The screams rose from the black lake like steam from boiling old blood. They were thin at first, like the cries of forgotten ghosts, then they beco thicker, heavier, deeper, until the entire crypt echoed with the howling tornt of a thousand damned souls.
Hades did not flinch. His face stern. He stepped forward. His robes trailing like shadows across the stone.
The air was bitter and tallic now as though the walls knows and rembered what had been sealed here.
The surface of the lake began to roil even wildly, ink-black waves churning violently as if trying to escape the pull of Hades’s will.
His outstretched hand glowed with pale cursed fla that neither holy nor infernal but sothing older. A power buried even to the gods.
The ink-link water cracked.
Sothing beneath it moved, not like souls drifting in sorrow but like beasts waking from centuries of chains.
One by one, they erged.
Not as n or mortals anymore. These were the forsaken remnants of many worlds. The souls that had beco twisted echoes of ancient beings who were once revered but now erased from history and caged by Hades’s own decree.
There were Elven warlords, their spectral forms still clad in bloodstained armor of lightwood and silver, eyes glowing with the madness of betrayal.
Gnarled and wrathful Dwarven kings who had buried entire mountains in molten vengeance and sealed their own clans in stone for defiance.
Orc generals whose war cries had once drowned rivers, now nothing more than bone and spirit and black fire, clawing their way to the surface.
Ogres, monstrous and bloated with sin, whose hunger had devoured a whole in their empires in their worlds.
The sly and serpentine Goblins, who had bartered souls of their kinds like coin for power until even underworld spat them out.
And there are still more of them. Creatures lost to ti, spirits of forgotten races whose had comitted variuous atrocities thqt now had beco only scars etched into the fabric of the world, even before the Selectipn Stage begin in their world.
Hades watched as they broke free, one after another, rising like statues from the lake, their forms dripping ink and shadow.
So crawled. Others walked upright with the arrogance of old power.
All of them bore the marks of imprisonnt like chained limbs, branded chests, and hollow eyes.
He had locked them here and had sworn thay they would never rise again.
The words of his oath echoed faintly, not from the crypt, but from Hades’s own mory. A vow carved in divine law, sealed by his own blood.
But that was before Clyde.
Before the anomaly—this thing that did not belong to any realms appeared.
Now the line had been crossed and their survival demanded more power.
Hades lowered his hand slowly, and the lake quieted. The last of the Forsaken had erged and now he jad a legion of nightmares, standing in eerie formation before him.
They did not speak. But they rembered their hatred and power.
And in the silence, Hades finally spoke. His voice echoing with absolute command.
"You are unworthy creatures. You are unwanted by judgnt. But you are mine."
He extended both arms now, and black fla surged through the ranks. The souls shuddered as they were bound with purpose.
"We will go to a war. You all will feed on the corruption that plagued the realms and you all will devour mu enemies."
His eyes blazed and the Forsaken scread again not in pain, but in rebirth.
Hades turned without a word.
The black fla around his arms dimd, retreating into his skin like smoke swallowed by a storm.
Behind him, the Forsaken stood still, silent as tombs, awaiting the command of the one who had awakened them.
With a re thought Hades summoned a fraction of the legion to follow. A hundred of them stirred.
The others remained where they were for now, lting back into the shadows of the crypt but not back into the black lake.
Their ti would co later. But for now, only the chosen hundred followed.
They moved without sound or breath, their feet never quite touching the earth. So were still afla with the black fire of Hades’s will, others were wrapped in their own twisted auras — smoke, poison, frost, or shadow — echoes of the forgotten powers they once wielded in life.
Hades ascended through the winding halls of his domain and the Forsaken glided behind him like a tide of death that had rembered how to walk.
At last, he erged back to the surgace of his domain.
The mont Hades stepped into his palace in the domain surface, the temperature dropped. The air grew tight.
And then they ca.
The Forsaken spilled into the corridor behind him, row upon row of abominations, half-souls, cursed warlords, and unclean spirits marching in unnatural silence.
The Underworld guards — Hades’s chosen warriors from the Selection Stage — stood ready with spears of black bronze and armor. But none of them raised their weapons.
They could only stare. Eyes widened behind helts. So stepped back instinctively. One dropped his spear with a clatter, the sound echoing like a funeral bell.
These soldiers had seen countless horrors walk these halls. But never this. They knly ever heard of the Forsaken.
Their god, Hades, walking calmly at their head like a shepherd of the damned.
The black flas that clung to him had not faded, they pulsed with unnatural rhythm. His expression was stern, his gaze straight ahead.
He did not address the soldiers about what is going on. He did not need to.
The soldiers knew that the war had changed. The stakes had risen. Now Hades even had broken his own oath.
The Underworld shuddered. But now Hades is ready.
He could never forget the humiloation he felt that ti when facing Clyde. At that ti he and Gabriel was in draw with Clyde but deep down he knows that he could be losing at so point. So he won’t let the sa thing happened again.
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