Orario's walls were crowded with soldiers from end to end.
Hundreds of archers lined the battlements with arrows nocked and bowstrings creaking. Rows of mages stood behind them, staffs lowered, chants held ready on their lips. Siege engineers manned the great ballistae, and defensive units had packed every tower and stairwell for a long, grinding war. Damien stood at the center of it all on the northern wall, wind tugging at his coat, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
The plan was simple. If Zeus was as arrogant as Damien believed, he would attack from the north, across open plains where every soldier could be seen from miles away. If he did, Orario would dominate the field, and the war against his demigod army would be an easy one. That would leave only the gods, and the gods were Damien's to handle.
It did not take long to learn he was right.
Half an hour. That was all the time Orario needed to spot the army marching across the northern plain, count it, analyze it, and prepare an answer. Zeus had shown his entire hand without a single attempt at deception. Damien watched the black mass of the enemy crawling toward the city and asked himself the obvious question. Why would anyone do that?
He had prepared for that answer too. The army was never the real attack. Zeus intended to strike Orario himself, first.
The sky above the city darkened. A cloud rolled in out of nowhere, thick and bruised, and yellow lightning began to crack through its belly in slow, hungry pulses. Then it fell. Hundreds of connected bolts hammered down toward the walls like a sentence being passed, a judgment meant for every soldier standing there.
Damien's shadows did not care for being judged.
The ground beneath the wall split open and darkness poured out of it, rising and thickening until it formed a giant in Damien's own image, a towering silhouette of living shadow that stood taller than the highest tower. It raised both hands and caught the lightning as it fell. Bolt after bolt after bolt bent toward its palms and gathered there, a screaming cluster of yellow fire crushed in a fist of black.
Then the giant cracked it. The whole mass of lightning snapped like dry kindling, and the sound rolled across the plains as a dare thrown straight at the gods.
A laugh answered it from the sky.
"Boy." Zeus's voice rolled down from the clouds, vast and amused. "I admit it. You are no mortal. You are a rightful god in your own right, and pride like yours is something I can respect. NOW I respect it." The laughter faded into something colder. "And because I respect you, I will go all out to destroy you. ATTACK!"
The clouds parted.
Zeus hung in the open air with white hair streaming and lightning crawling across his shoulders, and behind him came the others. Thirty gods emerged from the storm, and each carried a different color of divinity that clashed against the next. The pale, shifting gold of the sandy deserts of Arabia. The cold jade and crimson of the Eastern pantheons. The sharp silver of the West. Most of them burned with the blue iron of the north or the white marble light of Greece. The sky itself seemed to strain under the weight of so much power hanging in one place.
"I bring you an army of gods," Zeus declared. "Not men."
Damien rose from the wall and floated in the air, looking up at the army above him with hands loose at his sides and not a trace of worry in his face.
"And I welcome that army," he said, "with darkness."
It did not move like an attack. It was not speed, not even speed beyond light. It was displacement. Darkness replaced the air, particle for particle and atom for atom, across ten full kilometers of sky in a single instant. To the soldiers on the walls and the demigod army marching across the plains, the heavens simply gained a gigantic, perfectly black rectangle, sharp-edged and silent, where the gods had been.
Inside it, the world was different.
Most of the gods had been caught. Damien was confident a few had slipped his trap, but most stood now in a domain he had shaped from memory. It was the Garden he had once named in the dungeon, vast and beautiful, with soft grass under their feet, flowers glowing faintly in the dusk, and a calm sky that made the sight of an army of gods feel faintly absurd.
Damien stood in front of Zeus and his closest allies, hands folded behind his back.
"I'll be honest with you," he said, and his voice was almost friendly. "Most of you are going to suffer today. The degree will vary. I'd rank it as death first, then torture for any of you who survive this and outlast the others I defeat. Since I'm being polite and warning you, I'll add this. Ending yourselves would be a kinder fate than death by my hands. If you want to start, I'm giving you roughly ten seconds before I begin killing."
It was theater, and he knew it. He wanted them to understand something simple. He did not fear them. They were the ones who ought to fear him.
Some of the gods laughed outright. Others traded jokes under their breath. A few bristled at the insult, and Zeus himself looked ready to roar with amusement. None of them took the words seriously. Why should they? They were gods.
"That's ten," Damien said. "So it's death by my hands."
The world turned black.
It was not dusk or shadow. It was pitch, absolute, without even a hint of outline. Gods with the eyes of owls and wolves, who could see through any night, found themselves blind. Something moved among them in the dark, too fast for any sense to catch. Two heads left their shoulders almost together, and two bodies dropped into the grass.
"He's dead! He's DEAD!" a god shrieked somewhere in the blackness.
"Another one here," came a second voice, shaking. "Another one gone."
"SILENCE!" Zeus's roar cracked across the dark like a whip, thick with rage. "The weak die. We survive. NOW KILL HIM!"
The darkness lifted for a heartbeat, just long enough for the surviving gods to see Damien standing in front of them with a severed head in each hand. Blood ran down his wrists. His expression had not changed at all.
He let both heads fall.
Pitch black swallowed the garden again.
....
Not all of the gods had been caught.
Hera and a handful of her followers had torn free of the darkness at the last instant and tumbled out onto open ground just outside the black box, panting, their robes scorched by the strain of the escape. They straightened, and found they were being watched.
Six figures stood along the edge of the northern wall, looking down on them. Behind those six stood four more, silent and still, their shapes cut sharply against the pale morning light.
One of the six smiled. It was not a kind smile.
"Good morning, Mother," Alcy said. "Or should I say Hera. My father's vengeful wife. The bitch who tried to POISON me."
Hera's face went white with fury. "HERACLES! You insolent little wretch. You come down here. NOW."
"Oh, I will." Alcy cracked her neck. "Here I come, Mother."
She stepped off the wall. There was nothing respectful about it. She dropped like a falling star, a streak of bronze and red hair and raw momentum, and her boots slammed into Hera's chest before the goddess could finish raising her hands. Hera went flying backward across the plain, gouging a long, ugly trench into the earth as she tumbled.
Alcy landed in a crouch, rose slowly, and pointed her blade at the wreckage.
"She's mine," she said.
Finn smiled from the wall, his golden-white eyes bright and his spear resting easy against his shoulder, as the other Generals and the four silent figures behind them began to ready themselves for the battle to come.
"Go for it," he said.
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