Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 313: Finally Meet!

The fall was a masterclass in psychological terror.

Damien and Isabelle plummeted down the colossal chasm, encased in the blinding silver light of the Platinum Prince’s absolute [Stagnant Eternity].

Outside this five-meter-wide tube of frozen time, the stampede of the abyss was paused mid-frenzy.

As they fell at terminal velocity, accelerated by a localized gravity field Isabelle was projecting, Damien looked through the shimmering silver barrier.

Millions of monsters were locked in place. He saw the gaping, multi-jointed maw of a Tier 7 Centipede inches from the barrier, its toxic green saliva suspended like glass beads in the air. He saw an 8th-Order Asura mid-swing, its muscles bulging, its face a mask of absolute, screaming panic.

They were falling through a museum of suspended nightmares.

"The Prince’s power is terrifying," Isabelle whispered over the roaring wind, her ruby eyes tracking the frozen leviathans whizzing past them.

"To hold all of this... even with half his body destroyed..."

"Yeah but at what cost," Damien said, his voice cold but layered with genuine respect. "He bought us a straight shot. Let’s not waste it."

FWOOSH.

They burst out of the bottom of the chasm, the silver tunnel ending abruptly as they crossed the threshold into Layer 7: The Primordial Wilds.

Damien flared his [King’s Mantle], preparing for an immediate onslaught of the ancient jungle’s native horrors. He gripped the Pantheon Sword, his Eclipse Core revving up.

But there was no attack.

In fact, there was no sound at all.

As Isabelle used her gravity magic to cushion their landing, they touched down on the petrified, bone-like soil of the 7th Layer.

It was a ghost town.

The towering, mile-high fungal trees were silent. The massive, subterranean oceans of toxic sludge were still. The colossal nests of the Void-Crawlers, usually teeming with violent, screeching life, were completely abandoned.

"They really all left," Isabelle breathed, looking around the desolate, bruised-purple landscape. "An entire layer of the Abyss... completely emptied."

"If your house was built on top of a volcano, and you heard it erupting, you wouldn’t pack your bags either," Damien muttered, his cross-shaped pupils scanning the horizon.

"You’d just run."

He didn’t linger to admire the haunting emptiness. He activated his [Shadow Step], grabbing Isabelle and chaining teleportations across the deserted Wilds, heading straight for the central descent point that led to the 8th Layer.

Without the millions of apex predators to slow them down, a journey that would have taken months of bloody warfare took practically half the time.

Within a few weeks, they reached the edge of the Continental Drop, the gateway to Layer 8.

But the moment they stepped over the threshold, the laws of reality broke.

KRA-KOOM.

Damien and Isabelle were instantly slammed by a wall of apocalyptic pressure. It was the environmental fallout of a dimension tearing itself apart.

"Master!" Isabelle gasped, her knees buckling as the gravity around them suddenly inverted, then snapped back, then inverted again.

Layer 8 was disintegrating.

Below them, the subterranean sky was bleeding a suffocating, putrid red light. The sheer, incomprehensible power of the Demigods clashing in Layer 9 was rising, vaporizing the bedrock of the 8th Layer. Massive, floating islands of obsidian rock were being torn upward into the air, while rivers of magma flowed backward into the sky.

The air smelled of ozone, rotting flesh, and the unmistakable, world-ending scent of the Void.

"Hold on to me!" Damien roared, wrapping his left arm around Isabelle’s waist..

"Domain Expansion!."

A ten-meter sphere of twilight-purple energy wrapped around them. Inside his Domain, Damien’s Will was absolute. The inverted gravity ceased. The vaporizing heat was neutralized.

Safely inside the bubble, they plummeted through the crumbling ruins of the 8th Layer, dodging floating continents and geysers of upward-flowing lava.

"We are close!" Damien shouted, looking at the system map blinking furiously in his vision.

"The entrance to Layer 9 is just below that magma shelf!"

Through the chaotic debris, Damien spotted it.

A massive, jagged gateway carved into the very bottom of the world. It was forged from petrified bone and dark-matter, pulsing with the sickening, necrotic energy of the Rotting King.

But the gate wasn’t open.

And it wasn’t unguarded.

Hovering in front of the massive bone doors were fifty figures.

They were humanoid, clad in tattered, grey robes, their bodies bloated and pulsating with the exact same Red Aura Damien had seen on Emperor Thraka.

"The Rotting King’s Zealots," Damien narrowed his eyes as they descended closer.

They were 7th-Order elites, willingly corrupted by the Void and fueled by Azazel’s blessing.

They hadn’t run with the stampede instead they had been left behind as a rearguard, a suicide squad meant to ensure absolutely no one interrupted the summoning ritual below.

"Intruders!" the Lead Zealot shrieked, his jaw unhinging to reveal rows of jagged, rotting teeth.

"The Master’s ritual shall not be—!"

"I really don’t have time for the monologue," Damien sighed.

He looked at his System interface.

[Current DP: 3,500,000.]

He had just earned a fortune for saving Layer 6. He was sitting on a war chest that could rival the Gods, and his parents were currently fighting for their lives just behind those doors.

He wasn’t going to waste a single drop of his core’s stamina fighting a rearguard.

’System,’ Damien commanded, his mind cold and absolute. ’Expend 500,000 DP. Target: Isabelle and Myself. Temporary Law Infusion.’

[System Warning: High Expenditure Detected.]

[Target: Gravity Magic (Isabelle) -> Absolute Singularity (Temporary).]

[Target: Pantheon Sword (Host) -> True Severance (Temporary).]

[Cost: 500,000 DP. Duration: 60 Seconds.]

[Confirm?]

’Do it.’

VWOOOOM.

The golden transaction was approved.

Inside the falling purple bubble, Isabelle suddenly gasped. Her ruby eyes flared so brightly they bled physical light.

The demon horns on her head grew, and the ambient gravity around her hands condensed until the space itself cracked like glass.

She looked at her hands, trembling with the sheer, incomprehensible weight of the power Damien had just forced through their Contract link.

"Master..." she breathed, feeling like she held a collapsed star in her palms.

"Clear the trash, Isabelle," Damien said, his own Pantheon Sword igniting with a white light so pure and dense it completely erased the red glow of the Zealots below.

"With pleasure!"

Isabelle simply looked down at the fifty charging, screaming Void Zealots and clapped her hands together.

[Gravity Law: Universal Crush.]

There was no sound.

The concept of gravity in a mile-wide radius was magnified by ten thousand.

The fifty 7th-Order Zealots, beings capable of leveling surface-world cities froze in mid-air. Their defensive barriers were bypassed entirely.

SQUELCH.

In a single, unified, sickening crunch, all fifty Zealots were instantly compressed.

Their bones, their void-armor, and their cores were crushed into a singular, bloody sphere no larger than a marble.

The marble dropped into the abyss, leaving the airspace completely empty.

Damien didn’t even blink at the massacre. He descended directly in front of the massive, indestructible bone doors leading to Layer 9.

The doors were inscribed with curses of decay that would rot a man’s soul just by looking at them.

Damien raised the Pantheon Sword, fueled by a half-million DP buff.

"Open," Damien commanded.

He swung horizontally.

A wave of pure, white [True Severance] detached from the blade. It hit the massive doors. The curses didn’t activate. The dark-matter didn’t resist.

The colossal gates were cleanly bisected. The top halves slowly slid backward, crashing into the frozen hell beyond with a sound like a falling mountain.

The path was open.

Damien grabbed Isabelle, and together, they stepped through the threshold.

The moment they crossed into Layer 9, the temperature plummeted to absolute zero, and the chaotic noise of a god-level war assaulted their senses.

They stood on a high precipice overlooking a frozen, icy wasteland that stretched to the horizon. But the ice was stained black with blood and shattered by craters the size of oceans.

And in the center of the apocalypse, Damien finally saw it.

A colossal, jagged Void Gate, pulsating with the terrifying Red Aura of the Heavenly Demon.

Standing before it was the Rotting King, a towering mass of decay and death, actively sacrificing the leylines of the dimension.

And fighting him, pushed to their absolute limits, bleeding, broken, but refusing to yield, were three figures.

A man wielding an army of shadows. A woman weaving illusions of blood. And a towering ancestral spirit of bone.

After sixteen long years of running, scheming, and surviving, Damien’s breath caught in his throat.

His dual-colored eyes widened beneath the shadow of his mask.

"Mom... Dad..."