Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 350: Gods And Monsters [II]

Are you familiar with that frustrating feeling when you’re in a ditch you can’t get out of by yourself, so you call a friend to help.

But while that friend does end up coming, they take their sweet goddamn time doing so?

In that moment, you’re not sure whether you want to be more thankful or beat the everliving shit out of them.

That was exactly the internal crisis I had to go through when I held Aurieth again after a little over a month.

But all that tension bled out of me soon, replaced by a confident calm as the golden blade glowed brighter in response to my Essence.

I grinned and spun in mid-air before cartwheeling down, letting gravity do its work while also building immense momentum on my own.

The God took a single step back as I crashed with the force of a falling meteor, cratering the frozen ground under the flattening weight of my greatsword.

The fallen deity immediately retaliated by snapping his warhammer at me. I blocked with Aurieth, although the impact still shook my arm and flicked me away several feet back.

I landed with a perfect backflip, immediately forming a small glacier to offer me proper footing.

In that time, I had not only created another ice arm to replace the one that broke earlier, but had also switched Aurieth into its bow form.

Yes, bow form.

Because it’d been so long since I used my Divine Sword, and I’m fairly certain you’ve forgotten all about its enchantments, here’s a quick rundown:

====

[Name]: Aurieth, the Divine Blade

[Rank]: Undefined (Soulbound Artifact)

[Type]: Armament

[Item]: Artifact

————

[Enchantment]:

1. [Final Gambit] – When the wielder faces mortal peril, Aurieth’s power surges exponentially, turning the tide of battle in their favor. The closer to death, the greater its lethality.

2. [Trinity]

– Aurieth can seamlessly shift between three forms: an Executioner Greatsword, Twin Single-edged Longswords, and a Regal Bow.
3. [Celestial Furnace] – Converts the wielder’s raw Essence into pure light energy, fueling devastating attacks imbued with divine brilliance.

4. [Conduit] – While held, Aurieth subtly enhances the wielder’s Essence absorption, accelerating recovery and strengthening their reserves.

====

Ah, truly, what a spectacle of craftsmanship it was~!

”I missed you so much, buddy!” I murmured, nocking one fire arrow after another and letting them loose in blistering succession like an artillery battery.

The arrows were imbued with the effects of [Celestial Furnace], so not only were they being shot like beams of light, but their destructive capabilities had also increased tenfold.

Dear gods, this whole hellish journey would’ve been so much easier if I’d just had this sword with me from the start!

Oh, speaking of gods, the God used his trident in my answer and summoned a vast tidal wave that rose before him.

The arrows — greatly enhanced by Aurieth’s enchantment and my own Essence — hit that curling waterfall like a flurry of missiles.

A series of steam explosions and violent splashes triggered, completely shredding the tsunami that was about to follow suit after that tidal wave.

Massive plumes of superheated vapor hissed upward, veiling the entire battlefield in a misty fog.

But I didn’t stop firing. Not until that same serrated disk blade from before ripped through the haze and came spiraling toward me.

Of course, unlike before, I was ready. I quickly switched Aurieth back into its greatsword form and unleashed a blinding pillar of light from its tip, catching the speeding disk dead-on with the force of a supernova.

The collision resulted in a high-pitched whine of metal.

But the serrated disk still did not stop. It just kept on coming, parting the torrential beam of light as it ground its way toward my skull.

My effort wasn’t in vain, though. Its spin was slowing down slightly.

Noticing that, I tilted my greatsword just a fraction of a degree. Instead of meeting the disk in a frontal contest, I let it slide along the flat of the golden blade.

The screech of metal on metal was loud enough to scrape my eardrums, but it diverted the disk’s trajectory.

The disk whistled past my ear, taking a lock of hair with it, and carved a clean, mile-long trench through the frozen sea behind me.

But in doing so, I was left off-balance.

The God capitalized on that slip-up by barreling through the fog. I had only a moment to widen my eyes before he drove his obsidian stake of a needle into my chest... impaling me on the spot.

...Or that’s what would’ve happened.

In reality, my form shriveled and disintegrated into twinkling specks of black light, like dark fireflies scattering in the night.

It was thanks to a Card I had taken from Lily.

[Grave Mistake

- Effect: Creates a short-lived shadow clone that dissipates into dark motes upon impact. The caster is invisible for three seconds after activation.]

The God’s obsidian stake passed through nothing but empty air and fading embers.

He had overextended.

And the momentum of his heavy body was now carrying him forward into the space I had just occupied.

And as the fog swirled around his confused, six-armed, multi-headed silhouette, I appeared directly above him.

I had used those three seconds of invisibility to jump high.

He didn’t have time to look up as the dazzling blade of my greatsword came down in a vertical slash to burst open his skull like a guillotine.

Swooo—!!

”Wha—?!”

But my sword met no resistance as it dissected the fallen deity. It just felt like cutting air.

The God’s form rippled like a reflection in a disturbed pond, and I realized I had made a grave mistake of my own.

It turned out, the God had pulled the exact same trick on me.

He had created a mirage.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My eyes darted frantically to find him, but he was nowhere to be found.

Until...

Behind me.

I couldn’t even turn.

The air pressure behind my shoulder blades spiked. The real God emerged from the fog, and the next thing I knew, a thick spike of glassy obsidian was jutting out of my chest.

My back, my spine, my lungs, my heart, and even my soul — the needle’s jagged point pierced it all.

I looked down at it, blood spraying from my mouth in a violent cough.

I don’t remember feeling pain.

Don’t get me wrong, it was painful as fuck. That’s the best way I could try and describe what it feels like being staked through your heart.

But I just don’t remember it.

What I do remember is thinking, ’Oh... this is it.’

The prophecy was fulfilled.

As a teeth-clattering chill started seeping into my very bones and darkness began encroaching on the edges of my vision... I had no doubt left that I was going to die now.

It was only the question of when.

My breath was breaking. It’s a suffocating sensation when you physically feel your lungs rapidly filling with blood.

But what really gets to you is when you try to inhale as much air as possible, but your breath starts getting shorter and shorter.

It feels like drowning, just so much more agonizing.

I tried to stay awake, to resist the comfortable embrace of death, but my eyelids felt like lead.

At last, I couldn’t keep them open.

My struggle to stay conscious turned into slow blinks, and with each blink, my awareness started fading into a colorless void.

But naturally, I wasn’t going to die yet.

How would I be telling this story if I were, you know... dead?

Okay, yeah, I did die. But not just then.

Because just then, something miraculous happened.

When I forced my eyes open for what I thought would be the final time, I saw... something.

Before me, the entire battlefield was now half-translucent, overlapped by an endless lattice of glowing strings that stretched for as far as the world itself stretched.

Glowing strings...

Wait!

...No.

Upon a closer look, I realized those strings were made of... letters?

Yes! Small, repetitive sets of letters.

They were everywhere — intersecting, overlaying, and weaving into one another in patterns so complex I had to squint to see them. And my... brain hurt the more I did.

They made up everything, like atoms but on a more conceptual level.

Some strings, like the ones knitting together the small glacier under me or the silver sea beyond it, were as thick as chains.

Other strings, like those creating the broken shards of ice or the drops of blood on my body, were as thin as spider silk.

Yes, by the way, my own body was fabricated from the interconnected weave of those tiny letters as well.

Each one of them — those runes, those letters, those... codes — shimmered in colors I didn’t have names for, in hues that felt wrong to gaze upon.

It was as if my eyes were translating something they were never meant to see.

...Because they indeed were not.

I realized a couple of things at that moment.

First was that the ice, the fog, the God, and my own impaled body were all just outlines — projections cast by something far more fundamental.

The second was that the world had... peeled away before my gaze.

Peeled... That was the only word that came to mind. Like something had taken reality by the corners and lifted it just a little, enough for me to glimpse what was underneath.

Straight away, I was reminded of Rexerd’s journals and what I had read in those pages.

He had mentioned a layer of existence called the Underrality. I didn’t fully understand what it meant back then.

I did now.

This was it...

This was the foundation atop which the entire physical plane was built, the building block of everything that is.

This was the Underrality.