My Life as A Death Guard
Chapter 513: Beneath the River
Malcador blinked. He was standing in the doorway of his dining room in his Terra residence.
The old man looked up, watching as black slime seeped relentlessly from the cracks in the walls, the viscous liquid slowly trickling down.
Malcador glanced around. Sounds came from the kitchen connected to the dining room, and aromas wafted out, carrying the steam of food.
He thought for a moment, walked to the dining table, and sat down, disgustedly pushing aside a greasy, flattened wine bottle.
The old man waited patiently. Facing him at the head of the table was the Mona Lisa, the woman's face already gone, leaving only a gaping black hole. Behind Malcador, the Sunflowers had completely transformed into a painting of pure black.
The person in the kitchen finished cooking. Footsteps sounded, and a cheerful little tune was hummed as they walked—
"—Ahhhhh! Holy shit!!!"
Malcador calmly watched as Hades stumbled out, nearly knocking over the basin of food he was carrying. But Hades ultimately managed to stand there steadily, staring at Malcador in utter shock.
"Malcador?! Holy shit, what are you doing here?" Hades exclaimed, hurriedly setting his plate and bowl on the dining table before rushing back into the kitchen to get a portion of food for Malcador.
Malcador stared at the dishes Hades had laid out, let out a long, deep sigh, and said wearily, "Just came to see you."
"Me?" Hades' voice boomed from the kitchen, full of energy. "I'm great, how many bowls do you want?!"
"I'm not hungry."
"Just one bowl then!"
Hades came running back out, a rice scoop still held in his mouth. He placed the bowl in front of Malcador, sat down opposite him, and began eating without any pretense of waiting for him.
Malcador watched him in silence.
"What have you been doing lately?" the old man asked abruptly.
Hades looked up. "Eating."
"And?"
Hades hesitated for a moment, his gaze turning vacant. "Sleeping?"
Malcador took another deep breath. He looked at Hades with a calm that betrayed a hint of resentment. "Nothing else?"
"Nothing," Hades said. "Oh, Old Ma, how come you're the only one who comes around lately? It seems—" Hades trailed off, pausing. "It seems you're the only one who's visited recently."
Malcador shook his head. He hadn't even picked up his chopsticks. The old man desperately craved a drink—but he wouldn't touch that filthy wine bottle.
"...Others have come," Malcador said slowly. "But I'm the one who's come closest."
"Others have come?" Hades looked up, his chopsticks frozen mid-air. "No wonder I sometimes feel something's off here."
Malcador rolled his eyes. "You wouldn't want to feel a visitor's presence directly, especially not the one who came before me."
Hades thought for a moment. "Can't remember," he muttered vaguely.
Malcador sighed.
"You should get back to work, Hades—you've been eating too much. Don't you feel like you've put on weight?"
"A little," Hades said solemnly. "But my food bowl kept overflowing. Wasting food is shameful, so I decided to devour it all."
"At first, I was so stuffed I thought I'd throw up. But later, I could devour ten bowls at a time!"
The Lord of the Underworld quickly cleared the table, then set down his chopsticks. "Malcador, you should have seen it. The food was gushing out of that bowl like a waterfall. I almost drowned in it."
"But you still finished it," Malcador pointed out coldly, "and you've grown even fatter."
Hades looked profoundly wounded. "You guys should have helped me eat. Don't just leave it all to me—what about Mortarion? Give him some too."
Malcador chuckled. He lowered his gaze to the bowl in front of him, where an unidentified glowing substance shimmered—this portion of warp energy seemed to originate from Slaanesh.
Malcador discreetly shifted his gaze away.
"I cannot partake," Malcador said. "And you should stop eating, Hades. It's time to get up and get to work."
"Get up?" Hades blinked. "I'm awake, Malcador. Are you so hungry you've gone senile?"
Malcador stared at Hades, his expression grave and silent. The old man's gaze sent a chill down Hades's spine.
"What's wrong?" Hades asked. He could tell Malcador wasn't right—the man before him seemed far weaker and more frail than the one he had known.
Malcador stood up. "This is my home," the old man said, each word deliberate. "My residence on Terra—Hades, why are you here?"
"I never invited you to my home."
Malcador's voice began to stutter, his movements glitching like a frozen video, his limbs fracturing in space.
Hades opened his mouth. "Yeah, this is your house," he said naturally, though his expression was anything but. "...So... why am I in your house?"
Panic surged through Hades. "Wait, this is wrong! Wasn't I just in the Palace?!"
Hades shot to his feet, his chair clattering to the floor behind him. He scanned the room, and as he focused on his surroundings, the space began to dissolve like melting chocolate.
"What the fuck?!"
He turned to Malcador, only to find him melting away just like the room. Malcador's distorted mouth writhed, but Hades couldn't make out a word.
"Malcador?!" Hades lunged across the dining table, trying to scoop up the liquefying man, but his touch only accelerated the process. Finally, Hades fell to his knees, watching in despair as Malcador's melted form seeped into the floorboards.
Suddenly, as if struck by a realization, Hades spun around. He saw the rice cooker in the kitchen—a jarringly out-of-place appliance in the rest of the room—spouting something out again. But this time, Hades saw clearly.
It was—Malcador?!
!!!!Malcador erupted from the rice cooker—ugh-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!
Hades' mind went completely blank for a moment.
A fragmented voice pulled him back to his senses. As if struck by a heavy blow, Hades slowly lowered his head to see something regrowing on the plate. Within the pristine white ceramic, that incongruous mouth opened, and Malcador spoke wearily,
"Hades, wake up... Hades..."
Under the immense shock, Hades' figure swayed. He fell backward—and promptly fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes again, the tide had completely receded.
All was silent; the stars had all gone out.
Endless darkness enveloped him. Hades opened his eyes weakly, an unknown liquid trickling from the corner of his mouth.
Now there was nothing here. No psychic projections, no Malcador, no—no one at all. Only he remained: the Lord of the Underworld.
Hades stared into the infinite dark. It had been just like this back on Barbarus, when he was still young, sitting alone by the riverbank every day, contemplating life.
Now, he sank alone into the river of death he had forged with his own hands, imprisoned at its bottom, despairingly contemplating life.
The heavy waters of the river of death pressed down on him, suffocating him.
Clearly, his mind was not functioning well.
Hades felt his thoughts sluggish. He wanted to figure out what had happened, but something always blocked him, preventing him from thinking, preventing him from making any decisions beyond instinct.
Just as they had hoped before.
So, Hades activated his Mind-Power Divine Skill, and began to think with all his might.
First, the simplest: 1+1=2, 1+2=3... Hades climbed the great mountain of logic, step by step. He needed to rebuild the channels of logic and reason—this was the most fundamental reliance that allowed him to survive.
It was also why, in this world full of madmen, he was a sane person.
This took him a considerable amount of time. Here, Hades had no concept of time, yet it seemed he did. From starting with 1+1, he worked his way up to deriving all the concepts and derivative laws he had acquired.
And then... what came next?
Hades's gaze was vacant as he painfully recalled. He thought of Malcador, then the Emperor, and then the Emperor's disappointments—his sons. Mortarion, Angron... the Legions, the mortals... Macragge...
Bit by bit, he meticulously re-examined his connection to this world, with a level of care ten thousand times greater than when he was cable-managing his own chassis. Though this process was riddled with fragments of memories that did not belong to him, Hades knew they were likely... gifts thrown to him by those people.
The thought made him nauseous. Hades couldn't tell how much he had already consumed. In his subconscious, the act of "devouring" had been concretized and mimicked as "eating." He thought of Malcador, who had just scattered all over the floor—Hades sincerely hoped they wouldn't completely sacrifice themselves to him.
But the fragments were incomplete. Only a small portion of the information had been captured by him; the rest, along with the psychic energy, had vanished into the bottomless pit known as the Black Domain.
Hades couldn't see it all. He could see a crimson figure on a snowy plain, a giant insect cocoon in a garden, and in the Imperial Palace...
Hades decisively put an end to this line of thought.
The memories were merely fragments, and he had no idea what had truly happened. So, Hades sealed away these memories that did not belong to him and continued to organize his own information.
In the process, the urge to fight and leap down to slash those False Gods to death grew stronger and stronger. Hades saw the people's steadfastness and faith, the very things he had always fought for.
His demands were not high; he only hoped that humans could live like humans.
As Hades patiently sorted through the information, the pressure on his chest grew lighter and lighter. He realized he could move, so he struggled to swim upward.
Pitch black, pitch black—it was an endless, boundless black. Hades swam for a very long time, so long that he began to doubt his own life. Was there really an exit here? Or had he been swimming in the wrong direction?
But fortunately, Hades could keep swimming. As he ascended, he prayed that Malcador was fine, that Mortarion would not ascend to daemonhood, and that the Emperor wasn't stuck on the Golden Throne... This was another extremely long process.
As time dragged on, Hades felt he was edging closer to reality. Or perhaps something was still blocking him from regaining control. He grew exhausted; his breath-holding limit had been reached. Occasionally, he would black out from oxygen deprivation, only to awaken in the frigid river of death and continue swimming upward.
For an ordinary person, this would be an agonizing ordeal. They would flounder, unsure if they were heading in the right direction or if an exit even existed. The constant torment of drowning would break them, driving them to doubt themselves and everything else until they spiraled into self-destruction.
But for Hades, his only hope was that the distance he swam upward would exceed the distance he sank while unconscious.
Still, he thought, if the exit is actually at the bottom, then sinking a bit more wouldn't be so bad. My real nightmare would be sinking exactly as much as I swim up. Then I'd be truly screwed.
So he kept swimming. He'd black out from lack of oxygen and sink, wake up and swim back up, black out and sink again...
Finally, a sliver of light, so dim it was almost invisible, pierced the water.
Hades's eyes lit up. He swam harder toward the surface—thankfully, he hadn't given up. Though he'd secretly slacked off 6,981 times along the way, he kept pushing upward with relentless determination.
Thank the Emperor I'm a Death Guard, Hades thought. Any other Legion would have been done for by now. Only Mortarion's brand of bullshit training and brain-dead genes could produce soldiers so stubbornly unyielding, who'd keep banging their heads against a wall without ever turning back.
When I get back, I'll treat Mortarion to a drumstick!
But Mortarion doesn't like eating, so I'll just eat it for him!
The light grew brighter, shafts of it piercing the water. Hades looked up. The points of light were expanding, stretching into lines, then widening...
Hades stopped.
He stared in disbelief at the scene before him. A gentle, creamy-white light bathed his face, the waves rippling with the glow.
The lights... they were all people.
Thousands, millions, billions of sleeping figures floated serenely in the current, their faces peaceful and undisturbed.
They seemed carved from some luminous jade, their bodies radiating a soft fluorescence as they slowly sank to the riverbed, soothed by the river of death.
In their glow, Hades raised his hand. It was a void of absolute black, like the deepest night.
Well, he thought, I guess I don't do 'sparkly.'
Hades realized what those people were. He carefully pushed past them, continuing to swim upward. Only now did he realize that the previous scene had been but a drop in the ocean.
As he ascended, the light grew stronger, forcing Hades to squint just to keep moving. He felt as if he were swimming through the heart of a flowing star. He gently pushed aside the people—or whatever else existed there—and swam higher.
It remained a long, arduous journey. He passed out from lack of air another 359 times along the way, but fortunately, the people beneath him held him up, slowing his descent.
Finally, Hades saw the shimmering surface of the water, where iridescent auroras flowed, reflecting his own face.
He spotted Malcador's figure floating just beneath the surface. He wasn't glowing, just his original self.
Without hesitation, Hades swam over, scooped Malcador into his arms, and burst through the surface.
Hades opened his eyes, tears streaming down his face. Before him, he saw Malcador slowly cracking apart.
"Fuck you..."
These were the first words Malcador spoke to Hades.
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Tn: I updated the story once every 2 days, but if you want to see more chapter of this story ahead of time, please go to my Patreon.
Latest Chapter: Chapter 525: The Erasure[1]
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[1] https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/my-life-as-death-164167815
[2] https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/my-life-as-death-164167815