Extra's Death: I Am the Son of Hades

Chapter 785: Hanged Man

Darkness erupted in every direction, swallowing the remains of the fractured battlefield.

Neo felt it press in from all sides, a single overwhelming presence that didn’t feel like a thing with form or shape, but rather a countless emotions fused into one and given mass.

Pain burst through him immediately, sharp at first and then spreading like something alive beneath his skin.

His breath caught.

His thoughts scattered.

Everything inside him felt stretched between burning and freezing.

The Darkness wrapped around him.

It felt oddly gentle, like hands pulling him into a warm embrace.

Warm, but wrong.

Protective, but greedy.

It tried to soothe him, yet it couldn’t stop itself from pushing deeper into him and consuming him.

He could barely tell whether it wanted to hold him or devour him.

Across countless universes, entire realities trembled.

The presence descending on him wasn’t alone.

The Mother of Horrors pressed through the cracks between reality, followed by her children.

The Mad Supreme, the Witch of Gluttony, the Great Evil.

Her arrival felt like someone had dropped the concept of dread into creation and let it spread.

The Conquerors responded instantly.

Their Worlds expanded outward—rivers of power that filled the emptiness between universes—and their Technique Spirits rose in blinding torrents of energy.

They were trying to shield everything they had ever built, patching the walls of their realities with raw force as the Horrors pushed against them.

Two Eternals appeared next.

They moved faster than the collapse that was already eating through space.

Their Ouroboros Authority manifested as two serpents, one silver and one purple.

The moment the snakes formed, they wrapped around each other and began spinning, twisting, merging.

Time shifted immediately.

The flow of it bent, snapped, and stretched.

Seconds folded into each other.

Entire minutes vanished.

Arkan, the slimmer of the two Eternals—the one with the humanoid body and a crystalline, tear-shaped head—gave control of his Ouroboros Authority to the other Eternal beside him.

He didn’t hesitate.

The moment he handed it over, he closed his eyes and reached through the link the Authority gave him.

He was reaching for the root of the Authority.

Neo felt the change before he saw anything.

It was as if the entire Cosmos took a single breath.

Then something on the edge of eternity moved.

The hanged man—the corpse suspended above the Eons, whose blood fed the Infinite Neverborn branches—shifted.

His corpse had been motionless for ages, chained like a criminal.

He shouldn’t have moved.

He couldn’t move.

Yet he opened his eyes.

This was Arkan’s doing.

The hanged man’s mouth formed a single sound, though Neo couldn’t hear it clearly.

And time elementals exploded outward from him.

They poured into the battlefield, a tide of pure temporal power with no clear shape but endless motion.

Arkan grasped the time elementals and forced them into a pattern.

He used them like a net, pulling on the lines of time around the Horrors, slowing them down, eroding the power of the Mother of Horrors piece by piece.

His expression twisted as he pushed himself further.

Controlling the Hanged Man, even if he was dead, wasn’t easy.

While the other Conquerors and Eternals fought desperately to keep the universes intact, Veydran—the leader of the Eternals—stood still.

His eyes followed Neo, calm and unreadable.

He didn’t spare even a glance toward the collapsing realities around them.

It was as if none of it was his concern.

Apollyon was different.

He watched the battlefield with tight jaws and tense arms.

His gaze moved across the destruction, the deaths, the universes breaking apart.

He looked like someone trying to weigh the cost of everything happening around him.

Then he spoke. His voice was deep and ancient.

“Send her back, Heavenbreaker. Darkness is no longer sane. If her real body appears here, everything around us will be destroyed.”

Only the darkness elementals had arrived so far, along with the Horrors themselves.

The true World of Darkness—the actual body of the Mad Supreme—was still forcing its way through the boundaries of realities while Apollyon was trying to slow her arrival.

Neo could feel it coming.

If she arrived in full, nothing nearby would survive.

Neo’s expression pulled into something harsh, though most of his face was hidden by the darkness devouring his senses.

His hearing faded in and out, but he caught enough of Apollyon’s voice to understand what he was asking.

“Send her back?”

Neo managed to spit out.

Even if he had not called for the Mad Supreme, she would’ve come nonetheless to save him.

He knew this, yet he decided to bear the destruction that would be caused by her arrival as his own.

“You’re acting like you actually care about the lives here. What about the people you killed while trying to capture me? What about all the universes and the people the Eternals erased until now?”

Apollyon didn’t look offended.

He answered as if Neo had asked a normal question.

“That was done for the integrity of the Cosmos.

“Ashes must be erased.

“The Cosmos can no longer reset. Even universes don’t die properly anymore. They decay. They rot until nothing is left.

“We use the blood of the Fallen Devil just to maintain newborn universes and let them grow.”

He paused, his voice steady but heavy.

“In this capricious condition, the existence of Ashes can collapse everything. A single paradox will spread like a crack and break what little stability remains.”

Apollyon had read the entire tapestry of Fate as soon as he came out of the Forbidden Lands.

Naturally, he knew Neo was talking about the Tartarus and the people there that were erased by the Eternals.

“So all of that was necessary sacrifice?” Neo said.

His voice shook but the venom in it was unmistakable.

He felt the darkness digging deeper into him, eating away at his Intent and gnawing at the edges of his consciousness.

Pain threaded through him in waves.

But anger pushed through the pain.

Seeing Apollyon act righteously greatly angered Neo.

Apollyon’s gaze rested on him for a long moment.

“I understand why you’re furious. And I won’t deny your reasons.”

The battlefield roared around them.

The Horrors tore apart worlds.

The Conquerors pushed back, spilling techniques that cracked space.

Arkan continued to channel the corpse’s time elementals, and the pressure on him intensified every second.

Darkness spread, reality crumbled, and Apollyon stood still, watching Neo as if they were the only two people in the scene.

He should have attacked by now.

Neo could feel it.

Even injured, Apollyon had the strength to crush the Horrors, and break Neo without much effort.

It wasn’t arrogance.

It was a simple truth.

Not even Ultris at his peak could match Apollyon.

So the idea that a Witch who had lost her sanity could stop Apollyon from killing Neo was absurd.

Yet Apollyon didn’t move.

Instead, his gaze shifted to the hanged man in the distance, the corpse of Ouroboros.

“That man, is your teacher, isn’t he?”

Neo’s throat tightened.

“What about him?”

“He is my father.”

Neo felt his thoughts stop.

His mind went blank for a moment.

Apollyon continued, voice steady but carrying something deeper.

“He sent me to the True Blessed Lands. He wanted me far from the wars that were coming.

“I wanted to help, but he insisted I stayed away.

“He said the storms would swallow everything.

“He loved me. And yet, when I finally returned from the True Blessed Lands…”

He exhaled slowly.

“The first thing I did was kill him. Do you know why?”

Neo stared at him, the darkness pulsing around his body.

All around them, battles reached their peak.

Conquerors screamed as their worlds were shredded.

Horrors multiplied.

Eternals felt the strain of fighting the partially descended Mother of Horrors.

But Apollyon didn’t look away from Neo.

“This Cosmos is in this state because of him. He spoke of peace, of killing the Absolute Judge.

“He said he would stop the Devil that wanted to destroy everything.”

“And yet, it was not your father who shattered the universe, broke the cycles of Eons, and the continuous rebirth of the universe.”

His eyes didn’t hold anger, only a deep exhaustion and determination.

“It was him. Ouroboros.”

Neo felt the words sink into him, heavy and cold.

“He spoke of hope and yet all he left behind was utter devastations.

“That’s why I killed him.”