The Wrath Of The Gods - Part 3
Thanatos thundered forward, and Athena shot forward to meet his charge. Her silver chalcidian helm coalesced into being over her head, and her legendary Aegis appeared on her left arm as she hefted her spear with the other to meet Death's own.
She struck like a viper to deflect the oncoming attack. Celestial bronze met stygian iron, and the impact resonated with a haunting metallic dissonance that echoed across the heavens. The very air wailed with the power of it.
The clash of arms lasted only a beat before Thanatos plowed forward and through it with his weight and deflected her spear with such strength that the goddess's guard was blown wide open. She staggered back several paces and tried to compensate for the sudden vulnerability with a raised forearm, brandishing Aegis in all its wretched glory.
This wasn't the mere duplicate Thalia Grace wielded, but the genuine article. The original shield of millennia gone by, the first and most horrible incarnation of Medusa's head immortalized in service of the goddess who'd twisted her shape into monstrosity by the craftsmanship of Hephaestus himself. Enemy lines and armies entire had broken and fled when the wisdom Goddess carried the shield into battle, and such was the terror the gorgons facsimile inspired that even immortals did not gaze into it lightly.
Faced with it at point-blank range, Thanatos didn't even flinch.
Transferring his spear to a single hand with an almost condescending fluidity, he lashed out with his free arm in the split second it took Athena to regain her footing. The air distorted and cracked more fiercely than any thunder as his fist tunneled through it to strike at her.
Athena caught the first bone-rattling blow with Aegis, barely, but Thanatos gave her no pause the second strike was that much fiercer. The collision was so great that she was driven half a foot down and back across the splintering earth as she tried to brace for the impact, her feet carving trenches through solid stone and crushing it to fine rubble.
Shielding was a failing strategy if there ever was one, so as he reared back for the third hit, forgoing the use of his weapon entirely, she swapped tactics. With swiftness her foe did not expect of her, she weaved under the oncoming blow and flung herself to the side, allowing the motion of his overextended swing to carry him and force him to stumble ever so slightly.
The moment of imbalance was minuscule, something no mortal or demigod warrior could have hoped to capitalize on, but it was enough for Athena to reaffirm her grip on her spear and lunge forward, aiming to drive it through his unprotected back - unlike her, Thanatos wore no armor beyond his black robes.
A worthy tactic, but she'd miscalculated - she failed to account for the wings.
As she thrust her spear forward, the primordial's wings unfurled and snapped open in all their majesty. The resulting explosive atmospheric distortion was comparable to getting smacked in the face by a category-five hurricane. Gale force winds bombarded Athena, throwing off her aim and nearly blasting her off her feet entirely for her troubles. Furious air currents slipped through her helm and stabbed at her eyes like tempestuous daggers, forcing her to grunt and angle her head away on instinct.
A costly mistake.
Thanatos turned on the spot and backhanded her so savagely that her helm all but caved in like tin foil from the power of the blow. The force sent the goddess rocketing away and into a veritable mountain of scrap metal and ruined, discarded treasures.
She slammed into like a meteor, pulverizing her way through it and forcing her so deep into the ground below that the earth heaved and bucked like the waves of Poseidon's seas, flinging ruined debris up and everywhere.
The tremors could've probably been felt from the other end of the state.
Thanatos regarded his work silently and, when the goddess made no move to reemerge and return to the fight (if you could be generous enough to call it that) turned to regard the inferno raging behind him.
Like him and the little wisdom goddess, Apollo and Hermes had spared one another no words before leaping into battle. Perhaps the sons of Zeus simply knew each other too well to attempt diplomacy. Or perhaps they were simply that eager to spill blood and sow carnage at one another's expense.
Considering the capricious nature of the Olympians, Thanatos knew that the latter was just as likely as the former.
Either way, The two gods were locked into a vicious deadlock. Apollo had wreathed himself in a corona of solar flame and divine presence that reduced his surroundings to bubbling magma and burning air, and every swing of his blade had abandoned every pretense of grace and polished fluidity and replaced it with an unhinged fury befitting the worst of Tartarus's monsters instead.
That, or Ares himself, but seeing that said war deity was slumped a distance away and was currently doing his best impression of a jittery, mold-infested lemon battery courtesy of Apollo himself, perhaps it was he who fell short in that regard
Hermes met this new barbarity with a hard cruelty of his own, an inhuman snarl twisting and morphing his features into something that would have driven any mortal wretched enough to see it into the throes of madness. His Caduceus shone with bursts of red and green radiance of its own as he fought back, deflecting every savage strike with speed befitting the swiftest of Zeus's brood.
Every clash was akin to a cluster bomb going off, and the roars of the two gods were deafening beyond even that.
It truly was such an ugly display.
Ugly... and honest.
"Children." He tutted in disappointment. "So dramatic."
Still, he moved to intervene.
So long as he continued to fight on Luna's behalf, even indirectly, it would not do for Apollo to fall. For all his power, there was only so long that he could maintain a corporeal form on such short demand, after all.
He took a step towards the warring Olympians, just one, before stilling and snapping his head to the side as the spear that would bore through his headshot past at ludicrous speeds, the very edge of the leaf blade scoring a shallow cut on his cheek as it whistled past.
Black, inky shadows seeped out of the trivial wound, and he raised his hand to trace it in surprise even as the flesh knit back together nigh-instantaneously.
That she'd managed to land a blow, even one so inconsequential as that...
He dismissed the younger godlings and turned to face Athena
Her armor was tarnished and covered in pockmarks and rents, and her helm was misshapen and damaged on the one side where he'd landed his last strike. Golden ichor seeped from the grooves and rents in the ruined helm and trailed across her neck in glistening lines, but she hardly seemed to notice.
"Your fortitude is impressive, daughter of Metis," He acknowledged with a tilted head. "But it is often wiser to know when to lay down your arms and surrender to a superior foe."
"Indeed." She agreed with a level voice, not a hint of unease to her. She twisted her hand, and her spear once again coalesced in her grip from motes of light. "And it is wiser still to never underestimate a seemingly inferior opponent, lest they strike you down when you least expect it."
Well, then.
"Fair enough."
Hermes and Apollo now completely forgotten, Death and Wisdom leaped into battle once more and promptly began to rip each other apart.
...
As to where Bianca and her friends were in the middle of all of this... they weren't.
The very second that the gods and the primordial (Luna's dad, who was also Death - what even was her life!?) had started duking it out, there were no words needed.
It was almost awing, the way the seven of them acted like a team. In perfect unison, like a well-oiled combat machine, they turned and hightailed it the Hades out of there, sprinting for their lives as the world started out and out exploding behind them.
There was nowhere to go but forward, metaphorically and very literally, and so they sprinted across plains of ruined metalwork and lost treasures in the only direction they could, running until their lungs felt like ballons stretched to the point of busting.
And then they ran some more.
"Keep going!" Luna gasped, and it was only the sheer adrenaline that kept Bianca from stopping in concern.
By that point her friend was so out of it that Zoë was half dragging, half carrying her by her side, her skin only a shade away from being milk-pale and shimmering with sweat. Her left arm was glued to her side and her shirt was damp with a nauseating amount of blood. More than even Thorn's spikes had managed to draw out of her, and there was no time to stop and treat her here.
Damn it.
She knew Luna kept shrugging it off and claiming she'd had worse, but Bianca's growing fear (that was practically her default emotion now) refused to abate.
She looked like she was about to d-
"There!" Thalia yelled, snapping her out of that line of thought (Very likely for the best).
The daughter of Zeus pointed ahead, and Bianca followed her gaze to salvation. There was a boundary there, a point where the junk seemed to pool in on itself and go no further. The edge of the dump.
The barren, empty road and desert-like surroundings beyond that would have once been uninviting and eerie, but compared to the alternative behind them, it looked like the path to blessed Nirvana (Or was it Elysium, now?)
She nearly cried at the sight. They were close, now.
(Or were they?)
She hesitated, her sprint faltering ever so slightly.
Bianca was capable of basic pattern recognition. She knew it wouldn't be that easy, because literally nothing else had been, right from the beginning. Her every instinct all but screamed it.
That's why, when things went wrong again, she wasn't even that surprised.
It still hurt, though. They had been so very close.
The only warning was the smell of ozone. It overcame them suddenly, clogging and overwhelming, heavy enough to drown in.
Thalia stopped dead.
"No."
Overhead, the darkness shifted. The stars vanished, swallowed by the tapestry of thunderclouds that stretched infinitely, from one end of the sky to the next.
"No no no!" Thalia screamed up at the dome of darkness and fury "Don't you dare-!"
And that's when the heavens were cleaved open, and Bianca finally witnessed Zeus's wrath firsthand.
The lightning nearly blinded her long before the thunder all but blew out her eardrums. When it did strike, Bianca was almost grateful for it - one second of unspeakable agony, followed by a ringing silence and an unnatural kind of peace.
But even if she could not hear, she could still see.
Even as the searing glow of the lightning dulled, she could still see the arc of crackling power that descended from above, that was still descending from above, even now, lancing not at them, but at the gods they'd left behind.
No, even that was wrong. Not gods.
God. Just the one.
Bianca did not see Thanatos and Athena. She did not see Hermes - the three may as well have been gone. Her head was fuzzy, her thoughts suddenly slow - she barely even remembered what they looked like.
But she could see Apollo, somehow, and she could see the way the lightning struck at him, the bolts burning through his chest.
She couldn't hear a thing, but she could still see the sun god scream.
It was horrifying.
Someone grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet - had she fallen? She hadn't even noticed that all seven of them had been blasted clean off of their feet.
Luna - of course it was Luna - was pulling her up despite her ruinous wounds, her eyes blown open in panic as they met hers. Her mouth moved silently, but Bianca couldn't hear a thing.
Her gaze was still on the screaming god that only she seemed to be able to see - the lightning did not relent, white and blue streams arcing over his skin and crumpling it like paper. Flecks of glowing gold were rising off Apollo's writhing flesh, as though it was scorching the luster off his skin.
Could the god of the sun burn?
Yes, he can.
Such was the ordeal of the last forty-eight hours and the strangeness of everything going on in her head at the moment that Bianca didn't even question the strange voice that slithered into her mind, or even pause to consider whether or not listening to it was a good idea.
That's bad, she thought sluggishly.
Indeed. And you and your friends will suffer far worse than he if you don't escape.
That's even bad-er, she thought back, and resisted the urge to giggle hysterically.
You can save them. Him too. You can save all of them.
Now that sounded like a good idea. But Bianca had no idea what to do.
I can show you. Reach below, child.
Luna was tugging at her shoulders frantically, but Bianca wasn't even aware of her existence as she dropped to her knees and began scrabbling at the junk at her feet, tossing aside useless garbage and priceless treasure by the handfuls in her search for... something.
She found it when at last her hand reached solid stone. Her fingers traced the triangular symbol perfectly carved into the earth.
(Δ)
A Greek delta, Bianca realized, even if she didn't know how she knew. More importantly, she could feel power thrumming through and beneath it, power and potential, and she knew instantly that this was their way out.
But how?
Open it, the voice coaxed her, all that lies below is yours to command by right of blood. Open it now.
Bianca pushed down on the Delta, and it lit up with a blue glow.
Two things happened then.
One, the fog that had been dulling her senses like a double dose of magical helium straight to the brain dissipated instantly. Sound and clarity and terror came rushing back in, and she suddenly realized that people were screaming at her to move.
Luna, Zoe, Annabeth, Percy, even Nico. Especially Nico.
Everyone was screaming.
And second, Bianca had just enough time to realize that, to realize that something horrible was about to happen before the ground at her feet disintegrated and she plunged into the abyss waiting below the surface.
She screamed as fell, hand gripping the edge of the splintering earth in a desperate attempt to hold on, nothing but open air and darkness stretching out beneath her as the chasm she'd unwittingly torn open began to grow, expanding outwards beginning to swallow everything around them.
"Bianca!"
"I'm sorry!" She wailed. What had she done!? "I didn't mean to! I saw Apollo and I saw you and I- I thought- I thought I was saving you!"
Bianca couldn't see anyone but Luna, hanging on to the ledge beside her with the very tips of her fingers, which meant that either they were behind her, or-
Or they'd fallen.
Their friends - her brother - they were gone.
Oh gods, what had she done!?
"Let go!" Luna yelled (The first time she's ever truly raised her voice) over the roar of cascading devastation - everything in their vicinity was sliding towards the chasm like quicksand surging to fill in a cavernous depression. "Bianca, let go, or we'll be crushed!"
The words were wasted - Bianca's hands were already slipping, her hold breaking on both physical hold and her very sanity. It had all caught up at last- all the stress, all the harrowing fear of the past two days that had been squeezed into a box and compressed by virtue of Luna's presence came rocketing back out, ripping rationality to shreds.
She barely felt it when she finally, too lost in her waking nightmare to acknowledge her fingers losing their hold.
What did it matter? She'd lost everything else.
She'd destroyed everything else.
No, the voice that had caused this whispered in her ear, one final time, You made a choice, as all who come to one of my crossroads must. Now fall, and walk the path you paved yourself, daughter of Hades.
The last thing she'd heard was Luna's voice, raging helplessly against the inevitable.
"ACCIO BIANCA DI ANGELO! ACCIO PHOEBUS APOLLO!"
And then they fell into darkness, and Bianca knew no more.
"NO!"
...
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