While the situation looked bad, Eris herself wasn’t all that worried, unlike the Saintess. She had spent the better part of her prime years working with corpses, cutting them apart and getting them ready for their families to see. While countless people respected her, the majority avoided her.

She reeked of death, and people found it disturbing to get close to someone who cuts up corpses for a living. Those last few days were especially rough with all the corpses coming in, and she was desperate for a moment of respite.

Arad might be a serial killer, a murderer, but she was fine settling for him, even if for just one time. So, while she looked like she was sacrificing herself to save the Saintess, in fact, she couldn’t wait for that woman to leave them alone. She could even use this event later to garner sympathy and maybe find someone to settle down with.

As she grabbed Arad’s belt and tried to unbuckle it, the leather snake refused to give way, and no matter how much she strained her fingers, it never came undone.

"Since I found you, it is time for me to look for Murder." Arad cracked his neck, thinking about the current situation. There were only three possible options to explain this situation.

The first explanation was that Eris is still controlling everything and that all of this is just an act to bait him into a specific situation. This was based on the fact that he could read Eris’s thoughts, but not the thoughts of everyone else.

The second explanation was that Eris did lose control of her Murder portfolio, and this is the result. That is the worst possible case, and it would mean their fight has to wait for later. He has to act quickly and save her in this case.

The third option, and the more likely one, is that Eris did lose control, but it was an intentional move necessary for a grander plan. Arad’s reasoning for this was Eris’s rigid mentality and the protection she has from Amaterasu. She won’t fall easily, and Amaterasu would’ve helped if Eris were to be swallowed by Murder.

"A city of murder that reeks of blood and dead rats." Arad smiled, and Eris stared up at him. "What are you even talking about? Would you mind showing me how to undo this strange belt?" Arad did have a special belt that was made by Merida and Mira, it was composed of two tough leather belts and several locks that made taking it off an arduous task, unless he did that with his stomach. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Arad reached down, grabbed Eris, and threw her on his shoulder, then took a step forward and snatched the Saintess as well. The Saintess screamed, "Put me down! Put me down!"

Eris looked more exhausted and disappointed than worried and angry as she waved one hand. "She is right, put her down. She reeks of shit!"

Arad smiled, "Well, what about now? I cleaned her up." He indeed did, and she didn’t even notice it. "Wait! How did you? When?"

"The situation would’ve been desperate if I were powerless." Arad smiled as he took a single step up, and they appeared at the top of the hospital. "But I’ve got all of my power ready."

As Arad chuckled and smiled from ear to ear, his eyes burned dark purple, and his teeth shifted into being shark-like in their form. Seeing that face, and feeling the horrifying gust of magic and murderous insanity of an adult void dragon, the Saintess pissed herself and fainted on the spot.

"Murder, who said you can defy my wife?" Arad growled as he took Eris’s cigar and took a whiff before breathing out a titanic cloud of dark smoke. From that darkness, a murder of crows emerged, followed by a flood of black rats.

"Tear everything apart, don’t leave a thing whole." As Arad growled, the swarms of rats and crows moved. "Show Murder where it stands, eat and shit it out the way it deserves for this."

The rats swarmed the hospital first and fed on everyone there, consuming them in seconds, and then they went on to eat everything else that they could, from paper to clothes and wood, tearing the entire building apart, and then they spread into the nearby building. The crows, on the other hand, hunted everyone and anything that tried to flee with vicious accuracy, drowning the city in their caws and screams of pain and death.

For the first time, Eris looked afraid as she saw the entire city getting eaten alive by Arad’s dark rats and crows. It was a ghastly and horrifying scene, yet... Arad’s face was calm, as if this meant nothing to him.

But then, everything changed in the blink of an eye. He had felt it, a powerful presence in the city’s alleyways that was rapidly killing hundreds of his rats and crows with ease. That was Murder, and in that instant, Arad summoned one of his incarnations into that location to teach murder a lesson.

When Arad landed and looked forward, he froze in place as his eyes opened wide. He had never been so shocked in his life, but today, he had seen something that he had never expected to see. That short man, that silky blond hair, long ears, and the disgusting scene of him asking a terrified woman if he can suck her toes if he saves her from the rats, and that he would just kill her if she refuses.

"Vars? How?" Arad gasped, but as if his instinct kicked in, he could reason out what had happened.

When a god dies, they are disintegrated and erased from existence, becoming nothing. But then, their image, memories, and will can remain engraved on the portfolio they once held the same way Jordan remained in Mira’s portfolio...

Vars’s soul had returned to nothing, but what is that nothing? Entropy cannot let energy be wasted, especially not at the scale of the energy a god’s soul would have. So... that nothing can only mean one thing, it had returned to him, AO, the nothing before everything.

He has Vars’s memories here in front of him, and his soul is lost somewhere deep with his Great Soul... this chance, he can’t let it slip.

Vars sighed, shrugged, and lifted both of his arms up. "I guess the fun’s time is over." At the next moment, a titanic horde of people appeared out of the ground, rising as skeletons of black bones, then getting engulfed by flesh.

The second stage of Murder was the ability to summon everyone the god had ever murdered as thralls, even the previous gods of Murder. What surrounded Arad now were billions of men and women, and there were three gods among them besides Vars.

Katal, the previous god of murder, and two more that Arad didn’t recognize.

"You can’t take us all down, it’s impossible even for you." Vars waved his hand and summoned his staff. "So, how about you look the other way, take your girls, and let me have fun alone in this city?"

Arad wasn’t listening to a single word as he stared forward with a shocked face, and then... VROOOOOOM! His heart rumbled like a revving engine, and what followed next was a massacre.