The God of Underworld-Chapter 343 - 42

At this moment, the sky over the mortal realm was no longer a canopy of stars, but was now a shattered mirror, a jagged, weeping fissure that bled the grey rot of the outer ones into the atmosphere.

Below this celestial wound, the ruins of the world smoldered. The Silent Wailers—those pale, infant-like anomalies of the void—poured from the crack in a relentless, cascading waterfall of non-existence.

Herios, his armor cracked and his breath coming in ragged gasps, stood amidst a field of obsidian shards.

Beside him, the Queen of Shadows, Scáthach, leaned on her twin spears, her crimson eyes reflecting the carnage of a war that had no end in sight.

Medusa, having turned into a her partial Monster form, have her serpent-hair hissing in a state of high-alert, while she gripped her daggers with white-knuckled intensity.

"How ugly, these creatures really are tarnishing my garden!"

Just then, a voice boomed as above them, a golden streak of light cut through the gloom.

Gilgamesh, the King of Heroes, hovered upon his flying throne, his gaze filled with a cold, regal disdain for the chaos below as he looked at the leaking tear in reality as one might look at a stain on a tapestry.

"I will block the scar," Gilgamesh's voice boomed, carrying the weight of the First King of Mesopotamia. "You deal with the remnants. Do not disappoint me, King Where All Began!"

Without waiting for a response, he surged toward the heavens, the gate to his treasury opening behind him, causing golden ripples in space as thousands of divine treasures launched themselves not at the monsters, but into the edges of the crack, intending to stitch the sky back together with the iron will of the first civilization.

Herios watched him go, a weary, wry smile tugging at his lips. "That guy... he really likes giving orders. Even at the end of the world, he's still the most arrogant man in history."

"He has the right," Scáthach muttered, her voice dropping an octave. "After all, he is indeed the most powerful human in history."

She and Herios, they are powerful, known far and wide in their own pantheon as God Slayers, but what they had done is far cry from the likes of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh had singlehandedly started the decline the age of gods, and kick-starting the age of humanity, allowin humanity to walk on their own two feet without relying on the divines.

Even Herios, in his prime, only started the Age of Heroes, allowing humanity to gain the respect of the divines, but had never ended the tyranny of the Greek Gods.

Not to mention Herios also doesn't plan on actually ending the age of gods, he simply wanted to prove that humanity doesn't need gods.

Suddenly, Scáthach stiffened, her gaze snapping from the falling wailers to the horizon where the fallen fragments lay. "Wait... Herios, look. Something is... wrong."

The fragments of the Outer Ones that they had spent hours hacking apart did not dissipate, instead, the grey ichor and calcified limbs they had severed began to vibrate with a low-frequency hum that made the teeth of every mortal in the city ache.

Watching this, they realized, the "Dead" matter didn't rot, but had migrated across the ruined landscape, with thousands of Silent Wailer corpses that started to slither toward one another.

And no, they didn't just pile up, they melted into one another; pale skin fused with obsidian bone; thousand-eyed heads merged into central, weeping clusters.

It was like, they were becoming... Whole?

"Of course," Medusa whispered, her snakes recoiling in instinctual terror. "If they are fragments, that means they can also become whole. Which means, we haven't actually been killing them... We're just, delaying the inevitable."

The scale of the fusion was staggering.

The ground groaned as a mass of grey flesh, the size of a mountain range, began to rise from the city ruins.

It was a jigsaw puzzle of horror—a True Outer One being reborn from the scraps of its vanguard.

"Stop them! Break their fusion before it completes!" Herios roared, his heart hammering against his ribs.

He ignited his soul, his sword trailing a wake of golden fire as he launched himself at the growing mass.

Scáthach followed, moving like a blur of shadow and crimson, her spears aimed at the nexus points of the merging flesh.

Medusa unleashed the full power of her cursed eyes, her gaze attempting to petrify the fusion before it could solidify.

Around them, all of humanity heard Herios' call and began to launch an attack directed at the fusing fragments.

But as their attacks reached the perimeter of the entity, their attacks were blocked...no, not blocked, it was more like they struck Nothing.

"What!?"

"What is happening!?"

"My attacks aren't hitting!"

But Herios and Scáthach stared as they saw a massive Conceptual Barrier erupted around the fusing fragments.

It was a shimmering, translucent wall of "Non-Euclidean Logic", something that completely defy human perception and comprehension.

Herios recalled the moment he attacked, when his sword struck the barrier, the golden fire didn't bounce off; it simply ceased to exist at the point of contact.

Scáthach's spears, which was capable of piercing the hearts of gods, slid off the surface as if they were trying to strike a shadow.

"It's not a shield." Scáthach said, her brows furrowed. "It's a conceptual field, which completely rejects any damage from creatures of this dimension."

"So we can only watch...?!" Herios muttered in frustration.

"Unless we can attack from a higher dimension, yes." Said Scáthach.

They were forced to watch, paralyzed by their own impotence as the fusion began to complete.

The wailing of the individual fragments merged into a singular, vibrating tone that shattered every window for a hundred miles.

The air then turned cold, like a deep, existential cold that froze the hope in the hearts of the surviving soldiers below.

The world watched.

From the bunkers of the fallen cities to the remaining strongholds of the heroic spirits, humanity looked up and felt the true weight of Despair.

This wasn't a monster they could fight with swords or courage, this was a horror that gods once feared, a creature beyond their reality, one that only to eat and devour, a creature of chaos and despair . 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

At that moment, the mountain of flesh finally solidified as it t stood as a towering, multi-limbed pillar of grey entropy, its head, a singular, massive eye surrounded by a ring of gnashing mouths, staring directly into the soul of the world.

Its presence alone caused the buildings around it to crumble into dust, not from vibration, but from the simple fact that their "Form" was no longer being maintained by reality.

At this moment, what humanity faced was no longer a fragment, but a True Outer One that had set foot on the mortal soil.

"Is this it?" a young soldier whispered from the field, his spear falling from his nerveless fingers as he dropped into his knees, "After everything... after the gods fought for us... we're just... going to end, just like that?"

Normally, they would've called him a coward, a deserter, even, but this time, they can understand.

This was not an opponent they can face.

This was a horror so absolute, no will or determination can make them fight it.

The barrier remained firm, acting like a wall of silence that mocked their every effort.

Herios stood before the giant, his sword dim, feeling the tiny, fragile heartbeat of his own existence against the infinite, cold pulse of the Void.

Just as the True Outer One raised a limb to flatten the last of the human resistance, a sound echoed from the deep—a rhythmic, heavy thud that matched the heartbeat of the Underworld.

The ground cracked...no, not just crack, but opened!

And from it, chains made of gold bursts out of the earth.

It pierced through the outer ones barrier and directly wrapped itself around the Outer One, forcing it to drop to the ground.

It roared in anger and indignation.

Just then, from the very soil of the battlefield, soil that had been soaked in the blood of both mortals and immortals, a figure manifested.

She did not fall from the sky like a meteor, nor did she emerge with a flash of light, she simply rose from the earth like a secret finally being told.

She wore a structured, dark blue coat that seemed to absorb the dim light of the dying world, her face partially obscured by a deep hood.

As she stepped forward, the grey rot that had been creeping across the ground hissed and receded, unable to touch the space she occupied.

"Lady... Medea?" Herios gasped, his voice cracking with a mixture of shock and a sudden, sharp spike of hope.

Medea. The Princess of Colchis, the legendary witch of the Argonauts, and the most favored disciple of the Goddess Hecate.

Having long ago ascended to the divine courts, she had become a figure of myth within myth.

There were even rumors that when Hecate had entered the Great Marriage to the King of the Dead, Medea had been part of her dowry.

Whether that was true or not is something only known to them.

Medea pushed back her hood, revealing eyes that glowed with the violet fire of the underworld.

She did not look at the True Outer One first, but at the huddle of shivering, terrified soldiers and the broken heroes who stood ready to die.

"Look at you," Medea's voice rang out. It wasn't the screech of a hag or the song of a siren; it was the steady, resonant tone of a Queen's Magistrate. "You, who were carved from the dust of this world and breathed into life by the very gods who now bleed for you. You stand before a shadow and call it the end? You stand before a silence and call it the truth?"

She stepped toward the massive, conceptual barrier of the Outer One, her hand glowing with a forbidden, ancient script.

"Despair is a luxury for those who have already surrendered their names!" Medea cried, her voice magnifying until it echoed in the hearts of every mortal across the globe. "The Thing before you is but a smudge on a page that we are currently rewriting! My Lord, the King of the Dead, does not recognize this 'Nothingness.' He recognizes the Law of the World! He recognizes the Debt of these creatures! And today, we will come to collect a debt it cannot pay!"

As she spoke, the heavy, suffocating weight of the Outer One's presence began to lift.

"This world is not a graveyard for the forgotten!" Medea roared, slamming her staff into the cracked earth. "It is the garden of the Underworld! And the gardener has come to pull the weeds!"

"AWAKEN, SONS OF THE EARTH! RISE, CHILDREN OF THE DEEP!"

The ground beneath the True Outer One's feet shook, before it detonated, but it wasn't a destructive explosion, but it was the sound of a billion tons of earth being moved by sentient muscle.

From the yawning chasms in the crust, figures of impossible scale emerged.

They were the Giants, the elder offspring of Gaia and Hades, born from the union of the Primal Earth and the Sovereign Deep.

They were titans of various skin and molten-purple veins, their armor forged from the tectonic plates of the world.

Each one stood as a pillar of physical reality, their mere presence forcing the "Conceptual Barrier" of the Outer One to groan and crack.

These were the Gegenes, the earth-born, who had once challenged Olympus but were now the sworn protectors of the Supreme Deity's domain.

They rose like living mountains, their hands grasping the grey, entropic limbs of the True Outer One.

Seeing that, the despair in the eyes of humanity started to recede, and in its place was a primal, terrestrial roar that matched the heartbeat of the planet.

Medea stood at the center of the giants, her dark blue coat fluttering in the wake of their emergence, her eyes fixed on the monster that had dared to threaten her Lord's garden.

"Now, Herios!" Medea commanded, pointing her glowing staff at the monster's eye. "The Earth holds him! Show this shadow the strength of a Soul that refuses to be unwritten!"