Harry stepped out of the elevator and into the celestial city of Mount Olympus, and immediately found himself taken aback.
It was a magnificent sight, even more than he imagined, or at least it had been once from what he could see. Now, it was a masterpiece in the process of being dismantled by a hurricane of bronze and ichor. Golden and white streets, once polished to a mirror shine, were cracked and destroyed under the weight of war.
Statues of deities lay shattered on the floor like discarded toys. Columns that had once touched the literal heavens were snapped in half, their white marble guts spilling across the plazas.
"Yeah… this would've looked a lot better without the end of war vibe," Harry muttered, his voice sounding oddly loud.
He walked forward casually, his hands tucked into his pockets as if he were taking a Sunday stroll through a park rather than navigating the epicenter of what was essentially a divine coup.
Any monster that caught sight of him and charged simply… stopped. Killed before they could even bark out a challenge, he was not here to waste time on small fires.
He passed the broken forms of campers and Hunters of Artemis. Some were groaning, clutching shattered limbs with white-knuckled desperation, while others stared blankly at the sky, their journey of life finished. Harry's gaze lingered on the fallen for a second too long. He won't deny that he was a little bit angry at seeing dead kids all around him. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He wasn't a fan of seeing kids die, and no matter how much he didn't care for people, kids are a different thing, especially when they haven't done anything to him.
"…Tch." Then he sighed.
He kept moving, stepping over the frozen, blue-tinted figures that lined the thoroughfare, unlucky demigods turned into ice sculptures mid-swing.
"Hyperborean giants," Harry noted, glancing at the frost-covered marble and the expressions of pure terror locked in ice.
With a flick of his arm, the ice shattered, freeing the people trapped in them as they fell onto the floor, gasping for air.
Further ahead, He could feel great divinity.
"Ah… there you are."
He reached a massive pile of rubble, a collapsed pillar that was completely blocking the grand entrance to the throne room. Harry didn't even slow his pace. He simply lifted his hand, his claws slicing through the blockage.
Slash.
A vertical line of white energy hissed through the air, and the multi-ton structure split clean in half. The two massive pieces fell away with a thunderous crash, sending up a cloud of gold-dusted stone to reveal the chaos within the heart of the world.
Inside the throne room, it was like the very air was humming with the friction of clashing powers.
Percy Jackson and Thalia Grace were fighting side-by-side, a sight that made Harry raise an eyebrow in genuine surprise. In the book, this wasn't how the final act was supposed to play out. Thalia was supposed to be trapped, separated from the others, leaving Percy to face the titan king on his own.
"Well, I guess I already broke canon just by showing up," Harry murmured to himself, watching a bolt of lightning and a torrent of water strike the same target simultaneously. "Not that I'm complaining. This looks entertaining."
At the center of the room stood Kronos. He was using Luke Castellan's body like a well-fitted suit, though the skin looked stretched thin and unnaturally pale, as if the power vibrating within was threatening to burst the seams of the mortal vessel.
Time warped and stuttered around him like reality was glitching. Percy and Thalia were moving in jagged bursts, one moment moving at the speed of thought, the next slowed to an agonizing crawl as Kronos manipulated time around them with a wave of his hand.
Harry didn't jump in immediately. Instead, he drifted toward the edge of the room where Annabeth sat slumped against the base of her mother's throne, clutching a nasty, jagged wound in her side.
"Hey," Harry said, his voice cutting through the clashing steel. "You okay?"
Annabeth jolted, her bronze dagger flying up in a defensive reflex before she realized who it was. Her grey eyes were wide, bloodshot with exhaustion and shock. "When did you… How did you get here?! I thought you were at the reservoir battling Hyperion! What happened! What of the monster army?"
"He's dead," Harry replied, his tone as flat and matter-of-fact as if he were announcing the weather. "And his army followed suit shortly after. They weren't very durable."
Annabeth's mouth went dry, her mind struggling to reconcile the image of the invincible Lord of Light with this man's casual dismissal. "…That fast?" she whispered. She had seen Hyperion's radiance from miles away after they had left Harry to battle, he was once a Pillar of the World. To hear he had been defeated so quickly was… terrifying in its own right. Just how powerful was this mysterious man.
Oh, if Annabeth only had time to observe the man, but the war and everything hadn't really given her time to question the man properly when they were in camp, that and the instinct to run from him or run him through with a blade was also another reason.
Harry ignored the awe. He gestured to the dark red stain spreading across her shirt, his eyes narrowing at the wound. "You're injured. Deeply at that."
"I'm fine—" she started, her pride flaring as she tried to push herself up to prove she could still fight. She immediately doubled over, a sharp groan wince escaping her lips as the world tilted and the floor seemed to rush up to meet her.
"Yeah, no. You're really not. Sit down before you bleed out on your mother's upholstery."
"How did you get injured like this?" he asked her.
Annabeth ducked her head in shame. This had come because she tried reaching out to Luke. She felt really stupid. She had been angry at Percy for so long about him just calling Luke evil, and she felt like they were abandoning the boy. She had convinced herself that the old Luke was still in there, and she almost died for that.
She should have known better. Thalia, who had been with Luke the longest, had already given up on him, yet she had thought she at least could reach him. What a fool she was. Percy was right.
Harry sighed, reaching into his hammer space and summoning his healing vial. There were only a few drops left, and he hesitated for a fraction of a second, his thumb brushing the glass. It was one of the few things he couldn't easily replace. It came from his authority, and it takes all the sun power he stores in a day just for a drop, and he already used nearly everything to heal from that outer god's wound.
"Damn it… I'm getting soft in my old age," he grumbled, acting as if he were an old man.
He levitated a single, glowing drop of the liquid. It hung in the air like a shining star before landing softly on Annabeth's wound. Instantly, a warm, golden light enveloped her entire form. The shredded fabric of her clothes didn't mend, but the flesh beneath it did, knitting together in a flash and restoring life to her.
Annabeth exhaled a long, shuddering breath as the bone-deep ache vanished, replaced by a surge of vitality that made her head swim. The grey fog of shock cleared from her mind. "Thank you," she said, her voice steady and filled with a new kind of wariness. 'Just what the hell is that?' she thought, her eyes on the vial. It looked like nectar, but she was sure it wasn't.
Harry just nodded as he sent the vial back, his eyes already locked back on the center of the room, dismissing her as quickly as he'd healed her.
Annabeth watched the fight through fresh eyes, and for the first time in her life, she felt truly small compared to her fellow demigod. She had always prided herself on being a strategist, a daughter of wisdom who could outthink any monster and always believed that with enough wisdom, the gap in power wouldn't matter all that much.
But after meeting Percy, things started to change, and now the scale of power on display here was beyond the reach of human logic. Thalia was a blur of silver and blue, moving like a living lightning bolt, her spear clashing against Kronos's sword with sparks that could blind a mortal.
And Percy… Percy was a force of nature. He was flickering in and out of the time-slowed zones with a reckless intensity, his movements fluid and violent like water.
One moment, he was ten feet away, the next he was locked in a power struggle with the Titan King, the floor beneath them cracking from the sheer pressure of their meeting.
"Hm. They're actually quite impressive," Harry commented from beside her. "Though I could do better".
Annabeth frowned, her protective instincts for her friends flaring despite her awe. "Then why are you just standing here? If you're as strong as you say, why aren't you helping them? They're fighting for the world!"
Harry tilted his head, his green eyes reflecting the strobe-light flashes of lightning. "Why would I? They're handling things well enough for now. It's rare to see demigods touch the hem of true divinity like that, wouldn't you say. It's a formative experience. Almost… beautiful, in a way."
"'For now'?" Annabeth snapped, catching the sharp caveat in his voice.
"For now," Harry repeated, his voice dropping an octave. "I guess you can't feel it, but Kronos is getting more powerful, he's adapting to this body of his. Every moment that passes, he syncs deeper with the vessel. Once his full power from the pits of Tartarus finishes pouring in…"
Harry dragged a finger across his throat in a slow, deliberate motion.
"It's over. The vessel becomes complete. And a fully realized Titan King doesn't lose to children, no matter how much water or lightning they throw at him."
Annabeth's blood ran cold. She looked back at Percy and Thalia in fear for them.
Harry exhaled slowly. He'd wanted to wait, to enjoy the fight, but watching Kronos manipulate time, freezing the air, stuttering the flow of the world, reminded Harry of a significant gap in his own arsenal. He didn't have a counter for chronokinesis yet. Time was still a constraint to him, and like Percy and Thalia, who were resistant to the power thanks to being powerful demigods and Kronos being weak, Harry, too, could only rely on his campione resistance and power to counter the ability.
"I don't have a perfect answer for that trick…It would be stupid to wait for him to regain all his power just to test myself," he muttered, his fingers twitching against his thighs. "Eh. Guess I'll just have to figure it out mid-swing. Trial by fire is usually more educational anyway."
He stepped forward, his presence expanding like a rising tide as he entered the fare.
Percy didn't notice Harry at first. His entire universe had narrowed down to two flickering points of light, the golden eyes of Kronos and the silver arc of Thalia's spear.
Every muscle in his body burned with a fatigue that water couldn't quite wash away. The sword, Backbiter, was a nightmare made of tempered steel and celestial bronze, added with the pieces of Kronos ' scythe, making it capable of reaping the soul directly from the body.
Even with the Curse of Achilles making his skin like iron, Percy didnt want to take hits if they were not nesscesary but He had to stay between Kronos and Thalia, while he was thankful to have his cousin helping him in this fight he had also found it annoying because thalia couldnt risk taking even a single hit from the sword so he had to act as a human shield while she looked for an opening.
And she seemed to realize that point somewhere mid fight as she seemed to back away and change from spear to bow, helping him out from a distance despite arrows not doing a thing but annoying the titan thanks to his own curse of Achilles.
Percy wanted to finish this fight fast because he had noticed that as the fight went on longer, Kronos was getting stronger. He was getting faster with every strike. The time-stops were lasting longer, leaving Percy frozen in place while the sword whistled inches from his throat.
He wanted to end this fight, but the problem was that he didn't know Luke's weak point, and that was making things more frustrating.
Percy lunged in for a desperate strike—
And then, the air in the room exploded.
BOOM.
Something hit Kronos from the flank with the momentum of a runaway freight train. The Titan King was launched sideways, skipping across the throne room floor like a flat stone over a still pond before slamming into the far wall with enough force to bring down a section of the vaulted ceiling.
"holy hera," Thalia shouted as Annabeth blinked at what just happened.
Percy blinked, his sword half-raised, his brain struggling to process the sudden, violent absence of his enemy. "…Did… did a truck just hit him? I didn't think there were vehicles on Olympus."
The "truck" vanished as the dust settled. Harry stood exactly where Kronos had been a second ago.
Percy stared, his jaw hanging open as he recognized Harry. "Where the hell did you—you were just at the reservoir! What happened with Hyperion!" he couldn't help but ask.
The wall at the far end of the room exploded outward as Kronos stepped from the rubble, his golden eyes glowing with a light so bright it was physically painful to look him in the eyes. The sneering cold arrogance was gone, replaced by rage that made the air feel like it was boiling.
"You," the Titan King growled, the word causing the floor beneath his feet to crack.
Harry grinned, his own eyes flashing with that familiar, dangerous emerald light. "Me?"
"The so-called son of Pandora," Kronos sneered, his voice a chorus of a thousand screaming souls echoing from the depths of time. "I do not know what dark hole you crawled out of, mortal, but I will enjoy tearing you apart and watching your cooling corpse."
Harry cracked his neck, the sound echoing clearly in the sudden, heavy silence of the room. The pressure was so intense now that the demigods felt like they were being pushed to their knees.
"Yeah, yeah. You and every other 'god' I've met," Harry said, rolling his shoulders as he stepped into a relaxed combat stance. The air in the room suddenly felt twice as heavy, a dark, scary pressure emanating from him that rivaled the Titan King's own.
'run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run,run' those were what were screaming in the heads of the demigods as they watched the man getting ready to fight the titan king.
For the first time since the war began, Kronos stopped looking at the Prophecy Child. He stopped looking at the Daughter of Zeus. His gaze locked onto the man standing casually in the center of the room.
Harry's smile faded. "Alright, old man," Harry said, his voice dropping to a low, melodic chill. "Why don't we send you back from the pits that you crawled out of."
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