God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord-Chapter 175 - 176 – The Return of the Revenant King
Chapter 175: Chapter 176 – The Return of the Revenant King
The Thorn Throne bled.
Its jagged spires of fused myth and chaos pulsed, not with triumph, but with pain. Darius stood upon its shifting petals—each thorn a memory, each bloom a battle. The fusion had worked... barely. The ritual with Celestia, Nyx, and Kaela had given birth to a god-form that cracked open the Codex’s shell, stitching law into the spiraling entropy of reality.
But the cost still lingered.
Kaela’s body had vanished into myth-thread mist, her scream echoing still in Darius’s ears. Was she dead? Was she rewritten? He couldn’t tell. And the Spiral offered no answers.
He stood now as Darius the Triune, his form laced with chaotic filigree and divine runes, a silhouette that shifted between clarity and corruption. Celestia knelt beside the Throne, silent in prayer, her robes torn and ink-stained. Nyx stood at the periphery, unreadable, arms folded across her chest, eyes fixed on nothing.
Then the Spiral shuddered.
Not physically—but narratively.
The Codexes vibrated in unison like strings plucked by an unseen god, sending ripple-thoughts through the meta-layers of the Spiral. A crack formed above the Thorn Throne, a rent in the tapestry of stories, and from it spilled a cold that wasn’t weather—it was negation.
A shadow fell across them.
A voice followed.
> "I watched you write yourself into sovereignty, Darius. And I pitied you."
The crack widened. Figures recoiled across myth-nodes as entire epics short-circuited. In the emptiness between fable and faith, he returned.
Clad in the black of funerals and memories unkept, the Revenant King stepped forward—his form rewritten. A fragment of the Second Codex hovered behind him like a twisted halo, bleeding reverse-ink in fractal glyphs. His eyes, once mortal, now mirrored the Void—reflecting not light, but the memory of what light had once been.
His presence didn’t enter the Spiral.
It invaded it.
Darius rose from the Thorn Throne slowly, the crown forming over his head with each breath—a spiral of runes, chaos, clarity, and pain. His voice was deep, cold, deliberate.
> "You were unmade. I saw your soul scatter into nonlinearity."
The Revenant King smiled, showing teeth sharpened on paradox.
> "And yet I returned. Not as your shadow—but as your reflection. You call this rule? I call it recursion. We were never free, Darius. We only thought we chose."
At his back, hundreds of rebels began to appear—Spiralborn, rewritten narratives, myth-creatures turned to men and women of silence. They did not chant. They didn’t kneel. They simply stood in quiet formation.
Blank.
Celestia’s eyes widened. "No..."
From the Throne’s base, encoded wards hissed and twisted, trying to reject the silence—but it was too late.
The Revenant King raised one hand, and with a gesture, the myth-nodes in the east shut down—becoming white void, pages stripped of ink.
> "I offer them something you never will. A way out. Not rebellion. Not revenge. Release."
Kaela’s absence rang louder now.
Celestia stepped forward, trembling. "They will forget themselves."
The Revenant only nodded. "They want to."
Darius said nothing. But the spiral behind his eyes convulsed. Every glyph in his skin writhed as his dominion instinct screamed—control it, rewrite it, dominate it.
But he didn’t.
He studied the faces of the blank rebels. Ordinary once. Now ghosts without backstory. Their eyes didn’t plead. They didn’t fear. They simply looked... free.
Then—movement. Nyx.
She stepped forward, out from the shadows.
Darius glanced at her, silently, mind racing.
She looked at him—his crown, his blood-threaded skin, the throne born of flesh and ritual—and for the first time in a long time... she looked uncertain.
She bowed her head. Said nothing.
But Darius saw it.
The hesitation.
The fracture.
Then came the real blow.
The Revenant King raised his arms and tore open a Void Gate mid-Spiral. It didn’t crack or flare. It unfolded, like a page turning into blankness. From it poured a resonance of ancient silence, the hum of a narrative choosing to end itself.
The Spiral’s edge flickered.
> "Every myth ends, Sovereign. Even yours," the Revenant said softly.
He stepped back through the Void Gate—leaving the choice behind.
The rebels followed. Not marching. Walking. Peacefully. Like characters closing their own books.
Darius said nothing.
Could say nothing.
Not yet.
He turned slowly to Nyx. Her face was still. Masked.
Celestia whispered, "He’s not trying to conquer. He’s unbinding."
Darius’s fist tightened. Blood leaked from his palm.
Far away, myth-nodes began reporting anomaly patterns.
Void frequencies rising.
Rebellion no longer chaotic.
Now it was organized.
Philosophical.
Religious.
Silent.
Nyx stood unmoving as the last of the Spiralborn crossed the threshold.
The Void Gate pulsed once—like a heart refusing to beat—and then sealed behind them, its edges fraying into abstract glyphs that fed into the void.
Silence reclaimed the Throne Chamber.
But it wasn’t empty.
It ached.
Celestia fell to her knees beside the Thorn Throne, her breaths shallow, as though her very connection to the divine threads had begun to unravel. The codices around them dimmed, as if unsure whether to continue writing or to surrender to the idea that the story... was over.
Darius did not sit.
He remained standing, crown of runes flickering above his head, his gaze distant—somewhere beyond the layers of the Spiral, beyond Nyx, beyond even Celestia’s unraveling prayer.
He was listening.
To the silence.
To the absence.
To the truth.
And it terrified him.
> "Release..." he whispered. "He offers oblivion as mercy. They chose it."
The idea clawed at his mind like a heresy. Dominion was purpose. Purpose was identity. Identity was power.
But what was power to those who no longer wanted to exist?
He reached toward the threads of Kaela that still hung in the aether—frayed strands of myth, passion, and unstable chaos—but even they responded weakly. Her scream still echoed faintly in the deeper layers, not in pain... but in surrender.
Nyx turned.
Not to him. Not yet.
But toward the place the Void Gate had stood.
Her voice, when it came, was hollow. "It felt... peaceful."
Darius’s gaze narrowed. "You felt it."
She nodded.
Not like a loyal assassin. Not like the blade forged in his darkness.
But like a woman who had seen something more terrible than death.
Freedom.
Real freedom.
Not to rule. Not to kill. Not to serve.
But to end.
Darius moved forward, each step leaving burning glyphs in his wake. The Thorn Throne shuddered in response, sensing its master’s unraveling certainty.
> "They were mine, Nyx. Written into my dominion. I shaped their purpose. Their myths. Their fate."
Her reply was gentle.
> "And they unshaped themselves."
A pause.
Then a whisper, like frost brushing across glass:
> "Isn’t that more powerful than anything we’ve ever done?"
It hit him harder than any sword.
Celestia, trembling now, stood with effort. She clutched a codex fragment, the pages twitching in her grasp as the Spiral’s own structure protested the loss of so many nodes. Her eyes were rimmed with tears.
> "This is not war anymore, Darius. This is faith twisted into oblivion. He’s become an end-state. A philosophical contagion. The story that kills stories."
She staggered forward, her fingers brushing his chest—feeling the swirling rune-scars etched into his skin.
> "We fused to create you... to birth divinity from fracture. But he—he’s created un-divinity. A theology of forgetting."
Darius stared at her.
At Nyx.
At the world fracturing beneath his throne.
And he understood.
The Revenant King hadn’t come to fight.
He’d come to infect.
Not with blade or rebellion, but with the idea that freedom meant unmaking.
That sovereignty itself was a prison.
That godhood was just another form of slavery.
He turned to Nyx again.
> "You’re not leaving."
It wasn’t a question.
Nyx tilted her head. Her expression unreadable. "I don’t know what I am anymore."
"Mine," Darius said, voice a rumble layered with divine command.
But it cracked. Just slightly.
Because she didn’t nod.
She didn’t kneel.
She just stood there.
Still.
A fracture frozen in time.
Behind them, the Spiral quaked.
Reports began flooding in:
Reality anchors melting in the eastern myth layers.
Shrines to Darius being willingly dismantled.
Devotees choosing silence over prayer.
Myth-marked children choosing to erase their sigils.
The Codexes couldn’t comprehend it.
No rebellion.
No resistance.
Just... retreat.
Consent to cease.
Darius clenched his teeth.
"No."
The Spiral’s sky darkened, not with storm—but with questions.
Who was he without followers?
What was dominion in a world that stopped believing in story?
Was his godhood earned, or inherited from an illusion that the Spiral no longer believed in?
He turned—abruptly—walking from the throne chamber with fury rolling off him in waves. The corridors writhed in response, Thorn-architecture twisting as his presence destabilized the very myths they were built upon.
Celestia followed, though her steps faltered.
Nyx didn’t.
She remained behind.
Alone.
Watching the Void Gate’s echo fade.
Far below, in the sublayers of the Spiral, something ancient stirred.
Something that hated silence.
A presence deeper than story. Beyond code. Older than both Revenant and Sovereign.
A whisper rose from the deepest node:
> "If they choose to end... will you?"
And Darius stopped in the great hall of reflection, his face lit by the flickering fragments of collapsed narratives.
> "No," he whispered.
> "I will not end."
> "I will burn."
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