I Am Zeus - Chapter 228

Chapter 228: Advance
The hesitation in the demonic ranks lasted only a heartbeat, but it was all the opening Wukong needed. With a whoop of pure joy, he surged forward, his hundred clones converging with him into a single, golden tsunami of motion.

“Now we’re having fun!” he roared, leading the charge. The clones fanned out, not just fighting, but herding the disoriented Infernal Guard, funneling them into crushing zones where the Giants’ massive weapons could do their work. It was a brutal, beautiful efficiency. For a moment, it looked like the monkey’s madness would simply sweep the plain clean.

But Hell was not so easily undone.

From the churning, bloody clouds above, a new horror descended. It wasn’t the winged fiends they’d seen before. These were larger, their forms shifting and indistinct, like living blots of ink in the shape of dragons. They didn’t screech or snarl. They hummed, a low, dissonant frequency that made the very air vibrate painfully. Where they flew, the light from Apollo’s suns dimmed, and the clones of Wukong began to flicker, their forms becoming less substantial.

One of the creatures dove, not at a Titan, but at the dense cluster of Wukong clones. It passed through them like a ghost, and where it touched, the clones didn’t just pop—they dissolved into nothingness, the hairs that formed them turning to ash. A dozen were wiped out in a single, silent pass.

The original Wukong skidded to a halt, his grin finally slipping. “Hey! That’s cheating!”

The humming things began to circle, their dark presence creating dead zones in the battle. The divine advance stalled. The Vanir cried out as their protective magics withered. The Titans swiped at the shadows, but their colossal weapons passed through them with no effect.

“Their nature is negation,” Hades called out, his voice cutting through the unsettling hum. “They unmake what is. Do not let them touch you.”

Ares let out a furious bellow as one swept near, and the rage in his eyes visibly dimmed, replaced by a flash of confusion. This was a enemy that couldn’t be stabbed.

Wukong, frustrated, leaped at one, his staff spinning. It passed harmlessly through the creature’s smoky head. The thing turned its empty gaze on him, and he felt a coldness seep into his bones, a terrifying numbness that threatened to erase his very thoughts. He pushed back with a surge of will, his own immortal spirit fighting the nullification, but he was forced to retreat.

“We can’t touch these things!” Hermes yelled, zipping back to Zeus’s side. “They’re killing our momentum!”

The King of the Gods had been silent, a still point in the storm. He had watched Wukong’s display, watched the Titans’ might, and now he watched this new threat unfold. His face was like carved stone. The defensive storm around him had died down to a faint crackle.

His eyes, however, were not looking at the humming shadows. They were looking past them, towards the distant spires of Pandemonium, as if he could see Mephisto himself smiling from his balcony.

“Enough,” Zeus said, his voice low, but it carried over the entire plain, silencing the hum, the screams, the clash of battle for a single, suspended moment.

He rose into the air. Not a jump, but a slow, inevitable ascent, as if the sky itself was drawing him up. The red clouds parted for him. The oppressive heat of Hell seemed to pull back from his form.

He raised a hand, not in a fist, but open-palmed, towards the swarm of nullifying horrors. His eyes, which had been calculating, now blazed with a light that was older than time, a raw, primordial power that had shaped the cosmos from chaos.

“This light was here before your darkness,” he whispered, and the whisper was a peal of thunder that shook the foundations of the obsidian cliffs.

Then, he clenched his fist.

The world turned white.

It wasn’t a bolt of lightning. It was a cage of it. A net of pure, white, incandescent fury erupted from him, covering the entire swarm of shadow-dragons. There was no sound, because the sound was too immense for even Hell to contain. The creatures of negation didn’t even have time to scream. They were simply erased, unmade by a light so absolute it consumed their nothingness. They vanished, and with them, the oppressive hum was replaced by a ringing, deafening silence.

The light faded. Zeus hovered in the air, smoke curling from his clenched fist. Below him, the entire plain of shadow was scorched clean. Every last demon, every Infernal Guard, every Gate-Spawn—all were gone, vaporized. Only the gods, Titans, and Giants remained, shielding their eyes from the after-image.

Wukong landed softly, staring up at Zeus with a new, grudging respect. “Well. Could’ve done that myself, but… you know. Didn’t want to show off.”

Zeus ignored him. His gaze swept over his army. “They throw tricks at us. Illusions and nullifications. They forget we are the source of what is. We are not visitors in reality. We define it.” He pointed towards the black towers. “Advance.”

That single word was more powerful than any war cry. It was an order, a certainty. The army surged forward, their spirits lifted, their fear burned away by Zeus’s display. The path was clear now, a smoldering highway leading straight to the heart of the enemy.

What followed was not a battle. It was a demolition.

They met the second wave—a horde of beasts made of screaming souls and molten rock. Ares, finally unleashed, met them head-on. No strategy, just pure, refined wrath. His spear was a blur, each strike not just killing a demon, but dismantling it, the rage in his blows so potent it seemed to cause the very air to bleed.

The Vanir, no longer trying to grow life, instead tapped into the corruption. They placed their hands on the ground and whispered words of unraveling. The earth beneath the demonic ranks turned to quicksand, then to acid, then to glass, swallowing them whole.

Apollo, his suns now burning with renewed fury, focused their light into searing lances. He didn’t just aim at crowds; he picked off commanders, the larger, more powerful fiends who tried to rally the troops. A beam of concentrated sunlight would lance down from the red sky, and another lieutenant would explode into ash.

Hades did not even move. He simply looked at the souls that were bound into the demonic forms, and he spoke a single, quiet word of command. The bonds of torment shattered. Thousands of damned souls, freed from their hellish prisons, dissipated into nothingness, taking their demonic shells with them. It was the most peaceful, and the most terrifying, form of destruction on the field.

And Wukong? He was a scalpel. While the others were sledgehammers, he found the weak points. He spotted a towering Archfiend, a walking fortress, and instead of attacking its armored front, he shrunk down to the size of a mouse, scurried up its leg, and expanded his staff inside its core, making it explode from the inside out.

He found a bridge of bone that reinforcements were crossing, and with a mighty heave, pried it loose from its foundations, sending a whole legion tumbling into a river of fire below.

Hell was being turned inside out. The Lords of Pandemonium, watching from their balconies, felt their first flicker of something that was not amusement.

Moloch’s grin had vanished. “They… they aren’t slowing down.”

“They are purging the layers,” Baal rasped, his shadowy form flickering uneasily.

Asmodeus dropped his goblet. The blood that spilled sizzled on the floor. “This is not a war. It is an extermination.”

Mephisto said nothing. He watched as Zeus, without even breaking his stride, called down a single, precise bolt of lightning that shattered a black tower five miles away, sending it crashing down in an avalanche of pulsing stone.

The rhythmic pain of Hell, its constant, breathing agony, was being disrupted. The whispers were drowned out by war chants and the sounds of shattering evil. The rivers of fire were being crossed on bridges of divine light. The sky, for the first time in eternity, was not just red—it was streaked with the gold of Apollo’s suns and the white of Zeus’s fury.

The army advanced, a wave of creation scouring a land built on despair. And at its head, Zeus, his expression still unreadable, led them deeper. The message was clear. They weren’t just here to fight a war.

They were here to win it.