Chapter 352: You fight with rage
The battlefield no longer resembled land.
Where once there had been marble colonnades and sunlit plains, there was now only ruin, jagged stone, and brackish water pooling into craters carved by divine fury. The sky, split between twilight and storm, was veined with lightning that refused to fade. It was not weather—it was judgment.
And yet, standing at the center of it all, Poseidon breathed evenly. The ocean inside him pulsed with each inhale, deeper and older than the world itself.
The three gods who had descended to oppose him—Ares, Athena, and Helios—were not mortals to be swayed by fear. They were battle-born, iron-willed, drenched in millennia of worship. Their auras pressed against his like mountains grinding together.
But even mountains drowned when the sea chose to rise.
Ares struck first. His war-spear blazed red, shrouded in the screams of countless battlefields. With a roar, he hurled himself forward, his strikes splitting the ground like earthquakes.
Poseidon met the first thrust barehanded. The spear’s edge, meant to pierce stars, halted against a wall of solidified current. Water spiraled from Poseidon’s palm, not splashing, not fluid, but coiled into the density of iron.
"You fight with rage," Poseidon murmured, shoving Ares back a dozen paces. "But rage has no depth."
Before Ares could retort, Athena moved. Her blade, Aegis-born, cut through illusions and struck at the mind as much as the flesh. She aimed not for his chest, but for his thoughts.
Poseidon felt the intrusion immediately—her voice, calm and ruthless, whispering through his skull. Yield, Dominic. You are still the vessel. Not the god. Let go, and I will end you cleanly.
For the briefest instant, the human name almost stilled him. Dominic—the boy he had once been, the mortal shell.
But then the tide rose, and with it the truth.
"I am not Dominic," Poseidon growled, and the ocean inside him flared outward. Athena’s mental grip broke like a reed in a storm. "I am what he became."
Helios descended then, fire lashing downward like a sun broken loose from the heavens. His light burned so bright that mortals on distant shores shielded their eyes, thinking the world itself aflame.
Poseidon did not shield his eyes. He raised his trident, and the sea answered.
A wall of black water rose, taller than mountains, its surface writhing with serpents of foam. Helios’s fire struck it—and vanished, smothered in an instant, like sparks drowned in pitch. The sea did not burn.
It consumed.
The three gods regrouped, circling. Their breaths came harsh, but their eyes were grimly set.
"You cannot hold against us forever," Athena said. Her armor was dented, her blade dripping seawater instead of blood. "Even a tide breaks against the shore."
Poseidon turned his gaze skyward. Lightning forked above, and the storm shifted as though kneeling to him.
"You speak of shores," he said, voice rolling across the battlefield. "But I am not the tide that comes and goes. I am the abyss beneath it all. And the abyss does not retreat."
He drove the trident into the ground. The earth howled.
From the fissures in the shattered plain, water surged—black, cold, endless. It swallowed rubble, corpses, even divine flame. The battlefield became an ocean floor, the gods forced to fight not on land but within Poseidon’s chosen element.
Ares roared, his body igniting with war’s fury. But his movements were slowed, the weight of the water pressing against him. Athena’s mind cut sharp, but her illusions blurred in the current. Helios shone, his fire boiling the surface, but even his light flickered here in the depths.
And Poseidon? He moved like a shark in his own blood.
As the battle raged, another voice stirred within Poseidon—not Athena’s, not Helios’s, not Ares’s.
Yes... drown them...
It was Thalorin, the ancient drowned king whose essence had fused with his own. A hunger older than Olympus, whispering from the marrow of the abyss.
Three gods. Three hearts. Three flames to snuff. Do it, and you rise beyond them all.
Poseidon’s grip on the trident tightened. For a moment, the old human hesitation flickered in his veins. Kill them, and war would be inevitable. The pantheon would hunt him endlessly. But spare them... and they would strike again.
He snarled, the water around him convulsing.
"I do not need your whispers," he spat into the abyss. "I am no one’s vessel. Not Dominic’s. Not yours."
The deep laughed, low and hungry. We shall see.
Ares surged again, his spear whistling through the dark waters. Poseidon twisted, the trident intercepting, and currents exploded outward, flinging both combatants through submerged ruins.
Athena dove low, blade aimed for his flank. Poseidon let her strike connect, water hardening into armor just beneath his skin. Sparks flew, but no blood. With a flick of his wrist, a whirlpool coiled around her, dragging her upward toward the boiling surface.
Helios, desperate, unleashed his core. His body became pure radiance, a miniature sun bursting in the ocean’s depths. The water hissed, evaporating into a blinding steam. For the first time, Poseidon winced—the heat gnawed at him, clawing at the sanctity of his domain.
Seizing the opening, Ares’s spear thrust true, grazing Poseidon’s side. Salt blood bloomed, staining the sea.
The gods pressed in, sensing their chance. Athena’s voice rang out in the boiling water: "Now! Strike together!"
Their combined assault—spear, blade, and sunfire—converged on Poseidon.
The sea god’s eyes burned with fury. "Then drown together!"
He unleashed it.
Not a wave. Not a current. The abyss itself.
A rift tore open in the water, a void of crushing pressure, blacker than night. It yawned like the mouth of some primordial beast, and from it poured tendrils of abyssal water—thicker than rivers, hungrier than storms.
The gods faltered. Even they had not seen such darkness.
Ares’s armor cracked. Athena’s illusions shattered. Helios’s light dimmed, swallowed by the void.
And Poseidon strode forward, trident glowing with abyssal fire, his wound already closing under the tide’s embrace.
Mortals across continents felt it. Shores shifted, seas rose, animals fled inland. Ships capsized in harbors that had been calm minutes earlier. Fishermen fell to their knees, praying desperately. Some whispered his name in awe, others in terror.
Poseidon.
No longer forgotten. No longer drowned.
The abyss had answered him.
And Olympus would too.