Chapter 1039: The City of the Twelve Bleeds

Hades, swinging his left hand to block Ares’ slashes, turned his gaze towards the one who’d just intervened and freed Athena, Hermes.

The severed bones in Athena’s feet began to regrow, her skeletal structure reforming as flesh rapidly rebuilt itself around it, with skin covering the restored feet in an instant.

In that same moment, as Ares pulled back his sword with the intent to charge up divinity within his blade, Hades vanished, his body materialising in the narrow space between Athena’s back and Hermes’ chest as he carried her, his sudden appearance knocking Athena from Hermes’ hands and pushing Hermes slightly backward.

Without hesitation, Hades thrust his sword straight through Athena’s back, the blade piercing her chest, tearing through her heart and bursting out in front of her body.

The goddess coughed golden blood, her hands clamping onto Hades’ sword as she tried to push it back, but her strength quickly gave way under his own.

In that last moment, she looked up at him, her eyes still carrying confusion as she muttered, "Why?"

Hades, however, didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled his sword out and followed the motion with a slash, sending a wave of darkness towards Hermes and Ares to hold them back.

Then his right hand released his other blade and moved towards her chest.

|Soul Extraction.|

Athena groaned in pain and screamed as Hades forcefully pulled her soul from her weakened body, then wrapped it in cosmic energy and used his Authority of Death’s Soul Preservation to store it away, letting her now lifeless body collapse to the ground.

Turning around, Hades grabbed his other sword in his right hand and looked towards the stunned Hermes and Ares as he said, "First one down."

The entirety of Olympus immediately shook.

The universe, already damaged, reeled from the sudden loss of one of its Main Entities, and Hades, the one responsible for that loss, immediately activated his Cosmic Darkness Authority once more.

|Prison of the Unseen Hands.|

From the dark skies and the shadows on the floor cast by the light of the fires burning across Dodekapolis, black hands stretched out at faster than light speed, reaching towards Ares with clawed fingers trying to grab him.

The god of war immediately swung his blade, splitting apart several dozen in a single slash, but for every one he split apart, two more took their place, the hands reaching towards him from every conceivable angle, trying to restrain him.

What’s more, being within Hades’ Domain Declaration was weakening his overall power, and even worse, Hades was concentrating his Domain’s power on restricting Ares’ Authorities as much as possible, weakening him even further.

Noticing that Ares would soon be overwhelmed by the dark hands, each touch inflicting a curse upon the god of war via Hades’ Monarch Rank Curse Authority, Hermes immediately activated his own Authorities of Light, Time and Alacrity.

"Talaria!" he called out, his famed winged shoes materialising as he took a step forward.

In a flash, Hermes had freed Ares from the onslaught of the dark hands, taking both of them across the star system to a planet at the opposite end in less than a split-second.

But the moment Hermes’ feet came to a stop, Hades appeared behind him.

"Fool. You should have taken the chance to save yourself."

"!"

Hermes immediately summoned his staff, letting go of Ares and swinging it towards Hades, the two snakes curled around its length, leaping forward to bite the god of darkness.

However, when they chomped down on Hades’ arm, his entire body exploded into a wave of darkness, and his voice echoed across the entire star system.

|Web of Darkness: Tangled Alacrity.|

The instant that command over the universal law of darkness was declared, the wave of darkness Hades’ body had exploded into reformed into a gigantic net that fell toward Hermes.

The god immediately dashed out of the star system, but Hades simply expanded the range of his Domain Declaration to encompass the entire galaxy for a moment, enough that no matter where Hermes moved in that instant, he would still be within Hades’ Domain.

Hermes had only just crossed the galaxy’s halfway mark when a net of darkness rose up from the ground below and entangled his legs, causing him to stumble and fall to the ground of the icy planet he was on.

Then, that web of darkness dragged him into his shadow, pulling him back to Dodekapolis, where Hades immediately stomped down on his hip, then grabbed his left leg.

Hades’ stygian iron blades sliced through the air, piercing the back of Hermes’ knee, and as the god screamed, Hades pulled the blade to the side, slicing off his leg.

Blood spurted like a fountain, but Hades didn’t get the chance to finish Hermes off as Ares charged in, his sword slashing straight through Hades body with overwhelming force.

The upwards diagonal slash unleashed by the god of war, however, only tore through Hade’s body, which had already been made intangible via elementalization, his Authorities lacking the power to damage that darkness.

Hades immediately compressed his Domain Declaration around Ares’ body, using thousands of dark hands to grab the god and hold him in place long enough for Hades to spin around and unleash a horizontal slash that relieved Ares of his head in one go.

He kicked the god’s body down, his hand touching his chest and extracting his soul, before locking it away, just like Athena’s.

Once again, the entirety of Olympus trembled as a second Main Entity died.

"Second one down," Hades muttered, turning his gaze to Hermes, who was bleeding on the floor.

But just as he took a step towards Hermes, a cloud of purple mist suddenly formed around his head, and he accidentally inhaled a little of the mist, his eyes immediately going wide as he coughed violently, inhaling more of that purple mist in the process.

*CLANG!

Hades’ swords dropped to the ground as he staggered, and his eyes lost focus a moment later, his body falling limp.

In that same moment, two arrows, one engulfed in bright golden flames and the other covered in silvery light, shot towards him from both sides, one from the front and one from behind, piercing his chest and immediately exploding.

The massive eruption of power sent cracks through the divinity-reinforced planet, shockwaves ripping the local fabric of space-time apart, and blasting across the star system.

A chubby man with bloodshot eyes and black, curly hair suddenly appeared beside Hermes’ severed leg, picking it up before rushing out of the blast, towards Hermes.

"Quite a bad situation you’re in there, brother," he said. "Here, stick your leg back on."

The man tossed the severed leg to Hermes, but Hermes didn’t move to catch it, instead reaching out towards the god himself, attempting to push him away with a wave of divinity.

However, Hermes was still entangled in Hades’ Web of Darkness that specifically targeted the law of Alacrity, one of the sources of Hermes’ famed speed.

As such, he wasn’t fast enough to stop the unseen hands of darkness from bursting out of the ground and grabbing the curly-haired god all over, instantly snapping his neck with violent force.

The shockwave from his neck being snapped blasted Hermes backwards, and the unseen hands reached out towards his chest, extracted his soul, and just like that, within seconds, Dionysus was down.

Meanwhile, from the cloud of smoke spreading across space caused by the two explosive arrows that had pierced Hades earlier, something shot out, tearing straight past the atmosphere and into space, heading directly toward a golden flaming chariot carrying a yellow-haired man with a drawn bow.

Before the man could even loose the arrow at what had leapt out, Hades was already behind him, his foot slamming into the back of the man’s head and forcing his face down into the body of the chariot, crushing his body through the metal frame.

Hades then grabbed the back of the man’s head, and even as the man’s body erupted with a nova-like burst of divine flames, Hades, protected by his cosmic energy barrier, summoned one of his swords and stabbed the man in the back of his chest repeatedly, blood spilling everywhere.

He then lifted the man’s body up and slammed him down with all his might, sending both the man and the chariot crashing through the atmosphere with meteoric force, smashing straight into the Seat of the Pantheon, right into the throne hall of the twelve Olympians.

Just as he slammed the man down, a dozen silver arrows appeared around Hades, shooting straight toward his vitals.

|Multi-Black Hole.|

Several dark spheres of darkness formed around him, distorting space as they spun and swallowed the arrows, preventing them from interfering with his movement as he stabbed the man through the back of his neck and then pulled his sword free along with the man’s soul.

He grabbed the man’s corpse and spun around, flinging it toward the man’s sister, who was about to loose another arrow at Hades, forcing her to drop her bow to catch her brother’s body.

In that same moment, a blue crack split through the skies, tearing apart Hades’ Domain Declaration as well as the veil of darkness across the entirety of the Olympion galaxy, returning light to the world.

Hades staggered as his Domain was forcibly broken, blood dripping from his lips.

However, he only smiled lightly, wiping away the blood as he looked up into the sky and met the wide eyes of the woman responsible for breaking his Domain.

"Took you long enough, dearsister."