Orti Anima Sanguineque( Greek myths/pjo self inserts in the three Hechatoncheires with fromsoft games powers): chapter 2: Hell IS

POV: CHRISTOPHER "KOTTOS" MCCONNELL

“That is so fucked. All of this is so fucked. What kind of fucked isekai is that?”

I mean, seriously. What kind of cosmic joke gets you killed by what, simultaneous heart attacks? Aneurysms? Divine intervention? and dumps you in literal fucking hell with a hundred arms and the vague memory of your mom being the actual Earth?

My hands and Christ, there are so many of them, like someone hit ctrl-c ctrl-v on my skeleton and forgot to stop curl into fists. All of them. Simultaneously. Which is its own kind of trippy. I can feel each individual set of knuckles crack, each palm compress, each finger bend. It's like being a one-man percussion section except the instruments are made of bone and spite.

The ground beneath me, beneath us, is wrong. That's the only word for it. Wrong in a way that makes your teeth itch, makes your skin crawl, makes every survival instinct you've ever had start screaming.

It's not black. Black would be merciful. Black would be simple.

This is the color of old bruises. The kind that yellow around the edges and hurt worse three days later than they did when you got them. Purples and browns and sickly greens all swirled together like someone took every unpleasant color in existence and mixed them with malice.

The stone, if you can call it stone, pulses. Not regularly. Not like a heartbeat. More like… like irregular breathing. Like the ground itself is having an anxiety attack. Which, given that we're apparently inside the literal bowels of Greek hell, might not be far from the truth.

There's no sky.

I look up, all my eyes look up, which is another mindfuck I'm gonna have to deal with later—and there's just... absence. Not darkness. Absence. Like someone cut out that part of reality and didn't bother filling it back in. Occasionally, something moves up there. Shapes that hurt to look at. Shadows of things that cast light instead of blocking it.

I decide not to look up anymore.

"Well," Elijah's voice cuts through my inventory of our new shithole accommodations. His voice sounds different. Deeper. Like he's speaking from the bottom of a well. "One where we end first chapter in what seems like hell."

I bark out a laugh. Can't help it. Leave it to Elijah to drop a genre-aware comment while we're literally in what seems like Hell. The laugh echoes wrong. Comes back twisted. Like the walls are mocking me.

Good.

Let them mock. I've been mocked by better things than geography.

I force myself to actually look around instead of just cataloging the wrongness. Years of warehouse work taught me to assess spaces quickly, where the exits are, what's blocking the paths, what could fall on your head, what could be used as a weapon if Brad from shipping gets drunk again.

Except there are no exits here. No paths. No OSHA violations to report.

We're in what I can only describe as a cavern, except caverns imply rock and geology and things that make sense. This is more like... like reality gave up halfway through rendering. The walls curve in impossible ways. Sometimes they're close enough to touch and I do, because I'm a tactile thinker, I need to feel things and the surface is slick and warm and pulls away from my palm like it's disgusted.

Other times, the walls are miles away. I know this because I can see things moving along them. Big things. Things with too many legs. Things that might be looking back at us.

Above us, not the non-sky, but closer, maybe fifty feet up there are bridges. Or maybe they're roots. Or maybe they're ribs. They arch across the space in geometric patterns that make my eyes water when I try to follow them. Some of them are broken. Others look like they're healing. Which raises the uncomfortable question: if this place can heal, can it also hunt?

There's light, but it's not coming from anywhere. It just is. Like ambient radiation except instead of killing you with cancer it kills you with existential dread. Everything casts shadows in multiple directions. Some of the shadows move independently of their objects.

I make a mental note to not trust the shadows.

Actually, scratch that. I make a mental note to not trust anything.

The air, if it is air tastes like copper and rot and old fear. Every breath feels like swallowing something alive. Something that doesn't want to be swallowed. I can feel it sliding down my throat, can feel it settling in my lungs like it's colonizing me from the inside out.

There's sound, too. Constant. A low hum that's less heard and more felt. It vibrates in my teeth, in my bones, in the hundred arms I'm still not entirely sure are mine. Occasionally, the hum spikes into something almost like a scream. Distant. Muffled. Like it's coming from behind walls that are trying very hard to contain it.

I wonder what made those screams. I wonder if we'll make them too.

I wonder if we already are and just can't hear ourselves yet.

"So to recapitulate," Niko's voice cuts through my increasingly dark thoughts. He sounds remarkably calm for a guy who looks like a cathedral had sex with a starfish and produced offspring. "We were playing online and the three of us died and we woke up with our new mother who's called Gaia, something I knew at first glance and probably same for you which that name tells me something but I don't remember well, and our new father for no reason decided to be an asshole and decided to throw us into hell."

I turn to look at him. All of me turns. It's like being a turret. My body rotates with surprising smoothness considering I've got approximately a billion joints.

Niko looks... Christ, Niko looks like someone tried to draw a god from memory and kept adding details until it stopped making sense. He's tall taller than a warehouse ceiling, taller than reasonable, taller than physics should allow. His arms fold around and through themselves like an Escher painting. His face is almost human. Almost. But there are too many angles. Too many places where the light doesn't fall right.

"It still feels like a mix of a dream and a nightmare," Elijah says from my other side. His form is harder to pin down. It keeps shifting. Not moving. Shifting. Like he exists in several states simultaneously and my eyes can't decide which one to focus on. "But at least, I think I know who Gaia is."

I snort. Can't help it. "Of course you would know," I say, letting the old familiar teasing slide into my voice like a comfortable weapon. "That's nerd shit."

"Oh, fuck you," Niko fires back immediately, and thank God, thank Gaia? Thank whoever—that he sounds like himself. Annoyed and amused in equal measure. "You literally have a spreadsheet for optimal boss stagger timings. You have a spreadsheet for which flask upgrades to get in what order across six different builds. You have footnotes in your Discord posts. Footnotes, Chris. You're the nerd."

"Those are tactics," I shoot back. "That's applied knowledge. Strategy. What you do is memorizing which NPC said what in dialogue that literally doesn't affect gameplay."

"It affects the story—"

"—which doesn't affect the game—"

"—the story is part of the game, you uncultured swine—"

"—oh, I'm uncultured? Says the guy who pronounces 'Cainhurst' with a hard 'T'—"

"—it IS a hard 'T', you phonetically challenged Philistine—"

"—it's French, dickhead, the 'T' is silent—"

"—it's not French, it's FROM Software's extremely unsubtle reference to Carmilla which you would know if you'd ever read a book that didn't have numbers and percentages—"

"—I've read books—"

"—stat blocks don't count—"

"—fuck you, stat blocks are literature—"

Elijah's laugh cuts through our argument. It's a good laugh. The kind that makes you want to join in even if you're not sure what's funny. "You two are so fucking married," he says, and there's warmth in his voice. Affection. The kind that makes my chest hurt in a good way.

"If I'm married to anyone, it's my spreadsheets," I mutter, but I'm grinning. I can feel it pulling at my face, faces? in ways that should be wrong but somehow aren't.

"See, this is what I'm talking about," Niko says, gesturing with approximately nineteen arms. "You have a relationship with Excel. That's concerning. That’s like those weirdos being in love with A.I or something. That's the kind of thing therapists write papers about."

"Bold words from a man who writes fan theories about item descriptions."

"They're not fan theories, they're textual analysis—"

"They're the same picture—"

"I will End you—"

"You couldn't End a tutorial boss—"

"I have never died to tutorial bosses—"

"Asylum Demon. First playthrough. Four times."

There's a pause. A beautiful, golden pause.

"...fuck you for remembering that," Niko says, but he's laughing. We're all laughing. And for a second just a second, it doesn't matter that we're in hell. It doesn't matter that we died. It doesn't matter that we're monsters now, reincarnated as things that shouldn't exist.

For a second, we're just us. Three idiots who found each other in a dead subreddit and decided that was enough.

"You told me that the armor I asked to help me choose was better than starting armor," I point out, because I'm a petty bitch and I will take this to my grave. My second grave. Whatever.

"It IS better—"

"—not if you can't WEAR it because you don't have the stats—"

"—you were supposed to LEVEL UP—"

"—you didn't SAY that—"

"—it's IMPLICIT—"

"Oh, implicit, listen to Professor Loremaster over here with his implicit game mechanics—"

"—at least I understand that games have depth beyond 'hit thing until it dies'—"

"—hitting things until they die is a VALID strategy—"

"—it's the ONLY strategy you have—"

"—it WORKS—"

"—a broken clock is right twice a day—"

"—are you calling me a broken clock?—"

"—I'm calling you predictably simple—"

"I'll show you simple—"

"Boys," Elijah cuts in, and there's something in his voice that makes us both stop. Not authority exactly. More like... like he's the adult in the room and we're kids who just realized we've been caught. "While I wish I had popcorn so I could continue watching because this is prime entertainment, we still know mostly nothing. Which is why it's important that we understand a little bit more of our circumstances. Who Gaia is. What this place is. And what the hell we're supposed to do next."

I sigh. Niko sighs. We sigh in stereo, which is both funny and deeply annoying.

But Elijah's right. He's always right about this kind of thing. The interpersonal stuff. The keeping-us-from-imploding stuff.

"Fine," I mutter. "Lore time. Hit us, Professor."

Niko shifts. His many arms fold in that way he does when he's organizing thoughts. I've seen him do it a thousand times in Discord, even if I couldn't actually see him. It's the pause before a dissertation. The loading screen before a cutscene.

"If I remember well," he starts, and his voice takes on that quality it gets when he's pulling from deep memory. Lecturer voice. I'd make fun of him for it but honestly it's comforting. Familiar. "Gaia is supposed to be the Greek Primordial Goddess of the Earth. Or in other words, she's the Earth itself. Not just on the Earth or of the Earth. She IS Earth. Capital E. The whole thing. Every rock, every mountain, every handful of dirt from here to forever."

He pauses. Collects himself. Continues.

"In Greek mythology, she was married to Ouranos, primordial of the sky. Who was, and I cannot stress this enough, a colossal shithead. Because each time they had children, he found them ugly and took them by force from Gaia before throwing them in hell. Which, uh. Kinda sounds like our case."

I feel something cold settle in my stomach. Or stomachs. Do I have multiple stomachs now? Questions for later.

"We aren't one-eyed giant cyclops," Niko continues, and his voice is steadier now. More certain. "And when I think of myself, when I reach inside, I feel a name. And that name is—"

He stops. Takes a breath that sounds like wind through canyons.

"Briareos, Amalkeides."

The world stutters.

That's the only way to describe it. The world stutters. Like reality skipped a frame. Like existence briefly forgot what it was doing and had to reboot.

The ground stops pulsing. The distant screams stop screaming. The impossible geometry freezes mid-impossibility.

Everything and I mean everything stops to pay attention.

It's like the universe just turned its head to look at Niko. Like all of creation, every atom, every mote of dust, every shadow and every distant thing crawling on the walls, all of it stops and listens.

The silence is so profound it has weight. It presses down on us. Into us. Through us.

And in that silence, I hear something. Not with my ears. Deeper. In my bones. In the hundred arms that aren't quite mine yet.

Recognition.

The world knows his name. The world

remembers his name.

And that terrifies me more than anything else that's happened today.

The moment passes. Reality restarts. The screams resume. The geometry goes back to being impossible.

But something has changed. Something fundamental.

Niko just declared himself. And it feels as if hell answered.

"Which means," Niko continues, and his voice is shaking now, just slightly, "that we were probably reincarnated as the Hecatoncheires."

I wait for him to elaborate. This is his wheelhouse. His moment.

He doesn't disappoint.

"The Hecatoncheires," he says, settling into full explanation mode, "also called the Hundred-Handed Ones. There were three of us—them. Briareos, Kottos, and Gyes. Brothers. Born from Gaia and Ouranos at the literal beginning of everything. And we were... we were powerful. Ridiculously powerful. Each of us had a hundred arms and fifty heads—though I'm not seeing fifty heads on any of us, so maybe that part's negotiable and we were strong enough to fight gods. Plural. Like, multiple gods at once."

He shifts, arms gesturing as he talks. I can see him falling into the rhythm of it. The comfortable pattern of explaining lore.

"But we were also, apparently, so fucking ugly that our dad couldn't stand to look at us. So he grabbed us, literal newborns and chucked us into Tartarus. This place. Right here. Where we are now. He just... threw us away. Like garbage. Like we were mistakes he didn't want to deal with."

There's bitterness in his voice. Fresh and old at the same time.

"Gaia was pissed, obviously. You don't throw a mother's children into hell without consequences. She eventually convinced our younger brother, Kronos, the Titan to overthrow Ouranos. Which he did. With a scythe. To the dick. Very Greek. Very violent. And as part of that whole rebellion thing, Kronos freed us."

He pauses. The pause is meaningful.

"And then threw us back in."

"What," I say flatly.

"Yeah. Turns out Kronos was also kind of a shithead. He freed us, used us to help overthrow Dad, and then immediately turned around and was like 'actually you guys are still ugly and I don't trust you' and back into Tartarus we went. For another few thousand years."

"That's—"

"Wait, it gets better. Eventually, Zeus—Kronos's son, our nephew starts his own rebellion. Needs muscle. Remembers that hey, there are three incredibly powerful war machines rotting in hell. So he makes us a deal: fight for him in the Titanomachy, help him overthrow Kronos, and he'll let us stay free. Give us honored positions. Treat us like the gods we are."

"And did he?" Elijah asks quietly.

"Sort of? We fought. We won. The Titans got thrown into Tartarus, ironic and Zeus made us the guards. The jailers. We went from prisoners to wardens, which I guess is technically a promotion, but we're still mostly in hell. We're just in hell with a purpose now. We're the locks on the door. The guys who make sure the Titans stay down."

Silence settles over us as we process this.

"So you're saying," I start, and I can feel anger building in my chest like steam in a pressure cooker, "you're saying we've been reincarnated as three guys so ugly they were thrown in hell, and so much of a pussy that their little brother freed them and threw them back again. And kinda the same thing happened with the son of their little brother, Zeus, except the guy didn't throw them back because they made themselves his favorite weapon and shit. You wanna know something? Fuck that noise! There is no chance in hel—"

"We are already in hell," Elijah interjects smoothly. "But sure."

I give him the side-eye. Multiple side-eyes. An entire panorama of side-eyes.

"So like I was saying," I continue, because I am on a roll and I will not be stopped, "I'm not agreeing with our supposed future. We deserve fucking better. More than that, it's us. There was nothing, no challenge that we couldn't do together and we were not gods. We were just three assholes with controllers and too much time and we conquered every Soulsborne game that exists. Every. Single. One."

I'm pacing now. All of me is pacing. It's like being a one-man army on the march.

"More than that, you know the future. You know stuff. You know, in this other world, the lore of this new world we're in. Which means we can abuse that shit. We can metagame reality. We have the strategy guide to existence itself and we're gonna use it."

I stop pacing. Turn to face them both. Let the savage grin I feel building finally show on my face. Faces. Whatever.

"Fuck that lame ass future! Let's make a better one. And I know exactly what."

"What?" Niko asks, and I can hear the interest in his voice. The engagement. He's with me. He's always with me when I start planning.

"That's simple," I say, and the words taste like victory and violence. "We begin by making this place, this would-be prison, this hell, into our own fucking turf!"

There's a beat of silence.

Then Niko laughs. "You want to conquer hell."

"Damn right I want to conquer hell. Why not? We're already here. We're already powerful. And I am DONE being someone's tool. Someone's weapon. Someone's convenient monster to lock away when I'm not useful."

"So your plan," Elijah says slowly, "is to take over Tartarus."

"Yes."

"The prison that holds or will hold the strongest deities and the wretched monsters and the most unholy sinners."

"Yes."

"The hell dimension at the bottom of reality."

"Yes."

"That's insane," Niko says.

I grin wider. "You got a better idea?"

He's quiet for a moment. Then: "...no. No, I really don't. Fuck it, I'm in."