When I emerged from the shadow, I expected chaos.
I did not expect this.
The coast of Greece is drowning in battle. Not in the poetic sense—the air tastes of salt, blood, and ozone, and the sand is a carpet of broken shells, shattered coral, and bodies. My siblings are already deep in the fight, each carving their own path through an endless tide of sea-spawn.
Hera stands like a general among soldiers, her new spear—crafted by Brontes' begrudging hands—flashing arcs of gold through the haze. She wields telekinesis with her free hand, hurling enemy bodies into the sea with the flick of her wrist. Every time her spear strikes, it's not just steel meeting flesh; the air itself buckles.
Demeter is all cold fury, scythe gleaming green with vines twined around the blade. Wherever she moves, plants burst from the sand, thick roots dragging crab warriors under while thorned creepers lash across their armored limbs. I see her decapitate a lobster-headed brute without even looking, her gaze fixed on something else entirely.
Hestia is fire incarnate—literally. Her entire form glows in a halo of molten light, hair whipping in heat-born winds as she whirls her twin flame whips. They burn even the wet shells of Karkinos-spawn, cutting through armor like it's wax.
And then there's Zeus—showing off, as always. Lightning and wind crash around him in an endless storm, bolts splitting sea beasts before they can reach him. His voice carries over the din, barking orders one second, laughing like a madman the next.
I barely have time to take it all in before something lunges for me. A humanoid fish, gills flaring, trident raised. Its scales shimmer in a green-blue sheen, too perfect for nature, and its eyes are all black. It hisses—an ugly, bubbling sound—and thrusts for my ribs.
I catch the weapon on my bident's lower prong, twist, and drive my own weapon up through its chest. The creature spasms, mouth opening in a soundless scream before I fling it aside. Another comes from my right, but my shadows surge before it can touch me, skeletal hands bursting from the sand to grab its legs. With a thought, those hands squeeze until bone cracks and the fish-thing crumples.
My body protests—shoulder stiff, muscles slow—but there's no time for weakness. Pain is just another battlefield companion. I push forward.
Zeus' voice cuts across the roar of waves. "About time, brother! Thought you were going to wait until we'd finished without you!"
I parry a blow from a shrimp-headed warrior—its spiny forearms clashing against my weapon—and reply without looking. "Wouldn't want you to think you could win without me."
The shrimp's shell splits under my next thrust. I yank my bident free and swing the haft into another foe's jaw, snapping it sideways.
The beach is a nightmare of motion—Karkinos warriors with massive claws, lobster brutes with segmented tails whipping behind them, shrimp fighters darting with unnerving speed. Among them, larger shapes stalk forward: humanoid turtles with shells thick enough to shrug off most strikes, shark-headed juggernauts, hulking hippo forms armored in coral plates.
One of the turtles steps into my path, shell mottled with battle scars, wielding a club fashioned from petrified coral. It grins—a slow, cruel stretch of lips—and charges.
I meet it head-on, bident aimed low. The point scrapes against the shell instead of piercing, the force jarring my arms. It swings the club, and I barely bring the haft up in time to block. The impact rattles my bones.
It laughs. Laughs.
I drop low, slam my palm to the sand, and let the Underworld answer me. Bone spikes erupt beneath the turtle, punching through the joints in its legs. Its laughter turns to a roar of pain. I rise, twist the bident, and ram the upper prong into the gap between shell and shoulder. This time, it sinks deep.
I shove the body away just as a shark-headed warrior barrels in from the side. It's fast—faster than its bulk should allow—but I sidestep, hook my weapon behind its knee, and pull. As it drops, I drive a knee into its jaw, teeth shattering under the force. My shadows lash upward, spearing through its torso before it can recover.
I barely have time to breathe before Hera's voice rings out. "Hades! Behind you!"
I spin, shadows coiling in anticipation, and see three fish warriors rushing me in a staggered formation. One leaps, another crouches low, and the third swings its trident wide. Perfect coordination.
I raise a wall of bone from the sand, their weapons clanging uselessly against it. Stepping around the barrier, I drive my bident into the leaping one mid-air, twisting so its body crashes into the crouched fighter. The third manages to graze my side, and pain flares white-hot. I retaliate with a burst of darkness that crushes the air from its lungs.
The piles of bodies grow higher, the stench thickening. And still they come.
We're being pushed, step by step, toward the inland cliffs. Every time we thin their numbers, more pour from the waves.
Then, the sound cuts through it all—a deep, resonant conch horn.
It's not just loud; it vibrates through the sand, the water, through my bones. Every enemy stops moving, heads turning toward the sea. Even the roar of the waves stills, as though the ocean itself is listening.
The horizon swells. The water darkens. And from its depths rises a figure that could only be one god.
Neptune.
He walks out of the sea as if it parts for him alone, each step sending ripples across the surface. His trident gleams, forged in the heart of some deep, crushing place. His eyes are the same as I remember—cold, sharp, unblinking.
"My dear siblings," he says, voice carrying without effort. "You've been busy."
No one answers at first. Zeus' jaw is set, Hera's grip tightens on her spear, Demeter's vines twist like snakes at her feet. Hestia's flames burn hotter, casting long shadows across the sand.
"I'll make this simple," Neptune continues. "Submit to me. Accept my rule, and I will spare your domains."
Zeus spits lightning into the ground. "You already know the answer."
Neptune's smile doesn't reach his eyes. "Then I will make you kneel the old way."
He lifts his trident high, voice ringing like a command to the sea itself."Lay waste to the land. Kill the gods."
The ocean roars in answer.
From every side, Neptune's army surges forward again, faster and with renewed frenzy. The beach becomes a ring of snapping jaws, clicking claws, and glinting weapons. We're surrounded.
Zeus bellows, hurling a thunderbolt into the thickest cluster. Hera drives her spear through two crab warriors in one motion. Hestia whirls her whips, cutting down shrimp fighters before they can swarm her. Demeter's plants tear up the sand in thick, writhing masses, dragging enemies into thorned pits.
And me?
I push forward through the crush of bodies, through the stench of brine and rot, until my bident finds purchase in another shell, another skull. My bones ache, my shoulder screams, but I don't stop. Because stopping here means drowning in more than water.
"Try to keep up, brother!" Zeus calls over the chaos, voice smug even as he splits a hippo-headed warrior in half with a lightning strike.
"I'm trying not to make it look like I'm overcompensating," I snap back, yanking my bident from a fish warrior's chest.
He laughs like this is a sparring match, not the end of the damned world. Hera's fighting just behind him, every movement precise, killing without wasting an inch of effort. Demeter's hair is plastered to her face with seawater and sweat, but her eyes are pure frost—she's not here for speeches.
My shadows tear through another wave, bone spikes bursting from the sand to impale anything too close. But even with my control, I'm… slipping. It's hard to describe—like my own power is dragging me deeper instead of answering me.
Another turtle warrior slams into me, shield-first. The impact jars my shoulder so hard my vision goes white for a heartbeat. I drive the lower prong of my bident into the gap beneath its arm, but the motion feels sluggish. Too slow.
Zeus notices. Of course he does.
"Getting rusty?" he calls, wind whipping around him.
"Focus on the enemies, not my form," I grind out.
Truth is, my enemies aren't the only problem. The swarm keeps coming—wave after wave, until the sand is thick with bodies. My body is heating up. Not from exhaustion. Not from strain. From inside. Like fire's crawling through my veins, spilling into my muscles, making my skin feel too tight.
I catch my reflection in a pool of seawater for half a breath—and see it. The glow. Gold-orange light, pulsing under my skin like molten metal.
What in the Styx—
"Brother—" Hera's voice cuts off as a lobster-headed brute nearly takes her head off.
The world sharpens and blurs at the same time. My breathing's too fast. I stab one enemy, twist, slice through another—
—and my shadow lashes out without me commanding it.
Three more enemies are crushed into the sand in an instant, shells cracking.
I didn't tell them to do that.
The fire in my veins is rising now, my whole body humming with the pressure. My powers aren't listening—they're pulling, lashing out in bursts. I shove an enemy back and watch, detached, as the shadows devour them faster than I could ever control.
Zeus' voice is sharper now. "Hades. Stop—whatever that is."
"I'm not—" I start, but then another burst erupts from me—black fire threaded with gold, ripping through a cluster of fish warriors so violently their bodies disintegrate.
The heat burns up my spine, into my skull. My hands are shaking—not from fear, but from too much power. It's spilling everywhere, sinking into the sand, the air, the dead.
And then I hear Zeus swear. Not the casual kind. The kind he uses when he knows things are about to turn catastrophic.
"Get back!" he shouts—to Hera, to Hestia, to Demeter. In the next blink, he's lightning. One bolt, three bodies, and they're gone—vanished inland.
Leaving me alone.
The swarm doesn't care. The sea creatures smell blood—or maybe they smell what's happening—and they charge.
I'm breathing too fast—ragged, uneven gasps that scrape my throat raw. The world has shrunk to heat, shadow, and the pounding war-drum of thousands of clawed feet tearing toward me. My vision flares with white every time my heart slams against my ribs, each pulse a flash of lightning behind my eyes.
The ground trembles beneath me—not from my power, not yet—but from the sheer, endless tide of creatures rushing inland. Shells glint like black iron, fangs like polished bone. They're close enough now that I can taste the salt and blood in the air.
And then…
Everything stops.
It's not a slow fade. It's a snap.
The chaos inside me folds in on itself, imploding into my core so fast I feel my chest cave inward. My ribs groan as though the air's been ripped away, and for one terrifying instant, I can't breathe at all.
The world falls into a silence that's wrong. Not the quiet of night, but the smothering stillness of something waiting to die. Even the ocean has frozen—waves suspended mid-crest, foam hanging in the air like strands of glass.
And then—
It erupts.
There's no mortal language for what happens next. Light and shadow don't just burst from me—they detonate, tearing outward in a perfect sphere that annihilates everything it touches. It's not fire. It's not lightning. It's… divinity, unbound and merciless. A storm with no wind. A scream with no sound.
The first row of monsters—crabs the size of ships, serpent coils thick as bridges—are gone in an instant. Not slain. Not burned. Erased. Their shapes dissolve into nothing before they can even fall. The second wave vanishes a heartbeat later. Then the third. Then everything.
When the haze finally begins to thin, I realize I'm standing alone. The earth beneath me is still steaming, the air still buzzing with the echo of what I've done.
And then I see it.
The land is gone.
I stand in the center of a wound carved into the world itself—a crater so vast its far edges fade into the horizon's haze. The coastline has been obliterated, half the continent's edge torn away in a single breath. What remains is a jagged rim of scorched stone and shattered cliffs, falling away into where the sea is already pouring in.
I don't have the strength to move. My knees are already trembling, each step of my heart sending spikes of agony through my ribs. My vision keeps lurching sideways—white haze at the edges—and I can taste copper and salt that isn't just seawater.
The wall of water is almost on me now, an endless blue cliff blotting out the sky. My grip on the bident slips. My knuckles are slick, not with sweat, but with ichor—my own divine blood, running from deep gashes along my arms. My armor hangs in tatters, and every breath feels like shards of glass grinding in my lungs.
Something's wrong.
No—everything is wrong.
I can feel the fractures in my bones, a lattice of sharp pain every time I try to shift my weight. My legs threaten to give entirely, tendons screaming, muscles seizing without warning. The divine hum inside me is fading, replaced by the hollow ache of something burning out.
The roar of the oncoming sea swallows the world. The ground beneath me quakes—not from the wave, but from me, from the sheer damage I've already done to the land. Cracks spiderweb outward, stone groaning, and then—
It gives way.
The earth splits beneath my feet, the shattered coast opening into a yawning wound. I fall—not into shadow, not into the familiar cold of the Underworld—but into something deeper, older, stranger. The air here tastes wrong, metallic and ancient.
I hit something hard, pain detonating through my broken frame, and the bident clatters out of my grasp. My ichor spills freely now, dripping down my side in slow, luminous rivulets.
Overhead, I hear it—the crushing, deafening roar of the tsunami crashing into the crater above, sealing it shut. The light vanishes, swallowed by rock and water, until there is nothing left but the cold and the dark pressing in from all sides.
And then, at last, the pain dulls.
And mercifully, the darkness takes me.