Chapter 326: Open the seal. Break the cage. Let the Abyss rise.
The waters beneath the battlefield trembled, quaking upward into spirals. Mortals who had survived the wreckage of the war screamed as the shoreline bent inward like a mouth swallowing itself. Ships were swallowed whole, towers collapsed into spray, and even the clouds above twisted in spirals that mirrored the abyss below.
Then came the first tremor.
The Abyss split wider, its edges glowing with a sickly green fire. Something moved within, not one presence, but many. Gods long forgotten. Leviathans whose names had been erased from memory. Beings that predated Olympus itself.
Poseidon’s jaw tightened. He remembered the Abyss. He remembered being banished into it, his chains dragging him down, his screams swallowed by infinite pressure. It had not been death. It had been suffocation. Endless, eternal.
Now, those he had once been imprisoned beside stirred, their voices like thunder in his skull.
"Brother of the depths... why do you stand above, when we remain below?"
"You were freed, while we drowned. Will you betray us too?"
"Open the seal. Break the cage. Let the Abyss rise."
Poseidon gripped his trident tighter. He had not clawed his way back into power only to unleash forces that could consume him as well. Yet, to deny them outright... the sea itself shuddered at the thought.
Behind him, mortals screamed again as the ground fissured. Saltwater gushed from every crack, not upward, but downward, pouring into the Abyss as though the entire ocean itself were offering tribute.
The decision could not be delayed.
"Enough," Poseidon’s voice cut across the battlefield, low and commanding. His tone silenced the cries of mortals and the whispers of gods alike. "The Abyss does not dictate my will. I am not your prisoner. I am not your heir. I am the tide itself."
But the Abyss answered with hunger.
A colossal hand, black as obsidian and scaled with barnacles older than time, thrust upward through the rift. Its fingers were longer than towers, dripping with brine that hissed like acid as it touched the mortal stone.
Mortals fled. Even broken gods, still lingering at the edge of battle, recoiled.
Poseidon did not move. His trident shimmered with light as he lifted it skyward. Water erupted in colossal pillars around him, forming a cage of spiraling currents that met the Abyssal hand with crushing force.
The impact shook the heavens.
Stone split. The sea howled. And yet Poseidon remained unshaken. His power did not falter.
"You forget," Poseidon said, his voice echoing across land and sea. "I am not the one reaching upward. You are the one dragging downward."
The Abyss roared, its voice vibrating the marrow of every living creature within a thousand leagues. The hand withdrew, but the fissure did not close. More voices surged from within, some pleading, others cursing.
And then—three shadows emerged.
Not full bodies, not yet. But the outlines of three gods drowned long ago. Their eyes glowed with hatred, their crowns twisted with coral and broken shells. They were Abyssals—once Olympians, now warped by the trench.
"Poseidon..." the central one hissed. "You left us. You wear the tide as your crown, but your throne rests on our bones."
"I owe you nothing," Poseidon answered coldly.
"You owe us release," they thundered in unison.
The sea itself tilted, waves crashing inland, tearing apart cliffs as though the earth itself tried to bow to their demand. The Abyss sought to rise fully. And Poseidon knew: this was no mere battle. This was a reckoning.
He lifted his trident, its tips gleaming with the power of every tide, every storm, every current. His voice cut like lightning.
"Then come. If you seek to rise through me, then drown in me instead."
And with that, he leapt.
The ocean obeyed instantly. A spiral vortex opened beneath him, dragging him down—not into weakness, but into his own domain, where mortal eyes could not follow. He met the Abyss head-on.
The first Abyssal god roared, swinging a blade made from petrified reef. Poseidon’s trident caught it, water surging outward in a shockwave that ripped apart the very trench.
The second unleashed chains of kelp and bone, seeking to bind him as Olympus once had. But Poseidon’s body surged with tideforce, his flesh liquid and infinite—no chain could hold him.
The third whispered curses, flooding his mind with echoes of the centuries he had spent drowning in silence. For a heartbeat, Poseidon faltered, his breath stilled as the memory clawed at him.
But then—he smiled.
"Do you think I fear drowning?" His voice was both thunder and surf. "I am the drowning."
With a single sweep of his trident, he shattered the curse. The waters themselves screamed as his command obliterated the Abyssal god’s hold.
The battle raged in total darkness, the mortal world above quaking with every strike. Cities far inland saw the ocean retreat, then rush forward again in impossible tides. Mountains cracked. Rivers reversed their flow. The world knew: Poseidon was no longer merely a god. He was the sea itself, in motion.
And as he clashed with the three Abyssals, the question burned in every god’s mind: would he rise victorious... or would the Abyss finally claim him again?
Where once there had been hills, towers, and mortals watching from trembling fortresses, now there was only water. A continent-sized basin, filled to its brim, stretched as far as the horizon. Seas where there should have been land. Drowned forests where there had once been villages. And at the heart of it, amidst whirlpools spinning like ravenous mouths, stood Poseidon.
He did not need to move to be terrible. His hair hung like strands of kelp, and his trident hummed with a resonance that made mountains shiver far away. The tide rose and fell with his breath, and yet his expression was calm—eyes gleaming like twin abysses.
The gods who opposed him stood bloodied, but not broken.
Zephyros, God of Sky and Judgment, hovered above on wings of storm. His armor cracked and soaked, his hands clutching a spear woven of lightning, but his gaze never wavered.