[Location: ???]

[Time: ???]

Time soon passed, and with his eyes closed Damien began to do something he hadn't done in a long while.

Dream.

The smell of sulfur and rotting monster flesh faded.

It was replaced by the scent of cheap noodles, instant beef tallow, and old dust.

Damien opened his eyes.

At this moment wasn't in the ribcage of a leviathan. He wasn't huddled against a rock wall with Isabelle on his lap.

He was sitting in a rickety wooden chair. The air was freezing.

A radiator in the corner clanked and hissed, failing to fight off the winter chill seeping through the thin window pane. Outside, heavy snow fell against a backdrop of grey concrete high-rises.

Damien looked down at his hands.

The calluses from holding a sword were gone.

The scars from the constant battle were gone. His skin was soft, pale, and unweathered.

He wasn't wearing his Abyss-stained trench coat, he wasn't wearing his signature Zero mask

He was wearing a faded grey hoodie with a coffee stain on the sleeve.

Apartment Block 404. Earth.

Panic, cold and sharp, seized his chest.

'No,' Damien thought, gripping the edge of the scratched table.

'No. Was it a dream? All of it? The Academy? Isabelle? The Abyss?'

Had he just fallen asleep at his computer sixteen years ago and woken up back in his pathetic, lonely reality?

SLURP.

The sound of someone eating noodles broke the silence.

Damien froze. He slowly lifted his head.

He wasn't alone at the table.

Sitting across from him was a young man with messy black hair, hunched over a steaming bowl of cup noodles.

He was scrolling through a cracked smartphone with one hand and holding chopsticks with the other.

He looked tired, his eyes circled by dark bags, but there was a strange, content peace about him.

It was Lin Ye. His past self.

"You're gonna let those get cold," Lin Ye said without looking up from his phone.

"You..." Damien breathed.

"Hmph. Look at him. Pathetic."

A second voice spoke from the shadows near the window.

Damien turned.

Leaning against the peeling wallpaper was a tall, imposing figure.

He wore tattered, regal robes that swirled like living shadows. One of his eyes was missing, covered by a jagged scar.

The other eye burned with a hateful, golden light.

He radiated an aura of absolute despair and tyranny.

It was the Original Damien Voss, or rather, the "King of Ten Thousand Monsters," the tragic villain Lin Ye had read about in the novel.

The man whose destiny Damien had stolen.

"Am I dead?" Damien asked, looking between the Otaku and the Villain.

"Is this the afterlife?"

"It's a Tribunal," the Villain spat, stepping out of the shadows.

"A judgment of your incompetence."

Damien flinched. The guilt that had been gnawing at him since he fell into the Abyss surged forward.

"I failed," Damien whispered, looking at his soft hands.

"I tried to change the story. I tried to save them. But look where we are. My father went mad. My mother is a fugitive in hell. And I'm stuck on Layer 1, coughing up blood."

He looked at the Villain.

"I'm just a fraud," Damien admitted, his voice cracking.

"I stole your body. I hijacked your life. And I drove it off a cliff."

In a trance he began to to release up all the bottled up emotions he had gotten in the abyss

Although with Isabelle by his side most of these feelings were suppressed but with what Gorim told him and the desolate nature of the abyss

It was hard to contain these feelings, so now in a dream they couldn't help but completely let loose

And seeing him like this, the Villain Damien stared at him. Then, he scoffed.

"A failure?" The Villain laughed, a harsh, grating sound.

"You call this failure?"

He walked over to the table and slammed his hand down.

"In my timeline, the one written in that book, I didn't run into the Abyss to save anyone. I watched my parents get beheaded in the Capital Square!

I watched their heads roll into the gutter while the crowd cheered! I died alone, spitting curses at a world that hated me!"

The Villain leaned in, his single golden eye blazing.

"You changed the ending, you fool. Theron Voss is alive. Elizabeth Voss is alive. Mother and father, They are both fighting. You gave them a chance I never had."

"And look at the others," Lin Ye chimed in, finally putting down his phone.

He turned the screen toward Damien. On It showed a montage of memories.

Leona leading the Beast Tribes, her head held high.

Alaric holding The Anvil, refusing to retreat.

Isabelle sleeping in the cave, her hand clutching Damien's coat.

"In the book, Leona died a slave in a fighting pit," Lin Ye said softly.

"Isabelle was a corpse found in a cage, dead from starvation, your actions are far reaching more than you can imagine."

"The elves, the dwarves, Lyra, Heaphestus, anyone of them would be glad to have you"

Lin Ye smiled, a sad, lonely smile.

"I sat in this apartment for years, wishing I had someone to eat with. You did it. You built a family. Don't you dare tell me that's a failure."

Damien looked at the images on the phone. He looked at the scarred Villain who had never known love, and the lonely Otaku who had only known fiction.

He felt a laugh bubbling up in his chest.

It started as a chuckle, then grew into a full-blown laugh. He laughed until tears pricked his eyes.

"This is ridiculous," Damien gasped, wiping his eyes.

"I'm sitting in a dream, asking a dead otaku and a fictional villain for advice on how to save the world."

Lin Ye grinned.

"Hey, don't look at me. I'm just you before you got cool."

The Villain smirked, crossing his arms.

"And I'm you before you got smart. But we are all the same thing."

"And what is that?" Damien asked, the laughter fading into a calm resolve.

"Greedy," both of them said in unison.

The room began to shake. The walls of Apartment 404 cracked, revealing the grey ash of the Abyss behind the wallpaper.

"The Tribunal is over," Lin Ye said, standing up. He pushed the noodle bowl away.

"I'm tired of being lonely. Don't let those chairs be empty again."

"And I'm tired of being weak," the Villain growled. He placed a hand on Damien's shoulder. The touch burned like a brand.

"Burn the world if you have to. But save them. Take everything."

"Also that heavenly demon lord bastard that used me as an expendable in the original plot, beat his ass for me"

Saying this, they both stepped into him.

Lin Ye dissolved into a stream of golden data, Logic, Knowledge, Humanity.

The Villain dissolved into a torrent of black shadow, Instinct, Ruthlessness, Lineage.

WHOOSH.

Damien gasped as the two fragments slammed into his soul.

In his mind's eye, he saw his core structure.

The Will Core in the center, previously a flickering flame, suddenly became thicker.

It became a dense, unbreakable diamond, fusing the humanity of the past with the ambition of the future.

Right now he wasn't Lin Ye pretending to be Damien.

He wasn't Damien pretending to be Zero.

He was all of them.

...…..

[Location: The Abyss – Layer 1 Cave]

[Time: The Next Morning]

Damien's eyes snapped open.

The smell of beef noodles was gone, replaced by the sulfur of the Abyss.

But the cold... the cold was gone.

He sat up. The fever that had been burning him for days had broken. His breath came easy.

He looked down.

Isabelle was still asleep, her head resting on his lap, her hand gripping his coat as if afraid he would vanish.

Damien reached out and brushed a stray lock of hair from her face. His hand was steady. The tremors were gone.

He looked at the Pantheon Sword lying in the dust.

'I stopped arguing with myself,' Damien thought.

'I am not an imposter. I am the ending this world deserves.'

He reached for the sword.

Instantly simply poured his Will into the blade.

VWMMM.

Instantly, silently, the grey crystal turned pitch black.

The [Will Cladding] coated the blade like a second skin, stable and sharp.

"Master?"

Isabelle stirred, rubbing her eyes. She looked up at him and blinked.

"You look..." She paused, searching for the word.

"Different."

"I slept well," Damien lied with a small smile.

He stood up, sheathing the sword. He offered his hand to her.

"Come on, Isabelle. We have a commission to complete."

Isabelle took his hand. She felt the change immediately. His grip wasn't weak anymore. It was firm.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

Damien looked toward the glowing entrance of the cave.

"To the Bone Hall," Damien said. "It's time to start the grind."

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