… Well. That was certainly one problem solved. Charon had been even more fussy about getting a raise than usual, considering how many more spirits he had to babysit and how often he had to run the ferry.

More importantly Hades no longer had to figure out how to collect several souls from outer space. Or worry about transporting misplaced souls to and from other afterlives.

On the other hand, he technically had several billion souls that had been taken from under his care and returned to the land of the living without the proper clearances. Thanatos was certainly not going to be happy if he was told to go after all of them at once.

Hm. Maybe he could stall by checking in with his counter parts… Well, less "stall," more "he needed to talk to them anyway, considering they had to come to a consensus on what to do now."

"Sir, Lord Zeus would like to speak with you."

Oh, wonderful. "Is the world ending?"

"Um, no, my Lord."

"Then tell him I'm busy. Until we get this sorted out, the only reason I want to hear from someone who is not responsible for retrieving or containing the dead is if another doomsday prophecy is about to come to pass."

"Yes, my Lord."

At least that was taken care of. For now. His inane younger brother would certainly not be pleased at being brushed off, but he had no ground to stand on if he tried to complain about it. Hades was simply doing his job and handling his problems as quickly as possible.

Over 3.5 billion souls that were dead and now weren't. To be fair, they shouldn't have died in the first place because that fool should never have been able to retrieve all five gems. Given the sheer magnitude of the issue, it was highly likely that he and his counterparts would decide to leave them be and let them live for the time being. It wasn't like the mortals hadn't put in the work to free them and recollecting them would be extremely difficult.

What to do with the remaining dead from that day would be slightly more complicated. They should not have died either but had not been a part of the initial sweep which wiped out half of all life. People in airplanes or other vehicles. People near someone who had been handling hazardous materials. People near heavy machinery as it failed. People living near the now unmanned nuclear reactors. Some had died within hours, some had died within days, some had died within months. All had died as a direct result of those destroyed by Thanos.

If he was going to be honest, they likely wouldn't release them. It was too much work to get their bodies ready to be reinhabited and to try and stop the mortals from noticing. On the other hand, if someone came questing for one of those souls, regardless of what was decided as a group, he likely would not put up more than a token struggle.

They would have to handle making sure they reintegrated then, not him. And if he just so happened to put them as a low priority recapture, then no one really needed to worry about that. It wasn't like they were going to be doing anything.