Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!-Chapter 315: Family Battle!
"Get ready to pay!"
The words left Damien’s lips, laced with the absolute authority of the [Greedy King’s Intent].
But words did not kill Demigods.
The clash between Damien’s [True Severance] and the Rotting King’s execution strike had sliced the 9th-Order decay perfectly in half, but the sheer kinetic recoil of opposing a Law of the World did not simply vanish.
BOOM!
A shockwave of violently displaced air and mana slammed into Damien’s chest. Even with his 8th-Order Eclipse Core burning at maximum output and his [King’s Mantle] flared, the physical blow was devastating.
Damien was launched backward like a cannonball. His boots carved twin, smoking trenches through the black ice of Layer 9, screeching for fifty meters before he finally managed to dig his heels in and grind to a halt.
He didn’t fall, but his chest heaved, and a thin line of black blood trickled from beneath his mask.
Damien looked up, his twilight-purple eyes narrowing.
Fifty meters away, the Rotting King hadn’t moved an inch. The severed halves of his decay magic had vaporized the glaciers behind Damien, but the Demigod’s massive, shifting form of grey rot simply rippled, instantly neutralizing the residual shockwave of Damien’s strike.
The gap was terrifying.
’So this is the 9th Order,’ Damien thought, his pulse hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. ’My 8th-Order Eclipse Core is a roaring fire. But his Domain... his Domain is an ocean, it’s like I just threw a match into the sea.’
He knew, with chilling absolute clarity, that no amount of Destiny Points could buy a cheap victory here.
But the Rotting King didn’t immediately follow up with another attack.
The five-hundred-foot monstrosity paused, its countless weeping faces turning to look down at the tiny human standing in the frozen wasteland. The Demigod was intrigued. It was annoyed. A mere 8th-Order mortal had just cleanly parried a conceptual blow meant to erase a bloodline. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎
"A human?" the Rotting King’s voice vibrated through the bedrock, dripping with ancient malice. "You carry the stench of the surface, yet you wield the shadow of the Abyss. What kind of anomaly are you, insect?"
That momentary pause, that singular, arrogant curiosity of a God examining a bug was all the Voss family needed.
Trapped behind a thinning wall of grey rot, Elizabeth Voss fell to her knees on the black ice. The absolute illusions she had been weaving to keep her husband alive faltered as she stared at the figure standing between them and the Demigod.
She saw the broad shoulders wrapped in the black trench coat. She saw the silver hair, whipping wildly in the necrotic winds. The mask was gone.
And when he had turned his head to look at Theron, she saw the face she had traced with her fingers in a nursery sixteen years ago. The sharp jawline, the arrogant smirk, the cross-shaped pupils that were a flawless, terrifying blend of Shadow and Light.
"Damien..." Elizabeth whispered, her voice breaking.
The Empress of Deceit, a woman who had manipulated entire armies and stood unblinking in the face of hell, broke down. Tears cut through the soot and dried blood on her pale cheeks.
’My baby,’ her heart screamed, an overwhelming tide of maternal relief crashing over her. ’He’s alive. He survived that cruel world... and he crawled all the way into the deepest pit of hell just for us.’
A few feet away, Theron Voss struggled to push himself up using his remaining good arm. The Void Mark, which had consumed his right side and half his chest in shifting black chitin, receded slightly, cowed by the sheer density of Damien’s presence.
Theron stared at his son.
He saw the 8th-Order Eclipse Aura radiating from Damien’s body, a majestic, seamless fusion that defied the very laws of magic he had spent his life studying.
Sixteen years ago, Theron had left in order to find a cure to his madness. He had wanted his son to live a peaceful, safe life hidden in the Elven Forest.
Instead, his son had followed him into the abyss. A King who radiated an aura that demanded the world bow to his greed.
Theron felt an overwhelming, chest-tightening surge of absolute pride. But right beside it was a profound, suffocating sorrow. His son had been forced to become a monster just to reach them.
"Damien..." Theron choked out, the name tasting like a miracle on his tongue. "You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous..."
Damien didn’t turn around. He kept his dual-colored eyes locked entirely on the towering Demigod looming above them. He didn’t have time for a tearful hug. He didn’t have the luxury of explaining the last sixteen years or the System.
If they lost focus for even a microsecond, the Rotting King would erase them all.
"I know I missed curfew, Old Man," Damien said, his voice steady, laced with a dark, confident humor that mirrored Theron’s own. "But we can talk about my grounding later."
"INSOLENCE!"
The Rotting King roared, his patience exhausted. The momentary amusement vanished, replaced by the wrath of a Demigod whose ritual was being delayed.
"You think a family reunion will save you? I will rot your bloodline from the roots to the leaves! I will feed your souls to the Gate!"
The sky of Layer 9 screamed. Millions of tons of grey decay condensed above the Rotting King’s head, forming a swirling vortex of absolute death that began to blot out the bleeding Red Aura of Azazel’s gate.
"Listen to me!" Damien roared, his voice cutting through the apocalyptic noise, saturated with the absolute authority of the [Greedy King’s Intent].
He didn’t speak to them as parents. He addressed them as the legends they were.
"King of Darkness! Empress of Deceit! Ancestor!" Damien commanded.
As he spoke, he released the suppression on his Eclipse Core. The pitch-black portion of his mana, the purest, most unadulterated form of the Voss Shadow Law, expanded outward.
It washed over Theron. It washed over the crumbling, skeletal form of the Voss Ancestor.
VWOOOM.
It was an instant, metaphysical click.
Bloodline Resonance.
Theron gasped as he felt Damien’s shadow intertwine with his own. The exhaustion in his core vanished, replaced by a sudden, violent surge of synchronized power. The Voss Ancestor’s necrotic bones stopped dissolving, reinforced by the dense, pristine darkness of his descendant.
"We cannot kill him in a battle of attrition! He is a 9th-Order entity!" Damien shouted rapidly, pointing the Pantheon Sword at the descending vortex of decay. "We don’t have to fight his Domain! What we need to do is disrupt his connection to the Gate!"
Damien didn’t need a mental link. The sheer resonance of their shared bloodline transmitted his tactical intent directly into their instincts.
"Isabelle!" Damien called out to the sky.
High above, plummeting from the spatial tear they had used to enter Layer 9, a figure wreathed in violet Hellfire crashed into the black ice.
"I am here, Master!" Isabelle roared. Her demon horns were fully elongated, her eyes burning like rubies as she slammed her hands onto the frozen bedrock.
"Pin his legs! Do not let him step toward the Gate!" Damien ordered. "Mom! Blind his senses! Give us a three-second window!"
Elizabeth Voss didn’t hesitate. She looked at her son, wiping the tears from her face, and her blue eyes hardened into ice. She was the Empress of Deceit. If her son said he needed three seconds, she would buy him four.
"Dad! Ancestor!" Damien turned to the two heavyweights of his bloodline. "Suppress the decay! Force your Midnight Domains into his arms! Stop that vortex from falling!"
The Voss Ancestor, a towering skeleton of necrotic shadow, let out a low, rumbling laugh that shook the ice. "He has your arrogance, Theron. I like him."
Theron forced himself to his feet. His grey eyes, previously dull with the acceptance of death, ignited with the starry black light of the Voss patriarch.
"Let’s show the boy how it’s done, Ancestor," Theron grinned savagely, his Void-corrupted arm pulsing with dark energy.
The massive vortex of grey decay was inches from dropping onto them.
"NOW!" Damien’s voice roared across the Frozen Hell.
The Voss family moved with terrifying, instantaneous synchronicity.
"Gravity Law: Supermassive Anchor!" Isabelle screamed. A violent purple singularity erupted directly beneath the Rotting King’s feet. The bedrock of Layer 9 shattered as the five-hundred-foot Demigod groaned, his knees buckling under the weight of a collapsed moon.
"Illusion Art: World of the Blood Petal!" Elizabeth shrieked, burning her remaining vitality. The grey decay surrounding the Rotting King’s faces suddenly burst into a blinding, torrential storm of red rose petals. The Demigod roared in confusion as his vision, mana-sense, and spatial awareness were completely severed.
"Midnight Domain: Abyssal Devour!" Theron and the Ancestor roared in unison.
A tsunami of pitch-black shadows, amplified tenfold by their resonance with Damien’s pristine core erupted. The shadows climbed the Rotting King’s massive body, wrapping around his arms like iron chains and halting the descent of the execution vortex.
The 9th-Order Demigod was pinned, blinded, and suppressed.
But it wouldn’t last. The Rotting King was already tearing through the illusions, his absolute decay eating away at the shadows and the gravity. They had exactly two seconds before his Law overwrote their attacks.
Damien didn’t waste a microsecond.
[Shadow Art: Flash Step]
He vanished from the ice, turning into a streak of twilight-purple light. He bypassed the flailing arms of the Demigod, ascending directly toward the Rotting King’s chest, where the massive, pulsating core of decay resided.
He drew back the Pantheon Sword. The blade was white, screaming with the pure, unadulterated energy of his stabilized Dual-Core.
He poured everything, his Golden Dragon Aura, his Hollow King’s Shadow, and the absolute weight of his Greedy King’s Intent into the strike.
"This is for making me spend all those years without my parents !" Damien roared, his voice echoing with the wrath of sixteen stolen years.
"PANTHEON ART: ECLIPSE SEVER!"
Damien swung.
A crescent wave of twilight-purple energy detached from the crystal blade. It wasn’t large, but it was impossibly dense. It struck the exact center of the Rotting King’s chest, biting deep into the 9th-Order flesh, aiming directly for the Demigod’s core.
The Frozen Hell held its breath as the ultimate fusion of the 8th Order clashed against the absolute decay of a God.
