Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: How Do You Kill a God?

  “I didn’t even touch it,” Dex said, disbelief hardening into fury. His fingers ran along his blades’ hilts, finding no comfort in the familiar motion. “How—“

  A second pulse silenced him, this one like a physical blow that drove the air from Jace’s lungs.

  It radiated from the Tower like a tidal wave. Magic buckled. Runes cracked. Defensive enchantments fizzled out mid-air with audible snaps.

  And above them, in that torn-open sky, more names were pulled into being. Tens of thousands every heartbeat, stitched into the Tower’s lattice from faraway cities, kingdoms, and shrines. The names weren’t just being written.

  They were being harvested.

  Ell cut in sharply. “They’re severing us. From the gods.”

  The silence that followed wasn’t quiet.

  It was dread.

  The air itself seemed to shudder as the Tower claimed its names, the once-hum of energy now a deafening roar in Jace’s mind.

  Students and faculty stood frozen, their voices rising in a chaotic chorus of pleas. Desperation filled the air as they called to the heavens, their prayers a raw cry for salvation, a plea to gods they had always trusted.

  And then, the heavens answered.

  The sky split apart with a deafening crack, a jagged wound tearing through the firmament.

  Thousands of bright openings ripped all around them and the gods arrived.

  They came in every shape and size, in forms mortal minds could scarcely comprehend.

  A woman with skin of molten gold and hair cascading as liquid starlight strode across the district, her steps leaving glowing imprints in the air. A towering figure, half shadow and half blinding light, rose from the ground as if formed from the shifting balance of night and day. They appeared on the streets and, in the sky, and above the Tower itself—a thousand pantheons made manifest, their presence as overwhelming as the sun’s first light after endless darkness.

  The air turned thick with the scent of ozone and crushed flowers, of blood and burning incense. The gods’ arrival should have been a moment of awe, their brilliance washing over the gathered crowd in waves.

  But it wasn’t.

  As each god arrived, their movements slowed. First imperceptibly, then visibly, their immense forms faltering mid-step or mid-flight. Their glowing eyes dimmed, their expressions frozen as though caught between horror and confusion. One by one, their celestial brilliance flickered, then faded altogether.

  Every god, every goddess, every divine being that answered the unspoken call became statues—immense and unmoving, their once-living forms now frozen relics of their grandeur. Their light extinguished, their auras snuffed out. The wolf’s head drooped, the stars gone from its eyes. The molten goddess crumbled to her knees, her golden glow reduced to cold, lifeless metal. The district became a graveyard of forgotten deities, their vast power reduced to brittle forms that could not hold their weight. A graveyard of the gods.

  Screams erupted from the crowd as the devastation became clear. Worshipers rushed forward, calling out to their gods with desperate, breaking voices.

  Around the square, others reached for their gods, pleading for aid, but their prayers fell into the void. Statues broke apart under their own weigh, collapsing into rubble. Others stood whole but silent, their once-vibrant features now dull and unseeing.

  The higher-ranked individuals—the champions and paragons of the gods—fared no better. Their faces paled, their breaths came shallow and ragged, and their limbs trembled with weakness. Auras that had once shone bright as suns now flickered like dying embers. Some clutched at their chests, gasping as though the severance had ripped something vital from within.

  Chaos erupted in every direction. People screamed, wailed, and clung to each other, their fear feeding on itself in a self-consuming loop. Some tried to flee, shoving their way through the crowd with wild, desperate eyes. Others stood paralyzed, their faces slack with disbelief. The square became a storm of sound and motion, a cacophony of sobbing, pleading, and shouted prayers that went unanswered.

  Jace’s gaze was locked on the Tower, its surface alive with swirling names. Every name. Every man, woman, and child in Terra Mythica etched onto its crystalline facade.

  Alice followed his gaze, her breath catching in her throat as she saw it too. The vast mosaic of light, stretching upward into infinity, held the names of everyone—those who had climbed, those who had not. The Tower had claimed them all.

  And the gods, the beings who had ruled Terra Mythica for eons, were powerless to stop it.

  The Tower stood tall, indifferent to the ruin it had wrought.

  And then, impossibly, Hades appeared.

  The god stood at the brink of the sundered sky, framed by the rift. One hand reached out, fingers extended, straining.

  But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

  Frozen.

  Fading.

  The outlines of his form frayed at the edges like paper soaking in oil. As if some deeper law—ancient, final—had bound him in place. A god made untouchable.

  Jace staggered back, breath hitching like he’d been punched in the chest. A crushing hollowness tore through him—cold, immediate, and wrong. The tether was gone. Not frayed. Not distant. Gone.

  He choked on the silence left behind.

  Jace’s voice came out hoarse, cracked like old stone. “How do you kill a god?” He stared at the battlefield—at the Tower, the names still etching. “Kill their believers.”

  The words landed like a curse.

  All around him, the world responded.

  Nobles fell to their knees, clutching at chests that no longer pulsed with divine rhythm. Warriors dropped their weapons, hands shaking as if caught in a cold they couldn’t shake. Some screamed. Others fled. A few simply curled into themselves and wept, eyes wide with incomprehension.

  And above it all, Hades remained—reaching, unable to touch. A god unmade not by blade or spell.

  But by absence.

  Molly crumpled beside the stage, her healing aura flickering out. Her hands glowed, then dimmed, then turned pale and still. It hurt her more than the rest, and Jace knew it was because of her strong connection.

  And still, the Tower hummed.

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  The sky tore wider, the wound yawning like flesh beneath a god’s blade—raw, ragged, unhealed. And then, from far beyond the plaza, a deeper sound rolled across the land: a groan. Low. Endless. The death-rattle of something ancient.

  The Wall, the last divine bulwark against the Dark One, shuddered.

  And then it broke.

  No explosion. No thunder. Just a silence so total it crushed the breath from the world.

  Where once the Wall had stood, there remained only a wound.

  A gaping, endless rent from horizon to horizon.

  And from its depths, darkness bled. Thick and pulsing, alive with malice.

  And from within that void, they came.

  At first, only shadows. Then shapes. Then hordes.

  The first undead slammed into the ground with a wet, boneless thud. Then another. Then a dozen. Then thousands—falling like cursed rain. Some hit stone and shattered. Others rose, limbs broken but still crawling, still hungry.

  And then they moved—no signal, no words, just instinct honed by fire and fear. Blades sang. Spells cracked the air. The clash of steel and the shriek of the undead collided into a single, deafening cacophony.

  The plaza dissolved into chaos.

  Where moments ago stood royalty and champions beneath fluttering banners, now sprawled a battlefield soaked in blood and panic. Screams ripped the air. Magic flared and failed. Steel flashed in every direction. The undead surged forward—grotesque bodies wrapped in rotting flesh, eyes burning with unnatural hunger. The ground itself groaned beneath the weight of them.

  Jace turned, scanning the battlefield through the blur of motion. His companions were already in the thick of it.

  Dex danced through the fray with terrifying grace, twin daggers flashing like silver lightning. Ell fought with raw purpose, her strikes fueled by fury and precision, bursts of Aether crackling with every swing. Alice stood firm, her Tome hovering beside her, pages glowing as spells rippled from her outstretched fingers in seamless arcs. Marcus was a wall, his battered shield he’d summoned from his inventory was raised high, lightning sparking feebly along his arms as he held the line.

  All around them, chaos reigned—Citizens and Travelers alike standing shoulder to shoulder, united by desperation. Archmages and farmhands, champions and cooks, all bleeding together into a single force against the tide of death.

  And still the dead came.

  Jace Shifted through a blur of chaos, landing beside Ell just as she staggered back from an overhead blow. Her blade, slick with ichor, trembled slightly in her grip—her usual precision dulled, her fire flickering beneath the weight of something unseen.

  “I can’t feel her,” she gasped, panic edging her voice. A lock of dark hair clung to her cheek, matted with blood that wasn’t hers. “My goddess—she’s gone. I’m fighting blind. It’s just me and the Word now.”

  “I know,” Jace said, catching her by the arm and pulling her steady. His hand gripped her wrist with more force than intended, as if anchoring them both. “They’ve severed the connection. But your Word still burns. That’s yours, Ell. Not hers. Use it.”

  For a beat, her breathing hitched—then her eyes found his. Something flared there. Pure will.

  She nodded once, sharp and silent.

  Then she turned, stepped into the next attack, and drove her blade through the throat of the snarling corpse before it could strike again.

  Alice appeared beside them, her fingers outstretched toward her floating Tome. Glyphs spiraled wildly across its surface, flickering and stalling like a dying star. “Divine links are null. I’m operating on raw aether. It’s unstable.” She gritted her teeth, forcing a spell into manifestation through sheer will. “But it’s mine.”

  Dex caught a snarling creature mid-leap, driving his knee into its skull and twisting as it collapsed. His blade flickered like it was trying to remember what it used to be. A jagged gash split his forearm, but he stood firm, driven by a renewed fire.

  “Maybe that’s enough.”

  “Fight like hell,” Marcus growled. He slammed his shield into the cobblestones, sending out a blast of force that toppled half a dozen ghouls—but he dropped to a knee, breath ragged. The titan that had once channeled Zeus’s thunder now fought with nothing but mortal strength and infinite fury.

  Molly caught him, barely managing to keep him upright. Her hands glowed with the faintest remnant of Loss’s touch, but the channel was more memory than magic now. “We can do this,” she breathed, her voice steadier than her hands. “We have to.”

  Then the second wave hit.

  More fell from the sky, howling and gnashing. Some were half-men, half-beasts—stitched together with sinew and madness. Monstrous figures with black eyes and twisted limbs crawled from the cracks. Wolves with human hands. Eyeless knights. Giant things with bones exposed like armor, dragging swords made from shattered tombstones.

  In the distance, they saw Brutus—an immovable figure amid the chaos—and began carving their way toward him.

  He planted his feet and raised his battleaxe high, his words like a thunderclap above the madness.

  “TO ME! FORM A LINE!”

  Darkness surged in waves.

  The horde poured forth—endless, insatiable. Not thousands. Not tens of thousands. Legions.

  The ring on Jace’s finger cracked with light.

  A flicker, then a glow, then a detonation.

  White fire surged upward in a geyser of light. The battlefield stilled for half a breath, undead stumbling, shadows pausing as if sensing something... wrong.

  The White Raven erupted into the sky.

  Wings like blades of moonlight. Eyes blazing like twin stars. Its cry tore through the heavens, shaking the dead from their footing. The spectral avatar, ten stories tall, descended with a scream that split the air.

  Jace raised his hand—and the Raven answered.

  It dove, a comet of divine vengeance, crashing into the heart of the horde. Hundreds of undead disintegrated on impact, turned to ash and silence. A pulse of cleansing fire rippled outward, tossing lesser monstrosities into the air like broken dolls.

  Jace moved with it.

  Shift cracked reality around him, teleporting in sharp snaps of aether. One moment he was at the Tower’s base, the next he stood knee-deep in corpses, his blade cutting arcs of shadow through twisted necks and breastbones. The Chains of Oblivion lashed and hooked, dragging enemies into kill-zones like puppets on burning wire.

  He unleashed the Chain of Oblivion’s Soul Severance aspect with brutal precision, tearing the essence from each undead with every strike. The power left trails of unraveling spirit in the air, felling enemy after enemy as their forms collapsed inward, hollowed and undone. His limbs ached from the relentless pace, every movement carved from exhaustion—he hadn’t recovered from the last battle, barely an hour past—but he pushed forward, relentless.

  To his left, Dex flowed between enemies, twin daggers flashing like silver fire. No wasted movement. Every dodge fed his speed, every kill sharpened the rhythm of his assault. He danced through three armored abominations and left only wet ruin in his wake.

  “They don’t let up,” Dex muttered to the dead, slicing through a ghoul’s spine without looking. Sweat poured down his face, but his movements took on a primal grace, a certainty born from desperation.

  Ell was fire incarnate. She crouched low, one hand braced against the ground as energy surged from her palms. A shockwave burst from her fingers, blasting a cluster of undead off their feet. She leapt high, flipped, and rained bolts of pure will down in a spread pattern that cleared twenty feet of battlefield in an instant.

  A construct lunged toward her.

  Ell didn’t blink.

  She sent a blast directly into its face. The creature exploded into a shower of rotted matter, and for an instant, a ghost of her old smile flashed across her blood-spattered face.

  And through it all, Alice wove aether like thread through a loom.

  Her Tome hovered before her, pages flipping of their own accord. She chanted three syllables in a tongue lost to time—and the ground beneath a cluster of undead opened, swallowing them into a pit lined with spinning glyphs. She twisted her hand, and the pit closed like a jaw.

  More surged in.

  She whispered a single word.

  A line of runes lit up in the air in front of her and ignited into a wall of spectral blades. As the undead passed through it, they were torn into ribbons. Her eyes were steady. Her breath was ice. Each spell cost her more than the last, the price of magic without divine favor etched in lines of exhaustion on her face.

  The White Raven screamed again, cutting a swath across the field like a divine scythe. For a moment, the battlefield burned white—every shadow retreating beneath its wings.

  Jace stood at the epicenter, ring glowing like a star.

  He looked like a god of war reborn.

  But already, in the distance, the sky darkened again. The tear widened.

  And the next wave began to pour through.

  Too many.

  Brutus roared from the ridge—blood-soaked and raging—his voice a war-drum pounding through the chaos.

  “GET THE CLIMBERS TO THE TOWER. NOW. SAVE WHO YOU CAN.”

  Undead plunged from the skies astride colossal, rotting birds—skeletal wings beating thunder into the air, feathers like torn shadows. From below, the earth split with sickening cracks as corpses clawed their way free, soil steaming with dark energy. The battlefield churned with death from above and below, a storm of claw, fang, and bone erupting from every direction.

  Then—steel sang through the dark. A blur of silver and motion tore into the horde, carving a path with impossible grace. Lyra burst through the ranks like a storm given form, twin swords dancing in a whirlwind of precise, lethal arcs. One blade swept low, cleaving knees and ankles; the other flashed high, severing skulls from spines. Undead fell around her in sprays of rot and bone, her every step a blur, every turn a death sentence. She moved like fury given form.

  Notifications flickered—kills, XP, pings—but he silenced them. His skills sharpened, creeping higher, but his bar was full. The rest bled into overflow, humming like pressure behind a dam. Battle Trance helped take off the edge, but he needed time to cultivate fully.

  Every second, more death and decay spilled in. Skeletal beasts, wights with jagged bone-blades for arms, stitched monstrosities made from men and beasts and something worse. A tide of the dead that did not falter, did not fear, did not feel.

  Above it all, in the far distance, the Dark One began to rise.

  A silhouette of void with a crown of fire, his form twisting the heavens like oil in water. His very presence drained color from the world. The sky dimmed. Hope suffocated.