I Am Zeus - Chapter 236

Chapter 236: Azazel
The air in the throne room was thinning. Not of oxygen, but of evil. The constant, oppressive weight of Hell was lightening, replaced by the sharp, clean scents of ozone, blood, and divine sweat.

Asmodeus watched it all from his perch on a crumbling archway, his legs crossed elegantly. Below him, the battle was turning into a slaughter. His own forces were in disarray. The stench of dead demons was becoming overwhelming.

His eyes tracked the pairs.

Thor and Loki moved through the chaos like a storm front. They weren’t even talking. They didn’t need to. Thor would swing Mjolnir in a wide, crushing arc, clearing a space, and Loki would be there in the opening, his daggers finding the throats or hearts of the disoriented survivors. It was a brutal, efficient dance they’d perfected over a thousand years of fighting together and against each other.

Asmodeus felt a flicker of… not fear, but profound irritation. This was messy. This was beneath him.

His gaze swept the room. Mephisto? Dust. Moloch? A broken heap. Belial? A puddle of poison. Baal was locked in a raging tempest with Poseidon, his smoky form being torn apart by divine wind and rain. It was only a matter of time.

The gods had paid a price, sure. Fallen giants littered the floor like felled trees. A few Vanir lay still, their nature magic extinguished. But they had numbers. They had unity. And they had a terrifying, focused rage that Hell’s legions, for all their malice, could not match.

A bold, terrible, and wonderfully reckless idea began to bloom in Asmodeus’s mind. It was a card so dangerous that even Lucifer, in his current state of apocalyptic pique, had refused to play it.

One Watcher remained.

Not just any Watcher. The one even the others had shunned. The one Michael himself had taken personal, painful measures to imprison separately from his brethren. A punishment within a punishment.

Azazel.

While Samjaza had taught humanity the paths of the stars, Azazel had taught them how to tear each other apart. He was the father of all corruption, the architect of weapons and war, the whisperer of every jealous thought that ever ended in bloodshed. He wasn’t just forbidden knowledge; he was active, gleeful damnation.

Releasing him would be like trying to put out a fire with a volcano. But Asmodeus was out of options, and he had never been particularly concerned with collateral damage.

A blast of lightning shattered the archway he sat on. Asmodeus dropped gracefully to the floor, landing without a sound as stone and bone rained down around him.

Thor stood before him, Mjolnir humming in his grip, his beard crackling with energy. “Getting bored up there, pretty one?” Thor boomed.

Loki materialized from a shimmer of air behind Asmodeus. “He’s not pretty, brother. He’s just… over-perfumed.” He sniffed the air dramatically. “Trying to cover the stink of failure, I suppose.”

Asmodeus brushed a speck of dust from his sleeve. “The boor and the trickster. A matched set. How… predictable.” He looked from one to the other. “Tell me, does he still fall for the ‘look behind you’ routine?”

Thor’s eyes narrowed. “I do not.”

“Of course you don’t,” Loki said smoothly, rolling his eyes. Then he pointed past Thor. “Wait, is that a second Mjolnir?”

Thor’s head instinctively started to turn before he caught himself, snarling. “LOKI!”

Asmodeus used the split-second distraction. He didn’t attack. He retreated, flowing backward like smoke. His form split into a dozen beautiful, alluring copies, each one beckoning, each one a perfect lie.

Thor swung his hammer, and a clone dissolved into rose-scented mist. Loki threw a dagger, and another burst into shards of broken glass.

“Annoying,” Thor grumbled, spinning Mjolnir to create a vortex of wind that began to tear the illusions apart.

But the real Asmodeus was already far across the chamber, his hands moving in a complex, bloody pattern in the air. He was drawing a sigil not of Hell, but of something older, something that smelled of cold desert nights and the first murder.

Loki saw it first. His playful demeanor vanished. “Thor. Stop playing with the reflections.”

“What? I’m not playing, I’m—”

“Now, Thor!” Loki’s voice was sharp with a rare urgency. He was no longer looking at the illusions, but at the symbol forming on the far wall. It was a key. A key to a lock that should never be opened.

Thor followed his gaze. He might not understand the magic, but he recognized the stench of something truly, cosmically wrong. “What is he doing?”

“Something very, very stupid,” Loki said, already running. “Even for a demon!”

Asmodeus completed the final line of the sigil. The blood he used—his own—glowed with a sickly, greenish-black light. The symbol pulsed, and the wall behind it didn’t crack. It rotted. The very substance of Hell decayed in an instant, revealing not stone, but an endless, silent void.

From within that void, a single, long-fingered hand, grey and skeletal, gripped the edge of the opening.

A presence washed over the throne room, so heavy and vile that every single being, god and demon alike, froze mid-action. It was a feeling of being watched by something that enjoyed suffering not as a consequence, but as the main course.

Asmodeus took a step back, a triumphant, manic smile on his face. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”

The hand tightened, and Azazel pulled himself into Hell.

He was tall and gaunt, his body looking like it had been stretched on a rack for millennia. His skin was the grey of a long-dead corpse. He wore tattered robes that might have been white once, but were now stained with the indelible filth of his own thoughts. His eyes were missing. In their sockets swirled two miniature, silent whirlwinds of black sand.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His mere presence was a sermon on despair.

He turned his sandstorm gaze upon Asmodeus.

“You… released me,” a voice said, though Azazel’s mouth did not move. The words formed directly in the mind of every creature present, each syllable feeling like a shard of rusted metal being dragged across the soul.

“A gesture of goodwill,” Asmodeus said, sweeping a bow. “We have… pests.”

Azazel’s head slowly rotated, taking in the assembled gods. A low, grinding sound that might have been a laugh echoed in their skulls.

“Pests,” the mental voice agreed. “I know how to deal with pests.”

He raised a hand, and a nearby giant, who had been moments from crushing a demon, suddenly stopped. The giant looked at his own hands, a confused look on his face. Then, with a roar of sudden, inexplicable rage, he turned and brought his club down on the head of the Titan next to him.

The battle, which had been a clear line of gods versus demons, dissolved into utter chaos. Alliances broke. Gods turned on gods, demons on demons. A Vanir screamed as her own magic twisted back on her, the vines she summoned strangling her instead. It was a plague of paranoia and violence, spreading from Azazel like a shockwave.

Thor stared, horrified, as a group of einherjar began attacking each other. “What madness is this?”

Loki’s face was pale. “Not madness. Clarity. He’s not controlling them. He’s just… reminding them of every reason they have to hate each other. And they’re listening.”

Asmodeus watched his plan unfold, a look of sublime satisfaction on his face. He had gambled everything. He had unleashed a pathogen that could not be contained, that would infect friend and foe alike.

He met Loki’s gaze across the room and gave a little shrug, as if to say, “Well? You wanted a fight.”

The true cost of his decision was only just beginning to be felt. The war for Hell was over. The war for sanity had just begun.