Apate closes her eyes and crouches, bracing for the blow. The impact never comes.
A gale of displaced air washes over her. She peeks through slitted eyelids.
Three figures stand as a living bulwark between her and oblivion: Nixi, a bristling shadow-panther with fangs bared; Epimetheus, his broadsword gleaming; and the towering, aqueous form of the goddess Styx. Before them, Morvud's attacking claw lies severed on the ground, its stump sizzling with emerald soul-fire. Black ichor pumps from the wound, each drop hissing and coalescing into a skittering, lesser fiend.
Charon's voice booms from the deck of the Black Pearl. "BASTARDS! DON'T LET 'EM TOUCH THE SOULS!"
"Keeeehhhee!!"
His skeleton crew howls, charging the newborn fiends. Cannon ports on the ship's side blaze, shredding the front ranks with spectral shot.
"Grr…"
Morvud groans, the sound a rockslide. He rears back, and a condensed beam of pure dark energy, thick as a temple column, erupts from his maw.
Nixi meets it head-on. She opens her own jaws, and a violent purple beam of divine power screams forth. The energies collide mid-air, crackling and spitting, pushing against each other in a contest of raw will.
Epimetheus bellows, wading into the swarm of fiends, his sword a whirlwind of dismembering strikes. Styx supports Nixi, hurling lance after corrosive lance of Styx-water at Morvud's flanks, forcing him to flinch.
"Charon! Evacuate the souls now!" Styx commands, her voice layered with the river's roar.
Charon gives a sharp nod. He turns on the panicked, quivering souls. "YOU! BOARD! NOW!" They remain frozen, a mosaic of terror. He grits his teeth, his patience evaporating. He lunges forward, grabs two souls by their ephemeral shoulders, and hurls them onto his ship. "I SAID BOARD, YOU WRETCHED GHOSTS!"
He becomes a furious ferryman, physically throwing the dead onto the Black Pearl until the deck is dangerously overcrowded. He spares one last glance at the battlefield: Apate and Epimetheus hold the line against the fiendish tide; Nixi and Styx are locked in their draining struggle with the Devourer. He spins the great wheel. "Full sail! We return with the legions!"
The Styx itself lends its current, and the Black Pearl shoots away into the gloom.
On the bank, Nixi breaks her beam and sprints. She is a streak of amethyst shadow, racing up Morvud's scaled arm. He swipes at her, but she leaps, using his own momentum, and lands on his shoulder. With a feral scream, she lunges for his face, claws radiating a light that scars the air itself.
Her swipe carves four deep, smoking gashes across his snout and eyes. Ichor, thick as tar, wells and pours.
"ROOOAARR!!!"
Morvud roars and smashes a claw into his own shoulder.
THAM!
Nixi vanishes into the cavern wall in an explosion of shattered stone. Dust billows.
"NIXI!" Apate's cry is pure anguish.
Morvud straightens. The horrific wounds on his face writhe. Instead of healing cleanly, the spilled ichor seeps back into him, and his body responds. His bulk swells, muscles knotting with new, demonic tendons. Dark blue scales thicken into armored plates. He inhales, and the very air of the Underworld screams toward him—a vortex of stray demonic energy, residual pain, and fear.
ROOOOOAAAAARRR!!!
The shockwave of the roar is physical. It disintegrates the lesser fiends into puffs of acrid smoke. Epimetheus is driven to one knee, his sword scraping a trench in the stone to anchor himself. "He's evolving… absorbing surrounding chaotic essences!"
The rubble shifts. A pulse of defiant purple light erupts from it.
ROOOAARR!!!
Nixi bursts free, larger than before, her form a perfect, giant panther of living shadow. Blood mats her fur, dripping from her jaw, but her amethyst eyes burn with undiminished fury. The black haze of her own power washes over her, sealing rents in her flesh.
Styx rises beside her, drawing the river up until her watery form matches Morvud's height. "This is my domain, Devourer. Your blood will replenish my currents."
She slams her staff down.
BOOOOM!
The River Styx answers. Pillars of black, acidic water erupt beneath Morvud, scouring his legs and torso. Steam and the smell of burning corruption fill the air. Morvud bellows, bracing against the torrent.
He retaliates not with a beam, but with a sweeping backhand. A crescent of compressed dark energy shears through the water pillars, dispersing them in a violent explosion of hot vapor. The backlash forces Styx back, her feet carving grooves in the bank.
Nixi uses the distraction. She vanishes and reappears at his flank. Her claws, moving with instinctual, ancient precision, carve glowing sigils in the air as they rake across his ribs.
SHRRRKKK!
Scales shatter. Black blood sprays.
"ROOOAARR!!!"
Morvud roars, twisting with shocking speed. His tail, like a massive battering ram, whips around. Nixi barely conjures a shield of dark energy in time.
CRASH!
The shield holds for a microsecond before shattering. She is catapulted across the battlefield, plowing through stone and the remnants of fiends. She flips, lands in a crouch on all fours, and coughs a splatter of black blood onto the stone. A low, continuous growl of pure ferocity rumbles from her chest, unwavering.
Morvud's new wounds pulse. The broken ribs don't just mend; they fuse and thicken, forming jagged, external plates of bony armor. The torn flesh hardens into glossy, crystalline black growths.
Styx's eyes narrow. "He adapts. He use our attack to harness himself." Her voice whispers directly into Nixi's mind. 'We cannot kill him this way. We must suppress him, as my mother did.'
Nixi's answering psychic growl is one of grim acceptance.
They move in unison. Styx raises both hands, and the river rises in a massive, rotating spiral—a drill of pure oblivion. Nixi leaps, not at Morvud, but into Styx's shadow, disappearing from sight.
"NOW!" Styx commands.
The watery vortex hurls forward. Morvud meets it, jaws gaping, dark energy condensing into a sphere in his throat.
The collision is a silent, blinding explosion of purple and black light that whites out the underworld sky. When it fades, a crater smokes between them.
And Nixi is there, her fangs buried deep in Morvud's throat, her claws hooked under his scales. She holds on with the weight of a falling mountain.
"ROOOAARR!!!"
Morvud's scream is choked. He thrashes madly, his claws raking her back, his tail hammering the ground. Nixi takes the punishment, her grip unbreakable.
'Corrosive Water Bind!'
Styx reinforces the hold. Chains of the blackest Styx-water coil around Morvud's limbs, anchoring him to the riverbank. He strains, the chains cracking but not breaking, locked in a brutal stalemate.
Morvud stops struggling. He stands still, an unsettling calm descending.
Styx's lips lift in a weary, triumphant smile. "Hah…finally. He is caught." She begins to pull, to drag him toward the river's heart, to drown him in her depths.
A wet, tearing sound, like velcro ripped from flesh, erupts from Morvud's back. It is followed not by his roar, but by Nixi's pain-racked scream. "ROOOAARR!!!"
She is flung away, her majestic panther form dissolving mid-air into the small, limp black kitten. She hits the ground and does not move, her tiny body punctured by a dozen thick, crystalline blue needles that have erupted from Morvud's spine—a brutal adaptation born of her suffocating embrace.
Morvud begins to gnaw on Styx's water chains. The corrosive liquid burns his maw horribly, sending up plumes of sickly smoke. But he does not stop. After the third bite, the burning lessens. After the sixth, the water where he bites turns clear, then dark, its divine power absorbed.
Styx recoils, yanking her remaining water back. Morvud charges her. She throws her hands up, and the river swirls into a massive, rotating shield before her.
CRASH!
He rams it. The shield holds, but cracks spider-web across its surface. He rams again. And again. He opens his new, needle-lined maw and bites the shield.
CRACK!
Two fleshy, embryonic arms sprout from his back. They writhe and form into small, bestial heads. These new heads snap forward, their long, sticky tongues shooting past the combatants toward the huddled mass of souls.
Epimetheus is a blur, his sword severing one tongue. The other retracts, clutching a handful of wailing souls. It delivers them to the main head. Morvud consumes them in a single gulp.
A surge of power visibly ripples through him. His muscles bulge, his height increases by several meters. He rams the water shield once more.
It shatters.
Styx falls. Morvud is upon her, his maw gaping to bite her in half. She thrusts her staff horizontally, jamming it between his upper and lower jaws.
She strains, holding the nightmare at bay. "Self-destruction," she murmurs. The staff glows with a sudden, intense golden radiance.
Morvud's eyes widen. Styx's form dissolves into pure water, which flows through his claws and back into the river. The glowing staff remains in his mouth.
BOOOM.
The divine detonation blows Morvud's head apart in a shower of black viscera. The shockwave knocks everyone flat. The splattered ichor immediately forms a new, larger wave of frenzied lesser fiends.
But from the headless neck, new flesh surges. It reforms, not into the old head, but into a larger, more horrific version—a pulsating, flower-like maw lined with concentric rings of rotating, razor-teeth.
The two smaller heads on his back shriek in unison. All three mouths turn toward the dense pack of souls.
Apate's voice is raw. "GUARD THE SOULS!"
But the guards are overwhelmed by the fresh fiendish tide.
The central flower-maw opens wide. A different sound emerges—not a roar, but a deep, horrific inhale. A suction stronger than any whirlpool grabs the air, the dust, the loose stones, and begins to drag the screaming souls toward it.
Apate acts on pure instinct. 'Crimson Bind' She throws her hands out, and threads of red light shoot from her fingers, lashing around soldiers and souls alike, pulling them into a single, struggling mass against the pull.
The threads strain. They sing with tension. One snaps, then another. Apate grits her teeth, pouring her divinity into the bind. "Please endure for few more minutes…"
As this much pressure not enough. The suction intensifies. The remaining threads snap.
Apate, Epimetheus, soldiers, and souls are all yanked off their feet, hurtling toward the grinding, razored petals.
Apate flails for a moment, then her struggles cease. The howling wind fills her ears. A deep, cold quiet settles in her chest. "I'm sorry, everyone." She closes her eyes and lets go.
SWOOSH-THUNK!
The world jerks. The suction dies. Apate slams into the hard ground.
She opens her eyes. A giant, double-bladed axe is embedded in the stone where Morvud's central head had been. The flower-maw lies several meters away, twitching.
Her gaze travels up the axe's trajectory. There, on the shore beside the newly-returned Black Pearl, stand two colossus being: hundred-handed, fifty-headed each. The Hecatoncheires, Gygas and Cottas. Charon is at the prow, all cannons aimed. And at same time he directs skeleton crews to form a defensive line. Thanatos join them with his death scythe.
A single word, wet with relief and exhaustion, escapes Apate's lips. "…brother."
"EVERYONE TO THE SHIPS! HE IS NOT DEAD!" Charon and Thanatos shout in unison. Cannon fire shreds the advancing fiends as the crews pull dazed survivors toward the relative safety of the vessels.
Gygas and Cottas charge the headless Morvud. It is not a fight; it is demolition. Hammers, axes, maces, and spears in a hundred hands rise and fall in a continuous, earth-shaking rhythm, pulverizing the monstrous body into the ground.
"He is foul and smells of rot, brother," Gygas grunts, crushing a regenerating limb.
"Endure it. Brother," Cottas replies, severing three tentacles that sprout from the mass.
Morvud's body, under this utter pressure, liquefies. It becomes a fast-spreading black slime that climbs up their legs and torsos, trying to engulf them.
Styx, her form reconstituted but faint, sees it. "BOTH OF YOU, DISTANCE YOURSELVES!" Her voice is lost in the cacophony of their assault. She acts instead, hurling a massive column of water not at Morvud, but at the Hecatoncheires.
The force blasts them backward, breaking the slime's grip and sending them crashing into a cliff wall. But it frees them.
Morvud, now a vast, undulating pool of sentient sludge, swells larger. Every spell Apate and the soldiers fire, every arrow, is absorbed. The mass grows darker, denser, more massive. A forest of black, whip-like tentacles erupts from it, lashing out at everyone.
Thanatos and Epimetheus sever tentacles that only regrow instantly. Styx's water jets are swallowed whole. Despair begins to set in. Morvud's tentacles become immune to their attacks. Thanatos and Epimetheus can't anymore cut him. Morvud began to absorb Styx itself through his tentacles.
Morvud wrap everyone—Apate, Thanatos, Hectonchrones, souls—everyone. Then he throw them in his void like stomach.
After that Morvud grow up to the height of mountains his surface can able to touch the roof of cave.
SWOOSH!
A black meteor falls from the cavern roof. Helkarion strikes the center of the slime-mountain with the force of a dying star.
The giant morass bursts. Everything it had absorbed—water, spells, stone, fiends, dieties, souls—floods out in a chaotic, filthy deluge.
Helkarion flies back through the air into the waiting hand of Hades as he descends, his obsidian wings folding. His amethyst eyes are pits of cold fury. He raises his free hand. A calm, twilight flame—the antithesis of chaos—ignites in his palm.
'Life Harvest.'
A ray of twilight flame lances out, striking the reforming sludge. It does not burn with heat, but with absolute finality. It severs the connection of life-force, drawing the essential energy of the Devourer out of its form and back into Hades. The sheer volume is immense, a torrent of stolen vitality returning to its sovereign.
"ROOOAARR!!!" "GRRR…!!!"
The screams that tear from the disintegrating Morvud are a chorus of pure, existential agony. His tentacles flail wildly, smashing the ground in its death throes.
Hades thrusts his other hand forward, his voice resonating with the full, deafening authority of the Underworld itself. "DEMONIC ENERGY! REMEMBER TO WHOM YOU SWORE LOYALTY! ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR KING!"
The very nature of the power that birthed Morvud rebels. The chaotic, demonic essence within the beast recoils from Hades's command, abandoning its creation like rats fleeing from a cat.
Stripped of both its stolen life-force and its foundational chaos, Morvud implodes. The colossal form shrinks, withers, and collapses in on itself until nothing remains but a smoking, inert puddle of thick, black tar.
A profound silence falls, broken only by the river's flow and the moans of the wounded.
Hades slowly descends, his feet touching the ravaged bank. He absorbs the last of the vast energies, and a visible change comes over him. His aura solidifies, becoming denser, more present. The air around him thrums with a deeper, more ancient power. His divinity has elevated, returning to its former, formidable rank: Mid-Level God King.
He kneels first by the small, still form of Nixi. A gentle, warm light emanates from his hand, washing over her. Her breathing, which had been faint, steadies.
He rises. "Styx. Secure your river and repair the bank. Charon. The flow of souls does not stop for anything. Resume your duties. Immediately."
They bow deeply, the command brooking no delay. "By your will, My Lord." They scatter, divine power flaring as they mend the broken realm.
Hades turns as Thanatos approaches and kneels.
"My Lord," Thanatos intones, his grave voice strained. "A calamity has unfolded above. Pandora, an… illegitimate child of Zeus, has opened a mystical jar. A curse is unleashed over Earth and Aether realm. All mortals and Aether-born have lost their immortality and fortitude. They are frail now, vulnerable to death, disease, and the corruption of their own emotions. The natural order is wounded. I must beg you to intercede."
Hades's chin lifts slightly. His amethyst gaze is impassive. "I refuse."
Thanatos's head snaps up. The bones of his clasped hands creak. "Why…?" The word is sharp, laced with a desperate disbelief that shatters his usual detachment.
"The Earth Realm is the domain of Olympus, not mine," Hades states, each word precise and cold as a glacier. "I intervened here because my border was violated and my people were endangered." He pauses, letting the absolute finality of his next words settle over the bank like a frost. "I am not a messiah. I am a king. My obligations begin and end at the shores of my own kingdom. That curse is the harvest of their own negligence and irresponsiblity. Let it stand as their eternal reminder."
Thanatos stares for a long moment. The fight drains from him. His head bows, his vast black wings drooping as if weighed down by the judgment. "I… understand, my Lord."
Hades gives a single, slow nod of dismissal. He walks to a large, unscathed stone and sits, not in rest, but in observation. His eyes close, and when they open again, they glow with a soft, all-seeing amethyst radiance. His perception expands, pierces the veils of the world, bearing witness to the flight of Typhoon, the despair of Pandora, and the slow unraveling of an order he has consciously, coldly, chosen not to save.