Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 329: No!
"No."
The single, blunt syllable fell from Alaric’s lips like a block of lead.
It didn’t echo in the endless, blinding white expanse of the mindscape.
It simply sat there, heavy and immovable, defying the absolute purity of the First Hero’s realm.
The towering, spectral figure of the Ancestor froze. The pristine light radiating from his armor flickered, rippling with a profound, terrifying indignation.
"You refuse?" the Ancestor’s voice boomed, no longer filled with sorrow, but with the wrath of a scorned deity.
The glass floor beneath Alaric’s knees spider-webbed with cracks.
"You choose damnation over salvation? You choose the shadow of a Heretic over the eternal glory of the Light?"
"I choose the mud," Alaric grunted, slowly forcing his left foot flat against the cracked glass, pushing upward against the crushing, conceptual weight of the holy pressure.
In the physical world, the agony was beyond human comprehension.
The golden fire of the Sword of Heroes l was roasting the flesh of his hands, spiraling up his arms and trying to incinerate the Titan’s Capacitor fused to his sternum.
The smell of searing meat filled the dim sanctum.
But inside the mindscape, Alaric’s grey eyes were dead set on the glowing giant.
"Your ’Light’ sits in golden palaces while the Outer Rim starves," Alaric said, his voice a low, gritty rumble.
"Your Paladins burn innocent people at the stake for having the wrong mana. You call Zero a villain because he doesn’t kneel to your Goddess. But he fed us. He saved us. He taught us how to survive when your ’salvation’ left us to die."
Alaric pushed himself up. His muscles groaned, the phantom pain of the real-world burns translating into a heavy, suffocating exhaustion in the spiritual realm.
*"Blasphemy!"* the Ancestor roared, raising his ethereal projection of the Sword of Heroes. *"You are a failure of my bloodline! A brute wielding a machine of the Void! You lack the grace, the purity, and the faith to wield this blade! Burn in your sins, Alaric Ironheart!"*
A localized sun of pure, incinerating Holy Light descended from the white sky, aiming to erase Alaric’s soul completely. It was the same absolute, unyielding law that the Pope wielded outside.
Alaric looked at the descending light.
He didn’t see an unstoppable divine punishment. He saw energy. He saw mass. He saw physics.
He remembered the grueling, brutal days in the Old Gym. He remembered Professor Mozart holding a fragile egg, teaching him that strength without control was just a crash waiting to happen.
He remembered the most important lesson Damien had ever imparted to them, a lesson the Professor had discovered in the darkest pits of the Abyss.
’Mana changes the laws of physics. Aura reinforces the body. But Will... Will overwrites reality.’
"You think you can judge me because you are a legend," Alaric whispered, his calloused hands curling into fists. "But you’re just a ghost."
*THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP.*
The rhythm didn’t come from the physical world. It echoed within the mindscape. Alaric’s Will—hardened by many years of fighting in the shadows, built on the absolute refusal to ever be weak again—manifested as the grinding, mechanical heartbeat of the *Titan’s Capacitor*.
He didn’t summon an elegant shield of light to block the Ancestor’s strike. He simply gathered his sheer, stubborn Intent and imposed it on the white void.
[Will Art: Titan’s Anchor]
The descending sun of Holy Light struck Alaric. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂
It didn’t vaporize him. It hit an invisible, impossibly dense wall of kinetic stubbornness.
The light shattered, scattering into harmless golden sparks across the glass floor.
The Ancestor recoiled, his radiant helm tilting in sheer disbelief.
"Impossible. You have no holy mana. You have no divine protection. How does a mere brute deflect the Light of the First?!"
"I told you," Alaric said, taking a heavy, thudding step forward. The glass floor didn’t crack this time; it groaned under his conceptual weight. "I’m not a hero. I never was one."
Alaric lunged, He drove his fist, wreathed in the dense, shimmering distortion of his Will, directly into the Ancestor’s pristine, glowing chest plate.
*KRA-KOOM!*
The impact sounded like two mountains colliding. The First Hero’s spectral form shattered like a broken mirror, the blinding white mindscape exploding into a million fragments of glass.
***
[The Physical World - The Inner Sanctum]
CRASH!
The heavy adamantite doors of the inner sanctum finally gave way. They exploded inward, raining jagged shrapnel across the ancient stone floor.
The blinding, absolute white light of the *Sanctuary of the Absolute Sun* bled into the dim chamber, carrying a pressure so devastating it stripped the oxygen from the air.
"The rats are out of holes," the Pope intoned, floating through the ruined doorway. His white and gold papal vestments were immaculate, but his glowing eyes were wide with a terrifying, fanatical wrath.
A thin line of dried blood still marked his cheek where Elena had grazed him.
Lukas stood between the Pope and the central dais.
His heavy, matte-black Magitech Gauntlets were hissing violently, the cooling mechanisms completely overwhelmed. The blue runes woven into the dwarven metal were flashing a frantic, warning red.
"Elena, stay down," Lukas coughed, blood trickling from his nose as the 7th-Order gravity threatened to crush his organs.
Behind him, Elena tried to push herself up, her *Photon Lens* cracked in half, her elven uniform scorched. "Lukas... you can’t... your arms..."
"Professor told me once," Lukas grinned, a wild, desperate smile spreading across his face. "Don’t be a sniper. Be a bomb."
Lukas slammed his metallic fists together. He bypassed the 1.5-second cooling cycle entirely.
He ignored the safety limiters Prince Hephaestus had installed. He pulled every single drop of mana from his core and forced it into the plasma emitters in his palms.
The gauntlets began to melt, fusing to his own skin.
**[Overdrive: Supernova Point]**
"You think a spark can blind the sun?" the Pope sneered, raising his hand. A pillar of concentrated holy execution gathered at his fingertips, aiming to erase the fire mage from existence.
On the central dais, amidst the blinding clash of impending magics, the golden fire enveloping Alaric’s body suddenly snapped.
It didn’t fade. It shattered.
*VWOMMM.*
A shockwave of pure, impossibly dense kinetic force exploded from the pedestal. It was so heavy, so physically absolute, that it snuffed out Lukas’s melting plasma and blew the Pope’s gathering holy light into a harmless mist.
The Pope froze, his arm still raised, his glowing eyes snapping toward the dais in sheer shock.
The golden flames that had been roasting Alaric alive were gone. In their place, a swirling, heavy aura of grey kinetic distortion wrapped around the giant’s body.
Alaric stood tall. His mythril chainmail was charred black, and the skin of his arms was blistered and raw, but he wasn’t screaming.
His hands were wrapped around the hilt of the *Sword of Heroes*.
"He... he touched the sacred blade?" the Pope breathed, genuine horror leaking into his absolute calm. "The Ancestor did not reject the Heretic?"
"He tried," Alaric’s voice rumbled, deep and resonant, echoing through the chamber. "We had a disagreement."
Alaric pulled.
With a deafening *SCREECH* of tortured metal and cracking stone, the Sword of Heroes was ripped from the pedestal.
But as the blade slid free, it began to change.
The elegant, slender, flawless silver longsword designed for a graceful, pristine knight shuddered. It violently reacted to the terrifying density of the *Titan’s Capacitor* and Alaric’s unyielding Will.
The pristine silver cracked. The outer shell of the holy artifact shattered like porcelain, revealing the true, primordial core of the First Era weapon beneath.
It was no longer a longsword. It absorbed the ambient mana of the room, rapidly expanding and reshaping itself to match the soul of its new master. The metal thickened, turning from shining silver to a deep, dark gunmetal grey laced with glowing, golden veins of holy energy.
It became a massive, six-foot-long Buster Sword, as thick and brutal as *The Anvil*, but humming with the conceptual, demon-slaying divinity of a legendary artifact.
Alaric rested the flat of the colossal, transformed blade on his shoulder. The sheer weight of the weapon cracked the stone step beneath his boots.
He looked down at the Pope, his tired grey eyes burning with a gritty, unyielding resolve.
"You guys talk too much," Alaric said.
The Pope’s face twisted in absolute, hysterical fury. The very idea that the sacred relic of his religion had been mutated into a barbaric slab of iron by a criminal was an insult that shattered his mind.
"BLASPHEMY!" the Pope roared, his 7th-Order Domain flaring to its absolute maximum. "I WILL ERASE YOU FROM THE TAPESTRY OF FATE! I WILL—"
Alaric didn’t wait for him to finish the chant.
He didn’t leap gracefully. He stepped forward, his massive frame moving with the terrifying, explosive speed he had used to dismantle Jorah in the Academy arena.
He closed the distance instantly.
The Pope hastily erected a multi-layered Aegis of pure divine light, a barrier capable of withstanding the breath of a dragon.
Alaric gripped the hilt of his new, colossal sword with both hands. The *Titan’s Capacitor* thumped violently, feeding a massive charge of kinetic energy directly into the golden veins of the blade.
**[Titan Art: Divine Impact Calibration]**
Alaric swung the massive slab of holy gunmetal horizontally.
He didn’t aim to cut the barrier. He aimed to break it.
*KRA-KOOM!*
The impact was deafening. The *Sword of Heroes* struck the 7th-Order Aegis.
The holy energy of the sword canceled out the holy energy of the shield, stripping away the Pope’s conceptual defense. And what was left was pure, unadulterated, multi-ton kinetic force.
The impenetrable divine barrier shattered into a million pieces of glowing glass.
The momentum of the swing carried through, the flat of the massive blade slamming directly into the side of the Pope’s ribs.
*CRACK.*
The sound of demigod bones breaking echoed clearly in the silent sanctum.
The Pope, the absolute ruler of the Kingdom of Light, was launched through the air like a cannonball. He smashed through the splinted doorway, flew across the antechamber, and crashed violently into the far wall of the Deep Vault, burying himself deep within the Adamantite rubble.
Silence fell over the inner sanctum.
Alaric stood at the threshold of the doorway, breathing heavily, the newly forged *Sword of Heroes* resting casually on his scorched shoulder. Steam rose from the golden veins of the blade.
He looked back at Lukas, who was staring at him with his mouth hanging open, and Elena, who had a faint, exhausted smile on her lips.
"We got the sword," Alaric rumbled, adjusting his grip.
"Now let’s go home."
