CRACKLE!
The air didn't just hum; it split apart with the sound of tearing silk as raw lightning wreathed Zeus's sky hand. He didn't shout, he exhaled a grunt of pure effort as he drove the Thunder Punch forward. The air itself flattened before his fist, compressing into a visible shockwave.
Hades twisted his torso, the lightning-charged fist grazing his ribs. The static discharge seared his chiton and left a blistering line across his skin that smelled of ozone and burnt flesh. He couldn't fully dodge the concussive tailwind, which hammered into his shoulder like a physical blow.
He was thrown off-balance, right into Poseidon's path.
CLANG!
The Poseidon's trident met Helkarion in a shower of white-hot sparks that stung their faces. Poseidon leaned in, his immense strength a tangible, crushing weight. The muscles in Hades's arms screamed as he was physically locked in place, his boots grinding into the rock.
Zeus didn't need an invitation. His sky hand glowed again, but this time a miniature, screaming cyclone wrapped around it. 'Thunder Punch + Aeroblast.'
There was no time to react. The blow took Hades square in the chest.
The sound was a sickening, wet crunch of bone giving way. The lightning didn't just flash—it burrowed, and the concussive air blast erupted inside his chest cavity. Hades's body arched violently, a jet of hot, black ichor, tasting of cold iron and grave-soil, spraying from his mouth and nose. He was thrown backward like a discarded doll, cratering the ground. The earth fissured around him with a deep, groaning shudder.
Before the dust could settle, the air itself screamed with gathering power. 'Storm Pulse!' 'Tidebound Execution!' A sphere of chaotic lightning and a crescent of water sharp enough to cut space itself converged on the crater.
Hades beat his wings, a desperate, lurching motion that hauled his broken body skyward. The twin attacks met the earth below. The BOOOM was not a sound, but a vacuum that stole all air, followed by a geyser of vaporized rock and acrid, stinging steam.
They fired again. This time, Hades didn't dodge. He met them with a storm of his own. 'Shadow Avatar'
His shadow bled across the ground, birthing a dozen clones that swarmed the brothers from all sides.
'Black Haze'
He and his copies blow a thick, dark haze that clung to skin and armor, swallowing light and muffling all sound into a dull, oppressive hum.
Zeus summoned a wind to disperse it, but the haze, woven from the very essence of secrecy, lingered. Then, in the heart of the darkness, a sickly green light flared in a dozen pairs of hands. 'Soul Quake.'
Hades clapped his hands.
The silent green ripple passed through armor, flesh, and bone without resistance.
Aaaaahhhh!!! AAAAAAA!!!
Zeus and Poseidon seized, their screams dying in their throats. This was not physical pain. It was the sensation of their immortal souls being flayed. A freezing fire ignited behind their eyes. Golden ichor, thin and shimmering, leaked from their eyes, ears, and nostrils. They clutched their heads, staggering as their very sense of self was violently shaken.
Through the spiritual agony, Zeus unleashed a wild, indiscriminate 'Chain Arc.' Lightning jumped erratically, scorching clones, Hades, and even Poseidon, who grunted as the electricity seared his side.
Gritting his teeth against the torment, Hades rasped, "Velkarion—bind Poseidon!"
The Stygian chain shot from his belt, its spearhead like a living thing that darted and weaved like a hunting serpent before fixing on its prey and lunging.
Poseidon's instincts screamed. "Awaken—Leviathan" He hurled the weapon, and the sapphire beast that manifested glowed with the same, unique azure light as Poseidon's own soul.
Snap!
The Leviathan's jaws closed on empty air as Velkarion twisted with impossible agility, its spearhead piercing the spectral beast's flank and bind. The Leviathan roared, a sound of spiritual anguish, its form dissolving as Velkarion's chains constricted, sealing it back into the trident, which now hung trapped and inert in the void.
Hades's eyes widened. "How…?" A flicker of his Secret Divinity burned the truth into his mind: a fragment of his brother's soul stor d in trident. "He anchored his soul to it…crazy."
The revelation cost him. A killing intent flared behind him. He lurched aside as Zeus's cyclone-wreathed fist shattered the space where his head had been.
What followed was a brutal, grinding exchange. Hades's enhanced Dark Shields bloomed before him, only to shatter like stained glass under Zeus's relentless, hammering assault. As the last one fractured, Poseidon, recovered and raging, charged from behind. Hades didn't raise another shield. He hurled a small, silently drifting
'Dream Void.'
It was too close. A wave of debilitating dizziness swamped their senses, making the world swim. Their body on his own surge divine energy and form film around their skin. Hades surged the essence of Mortality into Helkarion and struck—a vertical slash that carved open Poseidon's face with a wet, tearing sound, shearing through his eye, and a horizontal sweep that opened a deep, gushing wound across Zeus's stomach. Golden blood fountained, hot and slick. If divine energy not envelope their body then maybe this blow will be deadly for them.
The blinding, mortal pain shocked them awake. Their retaliation was instinctual, total. 'Tsunami!' 'Cyclone Core!'
The twin cataclysms—a mountain of divine water and a spinning sphere of atmospheric annihilation—hit Hades like the fist of the world itself, hurling his broken form through the air.
They tried to heal.
'Healing Water,'
Poseidon bathed himself in jade healing water while Zeus poured a high-grade potion over his gut. The gushing stopped, but the wounds remained, pulsing with a dark, necrotic energy that resisted all mending. The scars of Mortality would remain.
"HADES!" Their roar was one of raw, furious pain.
'Sky Wrath' 'Ocean Wrath'
Their auras erupted, no longer just power, but the screaming manifest will of their entire realms. The air itself became gold and azure. They charged, all their divinity concentrated into their final, decisive blows.
Hades met them, Helkarion flaring with void-black flame. He slashed, a crescent of absolute darkness flying to meet them. They moved through it, then their fists connecting simultaneously.
Poseidon's blow flattened his nose with a wet crunch. Zeus's punch to his chest splintered ribs, driving bone shards deep into his lungs. A following blow to his back cracked his spine with a sound like stepping on dry branches.
He was a broken puppet, held together by will alone. As Zeus's sky hand charged. He surge all his divine energy on it. His sky hand glowed, consuming all light and sound, drawing in the very energy of the battlefield. 'Overload Burst.'
The white explosion was absolute. It bleached the world of color and sound, leaving only a silent, blinding whiteness. When it faded, Hades drifted, a limp, bruised form caked in drying black ichor, his organs pierced, his bones shattered. Consciousness was a single, straining thread in the void. He dragged a ragged, bubbling breath, the taste of iron and ending filling his mouth.
His eyes, swollen to slits, closed. The whisper come out from his lips with finality.
"Apo…calypse—unle…ashed."
Lub-dub! Lub-dub!
The sound was not in Hades's ears, but in his bones, a deep, primordial rhythm that superseded his own dying heartbeat. His breathing slowed into the absolute stillness of the abyss.
Poseidon and Zeus look at unconscious Hades. Suddenly, unknown deep chill hit them. Poseidon look surrounding 'Something is strange. Something—ominous.'
Within his soul, in an endless void. Three orbs—black, silver and gold orbiting eachother over Underworld divinity. Suddenly, ceased their revolution. They collided and fused in a silent, terrible flash, collapsing into a single, miniature star of violent violet light. This new-born singularity locked into a perfect, terrifying orbit around the colossal core of his Underworld Domain.
A wave of golden energy—the pure essence of Harmony—surged through the chaos, and stable the connection between them. The great central sphere of his power began to spin, a vortex that tore energy from the fundamental fabric of reality itself.
Hades's eyes flew open. They were no longer eyes, but pools of raw, radiating amethyst light. His veins swelled, rising against his pallid skin like styx river, pulsing with a power that represents finality. The darkness was crawled from his hand and consume his full body. His bones cracked and lengthened, his claws curving into obsidian scythes, his wings sharpening into obsidian blades.
His presence was no longer that of a god-king. It was the silent, immense pressure of the primordial. Primordial that represents Underworld. That represents finality.
ROOOAARR!!!
His beastly roar reverberate in whole world like announcement of his arrival. A silent, visible torrent of pure, undiluted entropy erupted from him in all directions. The Underworld shake voilently, the very stones of Tartarus groaning as if trying to escape their own sovereign.
The effect was not contained only here. It was a chain reaction of cosmic law breaking. In the Earth Realm, series of castrophies occured. Volcanoes erupt and unraveled, vomiting continents of ash and fire into skies that block even a single ray of hope. The ground fissure, swallowing mountains and cities whole. Oceans forgot their nature, rising in mindless, mountainous tsunamis that ignored tides and reason. Ghosts and demonic beast become overactive and frenzy. Gravity faltered; stones, seas, and entire forests drifted upward into the smothering haze. In the sky realm, constellations shattered, star clash with celestial entities.
Zeus and Poseidon could only stare, their minds refusing to process the unraveling of their cosmos. The word escaped Zeus's lips, a breath of pure, unadulterated horror he had never known: "…Primordial."
Poseidon's instincts, usually a sharp and trusted guide, became a single, screaming note of primal panic. He looked at his own hands; they trembled with dreadful fear.
Hades turned his head, the movement unnervingly fluid and precise. An eerie, placid smile touched his lips, devoid of any malice or triumph they could recognize.
Zeus blinked.
And Hades was simply there. Inches away. No flash, no displacement of air. Reacting on part of seconds of battle-hardened instinct, Zeus threw every shred of his remaining power into a single, desperate punch with his sky hand, the air crackling and compressing into a vacuum around his fist.
Hades caught it with a single index finger.
The cataclysmic force of Zeus's own blow vanished into that one, impossible point of contact. Then, Hades gave a gentle, almost dismissive push.
To Zeus, it felt like the collective mass and momentum of every mountain in every realm had been focused into his sternum. The wet, sickening CRUNCH-CRACK of his ribs, sternum, and divine armor shattering was deafening. He was erased from his position, a golden comet of gore and broken divinity blasting backward through dimensions until he cratered into the deepest, darkest bedrock of the Earth Realm.
Poseidon turned. Not to fight. To flee. He burned his divinity, the very source of his life, rupturing his own divine muscles, his skin splitting under the strain. Fear had become his entire universe, a tidal wave drowning out all thought, all honor.
A voice, calm and intimately familiar, whispered directly into the fabric of his soul, bypassing his ears. "Where are you going, my lovely younger brother?"
Poseidon squeezed his eyes shut, pushing faster. He dared to open them a slit, a sliver of a moment to gauge his escape.
A black hand, serene and inevitable, was already closing over his face, cool and dry like ancient stone.
A single touch. 'Gleam of Nightmare.'
Poseidon's mind and body gave away, his consciousness faded in the dreadful terror. His body going instantly, completely limp, a discarded puppet adrift in the silent void.
Hades turned. He moved to Hecate, who stood rooted, a devastating mixture of awe, terror, and love warring in her eyes. He didn't speak. He simply opened his arms, and she fell into them, her embrace both a desperate question and a fervent answer. He felt her trembling against the cosmic chill that now radiated from him.
"We won," he whispered, his voice now a resonant, multi-layered hum that vibrated in her very bones.
"But how?" she breathed, pulling back to search his radiant, alien eyes. "This power... it's—It's Primordial."
"The Apocalypse form was a key," he explained, the words precise and calm, like a lecturer on annihilation. "It forced a perfect, critical synergy. Harmony stabilized the connection, allowing me to channel the raw, unformed essence of the Underworld itself. But it's a temporary for few more minutes and it also limited to my domain. Beyond these borders, I am—"
He froze. His head snapped toward the bottom of the Earth Realm, his smile vanishing, replaced by a look of pure, predatory focus. He shoved Hecate behind him with one arm.
"SHOW YOURSELF, GAIA!"
The Earth Realm tremble. The soil, stone, magma, and bedrock of the entire world combine into a living, breathing concept of the land, taking the form of a breathtakingly beautiful and utterly merciless woman. Gaia manifested, her eyes holding the cold, patient fury of shifting continents.
From the very cracks from earth realm, water flooded, the essence from which all seas were born—welled up. It gathered with a profound, silent pressure into a form of immense, ancient power. Pontus took shape, his presence the deep, crushing, and utterly silent.