Chapter 21 - Clash

The area Hades teleported them to was one similar to a large asteroid belt, it had various rocks of different shapes and sizes floating around. While hades was still lamenting on the limited number of charges left for the artifact in his hands, his assailants re-composed themselves and began to attack.

The mage god among them created magic orbs that were floated around and occasionally shot out attacks, others brought out their weapons and filled them with power before charging towards Hades.

Sensing this, Hades realized he did not have the leeway to worry about the charges of his artifact, despite possessing more strength than them individually, taking on multiple mid & high-ranked gods was still a difficult task, especially as he was not going all out due to various reasons.

Gollmiran's scythe, filled with divinity of death came slicing down on him from above, blocking it with one of his swords, he casted multiple basic dark magic; dark bullet spells towards him, although the magic was basic, the one casting it was not. The power behind those spells was enough to make Gollmiran retreat temporarily.

The god with space powers snapped his fingers and hades saw his attacks appear right in front of his face, with no time to dodge, the bullets hit him directly. Taking advantage of this, one of the gods skilled in hand to hand combat entered Hades range and immediately punched him in the stomach, sending him flying down to one of the floating asteroids.

As he was falling, the others did not let up on their attacks, dishing out great spells to attack him.

"Fire magic; Flame Gospel."

As the god spoke, a tornado of flames enhanced by divinity appeared hit hades, forcing him down at a faster speed. Gollmiran also used magic too, a debuff that reduced the enemies strength, however he felt his magic fail as hades' resistance was too high.

Hades crashed down with great force, breaking through the asteroid and falling onto the next one, this one was larger and sturdier so it withstood the force of Hades' fall.

A boisterous laugh resounded as Hades stood up from the ground, almost unscathed, the injuries he had were all superficial and were healing as he laughed.

"Good!, you should be able to do this much or it won't be useful fighting you."

He then increased his size, growing to over two meters tall, summoned orbs of darkness similar to what the mage god did and spoke out again,

"Young god of death, you said you wanted to prove yourself, I'm right here."

Gollmiran bellowed in rage and flew towards hades, his body increasing in size as his strength grew to match Hades'. The both of them did not increase in size just because they could, they did this to increase their physical strength and the force of their attacks.

He brandished his scythe and swung it towards Hades, who was still slightly surprised at how weightless the giant scythe seemed. Hades figured that this was just the result of the Gollmiran's ridiculous strength.

Pivoting on his foot, he raised up his first sword and attempted to parry the attack and have the darkness orbs he created fire at his unguarded body. However, just as the scythe came into contact with the sword, it glowed slightly and phased through the first sword with ease.

Hades expected something like this to happen, the weapon of a god would definitely not be ordinary, it was bound to have a few strange abilities, although encountering one with a refraction ability like this was surprising, he had already prepared by having a second sword in hand.

*DANG!!!

Shocked by the recoil, Hades gritted his teeth and redirected the scythe as best he could. Crashing into the ground, the impact almost made him lose his footing but he held out in the end. Glancing over at the Gollmiran, he had a look at how much damage his darkness orbs did to him.

'Oh f*ck…' he thought to himself.

He could see several black marks, symbolizing the attacks that had failed to penetrate his skin. Regenerating the lost health instantly, Gollmiran grinned before reaching out for his head. Obviously, there was no way Hades was going to let him have his way so easily.

He instantly increased the distance between them, however this gave Gollmiran's companions who could not attack earlier due to fear of friendly fire, a chance to attack him.

The mage god activated an ice magic that bound the user in place with chains and then froze them, seeing that his body was slowly being frozen, Hades only frowned before activating his flame magic.

Black Fire burst out around him and started to melt the ice slowly which surprised the Hades since most ice would instantly evaporate due to the fact that the flames were one of his most powerful ones.

"Surprised? Do you want to know why?" the mage god asked with a grin. This was only his distraction since another god had already activated a clone ability and a third was charging up an extra strong magic shot that would hopefully injure Hades.

Even if he does regenerate the damage he received, it should be fine because they could attack again, after all, they were ten and he was one, they had the advantage in numbers and were using it well seeing as two others were charging up powerful long range attacks.

"How kind of you to explain." Hades frowned while tearing off the chains with brute strength.

"Well I won't tell you." He laughed before the god with clones charged towards him with weapons in the hands of each of his three clones.

"Fool, do you think I can be tricked by a mere clone?"

His calm voice rang out as he shot towards where the real body was. Understanding that things were starting to go south, a god with a bow fired multiple arrows. Hades' body flickered away and dodged the shots with ease, he then sped up and sliced towards the real body instead of the clones.

His attack, was unfortunately blocked by a scythe that dropped down from above. Clicking his tongue at Gollmiran's interference, he dodged back and created multiple shields of darkness to block the magic and divinity based attacks that were fired at him.

His shield broke due to the intensity of the attacks and one of them got through to him, however it was blocked by his armor. Hades didn't get time to rest as he sensed a fist coming towards him. He threw his sword at the archer who was getting ready to fire more arrows and used his now empty hand to meet he fist that aimed at his face.

A small shockwave was generated from the clash as they were both pushed back a few meters, at Hades' back, Gollmiran who was waiting for him slashed multiple times with is scythe. Hades released a burst of divinity to deflect his strikes and motioned towards the sword he threw.

The weapon floated up and was about to return to his hands, however the space god who had been strangely silent snapped his fingers and the sword was teleported elsewhere. He then activated one of space magic's most fearsome spells.

"Spatial magic: Void Hole."

The name wasn't anything grand however, its effect were disastrous. Hades was currently engaging Gollmiran and two others so he had little time to dodge, along with the nearby asteroids and space debris, he was instantly sucked into the wormhole that appeared and was spat out from another that appeared on an asteroid quite the distance away.

His armor was cracked and he was bleeding in various places, the spell was one that was simple but destructive. The space in that wormhole was not something the average god could survive, the space god had already moved with the others to his location so they gave him no time to rest as they launched multiple attacks towards him.

[Authority of Darkness]

Realizing normal magic was not enough to escape the current situation, he was forced to finally use his authority. The darkness that spread out of his body formed a dome around him that protected him, some darkness swept over his body, healing his lighter injuries.

The attacks hit the dome of darkness hard and were unable to penetrate through, they did render it useless as it was cracked greatly in various places.

The darkness broke into pieces, but not from the intensity of the attacks but because Hades willed it to do so.

Waving his hands, five swords of darkness appeared as he used the duplication ability of his sword. The duplication would have 5 blades appear before contact and attack the enemy 5 times with the base power while for each successful hit, a part of the enemy's strength would be converted into magic and used to heal his wounds.

The attacks hit three of them while the other two dodged it with ease. Gollmiran appeared in front of Hades and used his weapon's refraction to phase through the darkness shield that had been hovering around Hades.

His attack almost hit however, Hades turned around and blocked it with his sword, the clash generated large shockwaves that pushed back the others around them and even cracked the asteroid they were standing on.

[Authority of Death: Withering.]

Gollmiran used one of his powers as a god of death; Withering. It allowed him to cause whoever he attacked to slowly have their life force sucked out of them as they would begin to shrivel and die. Even weapons were no exception to this as Hades sword was beginning to crack.

'Tch...despite his attitude, he's still a genuine god of death, although I have an authority of death, it's not my main so it's not as strong as his. If that's the case, I'll just counter it with my own main then.'

[Corrosion.]

As soon as hades came to a decision, he wasted no time in activating his own powers as a god of darkness. It's effect was exactly as its name implied, it corroded any and everything, very quickly at that. This included Gollmiran's scythe and the hand holding it, Gollmiran had no choice but to jump back lightly, to which Hades laughed.

He then turned to the attacks coming towards him and conjured various barriers of darkness to block them all, he also loaded his sword with enough power to easily dwarf a star, he released waves of corrosion afterwards, one of the gods wasn't fast enough and was caught by the corrosion.

Hades was not one to let a good opportunity go, before the space god could teleport him, his head had already rolled. This shocked the others, Hades just killed a superior mid-ranked god so easily, his sword met no resistance as if it were a knife being used to cut butter, except in this case the butter was the neck of a god.

Before the life went out of the eyes of the god he just beheaded, Hades did something he normally would not.

[Authority of Death: Soul Invitation]

This was an ability used by gods of death to retrieve souls who were escaping judgement, trying to break out of the system of reincarnation, or those who tried to return to life through improper means. However, in battle it could also be used to retrieve the souls of incapacitated enemies.

Gollmiran was very familiar with this ability and he felt nothing but rage seeing it used on one of his followers, the pain of having one's soul ripped out from their body was enormous, even more so for a god who had great life force.

Even though he was beheaded, it would still have taken a while for him to truly die, however Hades' cut short that time instantly. As the screams of the god rang out in their ears, the group lost all restraints. All this while, both sides had been holding back from using their full powers, however Hades' action had provoked them.

Some of them even entered their true godly forms and attacked Hades fiercely. Magic and Divinity attacks on a stellar scale flew out at speeds incomparable to the ones they were at before. Hades quickly retrieved the soul and moved out of the way, even still he was hit with multiple attacks.

"All of you, Zone Combination, Now!."

Gollmiran's shout rang out as they all obeyed his commands immediately, originally they were supposed to use this from the start, however, they felt that Hades would not need them to go to such lengths. The death of one of them changed their minds.

A god's zone was a mobile version of their holy territory, this allowed them to lower the strength of any enemies entrapped in it while increasing their own. Combining Zones increased the weakening effect depending on how many gods did this.

With 5 gods doing so, the weakening effect of the zone was enough to make even a superior-high ranked god, have his strength reduced to the inferior stage, this was a reduction of two whole stages. They were sure Hades could be defeated with this.

'fuck!'

Entrapping Hades in their combined zones did indeed weaken him as he cursed inwardly while trying to dodge the attacks coming towards him. His movements suddenly halted and it didn't take him long to figure out the culprit, the space god had locked the space hades was in, preventing him from moving.

This normally would not hold him for long as Hades was of a higher tier than the space god, however the combined zones had reduced his strength and it held him in place long enough for multiple arrows and magic attacks to crash into his body.

After barely escaping from the locked space, he felt heat behind him only to turn around and see a giant meteor heading towards him at bare neck speed. Hades activated multiple magics as he tried to block it. However, they would not let him, two of the gods in their true god forms slashed and punched at him simultaneously, propelling his body towards the meteor.

**BOOM

He crashed into the meteor that seemed as big as the average moon and there was a large explosion. Various asteroids in the area were destroyed as Hades' body fell weakly. Even still, Gollmiran did not let up on his attacks, he fired magic missiles imbued with his divinity of death's withering.

Hades barely managed to counter those with his corrosion before finally landing on one of the many asteroids that survived the amplified meteor explosion. Right before he hit it, amplification magic was casted on it, increasing its power greatly. If such a thing hit a planet, that planet was done for, even a cluster of stars would not be safe either.

And this was just one of the mage god's attacks, this showed how much he had been holding back before. Realizing he would be in mortal danger if he did not take serious action, Hades finally stopped playing around.

His aura swelled instantly, shocking the others, even Gollmiran, as he did not expect Hades to still have that much power left.

This was when something strange happened, the combined zone was broken, all the gods who created this suffered a backlash as their zone was forcibly destroyed. Gollmiran was shocked as he coughed out blood like the others, the gods would have their strengths temporarily reduced because of this, however his main reason for shock was because there were every few cases where a gods zone could be forcibly destroyed.

One of them was a situation where the god encountered a higher leveled existence then themselves, looking at the three meter tall man wrapped in an armor made of pure darkness with a jet black great sword in his hands, on his head was the legendary artifact created by the three cyclops brothers; the 'Helm of Darkness: Kynee'.

At this point Gollmiran knew he had encountered that situation.

||Domain Declaration: Underworld.||

Hades voice rang out and instantly the surroundings were transformed, the gray sands turned black instantly and the illusory figures of six rivers could be seen around them. On the meadows beside the rivers, hazy figures could be seen wandering around listlessly. The area around them had effectively become a pseudo underworld.

Hades had used his authority as the king of the underworld to declare this neutral area as temporary underworld.