The valley was unrecognizable.

  Where there had once been a flat snowfield, now there was wreckage — split stone, upturned earth, trees snapped at their roots and flung sideways like discarded kindling. Every clean line of it bent and broken by one man's hammer.

  Hermez surveyed it from the air, hovering just above the chaos on motionless wings.

  “Leveling up the ground, are we?”

  He remembered Aron’s last charge. The way the hammer had caught that uneven terrain and turned it into a weapon in itself, debris and shockwave multiplied by the fractured surface. A smart trick. Brutal, but smart.

  Hermez was smarter.

  He lifted the Sword of Ares sideways, feeding it. More divinity than he would normally spend. He felt the drain immediately, a hollow pull behind his sternum, the cost of existing at this altitude already bleeding him slowly, and now this on top of it.

  The sword drank greedily. He swung sideways through open air.

  The concentrated divinity released in a single horizontal slash, not at Aron, but past him. A wave of force that scoured the valley floor, flattening every ridge and furrow Aron’s hammer had carved into it. In three seconds, the battlefield was level again.

  Plain. Simple. No advantages hidden in the terrain.

  Hermez landed.

  He needed to end this quickly. Every moment he spent down here, beneath the mortal sky and away from Olympus, cost him divinity just to maintain form. The sword cost more. His defenses cost more still. He was burning through himself like a torch held upside down — functional, but shrinking.

  And the immortal had not slowed down.

  Across the flattened field, Aron came toward him at a dead sprint, hammer left behind in the snow. One arm. Blood-soaked. Golden eyes fixed and furious.

  Hermez watched him come and allowed himself one private thought.

  “If only I had her.”

  His daughter. His vessel. The one born different from all the others — not simply a demigod, not simply his blood, but something that had never happened before. A child who had inherited not his speed, not his cunning, but Zeus’s lightning. His father’s power running through a girl who should never have carried it.

  A perfect vessel.

  “If the immortal had never come into my way, I would have her by now. I would have my vessel. My treasure. And I would be unstoppable.”

  He filed the thought away.

  Activated his defenses.

  The mechanism was Hephaestus’s work — not beautiful, but utterly reliable. A lattice of golden-yellow energy expanded outward from his body, hardening into a curved shield that hummed faintly at its edges. Hephaestus had built it to withstand divine strikes. He had built it well.

  Aron leaped.

  His fist came down like a falling star.

  **Bang!!!!**

  The knuckle connected with the shield, and the impact rang out across the valley like a struck bell. The shield fractured at the point of contact, a single crack, hairline-thin, spreading outward from his fist like ice breaking under pressure, but still not broken.

  Aron’s golden eyes met yellow.

  Neither of them moved.

  They pressed on. Not using flashy, gritty skills, but with sheer will, pride, the stubborn refusal to be the one who gives ground. Hermez pushed outward through the shield. Aron pushed inward through the crack. The air between them compressed and crackled.

  “Slayer…” Hermez’s voice came out lower than he intended. Less a taunt, more a negotiation. “Make a deal with me. You leave me alone. I leave you alone.” He let a breath pass. “Just give me that human.”

  Aron’s expression didn’t change.

  “What does a god want with Peter?” he said, the pressure of his fist not easing an inch. “He’s harmless. Weak. Defenseless, even.” His jaw set. “He’s under me now. My herald.” His voice dropped to something flat and final. “So fuck off.”

  Hermez’s face went dark. He deactivated the shield.

  The sword came down in the same motion, no gap between the two actions, the defense dropping and the offense rising as one fluid sequence. A clean diagonal cut aimed at Aron’s chest.

  Aron twisted. Barely. The cursed edge passed within a breath of his already ruined shoulder, close enough that he felt the cold of it — the specific cold of Ares’s blade, the cold that didn’t stop bleeding.

  He kept his fist charged. Tight and ready.

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  But the strike had been a feint. Hermez’s leg was already moving.

  It came up from below, all that velocity, all that divine speed coiled into a single upward kick that caught Aron square in the stomach before he could redirect.

  The sound it made was not clean.

  Aron’s body folded. Blood burst from his mouth in a dark arc. He flew backward across the flattened snow, tumbling end over end until he crashed into something solid.

  His hammer.

  He lay there for a moment, hand resting against its handle, breathing through his nose.

  Hermez advanced.

  “He has what is mine, immortal.” The lightning was rising in him now — not just in his sandals, but traveling upward, climbing his legs, crackling at the edges of his sword arm. His voice had stopped performing.

  “The girl. The vessel. The blood that was never supposed to survive.” He stopped a few meters away. “Peter has kept her hidden. Fed her. Protected her.” His expression was almost something like grief, if gods were capable of grief. “She is mine. She belongs on Olympus. And you are in my way.”

  **Meanwhile — somewhere behind the broken treeline**

  The fire was small and reluctant.

  Theo had fed it twice already, and it kept threatening to go out, as if even the flames understood this was not a good place to linger. He sat close to it anyway, knees drawn up, watching Peter across the low light.

  Peter was staring at his hands.

  He had been staring at them for several minutes now. His trembling hands trying to make them still. The kind of stillness that comes from having thought the same thought too many times.

  Theo had questions. He had been accumulating them since the beginning, sorting them by order of importance the way you do when you aren’t sure how much time you have. This one had risen to the top.

  “The girl,” Theo said. No preamble.

  Peter looked up.

  “The one Hermez is after.” Theo kept his voice even. “She’s yours?”

  A long pause. The fire crackled once, weakly.

  “…No,” Peter said.

  Theo waited.

  “She’s not mine. Not by blood.” Peter’s voice was careful, like a man navigating around the edges of something he’d carried alone for too long.

  “Sadly, she’s a demigod. Like the others. Half mortal, half divine.” He paused. “But she’s different than these shitheads. She’s… better.”

  “Better how?”

  “She inherited Zeus’s lightning.”

  The fire went quiet. Even the wind seemed to stop.

  Theo looked at him steadily. “That’s not possible.”

  “I know.”

  “Zeus doesn’t pass his power to—”

  “I know.” Peter’s voice didn’t rise. “And yet. She was born with it. I found her. I kept her hidden.” He met Theo’s eyes for the first time. “Because if Hermez found her—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Theo understood.

  Everything depended on Peter now. He had always assumed it was because of what Peter knew, or who he was — some ancient connection, some forgotten role. But it wasn’t that. It was what Peter had.

  A girl who carried the king of gods’ power in mortal blood.

  And Hermez wanted her back.

  Theo opened his mouth to say something, to ask how long, to ask where she was now, to ask what the plan was, when the sound reached them.

  Not the sonic boom of Hermez. Not Aron’s hammer.

  Something different. Footsteps. Multiple. Moving fast and quiet through the broken trees to the north.

  Theo was on his feet before his mind had fully processed it. Peter was already standing, shoulders squared, looking into the dark between the trunks.

  They came out of the shadows in a loose formation.

  Large. Moving not like bastards of Hermez — not like soldiers, not like demigods trained to fight in ranks. Moving like men who had grown up brawling and never stopped.

  Their armor was mismatched, crude, and dented in ways that suggested it had been dented by other people’s fists as often as it had been hit by weapons.

  Ares’s sons.

  Not the legitimate ones. Not the ones given names and seats and places in the divine order.

  The bastards.

  The ones the god of war had scattered across the mortal world and forgotten, and who had grown up knowing it, and who had let that knowledge sharpen them into something jagged and mean.

  One of them stepped forward.

  He was smiling.

  “Oh, Peter,” he said pleasantly. “We’ve been looking for you.”