"She asked for us to hold off until she has her meeting. So just wait, Tasey."
He watched me like I was about to break loose.
My younger brother, a shade lighter than me, looked more tired than hunted. That was the funny thing about legends—out in the real world, "Agni, the hidden brother wanted by the world," just looked like a man who hadn't slept enough since the Tear reopened.
Today he was making an appearance in the open.
With Crow and his little ragtag group here to aid Grim as a decent squad of A-rank Travelers, me and this bastard were on entertainment duty.
Meaning: we were the leash. Not on the kids.
On me.
"We should be acting now before they're caught," I said. Purple flame licked along my knuckles, drifting off my hand in faint tongues, hungry for something to burn. "I'd rather no—"
"Since when did you stop trusting Grim as your second?" Agni cut in.
His tone was mild, but his eyes weren't. They were the color of banked coals—hotter the calmer they looked.
"He's an SS-ranked Traveler. Besides Ares and Athena watching us from over there, no one else can cause an issue here. Their main goal is to keep you from skinning the kid."
"'Ares and Athena,'" I echoed, glancing over my shoulder.
Our audience stood on the far side of the rooftop, pretending not to listen.
Ares leaned against a rusted ventilation unit in a simple jacket and boots, hands in his pockets, posture loose in that way only people who'd survived too many wars could manage. The air bent around him with a quiet, suffocating pressure—weight of battlefields, of a thousand decisions that ended in blood.
Next to him, Athena was the opposite kind of threat. Neat suit, hair pinned back, glasses she didn't need perched on her nose as she scrolled something only she could see. No mana leaking, no visible aura—just the heavy sensation that every move on this board had already been considered ten turns ahead, and we were all pieces she'd decided to keep.
Olympus' warhound and their little strategist, standing there like this was another performance review.
Both radiated that subtle, terrifying certainty you only got from people who could step into the Astral and never come back out wrong.
And both of them had their eyes on me, not the sewer hatch.
"Grim will be there," Agni went on, as if I hadn't looked away. "But it's their mess, their generation. At some point, the kids have to learn to stand on their own. We step in if it turns into a slaughter," he said, eyes briefly flicking toward me, "not before."
I clicked my tongue, but I didn't argue.
Not out loud.
My purple flames crackled, reacting to the agitation under my skin. Agni's own fire answered unconsciously—bright orange, almost gold, spilling from his palm in a controlled ribbon that sliced through mine and forced them to retreat.
He didn't even look at it.
"That's enough," he added under his breath.
"They're still kids," I said, voice low. "It's easy for Olympus to talk about letting the new generation stand when they're not the ones bringing bodies back in bags. I'm the one who has to pick up what's left when 'standing' doesn't work."
"They're not children anymore, Tasey," Agni said. "Not by our standards. Same generation as Zeus. Same rank. Same broken sky. You keep calling them kids, you'll never stop wanting to put your hand on the scale."
"And?" I growled.
We stood on a roof overlooking the city's underbelly. Far below, cars moved like blood through veins, and the sewer access Grim had chosen for the infiltration sat innocuous and rusted near a half-abandoned lot. From up here, it looked small. Harmless.
Like the Tear had, once.
"One wrong move down there," I said, "and that boy will turn this part of the city into a crater just to make a point. He's not stable."
Agni snorted. "Neither were we at his age."
"Exactly," I said.
Agni looked away, out over the city. The winter light caught on the faint scars along his jaw—the kind you didn't get from knives, but from concepts.
"Artemis told us to wait," he said. "So we wait. We've owed her since before the Tear reopened. I'm not about to repay that debt by ignoring one of the only people left who actually knows how to herd monsters without losing her mind."
"She's not going to like the word 'herd,'" I muttered.
"She can take it up with me later," he said. "If you're that worried, then hope the little Crow doesn't humiliate Zeus too badly. Pride kills faster than blades in their circles."
I stared down at the spot where the kids would be entering, jaw clenched so tightly it hurt.
The logical part of me knew Agni was right. The old guard could keep putting out fires forever, but the next generation had to learn how to balance the matches themselves. We weren't going to be around to supervise every grudge.
The rest of me remembered blood in gutters and parents shrieking over the bodies of children who never should've been on the front lines in the first place.
"We step in if it turns into a slaughter," I repeated. "Not before."
Ares and Athena didn't move. But I could feel their attention sharpen, like Olympus had wrapped a leash around my neck and was testing how far I'd pull.
"Fine," I exhaled. "We do it Artemis' way."
"Finally," Agni said, rolling his shoulders. His flame vanished with a lazy wave, like he'd simply decided it was done existing. "Try to look less like you're about to murder someone when she calls to check in."
"No promises," I muttered.
Below us, somewhere under the streets, the kids were heading toward a boy who called himself a god.
⎻⎻⎻
"Ms. Artemis, I don't think it's a hard request to rely on. Our supporters want more children sheltered under your program, so opening it up to the world is the rig—"
I cut him off with a raised hand.
Jim Tancer froze.
Vice-presidential candidate. The polling darling who'd somehow convinced half the country he could stand between Travelers and government without getting crushed. Walking compromise in a tailored suit—who had just remembered, on live television, that he was sitting across from someone whose people leveled dungeons for practice.
The room buzzed with quiet machinery. Three cameras, not one. A primary straight on us, a side angle for reaction shots, a third catching the full table and the flags behind. Red tally lights burned over each lens. A producer's voice murmured in someone's earpiece. A digital clock over the door counted seconds in unforgiving red.
Somewhere on the other side of that glass eye, millions of people watched this live.
One wrong sentence, and half of them would start screaming for blood.
I let the silence hang.
Negotiation rooms always smelled the same: recycled air, cheap coffee, fear dressed up as confidence. This one had the extra tang of hairspray and hot lights. Neutral hotel conference space, security sweep already done twice by our people, once by his. Chiron sat against the wall to my left, pretending to scroll his tablet, eyes half-closed. The two silent monsters he'd brought as "assistants" lounged near the door, half-shadow, half-threat.
A discreet red light near the ceiling confirmed what the world already knew: LIVE.
With us no longer under the government, or aiming to be, any deals we made would be treated as business.
That was the line I'd repeated to myself all morning.
Business, not leash.
"What normal humans want," I said, letting my voice settle into a calm that wasn't quite gentle, "or their attempts to carve their own benefits out of us, isn't going to work anymore."
The words went out through the cameras, through satellites, into living rooms and newsfeeds and guild halls. Someone, somewhere, clipped them even as I spoke.
Jim's throat worked. His staffers shifted behind him but said nothing. The one with the tablet looked like she wanted to vanish into the carpet, probably very aware the whole country was watching every flinch.
"I think you have the idea very backwards," I continued. "I'm mainly the figurehead for a group of rabid dogs. I only banned government policy that restricted their freedom of choice."
His mouth twitched at the phrase rabid dogs. The cameras caught it. The commentators would slow it down later, argue about whether it showed fear or respect.
"If these guilds don't want to, then I won't force them," I said. "I'm sure you understand the standard system we use to recruit students."
He hesitated, then nodded slowly. We'd gone over this in briefing documents, but paper wasn't the same as hearing it out loud—broadcast to a nation that could tear itself in half if the wrong people decided to be offended.
"The guilds haven't stopped recruiting orphans and civilian children who lack knowledge, or who could be tempted by people like Zeus or the current administration," I went on. "The only thing we concern ourselves with, as the Society, is maintaining integrity among men and women our own society can no longer govern."
He clenched his fist on the table, then forced it to relax. I watched the whole process. So did everyone else.
The desire to argue. The memory of what happened the last time a politician decided to "govern" people who could rewrite physics.
"Ms. Artemis—"
"Nicole," I corrected.
He blinked. The primary camera angle shifted a fraction, reframing us both.
"Nicole," he amended.
"You're not here as a representative of 'normal humans,' Jim," I said. "You've got enough astral residue in your system now to qualify for C-rank if we ever tested you formally. So stop pretending this is about you being left out in the cold."
His staffers stiffened. He went pale, then flushed. The camera saw all of it and didn't care.
"I—didn't realize it was that obvious," he said.
"It isn't," I said. "To anyone but us."
One of Chiron's "assistants" chuckled quietly. I didn't look their way.
"Now," I continued, folding my hands on the table, "if you're asking for us to establish a new agreement with your party—who's going to win—then you'll have to at least talk to Baldur, who's more respected as the King of American Explorers and as an SSS-ranked Traveler."
The director cut, I could feel it more than see it—a slight shift in the atmosphere as the feed went wide enough to catch the flags, the table, our whole posture.
Jim grimaced at the word win, but he didn't deny it. Politicians hated when someone skipped the theater and said the ending out loud.
"Don't take it the wrong way," I added. "But I've already done the best I could by implementing the new school system for kids who shouldn't take the Traveler path. That doesn't mean it's the end, and neither will there be judgment by any parties."
"You call that a 'school system,'" Chiron muttered from the wall. "The media calls it a slaughterhouse."
I didn't look at him either. "The media can call it whatever gets them clicks," I said. "We both know the ones who failed my test would've died screaming in their first real dungeon if we'd done things their way instead."
A beat of silence.
Somewhere, in a hundred living rooms, parents went cold thinking about their kids.
Jim flinched. Good. Let him picture it. Let the millions watching picture it.
"We understand better than anyone," I said, turning back to him, "that everyone kept having kids and is now afraid of a future you're slowly realizing is leaving our nest behind. Even you possess astral energy—a small amount, barely touching C-rank—but even our generation, who didn't enter the Sea, still benefited."
The words tasted bitter. Our generation. The ones who'd missed the first wave of insanity, only to find out that standing on the shore wasn't safety—just a different kind of drowning.
"I can't explain more about how you'll benefit in the future," I continued. "But the man you're following isn't reckless enough to keep pushing this. So just follow his steps."
"The President," he said quietly.
"Yes," I said. "He's willing to take the political beating. We're willing to keep the beating from turning into a war. That's the trade."
In the control room, someone was already framing that sentence as a pull quote.
I leaned back.
"We'll handle our side and keep things from going too far," I said. "As long as you all can agree to this, we won't let Travelers harm our fellow countrymen either."
His shoulders sagged. It was subtle, but it was there—the first honest reaction he'd had since this meeting started.
"…You talk like it's already decided," he said. "Like the best we can do is pick where we stand when the tide comes in."
"It is already decided," Chiron said before I could answer, eyes still on his tablet. "The only people who don't know that are the ones who still think 'gods' is a metaphor."
The director stayed on us anyway. They knew Chiron's voice worked better as disembodied dread.
Jim's jaw worked.
"There's a quiet understanding many are coming to," I said. "Our parents are either being slowly poisoned by astral presence, or their lives are simply coming to an end. Even the non-Travelers of my generation will outlive our parents by miles, while a lot of the old guard refuse to hand over the reins."
I thought of my mother. Of the lines on her face that weren't there ten years ago. Of the way she looked at the Sea now—not with fear, but with the resigned exhaustion of someone who knows they'll never map the whole thing.
"A lot of us understand it's about when they step down," I added, "not if."
Jim stared at the table.
"So we can wait," I finished. "We've been waiting since the Tear reopened. We can wait a little longer, as long as people like you don't make things worse out of fear."
He raised his eyes. There was something new in them—less panic, more anger. Not at me.
"At Zeus," he said. Not a question.
"At anyone who thinks they can build an empire out of broken kids and borrowed divinity," I said. "Your President is giving my people space to fix our own trash. The least you can do is not try to sell tickets to the cleanup."
Somewhere, a hundred extremist channels clipped that line and started foaming at the mouth. Somewhere else, a hundred tired parents exhaled and said, Good.
His lips twitched. "You realize that's not how my campaign manager phrased it."
"I don't care how your campaign manager phrased it," I said. "I care that when my students walk down a street, they don't have to worry about being snatched by some minor guild backed by Olympus, or by whatever patchwork cult Zeus cobbled together."
I held his gaze.
"Let us handle Zeus," I said. "You handle the press."
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Then Jim Tancer nodded once.
"…We'll draft the framework for a new public statement," he said. "Aligning with your 'no conscription' stance. No recruitment of minors without Society vetting. No back-channel contracts with Olympus."
He knew it. I knew it. Everyone watching knew it.
This was the sentence that could split the country in half.
His staffers looked like he'd just promised to jump out a window on live TV. Somewhere in the corner, the red tally light kept burning—silent witness that he'd said it.
"Good," I said. "Send it to Baldur first."
He blinked. "Not you?"
"I'm the figurehead, remember?" I said. "He's the one the monsters listen to when it's time to stop."
Chiron snorted.
The tension in the room shifted—still taut, but with direction now. Fear had a shape.
And far beneath us, in a sewer passage that smelled like rot and metal, that shape was walking toward a boy named after a god.
If we said the wrong things here, the country broke.
If the kids did the wrong thing down there, the world bled.
⎻⎻⎻
"Okay, keep your head down. We're almost inside."
Grim's voice bounced off the damp concrete.
I listened as he directed us into the sewer passage. Thomas backed him up directly from behind, Alexis walked in the middle, and I held the rear. Everyone kept their mouths shut.
The air was thick with old water, rust, and the kind of cheap industrial cleanser that never quite wins against mold. Our boots splashed through shallow, stagnant filth. Runes glowed faintly along the walls—Grim's, not Zeus'. Layers of precaution over precaution.
If something went wrong down here, it wouldn't be because we tripped an alarm.
The target of the mission was Zeus—Charles.
Humiliate him. Prove he wasn't worthy of the divine name he'd wrapped around himself.
The act itself was as basic as breathing in our world: be stronger than the one claiming the title. Divine names weren't participation trophies. You didn't deserve to keep one if you couldn't back it up in a straight fight.
Charles was a couple of years older than me, but we were the same generation, born under the same broken sky and handed the same miracle start. Both of us borderline S-tier with ridiculous beginnings, yet he was the one acting like some king of the trash mountain.
Grim walked point, but even an idiot could tell this wasn't meant to be his fight. The adults were here to stop a massacre, not hold our hands. This was our mess to clean up.
"You're grinding your teeth again," Alexis murmured ahead of me, voice barely above the drip-drip of water.
"Am I?" I said.
"It sounds like two rocks trying to kiss," Thomas added cheerfully.
"Focus," Grim said without turning. "Last thing we need is Zeus' rats hearing you romance your molars."
Thomas snorted, but he shut up.
The tunnel narrowed, then opened into a wider corridor. Grim's lantern—a simple orb of condensed mana—threw long shadows ahead, painting graffiti and old maintenance marks in sickly pale light. Somewhere above, the city hummed oblivious.
Even Oceanus, Zeus' grandfather, had apparently quietly signed off on this. Uranus had made a public statement that Zeus was to go by Charles—his birth name—an Explorer-rank individual who'd disappeared from the public eye, same as Thor the Blood Demon.
For Uranus to speak at all was rare. For him to speak against his own blood said everything.
Old gods don't waste words. When they name you, or strip a name away, the entire Sea listens.
"With Uncle Tasey and Agni sending kids back to my mom for treatment at the Society, they've already dismantled any influence Zeus held among minor guilds," Alexis whispered, like she was reminding herself as much as us. "Ares hunted down Apollo and the fake Artemis and left them hanging for weeks."
"As he should," Thomas muttered. "Calling yourself a divine anything when you can't even sense a real path—"
"Quiet," Grim said.
We all shut up.
Ares had punished them himself. Stripped their claimed divinities in public—took back the names they'd tried to wear like stolen jewelry. A blessing in disguise, if the rumors were true that Athena wanted to use them as an example for a new rule: claiming any divine name would be reserved for SS–SSS tier only.
Probably an agreement made by all Explorers and SSS Travelers. A line in the sand. A way of telling the world: this far, no further, if you want to call yourself myth.
Zeus had heard that line and decided to spit on it.
Grim's hand went up, and we stopped before the door to Zeus' hideout under the city.
It didn't look like much. Just a thicker segment of concrete wall, patched unevenly in places, with water stains trailing down like tears. But the mana traces told a different story—layers of reinforcement, noise-dampening, and a single, arrogant signature burned right into the center.
Lightning. Wind. A twist of something that wanted to be kingly and just ended up loud.
Music and laughter bled through the concrete—some kind of party on the other side. Drums, bass, the buzz of electric amps. Voices raised in drunk bravado. The occasional crackle of uncontrolled lightning, followed by shrieks of delighted fear.
"Subtle," Alexis murmured.
"Kids who think they're gods don't do subtle," Grim said, already kneeling to unpack the charges from his bag. "Thomas, watch the rear. Crow, you're with me. Alexis, monitor the ambient flow. I don't want any surprises from the Sea while we're cutting a hole in reality."
I moved up beside him as he began placing explosives along the wall. Civilian military-grade. Enough to blow a hole, not enough to seriously injure A-ranks unless they were sleeping right against the concrete.
Everyone knew the rule: you don't wantonly kill A-ranks unless you're ready for a hunting party.
Tonight wasn't about a body.
It was about a throne—and proving a name was empty.
"You sure you're ready for this?" Grim asked without looking at me.
I watched his hands move—precise, economical, the way only someone who'd done this on real battlefields could manage.
"Ready as I'll ever be," I said.
"That's not what I asked," he said mildly.
I exhaled.
Zeus. Charles. The boy who'd once been the loudest voice in the "we're gods now" chat channels. The one who'd tried to recruit me into his little Olympus knockoff just because my surname was redacted in more places than his.
We'd been on the same side in the first dungeons. Bleeding together in corridors that smelled like fear and sulfur. He'd laughed when I set the ceiling on fire to stop a wave of monsters. I'd laughed when he turned a mimic into a smoking crater.
Then he'd started calling himself Zeus.
Then he'd started treating other kids like NPCs in his personal myth.
Then Tasey had walked into my room with a file, tossed it on my bed, and said, "You're the only one his age I trust to prove that name doesn't fit him without making it worse."
"Grim," I said quietly. "If I lose, what happens?"
He finished setting the last charge and sat back on his heels.
"If you lose clean, the name stays with him," Grim said. "The old man and the rest will figure out how to contain the fallout. If he cheats, or if his people jump in… we step in."
"We," Thomas echoed from the back, voice darker than usual.
"And if it turns into a slaughter," Alexis added, almost under her breath.
"Then Tasey and Agni stop waiting on the roof," Grim said. "And this city gets to learn what war really looks like."
He paused, then added, "If you win—clean—he doesn't get to hide behind that name anymore. You're not here to take it. Just to crack it in front of everyone who matters. After that, the councils and the old monsters can decide what happens to 'Zeus.'"
Silence. Even the dripping water seemed to quiet.
I flexed my hand, feeling the Astral respond. The Sea pressed close down here, a thick, suffocating presence just beyond the concrete skin of the world. It knew what we were about to do.
"Failure isn't the end," I said, more to myself than them. "Death is."
"Exactly," Grim said. "And you're not dying tonight. Not here. Not for him."
He stood, dusted off his knees, and pressed his palm to the first charge. Faint sigils lit up, syncing with his mana.
"On my mark," he said. "Alexis?"
She closed her eyes, hands hovering near the wall, not touching. Light gathered at her fingertips, threads weaving into a lattice that mirrored Grim's explosives.
"Barrier ready," she said. "I'll catch the worst of the shock and redirect it down the tunnel. Thomas?"
Thomas rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck.
"If something comes through that isn't invited, I break it," he said simply.
"Good," Grim said. "Crow?"
I inhaled slow, feeling my core pulse in time with the distant bass on the other side of the wall.
"I walk in," I said, "and I prove he doesn't deserve his name."
Grim's lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"That's the spirit," he said.
He tapped the detonation rune.
The world jumped.
Sound slammed down the tunnel—a compressed boom as the charges went off, concrete screaming and dust exploding outward. Alexis' barrier caught the worst of it; the blast washed around us like a wave hitting a rock. Bits of rebar shrieked and bent, clattering to the floor.
When the dust settled, there was a jagged wound where the wall had been. Smoke curled from fractured concrete. Beyond, the party had cut off mid-chorus. Shouting replaced singing. Panic replaced laughter.
I stepped forward through the settling haze.
On the other side of the new doorway, a wide room opened up—part basement, part throne room, part nightclub. Neon lights flickered, struggling against the dust. Makeshift banners with hand-painted lightning bolts hung crookedly along the walls. Young men and women in mismatched armor and streetwear stared at us with wide eyes, fingers twitching toward weapons and half-formed spells.
At the far end, on a raised platform that had once been a maintenance scaffolding, he stood.
Charles.
Zeus.
White hair he'd dyed himself, slightly uneven. Lightning dancing along his arms in careless arcs. Eyes that used to hold shared jokes now filled with something brittle and desperate.
He grinned when he saw me, arms spreading wide.
"Crow!" he called over the echoing dust and shouts. "You could've just knocked, you know."
Behind me, I heard Grim exhale quietly. Alexis' barrier hummed at my back. Thomas' mana flared, not quite touching mine, but there. Solid.
"I did," I said.
I stepped fully into the room.
Kids scattered, some stumbling, some falling, clearing a path without quite realizing they were doing it. The Sea rolled closer, drawn by the gathering tension, by the clash of names.
Charles tilted his head, lightning intensifying.
"So," he said. "You come to bow, or to bark?"
My heart beat steady.
"This isn't your throne," I said. "And that isn't your name."
The room held its breath.
Above us, on every screen still tuned to the live broadcast, people argued about whether peace was possible.
Down here, in the stink and the noise, we stepped into the circle anyway.
Because failure wasn't the end.
Death was.
And whether he kept calling himself Zeus after tonight or not, everyone who mattered would know the truth:
The name never really belonged to him.