[Third Person Pov]
Lucian appeared as little more than a silhouette against the warped air, a shadow-figure clad only in the silver gauntlets and boots that remained of his shattered armor.
Atlas clicked his tongue, a sharp, contemptuous sound. He glared at the demigod through narrowed eyes, the weight of the sky momentarily forgotten in pure irritation.
"Tsk. Another one of your crazy world-altering spells. What is it this time, another dimension?"
Lucian's voice emerged distorted, layered with echoes that did not belong to a single voice. "Try another reality. This world is my forge. I'm the hammer… and you're my anvil."
Although Artemis was not the target, both she and Atlas felt the same cold prickle of unease the moment Lucian lifted two fingers and casually drew them through the empty air. An arsenal materialized above them—spears, blades, axes, polearms—hovering for a heartbeat before they began to rain downward like artillery shells.
Atlas moved with desperate speed. Power surged through his legs; each stride covered impossible distance as he threw himself clear of the descending steel. The ground behind him erupted in a continuous series of impacts, weapons burying themselves to the hilt and quivering with residual force.
…
Artemis spoke into the uneasy quiet, briefly the only sound was the galloping of their horses.
"May my brother be a testament to what I am about to say." She swore on Apollo, god of truth, and the air itself seemed to grow tense, waiting for her words. "There are moments when that boy scares even me."
Phoebe looked scandalized. "Surely you jest, my lady. Lucian is but a demigod, while you are a goddess."
The others shifted, some nodding in quiet agreement. It was unheard of—almost heretical—for one of the Twelve Olympians to admit fear of a half-blood, no matter how powerful.
Grover cleared his throat, ears flicking nervously. "Honestly… Lucian scares me too. Not gonna lie." His voice was small. "It's not that I don't care about him. Of course I do. But there are times when I just… can't help it."
Artemis's expression remained grave. "What unsettles me most is that Lucian has never once fought for his own survival."
Confused glances passed between the others. She continued before anyone could interrupt.
"Don't misunderstand me. He has every making of a great Greek hero. He possesses a compassionate heart. He willingly fights for the survival of others… just never for his own."
She paused, letting the words settle.
"When most people engage in battle, there is always a thread of self-preservation. You fight to win because losing means dying. That instinct keeps you sharp. It keeps you alive"
Another pause. Her voice dropped lower.
"But Lucian wants to win simply because he refuses to lose. He hates losing more than he fears death. All in all he's simply a sore-loser. When he fights, he is not battling for survival. He is battling for entertainment."
A slow, almost fond smile stretched across Artemis's lips, sharp and unsettling in equal measure.
"He's unhinged. Insane in every sense of the word."
…
Lucian's distorted laugh rolled across the broken ground. "Are you having fun, Atlas? Because let me tell you—this is the most fun I've had in months."
He raised one hand. A swirling barrel of swords materialized, blades spinning around one another in a glittering cyclone before launching one by one toward the Titan. Each weapon screamed through the air with lethal precision.
Atlas flipped backward, rolled, somersaulted—every movement a desperate dance to stay ahead of the relentless steel. Swords punched into the earth where he had been standing only an instant earlier, vibrating with leftover malice.
When the Titan finally risked reaching for one of the fallen blades, a searing heat raced up his arm the moment his fingers closed around the hilt. He cried out and flung the weapon away; it clattered against stone, still glowing faintly with residual curse-fire.
Lucian snickered, the sound warped and delighted. "Careful taking what doesn't belong to you. All these weapons you see here are cursed, after all."
He flexed his fingers, and the remaining arsenal answered his will, rising once more into the air like a flock of hungry metal birds, ready for the next volley.
Artemis hesitated at first, rooted in place as she watched the arsenal fall under Lucian's precise command. Then she forced herself forward. The blades curved around her body as if guided by an invisible will, parting cleanly and never once grazing her skin. The air hummed with the force of their passage, yet not a single edge touched the goddess as her march turned into a run.
"Ahhh!!"
Atlas's roar tore through the battlefield, raw and maddened. He wrenched two massive broadswords from the storm of steel around him, gripping them with Titanic strength. Whispers immediately flooded his ears—sibilant, relentless ravings designed to claw at the edges of his mind and drag him into madness. The cursed weapons spoke of failure, of endless torment, of the sky's crushing weight returning tenfold.
However he was the Titan of Endurance.
And so he endured.
The blades in Lucian's control spun like deadly corkscrews, generating their own howling gale before launching outward as missiles of pure force. Atlas met each incoming strike with a powerful swing of his broadswords. Lucian's weapons shattered upon impact, fragments scattering across the broken earth in glittering arcs. The sheer strength behind Atlas's counters was enough to give even Lucian pause.
"Truly a worthy adversary!" Lucian called, genuine admiration cutting through the distortion in his voice.
He closed the distance in a blur. "But fighting me while relying on a weapon is a lofty endeavor at best."
Lucian seized Atlas's own javelin from the chaos, spun, and hurled it with a sharp whistle that split the air. Atlas rolled aside at the last possible moment. Titanic energy flared around his remaining swords in a protective surge, but Lucian was already moving.
A sea of flames erupted to meet the weapons still under Lucian's command; the cursed steel hissed and blackened before crumbling into useless slag.
Lucian snapped his fingers. Atlas's blades slipped from his grasp as if the Titan's fingers had turned to butter. In the same breath, a line of heavy shields materialized around Lucian, interlocking with a resonant clang.
Atlas coated his fists in raw Titanic power and charged. Each swing shattered a shield in sequence, the impacts booming like thunderclaps. Lucian answered by summoning weapons in a continuous, almost casual stream—hammers that cracked against Atlas's chest and sent him skidding backward, only to be crushed a heartbeat later; blades that erupted from the ground in successive waves, battering the Titan from every angle. Thanks to Atlas's near-impenetrable durability, the weapons dealt more blunt trauma than cutting damage, slamming him about the field like a ship in a storm.
Artemis refused to remain a spectator. She moved in tandem with Lucian, loosing precise beams of silver arrows that streaked toward the Titan's weak points. Yet compared to the raw spectacle of demigod and Titan colliding, her contributions were nearly swallowed by the chaos. One solid kick to the gut drove the air from her lungs. A punch to the jaw rattled her vision. A glancing strike across the bridge of her nose filled her mouth with the sharp taste of blood. She staggered, breath ragged.
Lucian's hand closed around her shoulder and yanked her clear of the next devastating swing. He shoved her behind him and re-engaged Atlas without missing a beat.
Atlas had recovered his javelin. He intercepted Lucian's relentless strikes with the weapon's shaft, wrapping Titanic energy around it until every clash released shockwave blasts that warped the air and destabilized the magic saturating the battlefield.
"Enough!" Atlas bellowed, voice cracking with fury and wounded pride. "This has lasted far too long! Any longer and my pride as a Titan will not survive it!"
He leveled the javelin at Lucian, both hands locked around the shaft. "I command you, Son of Hades! You have lasted against me longer than most gods of the past. For that, even I must acknowledge your strength!" His roar shook the ground. "But I cannot allow you to live a second longer!"
Lucian's distorted voice was almost calm. "You're right. This stops now."
He extended one hand.
Atlas froze mid-charge—not by choice. Invisible golden threads, the same unbreakable filaments once forged by Hephaestus himself, snapped into existence around the Titan's limbs and torso. They cinched tight, locking joints and binding muscle with cruel precision.
Atlas snarled, muscles bulging as he tested the bindings. One by one the threads began to stretch and snap under the sheer force of his Titanic strength, each break accompanied by a sharp metallic twang.
"I hate you," Atlas growled, "with every fiber of my being."
Lucian brought his hands together in a sharp clap, the sound almost playful. "Careful. Hate like that has a way of developing into a crush."
"Fuck you," Atlas spat, glaring upward at the demigod floating just beyond reach.
Lucian's grin was audible even through the distortion. "No. I'm going to be the one doing the fucking."
He spread his fingers wide. A bolt of pure lightning materialized in his grasp with a deafening crack. Artemis's eyes widened in pure disbelief as the weapon of her father—the Master Bolt itself—took shape in Lucian's hand. Thunder rolled across the expanse. Lightning coiled around Lucian's body in living arcs, and in a flash of divine light a simple white toga settled over his form, the fabric snapping in the sudden wind.
"Lucian, what—?!" Artemis cried, voice cracking with shock.
Lucian drew the bolt back like a javelin. The air itself seemed to hold its breath.
"Get fucked by my lightning rod, bitch!"
He hurled the Master Bolt.
A blinding white flash swallowed the battlefield. The explosion that followed shook the earth to its foundations, a concussion of pure divine power that knocked the breath from every living thing within sight. Atlas's scream tore through the chaos as the lightning found its mark, every watt of Zeus's fury flooding the Titan's nerves and essence in a continuous, searing cascade.
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