Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 310: Warmup

"Under the Demi-god, I am invincible."

The words hung in the suffocating air of the Slag Heap, carrying an absolute, unshakeable certainty.

The Platinum Prince paused, floating just inches above the blood-soaked ridge.

The 9th-Order Demi-god looked down at the human boy.

He saw the cross-shaped pupils, one a void of abyssal black, the other a burning sun of dragon gold and the absolute lack of hesitation in them.

For the first time in five thousand years, the corner of the Platinum Prince’s flawless lips curled upward into a genuine, albeit faint, smile.

"Very well, human," the Prince’s voice tolled like a silver bell, cutting through the apocalyptic roars rising from the chasm.

"I’ll choose to believe in you, Keep my city intact. and I will open the gates to the outside world myself."

With a casual flick of his wrist, the Prince shot upward.

Bypassing the concept of distance, arriving instantly at the apex of the bleeding sky.

*THOOOOOM.*

From the depths of the pit, three colossal, world-ending auras erupted.

The 9th-Order demigods of the deep, a serpentine leviathan of boiling dark-matter, a six-winged phoenix composed of necrotic ash, and a shifting mass of sentient tectonic plates breached the chasm.

Their mere presence began to vaporize the very ground of Layer 6.

"The sky belongs to me," the Platinum Prince’s voice echoed across the dimension, bored and absolute.

"Domain Expansion: The Stagnant Eternity."

A blinding ceiling of flawless white light snapped over the atmosphere.

The three 9th-Order calamities crashed into it, completely isolated from the battlefield below, trapped in a timeless, unwinnable war against the Prince’s Law of Stagnation.

With the Demigods sealed away, the pressure on the ground shifted.

The true mass of the stampede broke the ridge.

It wasn’t hundreds or thousands. It was an ocean of millions.

Fifth-Order Void-Hounds, Sixth-Order Magma-Toads, and Seventh-Order Primordial Centipedes spilled over the edge like a tidal wave of rotting flesh and bone, driven mad by the apocalyptic destruction happening down in Layer 9.

"Hold the line!" Duke Ferro roared, venting a massive cloud of superheated steam from his dented iron chassis.

"There are too many!" Duke Argent hissed, his liquid-metal body splashing as a swarm of hounds tore into his flank.

The mercenary army of the Drifter alliance as already buckling.

The sheer numbers were too suffocating. It was a nightmare of endurance, a meat grinder that threatened to swallow the entire layer.

But amidst the chaos, a single figure walked forward.

Damien Voss or rather Zero unclasped the heavy black trench coat from his shoulders, letting it drop into the mud.

He didn’t draw a magical artifact to boost his stats. He didn’t open his System interface to buy a miracle with Destiny Points.

He didn’t need to cheat anymore.

For sixteen years, since the day he woke up in this cursed world as a doomed minor villain, he had been running.

He had scrambled for scraps, burned his lifespan, bled, schemed, and hidden in the shadows just to survive the whims of fate and overpowered protagonists.

But now, ever since he reached 8th order, he subconsciously felt like he had passed a limit

He closed his eyes, tapping into the Eclipse Core sitting in his chest the perfect, flawless synthesis of the Golden Dragon Aura and the Hollow King’s Shadow.

’I am tired of running,’

’Not when my parents are just right in front of me, if he hesitated here, what kind of person would I be?’

Damien thought, his breathing steady, his Celestial Life Physique eagerly drinking in the toxic abyss mana around him and converting it into pure, limitless fuel.

He opened his eyes. The world slowed down. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"Isabelle. Dukes. Fall back," Damien’s voice, laced with the absolute weight of his [Siren’s Chord] and the [Greedy King’s Intent], resonated through the battlefield.

"Master, you can’t hold the center alone!" Isabelle screamed, her hands wreathed in violet gravity-flames as she crushed a leaping chimera.

"I won’t be holding it," Damien whispered.

"I’ll be clearing it."

*BOOM!*

The ground beneath his boots shattered into a crater of glass.

Damien vanished using Phantom Speed, breaking the sound barrier instantly.

He materialized directly in the path of the vanguard, a massive, churning horde of over ten thousand 5th and 6th-Order beasts.

He drew the Pantheon Sword.

The crystal bladeignited. It was wreathed in a twisting helix of liquid darkness and blinding gold.

The sheer density of his unsuppressed 8th-Order mana caused the air around the blade to scream in agony.

Damien didn’t shout a technique name like before.

He didn’t waste a single drop of excess energy. He simply swung the sword in a casual, horizontal arc.

It was a swing of absolute, terrifying physical and magical perfection.

A crescent wave of Eclipse energy, thin as a razor but carrying the crushing density of a mountain, detached from the blade. It expanded outward, covering a sweeping five-hundred-meter radius.

It passed through the charging Void-Hounds. It passed through the heavily armored Magma-Toads.

It passed through their scales, their bones, and their mana cores without a fraction of resistance.

For a single, agonizing second, the horde continued to run.

Then, exactly ten thousand monsters slid neatly in half.

The top halves of their bodies crashed into the mud while their legs kept running for another step before collapsing.

A torrential rain of toxic green and black blood erupted, instantly vaporized into harmless steam by the sheer, radiating heat of Damien’s aura before it could even touch his clothes.

The battlefield went dead silent. The screams of the mercenaries stopped. Ziriork the Ferro-Ogre dropped his rotary cannon, his metallic jaw unhinging.

"He... he just erased an entire legion..." Duke Aurum wheezed from his floating palanquin, his golden skin turning pale.

"With a basic swing."

Damien didn’t stop to admire his work. He was a blur of absolute violence.

A 7th-Order Abyssal Harpy, recognizing the apex predator in the room, dove at him from the sky, its razor-sharp wings aimed at his neck.

Damien didn’t even look up. He simply extended his left hand.

[Hollow King’s Authority].

The shadows cast by the Harpy itself suddenly came alive, snapping upward like iron chains.

They wrapped around the 7th-Order beast in mid-air, pinning its wings to its sides.

With a casual flick of his wrist, Damien used his [Will Art: Severance].

The shadows contracted, cleanly decapitating the Harpy and dropping its lifeless body into the mud.

He danced through the chaos. He was no longer the boy who had to over-exert his cores to fight. He was in perfect, deadly harmony.

When a swarm of heavily armored Siege-Beetles charged, he didn’t use magic.

He stepped into their guard and used his Golden Dragon Aura to shatter their indestructible carapaces with his bare fists, punching straight through their 6th-Order cores.

When agile, toxic serpents tried to flank him, he used the Hollow King’s shadow to block their venom and bind them to the earth, turning their own momentum into broken necks.

He was a one-man meat grinder. He moved with a terrifying, rhythmic elegance, a King casually pruning a very dangerous, overgrown garden.

Every step he took claimed hundreds of lives.

He didn’t gain a single Destiny Point from the slaughter, after all he wasn’t exactly changing the plot, but he didn’t care.

Every swing, every step, solidified his absolute control over his new 8th-Order realm.

But a stampede driven by the fear of the apocalypse does not stop for one man.

The earth groaned. A deep, tectonic vibration rose from the chasm, so heavy it made the blood in Damien’s veins vibrate.

The sea of weaker beasts was violently parted, thrown aside and crushed under the hooves of the true lords of the deep.

Five colossal entities hauled themselves over the chasm ridge.

They were 8th-Order Warlords.

Ancient Demon Kings. A four-armed Asura clad in volcanic plate armor. A bipedal Behemoth made of shifting abyss-wood.

A serpent with three heads that wept acid. A towering mass of shifting tectonic plates. And a centipede made entirely of weeping red eyes.

They radiated the distinct, suffocating pressure of Warlords who ruled their own territories in Layer 7, beings capable of wiping out surface nations on a whim.

"SURFACE RAT!" the Asura roared, his four eyes burning with a mixture of terror from what he was fleeing, and absolute, humiliated rage at the single human blocking his escape.

"MOVE OR BE CRUSHED!"

Damien stood amidst the mountains of corpses he had just created. He flicked the toxic blood off the Pantheon Sword with a sharp *clack*.

He looked up at the five 8th-Order Warlords.

In the past, the mere presence of an 8th-Order entity had forced him to his knees, making his soul tremble.

But now? To him, standing firmly at the peak of the 8th Order with a stabilized Dual-Core, their auras felt frantic. Sloppy. Undisciplined.

"Five 8th Orders," Damien whispered.

A savage, arrogant smile stretched across his face, his dual-colored eyes locking onto the giants.

He felt the pure, unadulterated thrill of the summit.

He pointed the tip of his crystal sword at the towering Asura.

"Finally," Damien laughed, the sound sending a chill down the spines of every demon watching.

"A proper warmup."