I Am Zeus - Chapter 251

Chapter 251: Retreat
The silence after Michael left was heavier than the one before. It was a waiting silence. The kind that sits in your lungs and makes every breath feel borrowed.

Zeus stood there, feeling the eyes of every remaining god on his back. He could hear the shaky rhythm of their breathing, the clink of a weapon adjusting in a nervous grip. The victory party had been cancelled before it even started.

He finally turned from the empty space where he’d unmade the Devil. His gaze swept over the ruins of Pandemonium—the scorched earth, the rivers of cooling demon-blood, the shattered bones of the landscape. This wasn’t a prize. It was a tomb. And they were standing in it.

He looked at Hades. His brother hadn’t moved. The Lord of the Dead looked more at home here than any of them, his pale face a mask of quiet understanding. He wasn’t celebrating; he was taking inventory.

“Hades,” Zeus said, his voice rough, cutting through the quiet. It wasn’t a king’s command. It was the tired sound of one brother asking another for a favor.

Hades’s dark eyes met his.

“This place… it can’t be a backdoor anymore,” Zeus said, gesturing vaguely at the hellscape around them. “We closed one, but we might have just kicked open a bigger one. I need you to lock it.”

Hades tilted his head, a silent question.

“Take whoever you need. Anubis, Hel, the Shinigami—any death god from any pantheon who’ll listen. Link this place to your realms. To all your realms. Weave the underworlds together right here. Make it so that if anything tries to come through from… from up there… it has to pass through your domain first. Through all of your domains.”

He let that hang in the air. He was asking them to turn their homes into the first line of defense. To make their quiet realms of the dead into fortresses.

Hades didn’t blink. He simply gave a slow, single nod. “It will be a tangled web. It will take time.”

“We don’t have much,” Zeus replied softly.

“We have enough.” Hades turned, his shadows stretching out, and in moments, he was conversing in low, guttural tones with a jackal-headed god and a pale woman crowned with bones. The work began without another word.

Zeus’s gaze then found Odin. The All-Father was leaning on his spear, his one eye fixed on Zeus, seeing too much.

“Odin,” Zeus said, walking toward him. “Your runes. The ones that bind reality. The ones that hold.”

Odin grunted, a tired sound from deep in his chest. “I know the ones.”

“I need them. The strongest you have. The oldest. We need to fortify the seams between our worlds and this one. I want a wall that isn’t a wall. A lock that can’t be picked.”

Odin studied him for a long moment. “Runes like that… they demand a price. They drink power. They need an anchor. A constant source.”

“I know,” Zeus said. He lifted his hand, and this time, it wasn’t the wild lightning of before. A wisp of something darker, quieter, and infinitely older coiled around his fingers. It was the primordial chaos he had used to erase Lucifer, now subdued, but still thrumming with terrifying potential. It was the void given form. “I’ll imbue the runes with this. It will be the anchor. It’s… reactive. If something divine, something from His realm, tries to force its way through, the chaos will recognize it. It will resist. And we’ll know.”

Odin’s eye widened a fraction. It was a dangerous, desperate plan. To use the raw stuff of un-creation as a lock and key. It was like using a live volcano to power a hearth.

“You are playing with fire, Thunderer,” Odin rumbled.

“We’re already burning,” Zeus said, his voice flat. “I’d rather we choose how.”

Odin gave a grim, reluctant nod. He slammed the butt of Gungnir on the ground. The sound echoed, and ethereal, glowing symbols began to bleed from the spear-point, hovering in the air like ancient ghosts. He began to chant, his voice a low, gravelly song, as he started weaving the first protective lattice over the torn sky of Hell.

The rest of the gods watched, the reality of their new situation settling in. This wasn’t cleanup. This was a retreat under fire, a desperate fortification of a doomed position.

Aphrodite, her dress torn and smudged, helped a limping Hephaestus to his feet. There was no flirtation in her touch, only a grim, steadying support. He leaned on her, his face tight with pain, and began murmuring about forge-spells that could reinforce celestial bronze.

Athena, her helm cracked, was already directing lesser gods in gathering the wounded, her strategic mind already shifting from offensive war to logistical survival.

Zeus moved through them, a quiet center in the storm of activity. He placed a hand on Poseidon’s wet shoulder. “Get our people home. Use whatever rivers and seas connect to this place. Don’t wait for a grand exit.”

Poseidon nodded, his usual bluster gone. “The oceans will hide them. For a time.” He turned and bellowed, his voice carrying the power of the deep, summoning currents from the Styx to carry the Olympians away.

One by one, they began to leave. The Vanir, led by a weary Freyja, stepped into a shimmering portal of light. The Shinto kami dissolved into mist and cherry blossoms. The Egyptian gods faded into shafts of sunlight that pierced the red sky. Each departure was quiet, somber. There were no boasts, no cheers. Just the grim business of getting home to prepare for the end of the world.

Wukong bounded up to Zeus one last time. He didn’t salute or joke. He just looked at the chaos energy flickering around Zeus’s hands and then met his eyes.

“That’s some serious stuff you’re playing with, thunder-lord,” the Monkey King said, uncharacteristically serious. “Don’t get eaten by it. The big guy upstairs would be pretty cheesed if someone else blew up his toy box before he could.”

Then, with a flicker and a faint smell of peaches, he was gone.

Soon, only a handful remained. Odin, his face beaded with sweat as he carved runes of power into the very fabric of the dimension. Hades and his new council of death gods, their voices a low murmur as they began the slow, painful process of stitching the underworlds together, the air groaning with the strain of displaced geography.

And Zeus.

He watched as the last of the Olympians—a group of minor dryads and a wounded satyr—were swept away on a sudden, brackish tide summoned by Poseidon. Hermes gave him a last, unreadable look from the back of the retreating wave, then vanished into the gloom.

Finally, it was just him, the two ancient kings, and the ghosts of a billion dead.

He walked to the edge of the great crater and looked out. The red sky seemed to pulse, a wounded heart. The air stank of ozone, blood, and the strange, clean scent of Odin’s runes. He could feel the chaotic energy within him, a restless, hungry thing that was now bound to this place, to this desperate plan.

He had come here to put down a rebellion. He had ended up declaring war on God.

A bitter, tired smile touched his lips. Hera would have had a field day with this. The sheer, catastrophic arrogance of it.

Odin finished his chant with a final, guttural word. The runes flashed once, a searing white, and then sank into the landscape, vanishing from sight. But the feeling of them remained—a taut, invisible net over everything.

“It is done,” Odin said, his voice hoarse. He looked older than Zeus had ever seen him. “The lock is set. Your… energy… is the key. And the alarm.”

Hades glided over, the other death gods having already departed to their own realms to begin the great weaving. “The foundations are laid,” he said, his voice like dry leaves. “The connections are fragile, but they will hold. For now. Anyone coming from Heaven will find themselves taking a very long detour through the land of the dead.”

The three most powerful kings of their pantheons stood together in the silence of a conquered Hell.

“We have bought time,” Odin stated. “Nothing more.”

“Time is all we ever have,” Zeus replied.

Without another word, Odin raised Gungnir. A rainbow bridge, faint and shimmering, pierced the red haze. He stepped onto it and was gone, back to his golden hall and his doomed warriors.

Hades simply sank into his own shadow, the darkness swallowing him until not even a whisper remained.

And then Zeus was truly alone.

He stood there for a long time, feeling the immense, stupid silence of the place. He had won. He had saved everyone. And in doing so, he had likely doomed them all to a fight they could never win.

He lifted a hand and, with a thought that cost him more energy than he thought he had left, tore a hole in the world. On the other side, he could see the familiar peaks of Olympus, tinged with the soft light of a setting sun. It looked peaceful. It looked like home.

He took one last look at Hell. At the scarred land, the silent armies of the dead, the invisible runes and underworld bonds that now made it the most fortified—and most targeted—place in all of creation.

Then he stepped through the portal, and it sealed shut behind him, leaving the underworld to its new, silent guardians.