God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord -
Chapter 88 - 89: The Rebellion at the Gate
Chapter 88: Chapter 89: The Rebellion at the Gate
The Gate of Origin did not open—it split.
Cracks laced its vast arch of ivory and voidstone, bleeding silvery ichor that steamed as it touched the ground. Glyphs etched by forgotten Makers twisted into new meanings, their language rewritten by something far more primal than code or divinity.
At the base of the Gate, the rebellion had gathered—all of them.
The Saint.
The Twice-Killed Queen.
The Nameless Twin.
The Heir of Dust.
The Shattered Prophet.
The Bleeding Flame.
They stood with legions of broken faith and bitter conviction, their banners scorched, their divine artifacts humming with final resonance.
The Prophet spat blood and prophecy in equal measure as she clutched her twin-bladed staff. "If we do not strike now, there will be no strike to make. The Womb is alive."
"Worse," muttered the Saint, staring into the cracking sky, "it’s in labor."
Aetherwinds howled as a shriek tore through the Gate, echoing not through air but through memory.
Every rebel flinched.
Because they had all heard that scream before.
The scream of a god being born.
Within the Womb, Darius stood with Kaela, his hand wrapped around the crystallized will of Maelistra—the Shard of Song. His body was no longer mortal. No longer divine in the old sense.
He was reforged.
Bone knitted with myth. Blood pulsed with raw, undistilled law. Eyes like collapsing stars.
Beside him, Kaela had changed as well. The rift sang through her skin. She floated half a step above the ground, reality thinning around her like mist torn by breath.
"I feel them," she whispered, eyes narrowing. "Your old enemies. Your broken faithful."
"They come to die," Darius said without emotion. "Or to remember what they helped erase."
A moment passed.
He looked down at the Saint’s broken shard—the one stolen long ago during the Fall of Regret. It pulsed faintly in his palm.
"They carry pieces of me," he murmured. "Fragments I discarded to become what I am now."
Kaela touched his chest, over the place where the Hollow Heart beat. "Then it’s time to take them back."
Outside, at the Gate, the battle began.
The sky split as Darius’s pantheon descended like judgment incarnate—ten thousand divine specters trailing banners of shadow and flame. Nyx led the charge, blades curved in time’s reflection, her body moving like sorrow unbound.
The rebellion rose to meet them.
The Twice-Killed Queen danced with broken time, her twin lances spiraling lightning and loss. The Nameless Twin unchained her mirror-self, and two realities clashed as one. The Heir of Dust summoned his dead kingdom, bone soldiers tearing through the soil beneath divine feet.
And the Saint—
He did not fight.
He walked forward through the chaos, unarmed, robes torn by fire and memory. Toward the Gate. Toward the one he had once tried to love.
Toward the child in Darius that he had tried to protect.
At the threshold, reality parted.
And Darius stepped through.
He was unthinkable.
No longer bound by time.
No longer confined by narrative.
He walked like a storm disguised as a man, his shadow stretching in every direction.
The battlefield froze.
One moment, blood and screams. The next—silence.
He stared at the Saint.
"I remember," Darius said quietly.
The Saint lowered his head. "Then strike."
"No." Darius’s voice was soft thunder. "I don’t need to."
He raised a hand. Not to kill—but to reclaim.
The Saint screamed as light burst from his chest. The stolen shard—the echo of Darius’s past—ripped free and flew into the Hollow King’s palm.
"I take back what was mine," he said.
The Prophet lunged—but was caught mid-air by Kaela, who did not even glance.
"She’s still useful," Kaela said, coldly. "The rebellion may think this is the end. But we’re only at the second birth."
From the sky, the stars began to vanish.
One by one.
Like lights snuffed by an unseen hand.
The Gate pulsed again—wider now, unstable. What waited inside was not salvation. Not even power.
It was a choice.
The world tilted.
Not in physics, but in story—in the primal shape of reality itself.
The Womb pulsed again, and the Gate exhaled a gust of wind that stripped banners, flayed skin, and peeled illusion from bone. Rebels screamed. Spectral gods were vaporized mid-flight. Only those tethered to fate remained.
Darius stepped into that chaos, untouched.
Every step he took across the fractured ground rewrote the rules. Grass grew backward. Dust flowed upward. The sky folded into a spiral of collapsing thoughts.
The Twice-Killed Queen saw her children in the clouds.
The Prophet heard her unborn futures weeping.
The Saint saw his own face on every corpse.
And still, they charged.
Nyx intercepted the Heir of Dust mid-assault, twin daggers blooming from her arms. He blocked her with a wall of living tombstones, but she danced through memory like a wraith.
"You loved him once," he said, gasping, holding back her blades.
"I still do," she whispered—and then slit his throat.
But not enough to kill.
Just enough to make him remember.
In the heart of the Gate, Darius stopped.
He could feel them all pressing in—the lives he had unmade, the myths that tried to reclaim him. Every face was a mirror. Every death, a question.
Kaela stood behind him, hair floating in rift-light, her voice low. "We must complete the unmaking. The Womb is thinning. If we don’t sever the root—"
"I know."
He looked down at the glowing fragments of the Saint’s shard in his palm.
"This... was me," he whispered. "The part that cried at music. That feared being alone."
Kaela’s gaze darkened. "You are more than him. You are the god that crawled out of hell to make a heaven in your own shape."
"Maybe." Darius closed his fist. "But even gods bleed."
And then—he vanished.
The battlefield shuddered.
A roar tore through the sky—not from a creature, but from the Womb itself. Not a scream of pain or birth.
A scream of recognition.
The Nameless Twin froze. "It knows him."
The Twice-Killed Queen faltered. "Then it is not a Gate."
The Saint, now on his knees, trembling with bloodless hands, began to weep again.
"It’s a mirror. The Womb is the first thought that ever dreamed of being more than flesh. It reflects what we are—what we truly are."
"Then why is it screaming?" asked the Prophet.
The Saint looked up, and for the first time, there was no faith in his eyes.
"Because it remembers Darius too."
Deep within the Gate, beneath the skin of the Womb, Darius walked into a world unborn.
He passed frozen echoes of himself:
—A boy alone, hands pressed to a dead screen.
—A tyrant weeping over a woman’s corpse.
—A king begging for silence in a room filled with screams.
Each version reached for him.
Each version asked why.
He stopped before the last echo—a Darius who had never ascended.
He was tired. Human. Still afraid.
"I remember you," Darius whispered.
"I never forgot you," the echo said. "You killed me to become a god."
"I had to."
"No," the echo replied, stepping forward, placing a hand on his chest. "You wanted to."
For the first time since his ascension, Darius flinched.
And then the Womb began to pulse—faster, louder, with a rhythm that wasn’t divine or prophetic.
It was a heartbeat.
And it matched his.
Above, the rebellion fractured.
The Gate’s light turned black.
The battle stopped as all eyes turned toward the center—
Where a figure stepped from the Womb, cloaked in shadow and starlight, not Darius...
But something older, wearing his shape.
Kaela stumbled back, her voice a whisper: "What have you done?"
Darius looked at her.
And smiled.
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