The God of Underworld - Chapter 260
Chapter 260: Chapter 18
Freya roared as the abominations swallowed her whole, their black, tar-like bodies writhing and constricting around her like living chains.
She gritted her teeth, refusing to succumb, and a bluish-silver aura burst from her skin, radiant, divine, and fierce, erasing a wave of darkness in every direction.
The air trembled as her sword gleamed with celestial light, but the monsters only came again, endless and hungry.
Still, Freya did not hesitate.
With trembling arms, she lifted her blade once more and charged into the darkness.
Every swing tore through flesh and shadow, yet for every one she cut down, a dozen more rose in its place.
Time became meaningless. She no longer knew if minutes or hours had passed.
Around her, the cries of gods and spirits echoed, once fierce, now fading.
When she looked up, she saw Freyr bleeding heavily, his golden hair matted with soot and ichor, yet still swinging his sword with desperate defiance.
Thor’s lightning flickered weakly in the distance, his once mighty roar reduced to ragged breaths.
Even Hel, ruler of this forsaken realm, had cracks running through her pale skin like broken porcelain.
They were all nearing their end.
Freya’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her sword. ‘Are we truly going to die here?’
Her mind swirled with exhaustion and disbelief. ‘After everything we’ve done… after all the worlds we protected… will it all end like this?’
She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, her heart heavy with a strange, painful clarity. Oh how she regrets it.
No… she don’t regret fighting. She don’t regret staying. But… she does regret never finding him.
Her Odr.
The one promised to her by prophecy, her destined beloved. A man she had never met, yet one she had dreamed of countless times.
Was he already gone? Had he fallen somewhere in this endless war? She imagined him, a warrior with eyes full of light, perhaps already devoured by these same creatures.
A foolish, beautiful thought struck her, perhaps they have fought side by side without even knowing it.
Her vision blurred, and she could no longer tell if it was from tears or the spreading darkness creeping over her body.
Her knees buckled, and she fell, the blade slipping from her trembling hands and clattering uselessly against the blood-soaked ground.
“Freya!” Freyr’s desperate cry pierced the chaos, raw and trembling.
She smiled faintly at the sound of her brother’s voice. He still worries too much…
Her chest ached, not from fear, but from love. She wanted to tell him to stop shouting, to save his strength, to keep fighting.
She wanted to tell him that she had already given everything she had. That her power, her divinity, her very soul, it was all spent.
The abominations crawled over her legs now, gnawing and tearing at her flesh, but she could no longer feel pain.
Her body was numb, heavy, dying.
So this is how it ends… she thought faintly, the darkness closing in. ‘If only I could’ve seen you once, Odr… even just once…’
Just then, the world stilled.
A soundless tremor rippled through Helheim, and for an instant, it felt as if the entire realm held its breath.
Then, a calm, commanding voice echoed, not loud, but so absolute that even the gods froze.
“Why,” it said softly, “bother wasting your strength on them… when you can crush them with the pressure of your divinity?”
The air itself bent.
A pressure unlike anything Freya had ever felt descended upon the battlefield, vast, suffocating, divine.
Space quaked, as if the entire universe compressed on itself, and in that instant, the sea of abominations imploded, their bodies flattened into nothing but ash and black mist.
Freya’s eyes widened, her heart pounding weakly in her chest. It was as if, something that was long lost to her, has returned.
The darkness cleared, and through the haze of light and destruction, a silhouette began to take shape.
A man appeared above the battlefield, his presence so sudden and overwhelming that even the flow of corrupted energy seemed to pause in reverence.
His hair was a stark, luminous white-silver that shimmered like moonlight over a frozen lake, while his eyes burned with deep amethyst light, calm, commanding, and impossibly ancient.
Draped over his tall, lean frame was a robe of black, lined with gold embroidery that glowed faintly with every breath of divinity that leaked from his body.
His arms were crossed casually, as if the apocalypse raging below him were nothing more than a passing inconvenience.
Every god, spirit, and warrior of Asgard turned upward, their eyes wide with disbelief.
Even Freyr, bloodied and exhausted, forgot to breathe for a moment.
Thor’s lightning flickered out mid-strike, and Hel herself, ruler of the underworld, felt an unfamiliar chill crawl down her spine.
None of them recognized this man.
His divinity was completely different any Nordic gods, yet it was unmistakably divine. It was dense, heavy, suffocating, like the weight of eternity pressing upon mortal air.
The man’s voice rang clear across the field, neither loud nor harsh, but carrying a weight that made the world itself listen.
“Dealing with these creatures,” he said, his tone calm and almost dismissive, “is simple.”
He lifted one hand, slowly and effortlessly, and waved.
That was all.
No light burst forth. No explosion shattered the sky. There was no thunder, no roar, no spectacle. Nothing!
And yet, the endless sea of abominations, those things that had consumed gods, that had resisted divine fire and lightning, simply ceased to exist.
They dissolved, as though the universe had rewritten itself to erase their presence.
One heartbeat they were there, writhing and howling; the next, they were gone, leaving only silence and a battlefield steeped in disbelief.
Freya’s sword slipped from her trembling hands, the metallic ring echoing faintly in the sudden stillness.
Her eyes were fixed on the man, unblinking, her heart pounding as if trying to break free from her chest.
Somewhere, buried deep within her memory, the voice of the old seer echoed, soft, distant, and yet now ringing as clearly as if whispered into her ear:
“You will know him the moment your eyes meet. When your gaze finds his, you will understand without words. That man will be your Odr.”
Freya’s breath caught.
As though drawn by fate, by prophecy, by something far older than time itself, the man’s eyes turned, purple irises glimmering like molten amethyst, and met hers.
The world vanished.
For a single heartbeat, there was no battle, no screaming, no blood or death, only that gaze.
And in that moment, Freya knew. The prophecy was true. Her heart recognized him before her mind could, and every fragment of her divinity, every pulse of her soul cried out the same truth: This is him.
Her Odr.
Her destined one.
Tears welled in her eyes, unbidden, falling freely down her soot-streaked cheeks. It wasn’t sorrow, it was something purer, deeper.
A strange, overwhelming relief, like finding the other half of her soul after wandering for an eternity.
But the moment of stillness shattered as the heavens themselves groaned.
A second wave of darkness surged from the distance, thicker, blacker, vast enough to swallow the horizon.
The remnants of the Norse pantheon braced themselves instinctively, weapons raised, divine light flaring once more despite their exhaustion.
Then the sky broke.
A thunderclap, deep and ancient, shook the ground, and a storm cloud the size of a mountain swirled overhead.
A bolt of lightning, pure, golden, divine, struck the ground, splitting it open, and from the light emerged a man with hair like the sun and a beard of burnished gold, holding in his grasp a lightning bolt that crackled with raw authority.
Zeus.
But he was not alone.
A roar like the ocean’s depths followed, and a tsunami rose on the edge of Helheim itself, an impossible wave surging up from nowhere.
From within it stepped a tall figure with sea-green eyes and trident in hand, his very presence carrying the scent of salt and storm.
Poseidon.
Then, from portals of flame and mist, from rifts in the clouds and tears in the very fabric of space, more figures descended.
Some walked down beams of sunlight, others stepped out of swirling fogs or pillars of divine radiance.
Tens of thousands of beings filled the skies and the lands, armored gods, radiant spirits, beings of impossible majesty and power.
The Norse gods stared in stunned silence.
Freyr’s knuckles went white around his sword.
Thor’s lightning dimmed as he watched the newcomers with both awe and suspicion.
Hel’s pale lips parted, her expression unreadable.
These were gods. Every one of them radiated divinity, unmistakable and immense.
But none of them were familiar. None bore the markings of Asgard, Helheim, or any of the realms they knew.
“Who are they…?” Thor muttered, his voice hoarse with disbelief.
Freyr shook his head, eyes narrowing. “I… I do not know. But their power—”
“—is equal to ours,” Hel finished coldly, though her tone trembled with something dangerously close to fear.
Then, the silver-haired man spoke again, his voice echoing across the battlefield with regal calm.
“I am Hades,” he declared, the title rolling from his tongue like thunder across a silent sky. “God of the Dead. A god of the Greek Pantheon.”
He looked around, his gaze sweeping across the remnants of the Norse army: Freyr, Thor, Hel, and finally Freya.
“I come,” he continued, “at the request of Odin himself—to lend the aid of my pantheon to the Norse. For today, the realms stand together… against the darkness that threatens all creation.”
And as he spoke, the air itself shimmered with divine energy—the breath of a thousand gods rising as one.