God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord -
Chapter 81 - 82: Rise of the Hollow Pantheon
Chapter 81: Chapter 82: Rise of the Hollow Pantheon
The broken void stretched endlessly in every direction.
Where once the Womb of Stars had cradled the first dreams of creation, now there was only Darius — and those who had chosen to rise with him.
Or perhaps they had no choice.
Perhaps the sheer gravitational truth of his existence demanded their devotion, twisting even the fabric of soul and reason to bow before him.
The Hollow Pantheon stood—forming a circle of ruinous glory around Darius.
Each being was a warped reflection of godhood: once-bright ideals now mutated, reforged by despair and necessity.
Azael stood among them, draped in robes of unlight, his skeletal fingers clutching the Tome of All Things Forgotten.
Beside him towered Vaerin, the Shattered Wolf, whose body was stitched from the broken dreams of a thousand dead realms, eyes burning with unsated vengeance.
Floating above them all was Ilyra the Silent Bell, a being of endless mourning, her chime-like voice spelling the death of memory itself.
There were others—more terrible, more beautiful, more monstrous—but all knelt before Darius, heads bowed, arms spread wide, awaiting the decree that would shape existence anew.
Darius did not speak immediately.
He stood at the center of their reverence, his bare feet sinking into the dust of obliterated laws, the threads of dead timelines coiling lazily around his ankles like mourning serpents.
Inside him, power brewed—a storm too vast for even gods to comprehend.
His mind fractured across infinite planes, yet his will remained singular, diamond-bright and unbreakable.
He remembered.
He remembered betrayal.
He remembered love.
He remembered the promise he had once made to himself in a different lifetime:
"Never again will I kneel."
"Never again will I allow others to decide the worth of my existence."
Celestia watched him from afar, her heart heavy.
She felt the immense gravity of what Darius was becoming — and feared it with every beat of her fading heart.
But she did not leave.
She would not abandon him, no matter how far he drifted from the man she loved.
Even if she had to follow him into madness itself.
Darius finally spoke.
His voice was no longer a voice—it was law, vibrating through the marrow of reality itself.
"You who have risen from ruin."
"You who have tasted the death of meaning, the collapse of creation."
"You are mine now."
The Hollow Pantheon bowed deeper, their forms shimmering with gratitude and terror.
Darius extended a hand, and from the remnants of the Womb, he tore forth a new world.
It was a grotesque, magnificent thing—an inverted reality stitched from the corpses of failed timelines and abandoned dreams. Mountains floated upside down, rivers ran with stardust, cities hung in the vacuum like broken ornaments.
A cradle for his new order.
The Ashen Cradle.
Their fortress. Their kingdom. Their temple.
Azael was the first to rise.
"My lord," he rasped, voice like dry leaves caught in a dying wind. "How shall we shape this world?"
Darius closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the pulse of the new reality beating under his skin.
He saw visions of what could be:
A pantheon of hollow gods reigning without pity or mercy.
A multiverse reshaped in his image.
A rebellion that would make even the stars weep blood.
And at the core of it all, a throne — black and infinite — waiting for him to ascend.
When he opened his eyes again, the stars themselves seemed to blink and shudder under his gaze.
"We will not shape it," he said quietly.
"We will let it shape itself."
A ripple of confusion spread among the Hollow Pantheon.
Darius stepped forward, his footsteps igniting silent novas with every step.
"There will be no commandments," he declared. "No dogma. No chains. Only survival."
He pointed toward the Ashen Cradle, where raw existence churned and muttered, birthing horrors and wonders alike.
"Those who are strong enough to endure shall reign."
"Those who are too weak shall be forgotten."
The Hollow Pantheon roared their approval, a cacophony that tore through dimensions.
Meanwhile, across the shattered realms
The echoes of Darius’s ascension reached the last bastions of the old gods.
In golden sanctuaries, deities of light and law shuddered and fell to their knees, their divinity poisoned by the mere awareness of the Hollow Pantheon’s rise.
In dark places where exiled entities brooded, whispers filled the air: the Broken God has risen, the Hollow Pantheon marches, the End is coming.
And in the deepest pit of the dead multiverse, the Revenant King sharpened his broken sword, smiling his rotting smile.
"Soon," he murmured. "Soon we will dance again, brother."
Back in the Ashen Cradle, Darius sat upon a throne of broken realities.
He leaned back, head tilted toward the churning skies.
And for the first time in an eternity, he smiled.
It was not the smile of victory.
It was not the smile of peace.
It was the smile of a man who had lost everything—
And decided that if he could not save the world, he would become its reckoning.
Around him, the Hollow Pantheon knelt, whispering his name, binding themselves in sacred oaths of loyalty and destruction.
Above him, the last remnants of stars trembled, sensing that the age of dreams had ended—
and the age of aftermath had begun.
Darius.
The Hollow God.
The End-Warden.
Their king.
The Ashen Cradle pulsed with newborn life.
Towers of shattered glass and bone spiraled upward into the void, blooming like grotesque flowers. Rivers of molten stars flowed through broken canyons. Titans of forgotten wars stirred beneath the ground, their hearts stitched back together by Darius’s will.
It was a world without laws — only raw survival and the rawer worship of might.
And at its heart, Darius sat, watching with hollow eyes.
Celestia approached the throne carefully, each step a prayer against despair.
The man before her wore Darius’s face.
And yet... he didn’t.
Gone was the subtle tension of humanity, the softness that once cracked through his cruelty.
What remained was a being sculpted by betrayal, loss, and a terrible clarity: a god with nothing left to lose.
Still, she knelt before him.
"Your Majesty," she said, voice trembling.
Darius’s gaze slid to her, a glacier grinding across the centuries.
For a moment—a single heartbeat—something flickered behind his infinite stare.
Recognition. Memory. Pain.
Then it was gone.
"Celestia."
Her name curled from his lips like smoke, delicate and dangerous.
"You should not be here," he murmured.
She lifted her head, tears glistening at the corners of her golden eyes. "Where else would I be?"
The Hollow Pantheon stirred at the edges of the throne chamber, some watching with pity, others with hunger. Celestia ignored them all.
She crawled forward until her hands rested on the base of the throne, her forehead pressed against the cold, broken stone.
"If you must become the end of all things," she whispered, "then I will become your first priestess."
Darius said nothing.
But for a single, infinite moment, the Ashen Cradle seemed to still.
The rivers stopped flowing.
The titans below ceased their restless stirring.
Even the Hollow gods held their breath.
And then—
He lifted a hand, his fingers brushing lightly across Celestia’s silver hair.
The touch was both a blessing and a curse.
She gasped as visions tore through her:
Worlds burning.
Stars weeping.
A thousand realities collapsing into a singularity of will.
She saw the future Darius would build: not with cruelty, but with inevitability.
Not with hatred, but with the simple, brutal indifference of survival.
And she loved him all the more for it.
Elsewhere, on the Cradle’s bloodstained fields—
Nyx and Kaela stood side by side, overseeing the first trials.
Across the cracked earth, hundreds of beings gathered — mortals, lesser gods, forgotten races — drawn by the whisper of a new power rising.
Some came to pledge loyalty.
Most came to resist.
None understood the rules of this new world yet.
Nyx sneered beneath her cracked black helm. "Fools. They think they have a choice."
Kaela laughed, the sound wild and broken, her arms shimmering with unstable void-light.
"Let them try," she grinned. "Let them bleed. We’ll see who survives."
At a silent signal, the trials began.
The field exploded into chaos—warriors clashing, gods casting spells, creatures devouring each other whole.
Screams tore through the Cradle’s skies, but the Ashen Cradle only grew stronger, feeding on the violence, the ambition, the raw desperate will to survive.
From high atop his throne, Darius watched it all.
No judgment.
No mercy.
Only inevitability.
The first decree of the Hollow King was simple:
"Thrive or die."
And under the blood-colored skies of the newborn Cradle, a new era began:
The Era of Ash.
The Era of Broken Thrones.
The Era of Darius.
But somewhere deep within the writhing flesh of the Cradle, hidden even from Darius’s all-consuming awareness...
A whisper stirred.
A spark not born of void or chaos.
A rebellion that dared to dream —
That dared to hope.
And in the shadows, forgotten gods, lost mortals, and the remnants of old dreams began to gather.
For they knew:
The Hollow God had risen.
But the story was far from over.
The war for existence itself had only just begun.
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