a gigantic dragon with a jagged skeleton, but its body was not made of flesh and scales; rather, it was forcibly pieced together from countless broken runes, shattered armor, and rotting fragments of souls. With each breath, it caused the surrounding space to become noticeably pixelated.

  “That’s… the dragon Azrael?” Ronan, who had rushed over, was deathly pale, barely able to hold his staff. “Legend has it that it was the first pile of ‘code garbage’ after the Chaos Gods disintegrated, an absolutely unanalyzable chaos…”

  “Don’t use that superstitious term, Ronan.” Sergei squinted, and the data stream on his retina flashed by, dissecting the roaring dragon into a series of chaotic red characters. “From my perspective, it’s not a dragon. It’s a ‘system redundancy garbage’ resulting from a long period of neglect and accumulated logical conflicts. The Papal States has kept it locked in the abyss for so long just so that at this moment, it can be thrown into our internal network as a self-destruct virus.”

  The dragon roared to the sky, and a black, highly corrosive shockwave swept out, causing the defensive array that Sergei had painstakingly built to vanish as quickly as a revoked draft.

  “Boss, what do we do now?” Aria gripped the longbow tightly, her knuckles turning white from the force.

  Sergei took one last look at the system interface:

  [Warning: Your "false prosperity" strategy has failed due to logic overriding.]

  [Remaining computing power: 15%]

  “Prepare to clean up the memory.” Sergei took off his coat, and a deep black light suddenly burst from the bracelet on his left wrist, covering his shoulder. “Since the client refuses to pay the final payment and wants to remotely format the machine… then we’ll decompile his cleanup program.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  He turned to look at Aria: “Arya, this time I don’t need you to use brute force. I need you to be my ‘compiler.’ Do you dare to dismantle that ‘garbage dump’ into its most primitive binary code?”

  Aria paused for a moment, then a wild smile curled at the corner of her lips: “As long as you can give me directions, I’ll tear anything apart.”

  Azrael had arrived.

  As the colossal dragon spread its tattered bone wings and swept past the Demon King’s castle tower, the once-solid stone structure crumbled under its black force field, turning into countless pixelated particles that flickered and leaped in the air. This was not destruction in the physical sense, but rather the forced revocation of the "definition of existence" of this area.

  “Arya, connection established. Abandon your subjective vision and hand over your central nervous system to my system for management.” Sergei stood at the edge of the terrace, dark purple particles spewing from the vents on the back of his Black Hole Armor, accompanied by a deep rumble. He didn’t charge at the dragon, but instead reached out and placed his hand on the back of Aria’s neck.

  [Link Activation: 1:1 Synchronization]

  [Remapping target vision: Higher-order resolution mode loaded]

  Arya let out a muffled groan. The world before her instantly transformed: the sunset, the ruins, and the dragon vanished, replaced by a low-poly world composed of gray and white lines. And on the massive dragon’s body, dense, cascading red code covered everything.

  “Look at that dragon.” Sergei’s cold voice rang directly in her mind. “In the eyes of mortals, it is an invincible calamity. But in my eyes, it is just a piece of junk program that is copied and pasted everywhere for the sake of convenience and is full of logical dead loops.”

  The dragon roared, and the crystal on its chest flickered violently as a "breath of annihilation" capable of vaporizing matter within a radius of several miles began to gather.

  “It’s about to breathe fire!” Arya instinctively tried to back away.

  “Don’t move.” Sergei’s voice was as steady as a rock. “When it’s ‘warming up for the attack,’ it will temporarily shut down the defense patch on the lower left wing to ensure data throughput. The coordinates (122, 45, 89) are its energy feedback node.”

  The dragon opened its massive jaws, and destructive black light surged forth like a tidal wave.

  “Now! Shift three body lengths to the side, full draw.” Arya felt as if her body was being precisely manipulated by some unseen force. She didn’t think, nor did she even look at the oncoming pillar of destructive light. Under Sergei’s command, she slid into the blind spot of the breath at an unseen angle.

  “Shooting.”

  Whoosh! An arrow, imbued with remnants of a black hole, was released from its bow. In Arya’s analytical vision, the arrow did not strike the dragon’s head, but instead pierced the center of a red patch flashing with the word "Error."

  In that instant, the once-mighty annihilation breath vanished abruptly into the air, like a projector whose power had been forcibly cut off. The massive body of the demonic dragon shuddered violently, emitting a painful and bewildered wail.

  “See that? It’s throwing an error.” Sergei sneered. “The Papal States’ programmers are too lazy. To support such a massive size, they wrote the energy cycle as an infinite recursive loop, but forgot to add an exception handling mechanism. As long as an ‘illegal character’ is injected at a critical node, its entire underlying architecture will collapse in a chain reaction.”

  The dragon frantically flapped its wings, trying to take off, but due to a damaged node, its left wing experienced severe "data latency," and its flapping frequency was completely out of sync with its right wing. Like a stalled passenger plane, it crashed haphazardly into the wasteland, kicking up clouds of dust.

  “Arya, the final blow.” Sergei leaped from the terrace, his black armor drawing a deadly arc in the air. “It’s trying to reboot the system right now, and we need to fill its core database with junk data before it boots into ‘safe mode.’ Follow me, and I’ll take you to the door of its ‘core server’.”

  Like two streaks of light, one black and one purple, the two passed through the collapsing logic field and rushed straight towards the dragon’s heart, which was composed of countless twisted characters.

  At this moment, the dragon was seen as the embodiment of divine punishment by the Papal States, but in the eyes of Sergei and Arya, it was just a broken terminal that kept popping up "illegal operation" windows and was about to crash.

  “Target: Heart. Attack type: Formatting. Arya, send this ‘client representative’ a resignation he can never process!”

  Arya somersaulted in the air, her longbow fully drawn like a full moon, the dark matter provided by the Black Hole Bracelet converging at the tip of the arrow into a singularity powerful enough to distort light.

  Goodbye, God’s trash can! The arrow pierced the sky, precisely striking the core of the dragon’s logic.

  At that moment, there was no explosion, no blood or flesh flying. The enormous dragon’s body began to collapse inward from the center, accompanied by a crisp sound like shattering glass. Within seconds, the entire hundred-meter-long dragon was completely dissolved into countless meaningless data fragments, like a document being swallowed by a paper shredder.

  The wilderness returned to silence.

  Sergei landed steadily, looking at the last line of information on his retina:

  [Garbage cleanup complete]

  [Remaining redundant energy: Captured (being converted into Demon King's initial public offering shares)]

  He turned his head and looked at Arya, who was panting heavily but whose eyes were shining with an unprecedented light: “Welcome to the new world, Arya. Now you should believe that even gods can be ‘destroyed by a lower dimension’.”

  As the last fragment of red representing the dragon vanished completely in mid-air, an eerie silence descended upon the Asgardian wasteland. There were no celebratory cheers, only the faint hissing of the ground rippled by the data storm.

  Arya collapsed to the ground, her fingertips still trembling involuntarily due to the overload caused by the high synchronization of her nerves.

  “Is it over?” she murmured to herself, looking up at the sky.

  The clouds in the sky did not dissipate; instead, they seemed to be parted by some invisible force, and a pure, breathtakingly white beam of light fell vertically from the clouds, enveloping the point where the demonic dragon perished. Within that pillar of light, the remaining specks of energy from the demonic dragon began to float upwards uncontrollably, as if forcibly reclaimed by an invisible giant hand.

  “Look, this is the professional quality of the ‘client’.” Sergei stood at the edge of the pillar of light, his dark armor shimmering with a deep purple glow, which looked particularly ironic. “The cleanup process is complete. They are now preparing to retrieve this high-energy data, which they consider ‘spoils of war,’ back into the database. As for this devastated wasteland and the ‘battery’ that nearly died, they are not even on their audit list.”