Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 327: Pope’s Judgment

"Domain Expansion, " the Pope declared, his voice echoing with the wrath of a god.

He didn’t need to shout. At the 7th Order, a Domain wasn’t merely a spell;

it was the imposition of a supreme Will upon reality, overwriting the very laws of physics within its radius.

"Sanctuary of the Absolute Sun."

The Deep Vault ceased to exist as a physical room.

The heavy Adamantite walls, the pulverized marble of the fallen golems, and the creeping shadows of the subterranean level were instantly swallowed by a blinding, measureless expanse of pure white light. There was no floor. There was no ceiling. There was only the suffocating, burning purity of the Pope’s law.

The ambient Holy Mana didn’t just crystalize; it became a physical weight, pressing down on Class F with the gravitational force of an ocean.

"Gah—!" Lukas hit the ground, his knees shattering the pristine white glass that now formed the floor of the Domain.

He raised his hands, desperately trying to bypass the 1.5-second cooling cycle of his Magitech Gauntlets [3]. He ignored the safety warnings screaming in his neural interface, attempting to superheat the very moisture in the holy air.

[Blue Flame Art: Flash Boil]

"Burn! Just burn!" Lukas roared, trying to force a rapid phase change to blow the pressure back.

But the blue plasma merely sparked and died. Inside the *Sanctuary of the Absolute Sun*, the Pope’s Law dictated that no impurity could ignite. The thermodynamics of the attack were simply erased by the sheer, crushing density of the 7th-Order entity’s will.

"Tricks of a dying era," the Pope intoned, floating ten feet in the air, his papal vestments radiating a halo that burned the retina to look at. "You cannot burn the Sun, child. You can only burn *in* it."

The light around them began to physically tighten, aiming to incinerate the three ’heretics’ at the subatomic level.

*THUMP-THUMP.*

A sound like an engine revving cut through the blinding white noise.

Alaric didn’t drop to his knees. He planted his massive boots into the glass floor, his back arched, holding *The Anvil* above his head as if he were physically bench-pressing the sky.

The Titan’s Capacitor fused to his sternum was pounding violently, converting the crushing atmospheric pressure into raw, terrifying kinetic potential.

Every time his iron heart beat, the immediate area around him shuddered, physically pushing back against the Pope’s light with raw, defiant density.

"Run!" Alaric gritted his teeth, blood leaking from his nose as his bones groaned under the weight. "The door... it has to be behind him! When I move, you run!"

"You cannot outrun the light, Titan," the Pope sneered, raising his hand to bring the full weight of the Domain down on Alaric’s shoulders.

"You don’t outrun it," a calm, icy voice echoed from beneath Alaric’s shadow.

Elena stood up. Her pristine white uniform was scorching at the edges, and her breathing was ragged, but her ancient green eyes were sharp and unyielding.

She tapped the cracked silver rim of her Photon Lens , pushing her mana core to its absolute limit as she activated Focus Mode [9].

The teachings of Professor Mozart in the Old Gym flashed clearly in her mind.

*’You are obsessed with Light because it is your family’s legacy. But Light is rigid. It only travels in straight lines,’* Damien’s masked face echoed in her memory.

*’Create a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. You don’t need to force the thread. You just need to clear the path. Bend the world to suit the light.’*

"Human magic is arrogant," Elena whispered, raising both of her hands toward the blinding expanse of the Pope’s Domain. "You think because you are a sun, you cannot be refracted."

[Dual Art: Solar Centrifuge]

Elena didn’t cast a shield. She didn’t try to combat the 7th-Order light with her own.

Instead, she summoned a hyper-condensed vortex of wind directly around the three of them.

The wind spun at thousands of revolutions per minute, stripping the air molecules outward and creating an absolute, flawless vacuum bubble in the center of the Domain.

As the Pope’s annihilating Holy Light crashed down upon them, it hit the vacuum boundary.

Physics took over. With zero atmospheric resistance inside the bubble and violently spinning high-pressure air on the outside, the absolute straight lines of the Pope’s 7th-Order light were forced to obey the laws of refraction.

*FWOOSH!*

The blinding execution light hit the spinning wind and violently bent around them, creating a perfect, shimmering tunnel of safety that cut straight through the center of the Domain, leading directly toward the heavy double doors of the inner sanctum behind the Pope.

The Pope’s glowing eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated outrage. His absolute Law was being bypassed by simple optical physics.

"Heresy!" the Pope roared, descending rapidly to crush the vacuum tunnel with his bare hands.

"Now, Alaric!" Elena screamed, blood dripping from her eyes as the strain of maintaining a vacuum inside a Domain threatened to tear her mana core apart.

Alaric didn’t hesitate.

He dropped his defensive posture. He didn’t swing his massive sword wildly like a barbarian;

he treated it like a surgical instrument. Mozart had broken his bad habits, turning him from a bomb into a very blunt chisel.

Alaric sprinted down the refracted tunnel of light. As the Pope dropped down to block his path, Alaric sidestepped with terrifying speed for a man carrying four hundred pounds of mythrl.

[Titan Art: Impact Calibration]

He didn’t aim for the 7th-Order Pope, that would be suicide. He aimed for the space next to the Pope.

Alaric thrust the flat pommel of *The Anvil* directly into the vacuum boundary. He released the entire kinetic charge stored within the Titan’s Capacitor outward in a single, hyper-condensed shockwave.

*KRA-KOOM!*

The localized kinetic explosion hit the Pope’s descending holy barrier, throwing the Demigod off balance for a crucial fraction of a second.

Using the recoil of the strike to propel himself forward, Alaric shot past the Pope and barreled headfirst toward the heavy, magically sealed double doors of the inner sanctum.

He slammed his shoulder into the adamantite wood.

*CRASH!*

The doors splintered into a thousand pieces under his kinetic mass, revealing the dark, ancient chamber beyond.

The moment Alaric breached the threshold, the blinding white light of the Domain was cut off, replaced by the dim, golden pulse of an ancient artifact resting on a stone pedestal.

The Sword of Heroes.

"Lukas! Elena! Get in!" Alaric roared from the sanctum, reaching out a massive hand.

Lukas grabbed Elena, dragging the exhausted High Elf through the splintered doorway just as her vacuum tunnel collapsed, allowing the Pope’s blinding light to slam shut behind them.