Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 314 - 16 Year reunion!

The moment Damien and Isabelle stepped over the shattered remains of the bone doors, the concept of "temperature" ceased to exist.

It was absolute zero. The kind of cold that didn’t just freeze water, but froze mana in the veins, halting the kinetic movement of reality itself.

But worse than the cold was the sky.

There were no artificial stars here, no rocky cavern ceilings. There was only a swirling, apocalyptic vortex of sickening Red Aura.

The same oppressive, world-ending color Damien had seen radiating from Emperor Thraka, but magnified a million times over. It felt like standing beneath the pupil of an angry, bloodshot eye that spanned the entire horizon.

They stood on a high precipice of black ice, looking down at the epicenter of Layer 9.

The dimension was a slaughterhouse.

The ice was shattered by craters the size of oceans, stained black with toxic blood. Floating islands of bedrock were suspended in the air, defying gravity as the fundamental laws of physics broke down under the sheer weight of overlapping 9th-Order Domains.

And in the center of the destruction, towering over the frozen wasteland, was the Rotting King.

He was a five-hundred-foot-tall abomination. He had no true shape, he was a shifting, churning mass of grey decay, bone spurs, and weeping faces, draped in tattered robes woven from the souls of dead leviathans.

The King of the 9th Layer was performing surgery on the world. Massive, glowing green tendrils, the very leylines of the Abyss, were being forcefully ripped from the frozen earth and fed into a colossal, jagged Void Gate hovering behind him.

The Gate was screaming, resisting the unnatural expansion, but the Rotting King’s raw power was forcing it wider, allowing more and more of that suffocating Red Aura to bleed into the Abyss.

"He’s sacrificing the entire dimension to anchor the gate," Damien whispered, his breath crystallizing instantly.

But Damien’s twilight-purple eyes quickly darted away from the Demigod.

He looked at the three figures standing at the base of the Rotting King’s domain, fighting a desperate, losing war.

A choked breath caught in Damien’s throat.

To the left was a towering construct of necrotic shadow and fossilized bone, holding back a tidal wave of grey rot. The Voss Ancestor. The ancient 9th-Order entity was crumbling, his bone armor dissolving under the absolute decay.

In the center, hovering above the ice, was a woman with flowing silver hair.

Elizabeth Voss.

She was weaving illusions so dense they altered reality. When the Rotting King hurled spears of pure annihilation, Elizabeth’s domain warped the space, turning the lethal magic into harmless showers of red rose petals. But the toll was catastrophic. Blood wept from her beautiful blue eyes, staining her pale cheeks. She was burning her own lifespan just to keep her family from being erased.

And at the vanguard, standing face-to-face with the towering Demigod, was a man wreathed in suffocating darkness.

Theron Voss.

He looked older. His starry black hair was streaked with grey, and his aristocratic face was lined with exhaustion. But it was his right arm that made Damien’s heart clench.

The Void Mark, the curse that had forced Theron to flee the surface sixteen years ago, had spread. It had consumed his entire right arm and half of his chest, turning his flesh into shifting, black Void-chitin.

He was using the curse to fight, weaponizing the very disease that was eating his sanity.

"Midnight Domain: The Shadow of Ten Thousand Armies!" Theron roared, his voice cracking with exertion.

Thousands of massive, winged shadow-behemoths erupted from the ice, swarming the Rotting King and tearing at his grey flesh.

"FUTILE!" the Rotting King’s voice boomed, a sound like a crumbling mountain.

The Demigod swept his massive hand.

"Law of Decay: Absolute Erasure."

A wave of grey light washed over the battlefield. The ten thousand shadow-behemoths didn’t just die; they rusted, aged, and turned to dust in a microsecond.

The backlash hit Theron like a meteor.

"Gah!" Theron was thrown backward, crashing through three floating glaciers before slamming onto the black ice. The Void Mark on his chest flared violently, sensing his weakness and attempting to consume his heart.

"THERON!" Elizabeth screamed, dropping her illusions to rush toward him, but a wall of grey rot erected itself between them, trapping her.

"The bloodline of Voss," the Rotting King sneered, hovering directly over the fallen King of Darkness. "You have been a persistent parasite for sixteen years. But the Master has arrived. The Gate is open. Your shadows are no longer needed."

The Rotting King raised his hand.

The grey decay condensed into a single, localized singularity of conceptual death. It wasn’t an attack meant to injure; it was an execution meant to delete Theron from the timeline.

Theron struggled to push himself up, but his left arm snapped under his own weight. He looked at the descending ball of decay. He looked through the barrier of rot, catching Elizabeth’s tear-streaked eyes.

He offered her a sad, weary smile. ’I’m sorry, my love.’

The execution fell.

"Isabelle," a voice echoed across the frozen hell, calm, cold, and dripping with absolute authority. "Keep the pressure off me."

"Yes, Master."

Before the singularity of decay could touch Theron’s face, the space above him shattered.

[Shadow Art: Flash Step]

A figure materialized, standing directly over the fallen Theron Voss.

A black trench coat billowed violently in the hurricane of magic.

The Rotting King’s eyes narrowed. "A bug?"

The figure didn’t cast a shield. He didn’t try to dodge.

He drew a crystal sword.

The blade ignited with a blinding, terrifyingly pure white light, fueled by the 500,000 DP [True Severance] infusion Damien had purchased moments ago.

But Damien didn’t rely solely on the System. His newly forged Eclipse Core spun at maximum output. The perfect synthesis of Golden Dragon Aura and the Hollow King’s Shadow flooded into his arms, wrapping his body in a majestic, twilight-purple Will Armament.

"Pantheon Art..." Damien whispered, his voice resonating through the fractured dimension.

He swung the sword upward, aiming directly at the descending singularity of 9th-Order decay.

"...Eclipse Sever."

SHING.

It was a sound that defied the chaos. A clean, singular note of perfection.

The white blade, carrying the Law of True Severance and the absolute Domination of the Greedy King’s Intent, collided with the grey decay.

There was no explosion. There was no struggle.

The 9th-Order execution attack simply... parted.

It was sliced perfectly in two. The two halves of the grey singularity slid past Damien, crashing into the ice miles away and vaporizing the landscape behind him, leaving him and his father completely untouched in a safe, triangular pocket of existence.

Silence slammed into the battlefield.

The Rotting King froze, his massive, weeping faces staring down at the human who had just cleanly parried a Demigod’s killing blow.

Elizabeth, trapped behind the wall of rot, stopped breathing, her hands pressed against the barrier.

And Theron...

Theron Voss lay on the ice, staring up at the broad back of the figure standing over him.

He saw the black coat. He saw the twilight-purple aura, an impossible, flawless mixture of the Voss Shadow and the Golden Dragon.

And then, the figure turned his head slightly, looking back over his shoulder.

The silver mask with the black ’0’ was gone, discarded before the descent.

Theron saw a face that was an exact, striking combination of his own sharp jawline and Elizabeth’s elegant features. He saw the silver hair blowing in the freezing wind. He saw the cross-shaped pupils, one an abyssal black, the other a burning gold.

It wasn’ the lively twelve-year-old boy anymore.

It was a King. An 8th-Order Warlord who radiated an aura that demanded the world bow to his greed.

Damien offered a cocky, arrogant smirk that was identical to the one Theron used to wear in his prime.

"Need a hand, Old Man?" Damien asked, his voice steady despite the apocalyptic pressure.

Theron’s lips parted. His Void-corrupted eyes widened in absolute, reality-shattering disbelief.

His heart, which had been preparing to stop beating, suddenly hammered with a violent, overwhelming surge of life.

"Damien...?" Theron choked out, the name tasting like a miracle on his tongue.

"You’re late for dinner, Dad," Damien chuckled, flicking the residual decay off the Pantheon Sword with a sharp clack. "Mom’s going to be furious."

Damien turned his gaze back to the five-hundred-foot Demigod looming above them.

The smirk vanished. The warmth in his eyes died, replaced by the suffocating, tyrannical coldness of the True Zero.

He pointed the white blade at the Rotting King.

"You touched my family," Damien’s voice dropped, laced with the [Siren’s Chord] and the absolute weight of his Intent.

"Get ready to pay!."