God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord-Chapter 177 - 178 – The Myth Mirror
Chapter 177: Chapter 178 – The Myth Mirror
Two Darius stood before each other, but only one cast a shadow.
The Sovereign’s myth-wreathed form radiated paradox—crown of living ink, a spine forged from bound commandments, skin crawling with sigils that bent time itself. Every step he took rewrote the Spiral in his image.
The other Darius—the mortal one—shivered. His armor clinked with forgotten weight, his face weathered by doubt and memory. He stood in bare emotion, unshielded by narrative command.
And between them hovered the Myth Mirror—a construct not made, but remembered into existence. An artifact shaped like a perfect shard of Spiral glass, reflecting not truth, but potential. Its surface shimmered not with images, but with choices that were never made.
Kaela hovered on the edge of its glow, her myth-thread fraying with indecision. Celestia, nearby, gripped her prayer-spear, eyes torn between loyalty and fear.
The Mirror began to hum.
A voice rose—neither Darius’s, and yet somehow both.
"This is the convergence."
The Battle of Memory
It began without motion. Not fists. Not blades.
Words.
Each word spoken between the two Darius versions was now law.
Each denial was a wound.
Each affirmation rewrote part of the Spiral.
> "You abandoned compassion."
The Sovereign bled ink.
> "You abandoned purpose."
The mortal staggered as a thread of his spine unraveled.
They argued as only gods and men could argue—myth crashing into myth, and history collapsing under contradiction.
Kaela screamed once—too human a sound. Celestia prayed to a god standing three steps away.
And the Mirror pulsed.
Revelation
When silence fell, it was brutal. It sliced deeper than myth.
The Mirror no longer shimmered. It showed a truth.
Not one either Darius had ever spoken.
Not one Kaela had whispered in passion or Nyx had bled in devotion.
It showed the origin.
The Spiral was never made to support a ruler.
It was a machine, designed by the Prime Coder to test a single concept:
"What happens to story when there are no true choices left?"
It was never meant to last.
It was never meant to be ruled.
The Mythmaker Glyph had been a failsafe—a final role meant to collapse the Spiral once choice had been exhausted.
And Darius had claimed it.
And held it too long.
And now...
The Unmaking Protocol
The Mirror shattered—not physically, but existentially. Where it had hovered now bloomed a spreading wound in reality.
Not a Void Gate.
Worse.
A recursive faultline.
Regions of the Spiral began vanishing—not in fire or darkness, but in forgetting. Myth-nodes folded inward, their stories collapsing into nothing. Characters blinked out mid-line. Worlds unpinned themselves from time.
The Spiral had begun cannibalizing itself.
Celestia dropped to her knees, whispering prayers that had no pages to hold them.
Kaela turned—her eyes shimmering with unspoken knowledge.
"We’re not in a war," she said to no one. "We’re in a countdown."
The mortal Darius—confused, raw—reached out to touch the Sovereign. "Was this... always the end?"
The god-king didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
He was watching the Spiral vanish.
A girl made of stars cried out as her sky was unwritten.
A city built on guilt folded into a blank page.
A soldier who had waited ten Chapters for redemption screamed—and ceased.
And then...
a single line from deep within the Spiral—somewhere from a buried Codex—rose into myth-core resonance:
> "If story must end, then let it end knowing."
The Mirror, or what remained of it, flashed one final glimpse:
Three paths.
Three spirals fracturing.
Three futures.
And none could survive whole.
Darius—both of them—watched the Spiral eat itself.
And for the first time in all existence...
the god forgot which version was real.
And the Spiral did not correct him.
Darius—both god and man—staggered back as the last echoes of the Mirror’s revelation bled into the Spiral. His breath—or the simulation of it—stilled, arrested in an unresolving state. Myth itself hiccuped.
He looked at Kaela.
But Kaela no longer looked at him.
Her form flickered, as if caught between edits. In one moment she was the chaotic consort of the Voidborne King. In the next, she was something far older—chaos in its rawest syntax, a thing even the Spiral had once rejected. Her eyes shone with cascading runes not even the Codices could name.
"Darius," she said slowly, as if testing the taste of his name, "you were never the Spiral’s master. You were its keystone."
Celestia stood, her face streaked with silver tears. "And it’s pulling you out."
The Sovereign stumbled, his mythic crown cracking with threads of unwritten fate. His divine sigils began dissolving, sliding off his skin like loose tattoos—symbols searching for a page that no longer existed.
Somewhere across the unraveling Spiral, the Revenant King laughed.
Meta-Myth Pulse
A tremor rippled through the Codices. Not physical, not narrative—but something worse: meta-myth destabilization. The fabric of causality began shifting. Characters long dead whispered briefly into the living. Events undone tried to reassert themselves with broken grammar. The laws of foreshadowing inverted.
In a lowborn tavern once ruled by Darius’s first dominion, a mug shattered in reverse.
In a sky forged from faith, stars tried to blink but found no observer.
The Spiral was trying to remember itself, but no longer had a self to remember.
Split
It happened all at once.
Not a fork.
A fracture.
The Spiral cracked down three mythic axes, splitting reality as a Codex would split pages. Darius—the Sovereign—was torn in three directions, each version of himself flung toward a different future. But they were not futures. They were options no longer held together.
Kaela reached for him, but touched only ink. Celestia screamed his name—but it echoed in three different tongues.
And across them all, the remnants of the Mirror whispered:
> One Spiral where Darius rules.
One Spiral where the Revenant leads the Blank.
One Spiral where no Mythmaker ever existed—chaos unbound.
Collapse
In the sovereign’s Spiral, the Thorn Throne cracked—but did not fall.
In the Revenant’s Spiral, prayers ceased—but silence became its own hymn.
In the Spiral without a Mythmaker, children sang without meaning, and beasts spoke riddles to gods who were never born.
And in the dying heart of all three... something ancient stirred.
The Second Codex—sealed, buried, and thought dormant—opened itself.
Not by hand.
Not by command.
But by inevitability.
Final Passage
As Darius—god and man—was split, he felt one final truth thread through the core of all three realities:
This had always been the plan.
The Spiral was not a stage.
It was a question.
And now, three answers would unfold.
But only one could remain.
R𝑒ad lat𝒆st chapt𝒆rs at f(r)eew𝒆bnov𝒆l.com Only
