The city never slept, but Nyx had long stopped noticing. Skyscrapers stretched into the night like silver blades, neon lights flickering over streets that never forgave weakness. He walked among the shadows as if the darkness itself recognized him. And in a way, it did.
He had been a villain. Not the kind the world whispered about in fear, or the kind that would earn a tragic backstory in some novel. He had been real. A businessman, a kingpin, a man who ruled both the business world and the underworld with an iron fist and a calculating mind. And the world, the so-called hero, had always danced exactly where he wanted.
The systems, however, did not like anomalies.
[You were supposed to die] a voice echoed, not in his mind but from somewhere else, or everywhere at once?. It felt mechanical, cold, and impatient. A world away, no.. a hundred worlds away. The System.
Nyx smirked.
"And yet… here I am."
It was not the first time the System had pulled him from a world, ripped him from the empire he built, the life he ruled, the chaos he controlled. It would not be the last. Each time, these Systems expected him to bow, to play the villain who falls to the hero, to die neatly so that the world could continue without his interference.
He had a different plan.
For decades—or maybe lifetimes, time had grown meaningless—Nyx had learned how stories bent around him. He could twist fate with a word, a glance, a touch. He could make heroes falter, villains obey, and worlds obey the rules he wrote for them.
And now, yet again, the System had a mission. Another world. Another "hero" was meant to defeat him. Another script demanding his death.
Nyx tilted his head, letting the faintest smile curve his lips.
Every hero thinks they are the protagonist. Every world thinks it knows its ending.
But he had a message for all of them.
I am the villain who refuses to die.
And this time, the System would watch as he rewrote every ending.