Chapter 316: THIS WORLD DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU ALONE!”
The battlefield stank of burned salt and broken heavens.
The clash between gods had torn the skies into ribbons. Where once the constellations rested, now cracks yawned wide, bleeding radiant ichor and streaks of black void. The world itself tilted under the weight of divinity colliding. Mortals far below the mountain could only scream, their cities rattling as though earthquakes and storms had chosen to dance together.
And at the center—Poseidon stood, his trident planted in the fractured stone.
Blood, blue and radiant, streamed from cuts across his arms and chest, but his gaze burned with the kind of defiance no chains could smother. Around him, the remnants of three gods lay scattered—broken yet not destroyed. They were beings whose names had once silenced oceans, but here, they gasped in disbelief.
"You... should not exist," rasped Seraphin, Goddess of Flame, her golden wings mangled and dripping ash. "You are mortal and abyss. You are blasphemy."
Poseidon’s laugh rolled like a tide smashing against a cliff. His voice filled the fractured world.
"No, Seraphin. I am inevitability. You would drown the world in fire, Zephyros would strangle it with sky, Aegirion would bury it in tides of obedience. But me—" His trident pulsed, the waters behind him roaring higher than mountains. "—I am the ocean. And the ocean does not kneel."
The surviving gods rallied. Even broken, their divinity refused to extinguish.
Zephyros, bleeding lightning from torn veins, staggered upright. His once-pristine armor was cracked and stained, feathers burned away from his wings. Still, his eyes held authority. "Poseidon... this arrogance is not yours. It is Thalorin’s poison in you."
At the mention of that name, the skies trembled. A whisper ran along the waves, a voice older than gods, speaking from the marrow of Poseidon himself.
They fear you because they remember me. But you are not me. You are more.
Poseidon tightened his grip on the trident. His eyes glowed with the abyss and the dawn together.
"Thalorin was hunger. I am will. You chained him because you could not kill him. But you cannot chain me."
The battlefield screamed again as Seraphin unleashed her last fury. Firestorms twisted into pillars, aiming to incinerate the sea-born god. Zephyros flung thunderbolts the size of castles, the heavens splitting under their strike. And Aegirion, silent and trembling, raised his trident, torn between oath and brotherhood.
Poseidon met them all.
The sea erupted from nothing—no coast, no horizon, just raw, impossible ocean tearing through stone and sky. Waves surged like living serpents, swallowing flame, snapping thunder, and slamming against the gods with crushing force.
The clash blinded mortals who dared to watch from afar. Whole forests near the mountain snapped like reeds. Rivers changed their course. The air itself turned heavy, dripping salt with every breath.
And in the storm, Poseidon roared—
"THIS WORLD DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU ALONE!"
The trident drove into the ground. From its point, cracks spiderwebbed outward, glowing with abyssal light. From them, geysers of dark water burst, carrying memories of every drowned city, every forgotten soul, every weight the gods had chosen to bury.
The flood carried voices. Mortals lost at sea. Priests who had prayed and been ignored. Armies swallowed whole in storms the gods had called "judgment." Their cries became Poseidon’s chorus, a tide of vengeance too vast to silence.
Zephyros faltered first. His thunder dimmed under the roar. The flame of Seraphin sputtered, devoured by salt and shadow.
And Aegirion—Poseidon’s brother of tides—hesitated. His weapon shook. For one moment, he lowered his trident.
"You are not the abyss..." Aegirion whispered, staring into Poseidon’s storm-lit face. "You are more. You are..."
Poseidon’s gaze softened for only an instant. "I am the ocean unbroken."
But mercy ended there. The tide surged again, overwhelming the last resistance. The three gods were thrown into the void-cracks above, vanishing into silence, their cries cut off like candles smothered under water.
The battlefield went still.
The only sound left was the endless breathing of the ocean that now stretched in all directions, swallowing land, horizon, even the skies. The mortal realm had tilted—toward water, toward him.
Poseidon stood alone, but not lonely. Behind his heartbeat pulsed millions more—the ocean’s memory, the abyss’s hunger, humanity’s will.
And in that silence, a truth carved itself into the bones of the world:
The age of the chained pantheon was ending.
The age of the ocean had begun.
---
Far above, in Olympus, bells of warning rang. Gods whispered to each other in panic, for they had felt it too—the drowning of their kin, the shattering of old authority.
But Poseidon did not wait for their schemes. His eyes turned upward, toward the thrones of heaven.
"I am coming," he murmured. The ocean behind him surged higher, a wall against the stars. "And no council will stop me."
The world above Olympus shuddered as if the very sky had become an ocean. Clouds no longer floated—they drifted, pulled by invisible tides that bent starlight and moonlight alike. Mortals looked up from across the world and saw what no prophecy had warned them of: the heavens themselves swelling with waves.
Poseidon had risen far beyond the whispers of a drowned god. He was no longer hidden in mortal guise. No longer only a threat to harbors and cities. He was the ocean incarnate, a god who had stretched his dominion beyond the sea, daring to tilt the balance of heaven itself.
The battlefield was Olympus. Its golden columns and alabaster stairs were meant to endure eternity, but now they bled brine. Saltwater ran like veins through the marble, and cracks opened in the divine floor where fish swam through voids that should never have existed.
Three gods stood against him, their auras blazing like constellations brought to flesh:
Zephyros, lord of the sky, his wings spread wide, each feather holding storms.
Seraphin, goddess of flame, her hair a burning crown.
Nymera, mistress of shadow, her presence a silken suffocation of night.
Together, they had fought wars against titans, purged demon hosts, and bound other primordial beings into the Rift. Together, they had once toppled Poseidon when Thalorin’s hunger had driven him into madness.