Reincarnated in a novel: I am the villain!

"Can you hold a wrench?"

The question hung in the hot, smoky air of the border gate.

Damien looked at the greasy, disheveled Dwarf Prince standing on the platform. Hephaestus didn’t look like royalty.

He looked like a mechanic who hadn’t slept in a week. His eyes were bloodshot behind his goggles, and his hands were stained black with oil.

But Damien saw something else. He saw desperation.

"I can hold a wrench," Damien said, stepping forward, the shackles on his wrists still flickering erratically. "But I think you need someone who can hold a circuit."

Hephaestus’s eyes narrowed. "A circuit? You know Artificer theory?"

"I know that your suppression cuffs are failing because they are tuned to a standard mana frequency," Damien said, lifting his hands.

"My mana is... denser. It’s creating a feedback loop in the runic script. If you don’t unlock them in about ten seconds, they are going to explode."

Recalling information from the original novel, plus the bits he had understood from the Voss library, at least based on theory alone, he was an armature craftsman

It was also because of this that he believed his idea to culturally invade this world with blue star technology was going to be a huge success.

And as if on cue, following his words, the iron cuffs began to whine. The red light of the runes turned a dangerous, unstable white.