Hermes III

Hermes opened his eyes.

Not to the comforting darkness of unconsciousness, but to a world rendered in searing, agonizing clarity. Gold. Thick, molten trails of it carved burning paths down his cheeks, each droplet feeling like a branding iron against divine skin. They hissed where they struck the shattered earth beneath him, vaporizing sand into acrid smoke. The pain wasn't just physical. It was an absence, a yawning chasm ripped through the very fabric of his being. He could feel it. Not the lingering echo of Benthesicyme’s agony-spell that still twitched in his nerves like live wires dipped in acid – a sensation that had mercifully blanked his mind moments before – but something infinitely deeper. Something vital was gone.

May.

Her name wasn't a thought; it was a wound. A raw, open gash in his soul. He knew. Not through deduction, but through the terrifying, absolute clarity now burning within him. He could feel the hollow space where her presence, her warmth, her very essence had always resonated. She hadn’t just died. She had unmade herself. For him. Every laugh shared in their sun-drenched kitchen, every worried glance over Luke, every whispered promise in the dark… all of it, every particle of May, had been offered up, consumed in a pyre of purest love to fuel… this. This impossible sight. This crushing knowledge. The ocean of pain radiating from his battered form – muscles screaming, divine ichor weeping from unseen fractures, the lingering rot-spell gnawing at his core – was a mere whisper against the deafening roar of that loss. A stubbed toe compared to the amputation of his soul.

Why? Oh, May, why?

He understood the mechanics, the terrible logic, even as the grief threatened to drown him. Clear-sighted mortals like May weren't merely immune to illusions; they existed with the veil perpetually torn away. They saw the tangled roots of the past, the branching possibilities of the future – not the fixed path of the Moirai, but the shimmering, chaotic spectrum of what could be. It required an unbearable focus, a constant flaying of the mind against realities mortals weren't meant to perceive. Madness was the toll, paid in sanity and self. Now, that terrifying gift, that fragile, fractured lens, had been fused with his own divine existence. He was Hermes, son of Zeus, fleet-footed, cunning, bearer of burdens… and now, vessel of a sacrifice that scorched his eternity.

There would be no Elysium for her. No Asphodel meadows. No rebirth. She had given him everything she ever was, everything she could have become. Every potential future erased, condensed into a single, devastating act of defiance against Fate itself. The kindness was infinite; the cruelty, absolute. It was the ultimate gift and the eternal curse, wrapped in the scent of old books and summer rain that now only haunted him.

Golden tears blurred the descending horror. Benthesicyme’s orb of compressed ocean, a miniature dying star, plummeted towards him and Thanatos. It promised obliteration, a crushing embrace that would extinguish divine sparks. The pain in his body shrieked, demanding surrender. It meant nothing. Less than dust. He raised his left hand, not towards the orb, but towards the space around it. Towards the shimmering, phantom possibilities flickering at the edges of his new, terrible sight. He didn't summon power; he rejected a future.

His hand closed.

Not with a fist, but with the deliberate, crushing finality of someone squeezing the last juice from a pomegranate seed. An explosion of agony detonated inside him this time, centered deep in his chest, behind the sternum. It felt like shoving his own heart onto the point of Hades’ helm. A gasp tore from his lips, ragged and wet. This was the cost. Not stamina, not ichor, but a direct assault on his essence, paid to grasp the threads of what could be and snap one out of existence.

He saw it. A billion shimmering threads, each representing a potential collision, a specific moment of impact and destruction. He focused on the thickest, brightest cord – the one where the orb struck true. With a mental wrench that felt like tearing muscle from bone, he pushed that cord aside, declaring it would not be. He forced the unstable potential, the inherent chaos within the compressed water, to manifest now.

The orb didn’t hit the ground. It unraveled.

A silent, blinding flash consumed the world. Not the focused detonation of divine intent, but the raw, unfettered fury of physics unleashed. Matter ceased to be. The air itself within a two-mile radius simply vaporized, replaced by an expanding sphere of pure plasma hotter than the sun's core. The shockwave hit nanoseconds later, a wall of compressed force traveling faster than sound. It didn’t roll; it shattered. The ground liquefied instantly, bedrock pulverized into superheated dust. The concussion ripped mountainsides clean miles away, sculpting valleys in an instant. A fireball bloomed, climbing into the stratosphere, a roiling, incandescent mushroom cloud of vaporized earth and ionized air casting an unnatural, hellish twilight over the ravaged landscape. Sound arrived last – a deep, tectonic BOOM that wasn’t heard so much as felt in the bones of the continent, rattling windows in distant cities, momentarily silencing birds across states. It was akin to a Tsar Bomba’s fury unleashed on American soil, a scar on Gaia’s face.

Through the inferno, three figures stood. Unscathed. Untouched. Hermes, golden ichor still tracing paths through the grime on his face, his hand still clenched, trembling. Thanatos who had chosen to take back a humanoid form, dark robes swirling in the superheated winds, expression unreadable but posture coiled. Benthesicyme, high above the devastation on a platform of solidified seawater, untouched by the fury she had birthed and Hermes had prematurely detonated. Her emerald eyes gleamed with predatory interest through the swirling plasma and ash.

The world was a cacophony of dying energies – the roar of superheated air collapsing back into the vacuum, the hiss of molten rock flowing like water, the crackle of electrified dust. Yet Hermes’ voice cut through it, soft, certain, aimed like an arrow at the sea goddess.

"I don't care about Olympus," he began, the words ash in his mouth. "Or the war between Heaven, the Ocean, and the Underworld." He took a step forward, the liquefied ground solidifying instantly under his sandal. "I don't care anymore that you turned Las Vegas to glass and salt." Another step. The air around him crackled with suppressed lightning, the scent of ozone sharp and clean against the reek of vaporized stone. His eyes, usually dancing with mischief or weary cynicism, were flat, cold pools reflecting the hellscape. "I only care about hurting you."

Benthesicyme’s smile was a slow, terrifying bloom. She dipped her head, a parody of a dancer's reverence before a performance. The grin that split her face revealed rows of needle-sharp teeth, gleaming white against the backdrop of fire. Her voice, when it came, was a melodic counterpoint to the destruction, carrying effortlessly. "Please," she purred, the word laced with eager anticipation. "Try your best. That's the only thing I want."

Thanatos materialized beside Hermes, his dark presence a chill counterpoint to the radiating heat. His voice was a dry rasp, like stone grinding on stone. "Do you have a plan?"

Hermes didn’t look at him. His gaze remained locked on Benthesicyme. "Yes," he stated, the single syllable heavy as a tombstone. "Hurting her."

He pushed.

Not with his legs, but with his entire being. Space itself seemed to flinch. The air ignited along his path. Not fire, but Cherenkov radiation – a blinding, ethereal blue glow as he surpassed the speed of light locally, warping spacetime around him. A sonic boom wasn't just heard; it was a physical wall that flattened the already molten landscape for miles behind him, sending waves of liquid rock rippling outward. In his right hand, his Caduceus flared, the twin serpents writhing with golden light. In his newly empty left, reality shimmered, condensed, and solidified. Not celestial bronze, but Orichalcum – the fabled gold of the gods and legends, humming with ancient, divine power. A blade formed, long, straight, and brutally simple, its edge singing with the promise of divine severance.

He was a streak of gold and blue annihilation aimed at Benthesicyme’s throat.

She moved. Not with blinding speed, but with impossible, fluid economy. Her trident, barnacle-encrusted and dripping phantom seawater, slid into the path of his Orichalcum blade. Divine metals met.

CLANG-G-G-G-G!

The sound wasn't a clash; it was the universe ringing a colossal, discordant bell. It vibrated through bone, through rock, through the very air. Nevada shuddered. Cracks spiderwebbed across the glassy plains below, deep enough to reveal the glowing mantle beneath. The impact, even blocked, was titanic. Benthesicyme was driven back, skidding through the air as if shoved by an invisible hand, crossing the length of an Olympic pool in an instant. Hermes followed, relentless, a golden comet trailing azure fire.

Caduceus whistled, a viper-strike aimed at her temple. Orichalcum blade slashed downwards, aiming to cleave her from shoulder to hip. Benthesicyme’s trident became a blur of dark metal and churning water. CLANG! SCRREEEECH! BOOM! Each impact was a localized detonation, a thunderclap that shook the sky. The sound wasn't just noise; it was pressure, a physical force trying to flatten the landscape anew with every blow. Nevada bucked and heaved like a living thing caught in a seizure.

Hermes feinted high with the Caduceus, then spun, the Orichalcum blade lancing low towards her ribs. A perfect strike. Or it should have been. Benthesicyme flowed around it. Not dodging, but swerving, her body bending like reeds in a current, letting the blade pass through empty, ionized air where her side had been a nanosecond before. His guard was open, exposed.

Left flank. Low. Entropic decay.

The warning flashed in his mind, not as words, but as a cold, certain knowledge – a phantom pain in his lower abdomen a fraction of a second before the attack manifested. He didn't think; he reacted. Abandoning the Caduceus mid-swing, letting it tumble through the superheated air, he pivoted violently. His body twisted like a corkscrew, the Orichalcum blade snapping back in a desperate, instinctive parry behind him. Not a moment too soon.

SHIIINK!

Benthesicyme’s attack wasn't a tendril; it was a spear-tip of pure, localized entropy. Where it met the Orichalcum blade, space itself seemed to rot, reality fraying at the edges with a sound like tearing silk and grinding bones. The impact jarred Hermes to his core, but he’d deflected the killing blow upwards. The entropy spear lanced into the upper atmosphere, and for a terrifying moment, the sky above turned a sickly, gangrenous green before snapping back.

Hermes’ momentum from the pivot carried him forward. His free hand snapped out, snatching the tumbling Caduceus from the air without breaking stride. In the same fluid motion, fueled by the impossible foresight, he brought the Caduceus whipping around in a savage horizontal slash aimed at Benthesicyme’s face, the serpents hissing with golden fury.

For the first time, genuine surprise flickered across the sea goddess’s features. It lasted less than a heartbeat, replaced instantly by pure, exhilarated mirth. She didn't flinch; she tilted her head with serpentine grace. The blazing tip of the Caduceus passed so close it singed her temple, severing a few strands of sea-green hair that drifted away like emerald smoke. Her shark-tooth grin widened.

Hermes didn't pause. The surprise cost her a microsecond. He exploited it. Lightning, called not from the sky but summoned directly from his divine blood, sheathed his right foot. He kicked, not with muscle, but with the focused energy of a collapsing star, aimed squarely at her center mass. Relativistic speed met divine intent.

Benthesicyme crossed her forearms, bracers of living ice snapping into existence just as the lightning-wreathed foot connected.

CRACK-THOOM!

The impact wasn't sound; it was a cataclysm. A sphere of compressed force, visible as a ripple of shattered reality, exploded outwards. The molten ground below wasn't just cratered; it was excavated, hurled upwards in a tidal wave of superheated slag that cooled instantly into jagged, black glass mountains as it flew. The sky above tore, revealing the bruised purple of bruised spacetime for an instant. Hermes felt the bones in his foot scream, even through the divine reinforcement.

Below. Right. Spatial shear.

The warning seared his mind a fraction before the attack. Benthesicyme, braced against his kick, had somehow simultaneously driven the butt of her trident downwards in a vicious, unseen stab aimed at his hip. Hermes wrenched his body, a desperate contortion. The trident's lethal point, trailing a wake of distorted space, grazed his thigh instead of spearing through his pelvis. Golden ichor sprayed, sizzling on contact with the warped air. The shear-force tore a gash in reality itself above them, a ragged wound leaking chaotic, non-Euclidean light.

He struck back instantly, ignoring the searing pain in his leg. The Orichalcum blade, guided by foresight, flickered out like a serpent's tongue. Not a killing blow, but a flick aimed at her cheek. It connected. A thin line of gold appeared, a papercut on divinity. Before a single drop of ichor could well, the wound sealed, skin knitting flawlessly. Benthesicyme’s eyes narrowed, not in pain, but in calculation.

Then, she moved. Her left foot, seemingly idle, snapped upwards in a blur too fast even for Hermes’ enhanced sight to fully track. It connected with his chin.

CRUNCH.

The world dissolved into blinding white pain. He felt his jawbone shatter, teeth turn to powder, his skull momentarily deform under the impossible force. Consciousness flickered. He was falling, a broken doll hurled from Olympus, trailing golden blood and lightning. The molten hellscape rushed up to meet him.

Pain? It was a gnat buzzing around the gaping void where May had been. He embraced the agony, used it as fuel. As he fell, great wings of pure, golden light erupted from his back – not feathered, but shaped like an eagle’s, vast and blazing. He beat them once, not against air, but against the fabric of space itself. The winds, responding to his authority as Zeus’s son, howled in obedience, forming a column of compressed air beneath him. His shattered jaw snapped back into place with a sickening grind, ichor ceasing to flow as divine flesh knitted. His severed Caduceus-arm blurred, reforming from golden mist even as the limb itself flew back towards him, reattaching with a sizzle of divine energy. He caught the Caduceus as it tumbled past.

He didn’t fall. He reversed. Shooting upwards like a golden javelin aimed at the descending form of Benthesicyme. She met him head-on.

What followed wasn't a duel; it was a collision of realities happening billions of times per second. They met in the bleeding sky above the glass wasteland.

ClangScreechBoomCrackThoomShinkHissCrunch!

The sounds blurred into a single, continuous, deafening symphony of destruction. Hermes was a whirlwind of gold and lightning, Caduceus and Orichalcum blade moving in blinding, impossible arcs, each strike guided by the chilling certainty of foresight – a split-second glimpse of the could be he strained to force into the would be with agonizing bursts of his essence. He saw the trident thrust aimed at his heart a microsecond before it launched, parrying with the Caduceus while simultaneously driving the Orichalcum blade towards a gap in her defense that foresight promised would open. He saw the whip-crack of pressurized water aimed to bisect him, twisting aside as it carved a canyon in the glass below, while countering with a lightning bolt condensed into a spear-thrust from his free hand.

Benthesicyme flowed like the deepest, most treacherous current. Her trident was no longer a weapon; it was the axis around which chaos spun. She parried the Orichalcum blade with a twist that sent shockwaves tearing through the lower atmosphere, simultaneously deflecting a Caduceus strike aimed at her knee with the haft, while her free hand summoned a localized tsunami of pressurized brine that Hermes only avoided by knowing it would erupt beneath him and warping his trajectory a nanosecond early. She moved with the terrifying grace of inevitability, her beautiful face set in a mask of focused ecstasy, shark teeth bared in a rictus of pure battle-joy.

He was faster than he'd ever been, guided by paths only he could see. Yet the gap remained. She was stronger. More fluid. More experienced in the raw, unfettered language of annihilation. He kept pace through sheer, agonizing foresight and sacrificial power, but he was dancing on a razor's edge, forced to react, to anticipate, to bleed essence with every miraculous deflection and counter. He was holding, but barely. He was the swiftest, augmented by prophecy, yet she was the ocean – deep, relentless, and fathomless.

Behind Benthesicyme, space rotted. Thanatos struck. Not with tendrils, but with lances of distilled entropy. Dozens. Hundreds. Each one a streak of absolute blackness, moving at relativistic speeds, not through space, but by eroding the distance between them. They aimed not just at Benthesicyme, but at the space she occupied, the vectors she might move through, seeking to unravel her reality.

Benthesicyme didn't dodge. She didn't even turn. She simply… accelerated. Her movements became a blur that defied visual tracking, a vibration in the air. Her trident became a shimmering shield of dark metal and churning hydromancy. ClangScreechHissRip! The sounds intensified, layered now with the sickening, wet-tearing noise of decaying reality. She parried Hermes’ Orichalcum blade thrust aimed at her kidney, deflected a Caduceus strike at her elbow, sidestepped a lash of divine lightning from his eyes, and simultaneously intercepted three entropy lances with precise flicks of her trident's points. The black spears shattered against the divine metal, dissipating into clouds of null-energy that made the air taste like ash and static.

She moved within the eye of a storm of her own making, countering attacks from two fronts with terrifying, effortless precision. The trident wove patterns in the air too fast to follow, a deadly dance that spoke of millennia spent not just commanding oceans, but being war incarnate. Hermes, fueled by grief and foresight, and Thanatos, the embodiment of ending, pressed their assault. Blades of light and void clashed against the indomitable tide. Gold, blue lightning, entropic black, and the deep, churning green of the abyss painted the shattered sky. Nevada wasn't a battlefield; it was an altar to destruction, reshaped with every passing nanosecond by gods who had ceased to care about anything but the exquisite agony of the fight. Hermes saw the paths, bent them at great cost, struck true only to see wounds seal. Thanatos unwove reality, only for the ocean to fill the void. Benthesicyme smiled, her teeth gleaming like pearls in a whirlpool of blood, and pressed the attack as if promising that the dance of annihilation had only just begun.

Gold. Not tears now, but light. It bled from fissures spiderwebbing across Hermes’ skin, each crack a searing line of agony that paled against the hollow roar where May had been. He saw the paths. Saw the Orichalcum blade deflected by a twist of the trident’s haft, saw the Caduceus strike dissipate against a shield of churning brine, saw Thanatos’s entropy lance unravel into harmless static inches from Benthesicyme’s spine – all countered, all absorbed, all met with that infuriating, beautiful, shark-toothed grin. They struck like twin hurricanes against an unyielding continental shelf. And the shelf held.

No. The denial wasn’t a thought; it was a tectonic shift within him. A rejection of reality itself, carved from grief and fury. He would not accept this. Not after the cost. Not while the phantom scent of old books and summer rain still haunted the charnel-house air. He would hurt her.

"Thanatos!" The name ripped from his throat, raw and amplified by divine will, cutting through the cacophony of clashing powers. "One millisecond! Give me one!"

Silence, thick and heavy, fell between the nanoseconds of their battle. A millisecond. To mortals, the blink of an eye. To deities dancing at the edge of lightspeed? An eternity. An ocean of time in which Benthesicyme could dismantle a universe. Thanatos, pinned beneath the crushing weight of the sea goddess’s defense, didn’t hesitate. Didn’t question. Shadows bled from his form, coagulating, solidifying. One Thanatos became two, identical figures of absolute darkness wielding scythes of entropic decay. They lunged, not at Benthesicyme, but around her, a whirlwind of void-edged strikes designed to occupy, to distract, to survive for that impossible sliver of time.

The duplicate’s voice, a dry echo of the original, rasped as Hermes disengaged in a burst of Cherenkov blue: "Hope your plan works, Messenger God!"

Benthesicyme laughed, a sound like shattering crystal. She flowed between the twin assaults of Death, her trident a dark blur intercepting decay, her free hand summoning localized tsunamis that the Thanatos duplicates warped away from with desperate contortions. She didn’t look at Hermes as he vanished upwards, but her voice chased him, melodic and eager, cutting through the chaos: "I hope you surprise me, Son of Zeus! I will not stop you!" A challenge. An invitation. A predator granting prey its final, desperate lunge.

His feet touched glassy earth. Not solid ground, but the fused, tortured remains of Nevada. For less than a heartbeat, he stood. Then, he pushed.

Not with muscles, but with everything. Every divine name etched upon his essence – Angelos Athanaton (Messenger of the Gods), Eriounes (Luck-Bringer), Promakhos (Champion), Argeiphontes (Slayer of Argus), Psychopompos (Guide of Souls), Dolios (Trickster), Oneiropompos (Conductor of Dreams) – they screamed within him. Concepts he embodied – Speed, Luck, Boundaries, Cunning, Transition – ignited like supernovae. He wasn't just running; he was unfolding across existence.

He ran up. Up the searing, superheated air, each step compressing the atmosphere beneath him into diamond-hard plates that shattered instantly in his wake. He ran across the bruised underbelly of storm clouds, his passage igniting them into sheets of purple lightning. He ran on the sky, the troposphere, the stratosphere, the very fabric of Earth's atmospheric skin yielding to his impossible tread. Then, he breached it. Kicked off the thinning membrane of air and plunged into the silent, infinite dark mortals called space.

Here, there was no air to scream. Only the silent, chilling vacuum and the impossible vista of Gaia below, a blue-green marble scarred by the glowing wound of their battle. He ran on the dark. Not on matter, but on potential. On the paths May’s sacrifice burned into his soul. He saw the could be – not just one path, but thousands. Thousands of Hermes, each taking a slightly different trajectory, each fueled by a different aspect of his divinity, all converging on a single, impossible point in the future. A point where he stood equal.

He reached for it. Reached with the last dregs of May’s gift, with the blazing core of his own pain. He forced the could-be. Not just seeing the path, but becoming it. He added the speed of the thousand other Hermes-that-might-have-been to his own.

CRACK!

The sound was internal, a universe rending. Gold, thick as molten ore, erupted from every fissure in his skin. He was a crumbling statue of divine ichor, held together only by sheer, desperate will. The cracks deepened, spreading like frost across glass. He was fracturing, not just physically, but essentially. The cost of forcing this miracle was dissolution.

But the sight… Oh, the sight. As he hurtled through the silent dark, back towards the battle-scarred world, his gaze pierced veils. He saw Gaia entire, a living, breathing entity trembling beneath divine wrath. He saw the intricate weave of the Underworld’s shadows far below. He saw Olympus, a distant, cold sparkle of arrogance. And below, impossibly clear despite the distance: Benthesicyme.

She moved with terrifying grace. Thanatos and his duplicate were less opponents now, more like flotsam in her hurricane. A contemptuous flick of her wrist sent a localized pressure wave that slammed one duplicate through a nascent mountain of black glass. A spinning back-kick, moving faster than thought, connected with the other Thanatos’s chest. The impact didn’t just send him flying; it punched him through the Earth’s crust in a shower of molten rock, a dark streak vanishing towards the chthonic depths below. She stood amidst the devastation she’d wrought, untouched, serene.

Then she looked up. Not towards his physical location hurtling through the void, but directly at him. Her emerald eyes, sharp as broken bottle glass, locked onto his fractured, golden form across the gulf. A slow, terrifying smile spread across her face. She raised her hand. Not the trident. Her fingers closed around the shaft, and with a thought, the mighty weapon shrank. Became a slender needle of dark, barnacle-encrusted metal. With deliberate, almost casual grace, she gathered her wild sea-green hair and secured it into a severe ponytail with the needle. A fighter preparing for the main event. Her gaze never left his.

Just us now, Hermes thought, the words echoing in the hollowed-out chamber of his mind. The pain was a white-hot forge, reshaping him. The grief was a black hole, consuming everything but purpose. Hurt her.

Benthesicyme opened her arms wide. Not in surrender. In welcome. In challenge. A queen awaiting a challenger on an empty, shattered plain. Her posture screamed: Come. Give me everything.

He answered. A sound tore from his ruined throat – part scream ripped raw by vacuum, part war cry that vibrated the divine essence within him. It wasn’t heard in the void; it was felt. All the stolen speed, all the borrowed might from a thousand could-be paths, all the screaming names of his domains, all the searing, sacrificial power of May’s sight – he focused it. Not into a weapon. Into momentum. Into the final, desperate kinetic fury of his being. He focused it all into his left leg.

He saw it then. As he plummeted, a meteor of divine vengeance, Benthesicyme didn’t wait. She rose. Not flying, but kicking off the air itself with impossible force. Her right arm swept back, gathering not water, but something deeper, darker. A shimmering, indigo-blue energy gathered around her fist and forearm, flowing like liquid night, like the crushing pressure of the abyssal trench. It pulsed, distorting the light around it.

They met. Not on Earth, but just beyond the kiss of its atmosphere, in the silent, star-strewn dark where Gaia’s protective embrace met the indifferent void.

Fist met foot.

—

There was no sound in the vacuum. Only light. Pure, annihilating light. A star was born, igniting in the space between Earth and Moon, brighter than Sol, bleaching the colors from the distant stars. It wasn’t fire; it was raw kinetic energy converted into photons, a silent supernova unleashed.

In that nanosecond of collision, Hermes felt the universe fracture. Every bone, every tendon, every scrap of divine essence within him screamed and tore. He was a sandcastle hit by the tide, dissolving. But he pushed. Pushed with the ghost of May’s smile, with the phantom weight of Luke’s unborn future, with the sheer, animal refusal to break before she did. He felt the impossible resistance – the indigo shield around her arm, the bedrock of her ancient divinity. He felt it hold. And then, he felt it yield.

—

On Earth, a protective, shimmering blue membrane – a desperately needed shield – flared into existence across the entire hemisphere facing the impact. It buckled, strained, but held. Without it, continents would have ignited.

In the silent heart of the newborn star, the impossible happened. The unstoppable force met the immovable object. Hermes’ left leg, channeling the fury of stolen futures and sacrificial love, and Benthesicyme’s right arm, sheathed in the crushing might of the abyss, shattered.

Not broken. Annihilated.

Geysers of golden and deep-sea golden ichor erupted into the vacuum, instantly vaporizing into swirling nebulae of divine essence. Shards of bone-like divine material and barnacle-encrusted armor spun away like shrapnel from a celestial explosion. The shockwave, silent but visible as a ripple of distorted spacetime, radiated outwards, pulverizing nearby asteroids and shaking the Moon in its orbit.

Hermes saw it. Saw the shock, raw and unguarded, etch itself onto Benthesicyme’s beautiful face. Saw the flare of genuine pain in her emerald eyes, eclipsing the battle-joy for a fleeting, glorious instant. A ragged, soundless gasp escaped her lips.

I promised, Hermes thought, the satisfaction a cold, sharp shard amidst the agony consuming him. Fractures raced through his entire being, gold bleeding into the void. I hurt you.

Consciousness frayed, unraveling like old rope. The light of the artificial star began to dim. The last sensation before the dark claimed him wasn’t pain, but a voice. Not heard, but felt, resonating directly in his fading awareness. Benthesicyme’s voice, stripped of mockery, filled with something akin to awe, and profound, terrifying respect:

"A magnificent dance, Hermes."

He felt, rather than saw, the impossible regeneration begin. Strands of ichor reaching, weaving, rebuilding her shattered arm amidst the dissipating stellar fire.

"Had you been on my side and not on his…" The thought-voice resonated, heavy with a strange, almost wistful finality. "...I would have proudly called you friend."

Then, only the silent dark, the fading light, and the cold embrace of oblivion. The Messenger of the Gods, broken and feeling victorious, tumbled, falling through the void, trailing stardust and golden blood a last mercy of the sea goddess allowing him to continue towards his favoured son.