Chapter 1023 - 426: Apocalypse Knight

Chapter 1023: Chapter 426: Apocalypse Knight

Mercury was unprepared for Hel’s ambush and could not defend against it.

The Underground Shelter dungeon is located in the Middle Layer, not having entered the Realm of Reason, also subjected to the plane barrier’s limitations.

The body of Mercury appearing in the secret research facility was merely a projection of a God, not his true self.

His projected body, boasting Divinity, was able to chase the Painter into fleeing in all directions, but when faced with Hel, who had complete mastery of Death Divinity, it was inadequate, and he could only be abused unilaterally by Hel.

He wanted to conserve his strength and escape with his projection, but within the embryonic form of Hel’s Divine Kingdom, he couldn’t even manage to leave.

After merely a few minutes of defense, he was decapitated, and the projection dispersed.

Before acquiring Divinity, Hel was just an ordinary Surface People girl and had no extensive knowledge about Gods.

She was merely puzzled why no soul appeared after Mercury died, unaware that Mercury was still alive.

This prevented her from fleeing immediately after her victory, instead using Divine Power to connect with the Netherworld ceremony, attempting to become the ritual’s leader.

She remembered Mercury saying that if she didn’t want everything familiar to her to disappear, she should seize control of Death Divinity, control the Netherworld.

It must be said, Mercury’s judgment of people is accurate; in terms of mastering Death Divinity, she is indeed an excellent candidate, successfully taking over the Netherworld ritual.

Via the Netherworld ritual, she sensed the souls of her deceased clan members and the souls of other test subjects swallowed by the Netherworld.

She used Death Divinity to lock these souls back into their original bodies, "resurrecting" them.

The resurrected dead had bodies identical to when they were alive, still able to grow, move freely, and sense the World.

Among the test subjects was a Surface Person who was close to her; they had known each other since childhood.

The person had fused with the Imaginary Divinity of the watchdog Garm, but unfortunately, the progress was poor, leading to being sacrificed during the Netherworld plan.

After awakening him, Hel, through her mastery of Death Divinity, helped him activate the Divinity within him and merge with Garm.

Perhaps due to having died once, those resurrected through her ability all broke free from the control of the Bright Society.

However, having been dead once, resurrection always comes with a price.

The cost for those resurrected by Hel was a mind in chaos, unclear consciousness.

They could instinctively perform most daily activities, like eating, drinking, excreting, hunting, and sleeping, but anything deeper, like thinking and conversing, became extremely difficult.

Their past memories also became blurry, only able to roughly recall each other’s identities.

Most of the time, to complete complex instructions, they required her to give detailed commands.

While she tried to prevent the Netherworld ceremony from invoking death energy on the surface, turning the entire planet into the Netherworld, she also attempted to improve resurrection methods to make the resurrected smarter.

The Bright Society arrived.

The leader was none other than the secret research facility’s director, Mercury.

His projection was almost hacked into pieces by Hel’s dual swords and decapitated; he deeply felt Hel’s power and discovered the Painter’s handiwork.

With Hel’s obstruction, he had already lost control of the Painter’s aura, who feared having already fled back to the Desolate Realm.

Now, what they could do was to eliminate Hel and reclaim the Imaginary Divinity of the Goddess of Death, minimizing their losses as much as possible.

To resolve Hel, this time, he called in other official members of the Bright Society.

Although they were all limited by the Middle Layer and could only project to the scene, making them no match for Hel, they had strength in numbers.

Including Mercury himself, he brought a total of fifteen official members of the Bright Society, among them familiar faces Wu had seen, like Perun and Aksu from Hymn Company, and even Hercules whom he had eradicated.

Apart from the combat forces needed to confront the Four Major Organizations, all the manpower that could be mobilized in the Bright Society was pulled over by Mercury.

Hel, who can exert full power of a Lower Level God in the Middle Layer, was indeed powerful, but her mastery of Divinity was purely instinctual, lacking combat experience.

The Bright Society members were not powerful individually but surpassed Hel in terms of Divinity application. The Bright Society members Mercury selected all either had strong immunity to death or a certain degree of control over death.

Relying on numbers, coordination, and battle experience, they managed to defeat both Garm and Hel at the cost of six God projections.

In her dying moments, Hel recalled what she did to Garm and her clan; she exerted her last bit of strength, casting her soul into the Netherworld, undergoing resurrection.

Confronting Hel, who returned from the Netherworld with even greater momentum, even Mercury and others were dumbfounded.

Defeating a fully formed God in the Middle Layer was an immensely difficult task even for the Bright Society.

If Hel could resurrect even stronger every time she died, it wouldn’t be only hard to recover the Divine Format of the Goddess of Death; even if the entire Bright Society descended upon them, they might not be able to defeat Hel in the Middle Layer.

Just when Mercury and others assumed all the projections they dispatched this time would be wiped out, they discovered that the reborn Hel seemed to have lost self-awareness, becoming extremely quiet.

She and the reborn Garm remained within the secret research facility and did not rush out to attack them.

After losing two more God projections, Mercury and others found that Hel simply wouldn’t leave the secret research facility of her own will; as long as they dared to step inside, she would still harbor "hostility" and provoke an attack.