Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 308: Dukes Battle!

On the other end while Damien stood paralyzed by the revelation of his family’s god-like war in the deepest pits of hell, the Dukes of Argentum were fighting for their lives.

The defense line was fragmented series of craters, boiling blood, and shattered barricades.

The unending tide of Tier 6 and Tier 7 monsters had successfully drowned the mercenary army, leaving only the true powerhouses to hold the chasm.

THOOOOOM.

The tectonic rumbling from the pit did not stop with the Asura Damien had captured.

The crimson mist at the precipice spiraled violently, pushed upward by the displacing mass of absolute apex predators.

Three new entities hauled themselves over the ridge, completely ignoring the lesser beasts they crushed beneath their claws.

They were 8th-Order Primordial Beasts.

The first was a Goliath Siege-Beetle, a creature the size of a warship with a carapace made of compressed obsidian and void-matter.

The second was a Sulphur-Drake, a wingless, six-legged reptilian horror that leaked toxic gas so potent it melted the concrete beneath its feet.

The third was a Faceless Terror, a towering mass of shifting, muscular tentacles and gaping maws that defied all anatomical logic.

Driven mad by the apocalyptic clash of the Demigods in Layer 9, they didn’t care about the city above them.

They just wanted to escape, and anyone standing in their path was marked for immediate termination.

"Hold the line!" Duke Ferro roared, venting a massive, whistling cloud of superheated steam from his rusted shoulder gears.

"Do not let them reach the city!"

The Iron Duke was already battered, his chest plate dented from his earlier brawl with the vanguard. But an 8th-Order High Noble of the Abyss was not to be underestimated.

The Goliath Siege-Beetle locked its mandibles onto Duke Ferro, charging like a runaway train.

Ferro didn’t retreat. He slammed his heavy hammer into the earth.

"Domain Expansion: The Iron Maximum!"

The battlefield around Ferro warped. The mud and blood evaporated, replaced by a suffocatingly hot landscape of grinding gears, towering anvils, and chains of red-hot iron.

As the Siege-Beetle charged into the Domain, gravity increased exponentially. The massive insect slowed, its joints screeching. Ferro stepped forward, ignoring the monster’s flailing void-blades.

"You are just scrap metal waiting to be forged!" Ferro bellowed.

He swung his hammer, but he didn’t just hit the beast, rather it hit the concept of its armor.

The hammer landed squarely on the Beetle’s head with a sound that shattered the eardrums of every mercenary within a mile. The indestructible obsidian carapace fractured, caving inward under the sheer, industrial brutality of the Iron Duke.

To his right, Duke Argent was engaged in a mesmerizing, lethal dance with the Faceless Terror.

The liquid-metal shapeshifter had abandoned his beautiful elven form entirely. He was now a swirling, razor-sharp vortex of living mercury.

The Faceless Terror lashed out with a dozen muscular tentacles, trying to crush and devour the Duke. But Argent was a master of fluidity.

SPLASH.

The tentacles smashed into Argent, but his body simply liquefied, exploding into a shower of silver droplets that bypassed the monster’s guard. The droplets converged instantly behind the Terror, reforming into Duke Argent.

"Cruelty is an art form," Argent hissed, his arms transforming into massive, silver scythes. "But you beasts lack all elegance."

"Secret Art: Silver Symphony!"

Argent spun and the mercury infected.

As his scythes sliced through the Terror’s tentacles, the liquid metal seeped into the beast’s bloodstream.

The monster shrieked as its own veins turned to solid, unmoving silver from the inside out. Within seconds, the 8th-Order horror was paralyzed, trapped in a cage of its own crystallized blood, before Argent casually decapitated it.

Meanwhile, the Sulphur-Drake had bypassed the frontline, leaping toward the heavy artillery batteries where Ziriork and the remaining defenders were making their last stand.

The beast opened its maw, preparing to unleash a breath attack of concentrated, melting acid.

"Oh, no you don’t."

A bloated, golden figure floated into the Drake’s path. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Duke Aurum. The Lord of Gold.

He looked ridiculous, a rotund demon covered entirely in gold leaf and fine jewels, riding on a floating palanquin. But in the Abyss, wealth equated to power.

"Do you know how much a single breath of yours will devalue my estate?" Duke Aurum scoffed, adjusting a diamond ring on his fat finger.

"Domain Expansion: The Golden God."

The air around the Drake suddenly sparkled. Millions of heavy, golden abyss coins, a material Damien had discussed with him as currency instead of cores, materialized out of thin air, forming a torrential storm of money.

"Everything has a price, beast. And I am buying your life."

The golden coins adhered to it. They fused with its scales, increasing its mass infinitely.

The beast roared, trying to fly, trying to walk, but the sheer, crushing weight of the Duke’s literal wealth pinned it to the ground.

Before the Drake could shake the gold off, the newest High Noble stepped in.

The Crystal Duke, the replacement for the disgraced Diamond Faction, levitated above the pinned monster. The Duke was a jagged, humanoid prism of refracting light.

"Calculated execution," the Crystal Duke chimed in a synthesized, refracting voice.

The Duke raised his arms, catching the ambient light from the plasma cannons and the burning city. He took the chaotic energy of the battlefield, pulled it into his crystalline body, and focused it into a single, blinding point of absolute destruction.

"Prismatic Convergence."

A beam of hyper-condensed, rainbow-colored light fired from the Crystal Duke’s chest. It pierced straight through the pinned Sulphur-Drake’s skull, vaporizing its 8th-Order core in a microsecond.

The three Primordial Beasts were dead.

The Dukes stood amidst the carnage, chest heaving, their Domains retracting. They had held the line. They had proven why they were the absolute rulers of the 6th Layer.

"Is that all of them?" Duke Aurum wheezed, wiping a bead of golden sweat from his brow.

"Do not lower your guard," Duke Argent hissed, reforming his arms from mercury back to hands. "The stampede is not over."

As if to answer him, the chasm let out a sound that defied description. It was the sound of a dimension tearing apart.

The vibration was so severe that Duke Ferro fell to one knee, his heavy iron chassis groaning.

The spatial scars in the sky above Argentum began to bleed heavier, weeping black void-matter onto the city.

The Dukes looked down into the pit, their faces draining of color.

The 8th-Order beasts they had just killed were impressive. But the aura rising from the chasm now was completely different. It was an aura that made their 8th-Order souls scream in absolute, primal submission.

"Ninth Order," Duke Ferro whispered, steam hissing from his terrified breath. "Those bastards of the deep are here."

High above the city, the Platinum Prince finally stopped suppressing the sky. The Demigod lowered his hands, his glowing white eyes locking onto the chasm.

The true test had arrived.