The God of Underworld - Chapter 265
Chapter 265: Chapter 23
Just then, a roar unlike any other reverberated through the fabric of the universe, a soundless detonation that transcended hearing, a pressure that shook the souls of every being present.
The cosmos itself quaked.
Stars flickered into nothingness.
Dimensions folded in on themselves.
Even the divine trembled beneath its echo.
And for the first time in countless eons, Hades flinched, a subtle motion that did not go unnoticed by those around him.
Every god looked up. And there, in the hollow void left behind by the sealed fragment, something moved.
The light of existence itself seemed to warp and recoil. The darkness shuddered and coalesced, and from within that impossible emptiness, a single eye, vast beyond comprehension, ancient beyond the birth of time, peeked through.
It was not the eye of a being that looked upon reality, but the eye of something that defined reality by looking at it, something whose mere gaze rewrote the concept of perception itself.
For a heartbeat, the eye blinked. And with that blink, the laws of creation collapsed.
The seal that bound the fragment shattered instantly, not by force, but by the sheer impossibility of what had just looked upon it.
The divine runes disintegrated into meaningless static.
The golden chains dissolved like smoke.
And with an earth-shattering scream, the fragment was freed, its monstrous body twisting as it lashed out with renewed, uncontrollable fury.
The void erupted in chaos.
The air split into ribbons of paradox.
The ground no longer existed, there was no longer up or down, no longer space or time.
The fragment’s roar fractured everything into kaleidoscopic shards of broken existence.
Yet before it could attack, Hecate, Frigg, Loki, Hel, and dozens of gods from both pantheons reacted in perfect, desperate synchronicity.
Their hands raised, voices overlapping in divine command, and a barrier of pure divinity erupted around the fragment.
Silver, gold, crimson, and violet energies intertwined, forming an intricate dome of divine light that shimmered and pulsed with every heartbeat of reality.
The air burned with power.
The space between moments screamed.
The fragment slammed against the barrier, its every strike like a collapsing world, yet it held—for now.
But all of them knew that it wouldn’t last.
Above them, the eye lingered.
It blinked again. And from its edges, countless grotesque arms—vast tendrils of raw concept and writhing void—began to emerge, each one lined with spiraling mouths and dripping with existence itself, as if the universe bled from their surface.
They groped at the hole in the boundary of reality, trying to pry it open, trying to enter, to make the Norse cosmos a part of its own ever-consuming body.
Inside, the freed fragment was regaining its strength, preparing to attack once more.
Outside, the true body of the Outer One was watching. And trying to enter.
“Fuck…” A god whispered
“This is what we’re up against…?”
The gods felt despair creep into their divine hearts. For the first time, they realized the scale of what they were up against.
This is not just a fragment, not even a Primordial deity, but something from beyond all universes, something that regarded creation as a single cell in its infinite anatomy.
Hades’ gaze was calm, but his eyes burned with grim understanding. He turned to Nyx, who stood beside him, her face unreadable amidst the storm of cosmic collapse.
“Can you handle the fragment?” he asked quietly.
Nyx’s eyes glimmered faintly, her expression turning solemn.
“We can try,” she said, her voice steady but carrying an undercurrent of divine tension. “If we combine our full power, it should be enough to restrain it once more… temporarily.”
Hades nodded once. “Then I’ll leave it to you.”
Without hesitation, he lifted his hand. In it appeared a weapon that distorted reality around its form, his spear, Desmos, forged by the cyclops and something he nurtured from the boundary between existence and nonexistence itself.
A weapon that can no longer pierced just flesh or spirit, but even concepts.
He turned toward the yawning void where the eye watched.
Then, without a word, he threw.
The spear vanished the instant it left his hand—no sound, no light, not even movement—only a streak of impossible purple that split the cosmos.
A moment later, it struck.
The eye convulsed, and the entire multiverse shuddered.
It was not a roar that followed, but something deeper, a vibration that existed before sound, a shivering of the very axioms of being.
Planets cracked, timelines unraveled, the gods screamed as reality buckled. It was a cry not of pain, but of disbelief, as if the entirety of existence was echoing one thought:
Something impossible has just occurred.
The eye recoiled violently, retreating back into the formless dark beyond creation.
But Hades was already moving, his body turning into a comet of black and violet flame as he flew through the void, breaching the edge of the universe itself.
And then, as he emerged beyond the walls of reality, he saw it.
The true form of the Outer One.
It was not a being. It was infinity given shape—an incomprehensible mass of tentacles that stretched across light-years, blinking eyes larger than galaxies, mouths that whispered the death of language, and bodies that were neither physical nor ethereal, but both and neither simultaneously.
Its mere existence bent logic to its will, every breath an act of creation and destruction, every blink a rewriting of what “is.”
And there, amidst the endless stars now turning to ash in its presence, Hades stood alone, his cloak of night fluttering in the impossible wind of the void.
His hand reached forward, summoning Desmos back to him, its shaft glowing faintly in his grasp.
For the first time in countless millennia, the God of the Dead felt small.
Not in fear. No.
But in the recognition that what stood before him was not a rival—it was an incomprehensible idea.
An existence beyond all known existence.
And yet, his eyes did not waver.
One can even see a faint, excited smirk on his face.
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Back within the trembling boundaries of the Nordic Universe, the divine light that had once illuminated the Nine Realms flickered and dimmed, as if the stars themselves were holding their breath in terror.
The vast battlefield of Helheim had fallen into silence, an unnatural stillness that pressed down upon every soul, mortal and divine alike.
Even the flow of time seemed hesitant, afraid to move forward.
Odin, his body still trembling faintly from the shockwave of Hades’ clash beyond the veil, flew beside Nyx, his single golden eye blazing with both determination and dread.
His breath came heavy, the exhaustion of unending battle clinging to his ancient bones.
“What now, Nyx?” he demanded, his voice carrying the weight of a god who had led too many wars and survived too few victories. “What do we do now?”
Nyx’s expression was grim, the cold void reflected in her obsidian eyes.
She bit her lip in frustration, an uncharacteristic gesture for the Primordial Goddess of Night, and for the briefest instant, the façade of omnipotence that all Primordials wore seemed to crack.
“We…” she began, her voice low and strained, “can only do our best to kill it. Hades won’t be able to help us anymore.”
Her words hung in the air like a funeral bell. The gods around them stiffened, despair creeping into their hearts like frost upon glass.
Nyx exhaled deeply, her gaze shifting toward the far reaches of the void where the fragment raged against their seals.
In that moment, she realized something that chilled her far more than the monstrous power before them—how truly fragile they were without him.
Every scheme, every stratagem they had devised against the Outer Ones, every fragment of hope they’d dared to nurture—it all relied on Hades, the sole being capable of standing against the impossible.
Without him, their combined might felt like a candle before an eternal storm.
Her jaw clenched, her eyes narrowing in fierce thought.
Are we truly so dependent? she wondered bitterly. Have the gods of two universes fallen so low that we cannot even stand without him?
The realization twisted within her like a knife. Her mind raced through possibilities, and at last, her eyes flickered with the faintest glint of desperation.
“Should I use it…?” she whispered to herself, her words barely audible even to Odin who hovered beside her.
Her hand trembled slightly, a gesture almost imperceptible, but Odin caught it, the sign of a being weighing a choice that could alter the fate of all creation.
Before he could ask, the world cracked open.
A soundless explosion of terror filled the cosmos.
The barrier that held the fragment, woven from the combined power of hundreds of gods, shattered like glass struck by a hammer of eternity.
The light that once confined it splintered into fading dust, and in that instant, a roar that could unmake sanity tore through the fabric of reality.
The gods recoiled, clutching their heads as divine senses screamed in agony.
The roar wasn’t sound, it was the concept of destruction made manifest.
Mountains collapsed across the Nine Realms, rivers boiled, and even the roots of Yggdrasil shuddered violently.
And then they saw it.
The fragment, now unbound and unrestrained, began to change.
Its form melted, reformed, and expanded beyond the comprehension of any living mind.
From its core erupted countless tendrils, black and glistening, each one as thick as a world.
They writhed through the void, piercing through realms, curling around planets like serpents constricting prey.
Every surface of those monstrous appendages was lined with thousands of eyes and gnashing mouths, each devouring the light, consuming the flow of magic, draining the essence of the cosmos itself.
The gods could only stare, their courage beginning to falter, as those tentacles stretched across the heavens like living chains of oblivion.
Odin’s single eye widened in horror, the divine light in it flickering with raw disbelief.
“By the roots of Yggdrasil…” he whispered, his voice trembling. “The entire universe…it’s being absorbed!”
He could feel it, the balance of forces unraveling.
The laws of physics, the fabric of time, the flow of mana, and even the concept of divinity itself, all were being consumed, funneled into the endless hunger of that monstrous mass.
The more it devoured, the stronger it became.
Planets cracked under invisible pressure, stars flickered and vanished as if swallowed by the void, and the World Tree itself groaned in pain.
If it continued, if not stopped within mere moments, the Norse Universe would cease to exist.
It would not explode nor fade. It would simply cease, its essence reduced to fuel for the crawling god that writhed through the heavens.
Nyx’s face hardened, her hand clenching into a fist so tight that cosmic light bled from her skin.
“If it’s not stopped now,” she said, her voice trembling between fury and dread, “this universe will be devoured in its entirety. Even Hades won’t have a universe to return to.”
Odin’s grip tightened around his spear, Gungnir, divine lightning sparking across its tip. His cloak whipped in the storm of collapsing reality.
“Then we stop it,” he said grimly. “Even if it means burning what little of us remains.”
And as the gods gathered their power for what might be their final stand, the sky itself split open once more, and the fragment’s endless tentacles continued their slow, inexorable advance, each pulse of their monstrous rhythm beating like the countdown of a dying universe.