250 God of the Dead
250 God of the Dead
I finally had the space to continue working through the list Guesswork had compiled for me. It was a grim catalog of threats filled with high-rated capes, unstable entities, and individuals who, if left unchecked, would tilt entire regions into chaos. Since this next confrontation was projected to be one of my larger battles in recent days, I made a detour before deployment.
I visited my son.
“You’ve grown a lot,” I murmured.
Ron floated peacefully inside the cylindrical incubation chamber, suspended in nutrient solution. Soft blue lights traced along the glass, monitoring vitals, neural development, and metabolic stability. He looked small and fragile in contrast to the machinery surrounding him, yet I knew what ran in his blood. What I had passed down.
I placed a hand lightly against the glass.
I promised silently that I would give him a world where he could grow safely, where he would not have to inherit the mess I kept creating and containing.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bother telling me you were coming,” Nicole said from behind.
The reinforced metal door slid shut with a heavy seal, locking the chamber once more. Even within the Company facility, this room had additional layers of security.
“Sorry,” I replied. “I just wanted to get a glimpse of Ron.”
It had become a habit. Before difficult fights, especially ones where the projections were unfavorable, I found myself standing here. It grounded me in a way nothing else did.
Nicole clicked her tongue softly. “There’s no need to apologize. I come here to recharge too.”
We stood side by side, watching the steady rhythm of Ron’s tiny chest rising and falling in suspension. Guesswork would have scolded me for wasting time, but this was not wasted. It was calibration.
If not to reaffirm my resolve, then at least to remember why I bothered.
“I’m heading out,” I said eventually. “Take care.”
“You too,” she replied.
She caught my hand, pulled me slightly closer, and pressed a brief kiss against my lips. “Good luck.”
I nodded and phased through the sealed wall. Even the thick nullification-based materials failed to obstruct me. My intangibility had reached a point where conventional suppression technologies struggled to keep up. That said, the NSD’s nullification systems were impressive. Reverse engineering their approach, especially the layers derived from the Führer’s personal application, would be strategically valuable.
I made a mental note to steal data from SRC for it. They were probably already working on it, so it would help to get a ‘copy’ of there findings and send it to the Company for comparison of there research progress.
Moments later, I stood on the rooftop of the facility. A portal opened before me, edges flickering with controlled spatial distortion. I stepped through.
The other side greeted me with decay.
I emerged onto another rooftop, though “roof” was generous. The building beneath me was fractured and hollowed out. The city stretching into the distance was worse. Towers had collapsed into skeletal remains. Streets were clogged with debris and unmoving shapes.
I adjusted my porcelain mask into place. Micro-cameras embedded along the lens rim synced with Guesswork’s interface. A translucent HUD blinked to life in my vision.
“You good to go?” Guesswork asked.
A minimap populated the upper left of my display, red markers blooming across multiple blocks.
There were many.
I looked down at the street below and immediately recognized the gait of the figures wandering between overturned vehicles.
Shambling.
Uncoordinated.
Dead.
“This is what we’re calling a dead world?” I asked quietly.
“By all meaningful metrics,” Guesswork replied. “Your target is theorized at approximately Rated-25.”
That number gave me pause.
I was Intangibility-20. My secondary abilities hovered around fifteen. On paper, there was a gap.
“That’s high,” I said.
“It is,” Guesswork agreed. “The upside is his potency seems focused rather than versatile. Likely a mutated telepathic branch. Limited spread, extreme depth.”
Psychic specialization.
Ironically, I was optimized for that matchup. My disdain for psychic interference had driven my own development in that direction. My empathy, my mental fortifications, and my layered cognition had all sharpened in response to repeated irritation.
“Name,” I said.
“Rodney Marseilles,” Guesswork answered. “Designation: Hades. Died of chronic lung cancer. At the moment of death, he anchored himself to the temporal imprint of that instant and pulled. Resulting manifestation: what we irregularly categorize as necromancy.”
I watched as one of the shambling corpses below snapped its head upward, as if sensing my presence.
“Necromancy through telepathic mutation?” I asked.
“More or less,” Guesswork said. “He doesn’t raise the dead in the mystical sense. He overrides residual neural pathways and binds them through a persistent psychic network. Think distributed hive-mind with corpse-based hardware.”
The red markers on my HUD shifted slightly.
They were converging.
I flexed my fingers and let my body slip partially out of phase, gravity loosening its hold. The air no longer felt restrictive. The concept of friction dulled.
“Any environmental hazards?” I asked.
“Besides several thousand corpses and a psychic nexus rated five levels above you?” Guesswork replied dryly. “Not particularly.”
A face formed in the air before me.
It was gaunt, stretched thin like skin draped over a skull, eye sockets hollow and endless. The projection flickered, then dissolved into drifting psychic static.
Guesswork continued in my ear, voice steady despite the visuals. “He raises the dead through telepathic override. Over time, it evolved into something viral. A psychic contagion. It induces extreme psychopathy in the infected and binds them into his network. We attempted cures. Even with Ms. Life involved, success rates were low and resource expenditure was absurd.”
Below me, corpses twitched and began orienting toward my descent.
“We actually weaponized him at one point,” Guesswork admitted. “Against certain iterations of the Witch that reached prime development. The SRC would teleport Hades and his undead into worlds that required… correction. Yes, I’m aware how that sounds.”
“Spare me the theater,” I replied. “Weaknesses?”
There was a slight pause.
“None that we can confirm,” he said. “He’s functionally unkillable. Extreme destruction, disintegration, spatial collapse—it doesn’t matter. He regenerates or rematerializes. The immortality mechanism appears soul-linked. We haven’t cracked it.”
Soul-based persistence.
That was inconvenient.
“We want containment,” Guesswork continued. “Sealing, ideally. The real danger comes from his retainers.”
I exhaled slowly. “He has highly rated subordinates.”
“Yes. Two dozen at least above fifteen. Several pushing eighteen. We may be partially responsible. Our repeated deployments gave him high-quality corpses to convert. He destroys any highly rated psychics on sight, but others he assimilates.”
I could not entirely blame Guesswork for that. He was relatively new to the SRC, even if his rise had been meteoric. Institutional sins predated him.
My HUD flared red.
“DUCK!” Guesswork shouted.
I reacted instantly, dropping my altitude sharply. A massive laser beam tore through the air where my head had been moments prior, carving a molten trench through the building behind me.
“I could’ve phased that,” I said.
“It would have destroyed your mask and support systems,” he snapped. “We can’t lose comms. You’re surrounded. Retreat downward.”
Fair point.
I phased through the rooftop and continued descending through concrete, steel, and rebar. Guesswork’s voice sharpened as new signatures populated the map.
“Eighteen. Sixteen. Fifteen. Over two dozen. They’re triangulating you. This isn’t random mob behavior.”
“That’s good,” I replied. “More pressure means faster growth.”
“That’s not how it works, you know that,” he shot back. “This isn’t a leveling system. You don’t grind mobs and gain experience points. This is not a game. Also, update: Hades was previously theorized to have degraded mentally. That assessment was wrong. He was feigning instability. You have to undestand you are not fighting a mindless foe.”
I emerged at ground level, stepping out of fractured pavement.
In front of me stood a skeleton.
Not a shambling corpse. Not a rotting cadaver.
A pristine skeletal frame, bones polished pale, blue flames burning steadily within empty sockets. Tattered remnants of what might once have been clothing hung from his frame like ceremonial drapery.
Guesswork finished grimly, “He’s a master tactician. Intelligent enough to deceive the entire SRC despite our surveillance infrastructure. If you find him, do your best to subjugate him immediately without killing him.”
The skeleton lifted a single finger and pointed at me.
“Die,” he said.
My heart stopped and my chest seized. Electrical signals ceased. Blood halted mid-flow. For a fraction of a second, the world narrowed to a silent, collapsing tunnel.
Then my secondary redundancies triggered.
Biokinetic micro-adjustments forced conduction pathways to reinitiate. My enhancer rating compensated. My body rebooted under forced override. The stoppage lasted less than a second, but it was real.
I inhaled sharply.
The skeleton regarded me without expression, blue flames steady.
“So you’re Hades,” I said evenly, recalibrating internal systems as I internally cussed at Guesswork. Subjugate? That was easier said than done. I continued, feigning friendliness, “New aesthetic? I suppose bones suit you. Minimalist. On brand for a god of the dead.”
Around us, the ruined street filled with figures.
High-rated capes, eyes glowing the same blue, flesh intact but will absent. They formed a ring, movements coordinated with unsettling precision.
Hades tilted his skull slightly.
“You resisted,” he observed.
“Occupational hazard,” I replied.
Inside my mind, I reinforced every psychic barrier I possessed. Empathy dampened external intrusion. Telepathic countercurrents spun into layered defense grids. If his kill command operated on direct neural authority, I needed insulation and misdirection.
The skeleton did not show even a flicker of surprise.
He simply gestured.
An invisible force peeled me upward and flung me across the skyline. I tore through two crumbling buildings before regaining orientation, concrete and steel exploding around my intangible form. I allowed most of the impact to phase through me, but the vector alone carried enough force to displace entire structures.
Interesting.
“He’s full psychic class,” I said over comms as I stabilized midair. “That was telekinesis. Precise. Layered with empathic accuracy. He’s reading my intent before I execute it. His telepathy is acting as a multiplier.”
Whispers flooded my ears.
Fragments of memory that were not mine. Tactical suggestions. Emotional overlays. A personality trying to graft itself onto my cognition. It reminded me of the Witch’s ability to upload aspects of herself into others, except this was cruder and far more invasive.
I reinforced my enhancer field and compartmentalized the intrusion. The foreign threads snapped like brittle wires.
Below, I struck an abandoned highway and rolled, asphalt shattering under displaced force. I rose immediately, lifting back into the air.
“Guesswork,” I said, “the SRC underestimated him. He cut through my intangibility prediction windows like paper. Please, tell me you got something on him.”
“You’re being triangulated,” Guesswork replied sharply. “His network is using the undead as distributed processing nodes.”
That explained the pressure.
All around me, undead capes stood like relay towers, their minds tethered to Hades. H
A massive hammer phased harmlessly through my torso as a hulking brute materialized behind me. Teleporter. Simultaneously, that same enormous laser beam from earlier lanced toward my flank while dozens of undead charged from below.
It was a layered assault.
I pivoted in place and phased the brute’s skull partially into his own chest cavity. The misalignment was fatal. He dropped instantly.
The laser veered slightly as if correcting mid-flight. I shifted phase and let it carve through a skyscraper instead, then traced its origin. The source blurred. It was a speedster, capable of transforming into that beam state.
I drew two telekinetic tarot cards and began slicing at the distortion repeatedly, adjusting frequency with each pass. The third adjustment found purchase. Limbs separated cleanly. I forced the remains into the pavement, phasing them beneath the surface.
“Watch for suicide bombers,” Guesswork warned.
The shambling undead that had been rushing me detonated as soon as my gaze phased them downward. Explosions rippled beneath the concrete as their bodies re-solidified and burst. The shockwaves fractured the roadway, forcing me higher.
More high-rated capes surged forward.
Their abilities varied from construct generation, density manipulation, energy projection, tentacled biomorphing. None individually surpassed me, but their coordination under Hades’ command was relentless.
An energy projectile formed that registered as unusually dense and unstable. I triggered chronokinesis locally, freezing it mid-trajectory, then released the temporal hold at an altered vector. It slammed into a charging cape and disintegrated him in a burst of white ash.
I phased down into the ground and re-emerged behind a tentacled shifter, discharging electrokinesis at full output. The smell of ozone and burning flesh filled the air as he convulsed and collapsed.
This was becoming drawn out.
I had entered intending to refine technique, to sharpen ratings under pressure. Gravity bombs were an expedient solution, and expediency dulled growth. Still, the tide was thickening.
I withdrew one orb.
Then another.
Reluctantly, I armed them and cast them into clustered formations of undead and elite retainers.
Black spheres bloomed, swallowing entire intersections. Buildings imploded inward. The psychic pressure dipped momentarily as dozens of network nodes were erased.
Hades remained standing in the distance, untouched, blue flames unwavering.
Hours blurred into cycles of assault and counter-assault. Night fell and rose again over a dead world that no longer cared for time. I rotated through abilities deliberately from intangibility refinements, tighter phase windows, more efficient psychic insulation, and sharper telekinetic precision. Each engagement forced micro-adaptations.
Days passed.
I did not tire in the conventional sense. Biokinesis regulated metabolic strain. Enhancer stabilized neural fatigue. Still, the sustained pressure was immense.
And beneath it all, I felt it.
Growth.
Incremental at first. Then more distinct.
My intangibility became smoother, less effortful. My psychic defenses layered faster. My control windows widened. The gap between thought and execution narrowed.
It had been a week when Hades finally approached me himself.
For seven days, I had fought his retainers without pause. The skyline had been reduced further into skeletal outlines. Entire districts were now fields of fractured concrete and gravity-scarred craters. My ratings had crept upward in subtle but measurable increments, each clash forcing refinement.
Then he appeared.
The lesser undead parted in synchronized silence as the skeletal figure walked forward through the ruined boulevard. Blue flames flickered calmly within his eye sockets.
“Why do you fight?” he asked.
His voice was no longer a distant command that halted hearts. It was almost conversational.
I found it irritating that we had not spoken sooner. A power set like his would have been invaluable to me. Soul-linked persistence. Distributed psychic amplification. Viral conversion. The strategic applications alone were staggering.
“Family,” I answered.
It was simple and true.
Despite a week of continuous combat, I did not feel fatigue in the traditional sense. My Enhancer rating sustained my stamina, corrected microtears, and stabilized neurotransmitters. Still, this stalemate could not continue indefinitely. I had limited time before other fires demanded my attention.
“How about you?” I asked. “What do you want? What’s your story?”
He tilted his skull slightly.
“I admire your strength,” I continued. “Your control. Work with me. There is something I must accomplish. An enemy I need destroyed.”
The blue flames dimmed momentarily, as if in contemplation.
“I know I had a life before this,” he said slowly. “But I do not remember it.”
Fragments of half-formed emotion rippled through his mind. It was confusion, detachment, followed by a hollow echo where identity should have been.
“If the SRC wronged you,” I pressed, “let me help you. Stand with me instead of against me.”
“I do not care about the SRC,” he replied. “I do not care about your enemy. I only want you to leave me alone. Can you do that for me?”
I exhaled softly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I need you. I need you to become the stones I tread upon to gain power. That’s why I fight, Hades… no, Rodney.”
The blue flames flickered brighter.
“Rodney?” he repeated. “Is that my name? Amusing.”
Guesswork’s voice murmured caution in my ear, but I focused on the skeleton before me.
“Since you have shown me something interesting,” Rodney continued, “I will offer you an opportunity. Kill me.”
“Eclipse, don’t fall for it,” Guesswork warned immediately.
Through empathy, I probed.
What I felt was not mockery. Not bait.
It was sincerity.
Of course, a demi-god class psychic could fabricate sincerity flawlessly. Yet deceit was irrelevant to my approach. If it was a trap, I would break through it. If it was genuine, I would exploit it.
I met his burning gaze.
“Why do you fight?” I asked him.
He grew quiet.
“It is an insightful question,” he said after a moment, tinged with something like grief. “C’est parce que mon existence est une erreur.”
“...”
“My apologies,” he added. “Sometimes another language surfaces when emotion spikes.”
He looked down at his own skeletal hands.
“I have always believed that what should be dead should remain dead. Is it not ironic? My existence alone compels the opposite. Wherever I stand, the dead rise.”
The ground trembled.
From beneath shattered asphalt and collapsed structures, forms began clawing upward. Corpses I had phased downward over the past week, buried deep, crushed under rubble, and annihilated in explosions began to crawl back into the light.
Innumerable.
An army reborn from a grave I had dug myself.
Rodney regarded the spectacle with quiet resignation.
“Ask me again,” he said.
So I did.
“Why do you fight?”
The blue flames steadied, no longer violent, no longer probing.
“To die,” he answered. “Can you do that for me?”