The palace was gone before they'd even walked through the front door.
Er...
Sirzechs stared at the wreckage. One second ago, the Palace of the Dead had been a sprawling monument of Greco-Roman grandeur, standing for millennia in silent authority over the land of the departed. Now it was a debris field. His mouth opened, then closed. No words came.
He'd known Bokue was angry. He'd known this trip would almost certainly end in violence. But demolishing the entire structure from the outside before they'd so much as knocked?
Was there even a point to negotiating anymore?
"Let's go in. He's not dead yet."
Bokue tossed the words over his shoulder like an afterthought and kept walking.
Inside the collapsed palace, massive stone walls lay split into sections, tangled together with shattered Roman pillars like the aftermath of an earthquake hitting a museum. The kind of destruction that would normally require heavy machinery and weeks of cleanup to clear.
Bokue cleared it by casually backhanding slabs of stone out of his path as he walked.
They reached what had once been a ceremonial hall. Bokue's earlier attack had sheared the palace down to ankle height, leaving the entire structure looking like a Japanese two-story house that had been built to only forty centimeters tall. Every wall now stood at waist level or below, and you could see into every adjacent room just by glancing sideways.
At the center of the hall, a massive altar remained largely intact. Every surviving surface was gilded in gold, the opulent craftsmanship clashing violently with the dead silence of the surrounding wasteland.
Behind the altar, three towering statues had once stood: the three great gods of Olympus. Zeus. Poseidon. Hades. All three had been reduced to pairs of stone shins still planted on their pedestals, their upper bodies scattered across the floor in chunks.
"Keh heh heh... I certainly didn't expect you to come here directly. You've caught me quite off guard..."
A figure emerged from the shadows at the far end of the hall, accompanied by a voice like dry bones scraping against each other. He wore an elaborate ceremonial crown and flowing priestly robes.
His eye sockets were hollow. No flesh. No eyes. Just darkness.
A skeleton in royal vestments.
The legendary God of the Dead: Hades.
"It's been some time. I am Sirzechs Lucifer, Satan of the Underworld."
Sirzechs stepped forward, defaulting to diplomacy.
"Lord Hades, I sincerely apologize for the abruptness of this visit. However, the circumstances that brought us here are severe, and I hope you'll understand."
"Keh heh heh... understand, you say..."
Hades chuckled, that skeletal rasp of a laugh rolling through the ruins. His skull rotated slowly beneath the crown, as if mentally tallying the property damage.
"Quite bold for youngsters, aren't you. Reducing my palace to rubble before even saying hello. Bullying an old man who can't fight back... Well, I suppose I could spare a few minutes to chat. But do tell me, what brings you here?"
"..."
Sirzechs pressed his lips together.
As the ruler of the entire Underworld, every word he spoke carried weight far beyond himself. If at all possible, he wanted to resolve this without escalation.
But even mud had its limits. They'd traveled to the deepest layer of the Underworld, stood in the ruins of a palace destroyed for a very specific reason, and Hades was sitting there asking what brings you here like a shopkeeper greeting walk-in customers?
There was shameless, and then there was this.
"Don't act offended."
Bokue spoke up.
"I demolished your palace first specifically because I knew Sirzechs-nii would want to talk things out before anything else. Figured I'd vent a little in advance."
"Otherwise you wouldn't have gotten a chance to speak at all. Your skull would've been separated from your spine and used as a football the second I laid eyes on you."
His tone carried no menace. No threat. He said it the way someone might state that water was wet or that Tuesdays came after Mondays.
"..."
Hades had no eyeballs in those sunken sockets, so reading his expression was impossible.
He said nothing. Simply stared at Bokue with those empty, bottomless hollows.
The silence stretched for several beats before Sirzechs cleared his throat.
"To the point, then. Yesterday, the Hero Faction of the Khaos Brigade, led by Cao Cao, appeared on Itogami Island in the Human World. They attacked my mother, my grandmother, and my brother-in-law, who were vacationing there. During the assault, they deployed the Dragon Eater, Samael, which was supposed to be sealed here in the Realm of the Dead."
"Oh, that business."
As if suddenly reminded, Hades slapped the crown atop his skull with one bony hand, his voice dripping with feigned revelation.
"You know, now that you mention it, a young man named Cao Cao did come by asking to borrow it a while back. I thought it was a strange request at the time, but he was so earnest about it that I went ahead and lent it to him after adding several layers of seals."
"And, well, I may have forgotten to ask what he planned to use it for. My apologies about that~"
Sirzechs: "..."
If the earlier act could charitably be called playing dumb, this was Hades dropping the pretense entirely and daring them to call him on it.
Earnest?Forgot to ask?
A toddler in the Underworld wouldn't buy that story.
"There's nothing left to discuss. Sirzechs-nii, you should head back."
Bokue exhaled quietly and waved a hand.
"Like we agreed. I'll handle the rest."
"...Understood."
Sirzechs hesitated for exactly one second before making his decision.
Crimson magic flared around him. A teleportation circle materialized beneath his feet, and in a blink, he was gone.
Hm?
Hades's skull tilted. The development clearly hadn't been part of his calculations.
"You sent the little Satan away. What exactly are you planning to—"
"Shut up."
Bokue's gaze dropped. His foot tapped the ground, and he rose into the black sky of the Realm of the Dead, drawing in a long breath of the bone-chilling air.
Magnetic Field Rotation: 990,000 Horsepower.
No technique. No strike. Bokue simply released the power he kept compressed and dormant every waking moment of his life.
The Realm of the Dead began to shake.
The ground, already scarred by his earlier sword-pressure, tore itself apart. Chasms yawned open across the frozen landscape, revealing bottomless voids beneath. What remained of the Palace of the Dead tilted and slid into the abyss like a cruise ship caught in a whirlpool.
Above, the pitch-black sky began to crack and splinter.
"This... why? This is my world! I am the God of Death who rules this realm! How can you—"
Watching his domain crumble around him, Hades finally lost his composure. The smug detachment evaporated in an instant, replaced by something raw and panicked.
He couldn't comprehend what was happening.
He was the master of this place. The Realm of the Dead was his domain, his territory, his extension. He and this world were one. As long as Hades existed, the Realm of the Dead existed. The reverse was equally true.
But Hades still existed. And the Realm of the Dead was dying.
"Wait... does that mean—"
Realization struck. Hades jerked his skull upward.
High above the collapsing sky, the young man in white hovered over the disintegrating world, looking down, both fists drawn tight against his sides.
"W-WAIT! I am Hades, God of the Dead!"
The skeleton god's voice tore through the chaos.
"If I die, the concept of Death itself will be lost from the Olympian pantheon! The consequences for the world would be incalculable! And that young Satan wants an alliance with Zeus! If you kill me here—"
"The Olympians can take it up with me personally."
Bokue's voice drifted down, flat and final.
"If they dare."
Annihilation Fist.
One punch. Everything in the Realm of the Dead dissolved like dust in the wind.
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