The God of Underworld
Chapter 143 - 42

Chapter 143: Chapter 42

Overworld.

Darkness blanketed Herion like an eternal eclipse.

Once a thriving city of marble spires, flowing aqueducts, and sacred temples, Herion had now become a battlefield of gods and monsters.

Its skies were blackened, its waters poisoned, and its once-proud structures shattered beneath the weight of a cosmic war.

The people had either fled, perished, or were consumed by the creeping tendrils of corrupted Gaia, now a floating abomination—her body distorted beyond recognition, her divine form twisted by the entity within.

The City of Herion was no longer the proud capital of the mortal world.

Those who remained, stared in defiance at the creature responsible for all of these.

A dome of corrupted energy radiated from Gaia’s twisted form, a floating abomination of vines, tendrils, eyes, and mouths, all swirling around an enormous core of divine malice.

Her mere presence warped the land. The trees wept blood, rivers ran dry, and mortals disintegrated into ash by proximity.

Three days.

For three days, the gods had fought her.

Three days without rest. Nonstop barrage of attacks just to slow her down.

And yet still, they barely even held her down.

High above the city, Zeus hovered, his once-pristine armor cracked and bloodied. Golden ichor dripped from his side, sizzling as it struck the cursed air.

His thunderbolt was dimmer now, crackling lazily on his hands.

His divine breath came in gasps.

He stared at the abomination that was Gaia, her tendrils devouring towers, her corrupted vines spearing through clouds.

Despite all their efforts, Gaia still reached Herion and have started devouring it, gaining power and strength every second.

And as he stared at her, deep withim his soul, he couldn’t help but feel fear.

He, who had once stood atop Olympus and stared down titans and monsters alike, was afraid.

"How long... how long do we have to hold her?" he wondered.

But there was no answer yet. Only the gnawing dread in his soul.

To beings who lived for millennia, who blinked and centuries passed, three days had never felt so long.

And for the first time in eons, Zeus felt the creeping whisper of death. Not even during the Titanomachy did he ever feel like this.

Around him, the other gods floated, barely upright.

Apollo, one eye gone, his golden bow nearly broken.

Artemis, stained with her own blood, limping mid-air.

Poseidon leaned on his trident, visibly using it just to float.

Hephaestus, his legendary Anti-Zeus Armor—crafted with the full intent of fighting the King of Gods—was now shattered, its right arm missing, and the central divine core orb flickering weakly.

Even Ares can barely stand, his consciousness barely holding on after fighting for three days straight straight.

Demeter’s emerald vines were dry.

Oceanus’s oceanic aura had receded.

Astraeus could barely maintain the stars that guided the remaining mortals to shelter.

And on the ruined ground below, Varn, the mortal commander of the Sentinels, stood with a broken sword in one hand and blood coating his armor.

He was still alive, but barely.

All of them were holding on by will alone.

Gaia was simply too powerful.

Just then, Gaia consumed a mountain, and its body twisted and grew once again.

Her power surge, so much so that the gods found it difficult to breathe.

Her body writhe and morphed, before slowly, from a monstrous entity, she once again reverted to a more humanoid figure.

Her size shrunk from reaching the skies to a mere fifty meters, and her figure was completely pitch black, her hair twisted and dance around.

Then, a single eye opened on her forehead.

And just like that, thousands of eyes opened all over her body.

Then came the sound.

A deep, resonating hum that split the skies and vibrated through every bone, every divine essence.

The gods felt their soul split for a second, and strength started to leave their body.

"Can we really...survive?"

No one knows who said this, but from Zeus to the rest of the gods. All of them were thinking the same.

Just then...

A massive twelve-pronged star erupted beneath Herion, stretching from horizon to horizon in blinding white-gold.

A magical array the size of a continent. Reality groaned in protest.

And then, it spoke, not aloud, but it echoed into the mind of every god.

"The gate is ready."

"Push Gaia down. The Underworld will handle the rest."

For a moment, time itself seemed to freeze.

Then, laughter came.

Weak, hoarse laughter from Zeus as he lifted his head to the sky.

He grinned.

A savage, tired grin.

"Took you long enough, you damn corpse hugger." he whispered. "...Very well. We will end this!"

He rose higher, summoning the very core of his authority.

From every storm, every oath, every piece of sky—lightning answered his call.

"TO ME!" he roared, and his thunderbolt formed, larger than mountains, golden-silver and humming with barely controlled judgment.

Apollo and Artemis took their places to his side.

Their bows glowed blindingly. The Sun and Moon compressed into twin arrows, formed from the very concepts of day and night.

Hephaestus, kneeling in the air, jammed his massive hammer into the failing core of his armor.

"One last gift," he muttered.

The orb began to glow brighter, consuming itself, as he raised his hammer high, and soon the hammer melted into raw energy.

Poseidon, standing upon a crashing wave conjured from sheer will, drew all the tectonic pressure from beneath the land.

"I’ll split space if I have to," he growled.

One by one, the remaining gods assembled.

Oceanus, Helios, Astraeus, Themis, Hestia, Demeter, Astraea, and more, each bled their final essence into the sky.

This is it. They cannot fail.

At the heart of them all, Erebus descended like a singularity.

His body consumed in black flame, he pulled from the void beyond light and compressed all his essence, all his dominion, into a single black sphere.

A black hole. Not just an ordinary black hole. But a black hole that holds all the conceptual weight of the primordial darkness.

Reality around it cracked, light and sound bent inward, and even concepts struggled to remain coherent.

This wasn’t power.

This was annihilation.

"NOW!" Zeus cried.

And they struck.

All of them.

Together.

The sky turned white. Then black. Then... nothing.

The universe screamed.

The ground shattered. Clouds evaporated. Mountains cracked like glass.

Time and space fractured, ribbons of alternate futures bled into the present, moments colliding, looping, repeating, reversing.

Zeus saw himself dying in ten different ways.

Artemis saw herself cradling a burning Earth.

Poseidon witnessed a version of himself turning into salt.

The cost of their final attack was so great that the very order of existence began to come undone.

The universe cannot endure such an attack of this scale and was starting to crumble.

At the same time.

In a separate realm, outside the battlefield, in a domain deeper than the Underworld, in a dimension with no form nor time...

A being stirred.

Khronos, the Primordial of Time.

He had watched quietly until now, existing beyond gods and mortals, beyond causality.

He had helped the gods in the background. Never showing his face nor figure.

But still, the gods being able to hold Gaia down was largely due to his help.

Now...

The fabric of time was tearing. History and future were colliding. Continuity was unraveling.

He opened his eyes.

And Time Wept.

The rivers of history reversed.

The future shattered into droplets of glass.

Khronos extended his hand and seized control of the temporal flow.

With infinite patience and infinite power, he rewrote the moments, split the timelines, and restored the sequence.

Time bent to his will.

He repaired the cracks, separated the eons, and stabilized the surge of godly madness that nearly broke the universe.

He spoke only once, a whisper on the edge of existence.

"This age must endure... a little longer."

And the world held together.

Back in Herion, Gaia screamed, all her stolen voices roaring in agony.

The attacks landed. All at once.

The gods’ final attack collided into her massive form like a celestial meteor storm.

And she broke.

Her tentacle-like hair were severed.

Her corrupted core cracked.

Reality itself dragged her down as the twelve-pronged star opened wide beneath her.

The Gate to the Underworld, fully active, swallowed her whole.

Like a divine vacuum, it pulled her in with overwhelming force.

She resisted, pitch black tendrils grasping at buildings, shrieking, trying to anchor herself to the mortal world.

But the gods gave no mercy.

Zeus unleashed another bolt.

Poseidon shattered the last foothold.

And Erebus, his voice cold and final, spoke. "Fall to the dark."

And the last of her was swallowed whole.

The Gate closed with a low, deafening thud that silenced all sound.

And for the first time in three days, Herion was quiet.

No more screams.

No more monsters.

Just silence.

Then...a breeze blew.

The first gentle wind since the war began.

The gods fell, one by one, to their knees, floating or crashing onto broken rooftops. Their breaths were heavy. Some cried. Others stared blankly at the sky.

They had done it.

They had pushed back the end.

As Zeus looked up, the last of his lightning fading, he muttered hoarsely.

"Hades... don’t fail now. Because if you do... we will have nothing left."

And the ruined sky slowly began to clear.