Divine Ascension: Reborn as a God of Power-Chapter 55: The Schism of Olympus (Part 15) - Ares vs Hades (Part 2)

Chapter 55: The Schism of Olympus (Part 15) - Ares vs Hades (Part 2)

Hours had passed.

Time meant nothing in Tartarus, but the damage caused by their battle told another story. Walls that once stood for millennia lay crumbled. Columns as old as some gods were snapped like bones while craters littered the obsidian ground, pools of golden ichor shimmered in the dark, and the stench of divine blood hung thick in the air.

Still, they kept fighting.

Their forms, once regal and untouchable, now looked monstrous.

Ares’s left arm dragged limply, torn at the shoulder joint, only partially held together by twitching sinew and stubborn will. His chest bore countless gashes, some deep enough to show the glint of fractured ribs beneath. His right eye was swollen shut, and a jagged tear across his scalp had soaked his hair with golden blood, now dried into brittle clumps.

His breath came in savage bursts, more like a beast than a god. A tooth hung loosely from his mouth before he spat it out with a snarl. His armor had long since shattered, the remnants hanging in ribbons from his hips and shoulders.

Across from him, Hades wasn’t faring any better.

The King of the Underworld stood hunched, his left leg dragging slightly as the knee joint failed to heal fully. His skin was torn in too many places to count—one shoulder split wide open, revealing pulsing divine muscle beneath. His cloak had burned away, and his spear was gone, discarded somewhere in the rubble after being broken in half and driven into his own abdomen.

His jaw, once shattered, had reset crookedly. His left eye remained unblinking, lid partially torn away. One hand bled continuously from where Ares had crushed the fingers with a war hammer hours ago.

And yet his grip remained steady.

Their bodies should have mended. Gods healed faster than thought—flesh regrew, bones reformed, ichor restored.

But this wasn’t a battle that allowed healing.

Each wound reopened with every blow. Each fracture deepened with each impact. Regeneration became meaningless under the weight of power.

Ares lifted a broken sword hilt, now more handle than blade, and staggered forward, his leg dragging behind. He coughed golden ichor, spit it aside, and bared his teeth.

"Still not... done..." he rasped.

Hades chuckled, and it was a ghastly, hollow sound, soaked in exhaustion and fury.

"You look like you’ve been through Hell, ready to give up?" He replied, blood dripping from his lips.

"Shut up."

Ares struck again.

Their blows were slower now, more deliberate, but no less lethal. Each swing came with the weight of mountains, each strike carved through the air with enough force to pulverize steel. There was no finesse anymore—only the raw instinct of survival and destruction. Every movement screamed agony. Every breath gurgled through torn lungs and bloodied mouths.

Ares’s sword carved a brutal arc meant to cleave through Hades’s neck, but the Lord of the Underworld dipped beneath it and drove his elbow into Ares’s shattered ribs. The crack was audible, followed by a sharp grunt and a spray of golden ichor from Ares’s lips. His body trembled for an instant—but then he surged forward and slammed his forehead into Hades’s face.

The crunch of bone echoed through the broken chamber. Hades staggered as his nose broke—again. Blood poured down his face like molten gold, mixing with the dirt and ash. But the force of the blow sent them both reeling, tumbling to the blood-slick floor.

They crashed down hard—shoulders and elbows thudding against jagged stone, weapons clattering away. And then came the clawing. The biting. The rage. There was no technique, no strategy, just two titanic beasts locked in a frenzy of violence.

Ares lunged first, his teeth bared like a rabid dog, and bit into Hades’s arm with all his divine strength. Skin tore. Tendon snapped. The taste of divine ichor filled his mouth, hot and metallic. Hades roared and slammed his knee into Ares’s side, then jammed his thumb into the war god’s collarbone, pressing until the bone gave way with a disgusting pop. Ares screamed and retaliated with a savage elbow to Hades’s jaw.

They rolled across the shattered floor, dragging blood and entrails with them. Rocks split beneath them, scorched black by the heat radiating from their overworked bodies. At last, they broke apart, sprawling on their backs, chests rising and falling like bellows from the forge of Hephaestus himself.

Smoke curled from their skin—thick, white, and bitter. Not from spells or from curses. But from the divine flesh itself, scorched and seared by the effort of keeping up with the impossible toll. The very essence of their immortality strained against the limits of what even gods could endure.

Hades’s jaw hung loose on one side, crooked from repeated impacts, and golden ichor spilled from the corner of his mouth like oil from a cracked urn. His eyes burned through the grime, relentless and focused, a furnace of cold fury.

Ares’s stomach was a ruined mess. Torn open, barely held together by the remains of his armor and sheer will. His arms shook from exhaustion, yet his grip clenched tighter around the hilt of a shattered blade. One eye was swollen shut. His breathing was ragged. But his mouth twisted into a bloodstained grin.

They shouldn’t have been able to fight like this.

No mortal could’ve survived the first minute.

No demigod would have even seen the end of the second blow.

Only gods could wage war for eternity.

And these two—these weren’t just gods.

These two were forged for it.

They were destruction made flesh.

"Yield," Hades rasped, barely standing, blood running down his leg like molten gold.

Ares smiled through a shattered jaw.

"Make me."

Ares’s defiance hung in the scorched air, heavy as a war cry, stupid as pride. Hades stared at him for a heartbeat longer—and then something inside him snapped.

His shadows surged again.

Not as a weapon or as a trick. But as him.

The Lord of the Underworld stopped pretending to fight as a man. No more posturing. No more restraint. His frame straightened, his broken flesh melted into lightless flame, and the golden ichor pouring from his wounds burned black the moment it touched the floor. The veil between god and realm dissolved. He was the Underworld now.

The shadows bled from the walls. The ground cracked into a spiral of obsidian teeth. The air grew colder than death, so frigid even divine flesh quivered.

Ares took a step back. Then another.

"You don’t want to do this," he rasped, eyes wide now.

Hades didn’t answer.

A black wave surged forward like a tidal wall—raw, furious, unrelenting. Ares raised his arms, swords in hand, and screamed against it. The first impact shattered every bone in his left arm. The second peeled away what remained of his armor. The third drove him into the ground so hard the floor cracked in a jagged, smoking crater.

He crawled up.

Blood gushed from his abdomen, golden and thick. His stomach had torn open along the ribs—intestines spilling, pulsing sluggishly. He tried to push them back in with one hand while holding a broken sword in the other.

"You think... this scares me?" he growled, voice slurred with pain.

Hades descended like a storm.

He didn’t walk—he appeared, slamming a foot into Ares’s spine and driving him deeper into the floor. Then came the fists—one to the temple, another to the jaw. Teeth exploded from Ares’s mouth in a spray of gold.

Ares swung blindly, blade whistling past Hades’s shoulder.

Hades caught his wrist.

And twisted until a *crack* was heard and pain started to be felt by the God of War. Ares arm had snapped.

The bone broke cleanly through the skin with a sickening pop. Ares howled, but didn’t fall. He bit Hades’s shoulder, to tore his flesh away with his teeth like a rabid dog.

Hades punched him so hard his skull bounced off the stone.

Still, Ares crawled forward. Stomach torn, face mangled, bones broken and ichor pouring from every inch of his body.

He reached for a jagged spearhead half-buried in rubble. And just when his fingers closed around it, Hades crushed his hand beneath his heel.

"You never knew when to stop," Hades hissed, his voice no longer entirely his own. "That’s what makes you dangerous, but also that’s your weakness. Sometimes, you gotta know when to fight and when to run, and you, my dear nephew, you don’t have a clue of how to do it."

Ares just coughed. Golden blood gushed from his mouth. He gave a twisted grin through his shattered face.

"I still... don’t...surrender"

His voice trailed into a wet gurgle as Hades drove his knee into his throat.

There was no honor left. No formal combat. This was annihilation. It wasn’t a fight anymore, it was a masaccre. Hades’s fists were meteors and his feet were like hammers. Every blow dented the ground beneath Ares. His ribs were gone. His left eye had burst. His stomach was completely exposed now, his insides dragging like torn cloth across the floor as he tried, still tried, to rise.

Ares’s leg bent the wrong way and snapped clean off at the knee.

He collapsed again—but lifted his head.

"I’ll kill you..."

Hades knelt, his hand wrapping around Ares’s throat.

"ooou’ll tly." Managed to say the damaged god.

Hades didn’t listen to him, he knew Ares would not withstand another attack. So he began to squeeze.

The walls shook with divine pressure. The Titans far behind the gates watched in silence, too stunned even to laugh. Tartarus itself seemed to reel backward, shadows recoiling from the violence of their master.

Ares thrashed, even as his trachea collapsed under Hades’s grip. His hand, barely a hand anymore, scraped against the ground searching for anything.

But there was nothing left.

Only Hades’s wrath.

Yet even as his vision blurred and his consciousness faltered, with his spine being cracked beneath that impossible grip—

Ares kept fighting...until he couldn’t do it anymore.

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