Chapter 61: The Heroes Of Elysium

  Thanks to the duel that had been interrupted I had a front row seat to Wilhelm's face distorting in horror as he watched Albrecht, Atanta, Odysseus and a slew of other Heroes stepping out of the portal.

  To his credit, he immediately turned tail and tried to run. He didn't try to stand there and bluster like a lot of bad guys I'd fought had done. If he truly couldn't die then that wouldn't be a concern for him but even then the smartest thing for him to do was to run away and inform the Holy Maiden of the danger we had brought to Olympus.

  At the same time, the smartest thing for us to do was to prevent precisely that. Anna, Atanta and Odysseus instantly nocked arrows and fired their shots, expecting to catch him if he dashed away at a full sprint. Albrecht instead summoned up his gravity magic and yanked a massive piece of rock out of the ground for Wilhelm to run into. On any ordinary foe this would have worked. They would have either been skewered with arrows, stopped by a rock shooting up in front of them, or both. But Wilhelm wasn't an ordinary foe. He knew how to use Qi techniques.

  Instead of running he summoned up a film of white energy and a moment ter he was gone, at the edge of the tholos. This was precisely how he had escaped us st time. He'd used a fsh step and then he'd used a spell crystal to whisk himself away.

  Just like st time Yume used her own fsh step to appear right in front of him the moment he showed up outside the tholos. I would love to say that I did the same but unfortunately I had no idea how exactly Yume did that. I could of course fsh step there but Yume had known where he would fsh step to before he'd showed back up and I had no idea how to do that. It made sense. She had decades of experience on me when it came to using Qi and, more to the point, she had decades of experience fighting people who used Qi. But it was still frustrating. I could jump after him but he could just vanish again. And so I had to leave catching Wilhelm to Yume.

  Fortunately there were more than enough enemies around even without Wilhelm present.

  “You know, I'm gd you left some for us,” Albrecht said as he stepped up next to me, “but I didn't expect to show up in the middle of an army.”

  “It was this or kill the army ourselves before calling you in,” I said as Albrecht stomped his foot on the ground to create a gravity wave that sent a volley of goblins arrows plummeting to the ground.

  “Fair point,” he said, then nodded at the goat trolls. “Will anyone be upset if I take those big bastards down?”

  “Knock yourself out,” I said. I took one moment to consider where I could do the most damage and after having to lean out of the way of another goblin arrow I decided I knew what I should be doing first.

  I fsh stepped into one of the fortifications the goblins had built and started swinging Helios Edge. To outside observers my swings would have seemed wild and uncoordinated but in truth that was only half true. On the one hand my body had become so strong and my perception so good that these goblins might as well have been affected by a Slow spell, giving me ample opportunity to line up each swing even if it didn't look like it but on the other hand Helios Edge was a weapon that simply lent itself to wild swings. When swung with force it sent out plumes of fire and so each swing decapitated at least one goblin and then roasted the two standing right behind the one my sword had actually cut, killing more and more with each swing until I was surrounded by a burning fortification filled with charred goblin corpses.

  I allowed myself a moment of satisfaction before I looked around for the next fortification the goblins had erected. Only a dead goblin was a good goblin, after all. That moment of seeking out my next target also gave me the chance to see how the fight was going.

  Alisha, Melinoe, Hestia and some of the Heroes were sending spells at the charging orcs and archers like Anna and Aphrodite peppered them with arrows while Selene, Hephaestus and a couple of simirly defensive-minded Heroes kept them safe. Hermes was floating high above the battlefield, raining quicksilver magic down on the foes. But the real fighters to watch out for were the Great Heroes and Poseidon.

  Having some of the Olympians along had been impressive all on its own but seeing Poseidon in action I could appreciate the monumental difference between the other Olympians and one of the big three. Poseidon, just like the oceans he governed, was a force of nature. The hooded traitor god we'd seen had used some powerful water miracles but Poseidon's dispy way breathtaking. He wielded his trident like a halberd, stabbing with the pointy end and swinging with the sharpened sides of the arches. That alone would have been impressive given that nothing seemed to so much as slow the swings of that trident but it was far from all of what Poseidon could do. Each movement he made was accompanied by a jet of water shooting out and striking a foe. This wasn't just a mildly annoying bst of water, either. Those water jets stripped flesh from bone, tearing holes into whatever they struck. If anything was stupid enough to approach Poseidon from behind they were immediately caught by such a jet and anything that tried to scramble away from him was scoured as well.

  Albrecht was exactly as terrifying as when I'd fought him. He used his gravity magic to make boulders shoot out of the ground to hem his foes in and to harass them so that they couldn't avoid the devastating swings of his ridiculous sword. Wherever he swung that bde the world exploded, body parts scattering across the floor of the tholos.

  Atanta was completely different but no less effective for it. She dashed around the battlefield, slicing foes up with a pair of curved swords, and whenever she had room to breathe she would toss her bdes into the air, pull out her bow, fire a shot, stow the bow again and then catch the falling bdes before continuing to dash and ssh. It was a fmboyant way of fighting and it probably wouldn't have been so effective if not for the enchantments on her weapons. The swords caused cutting gales with every slice in the same way Helios Edge created plumes of fire and the bow multiplied her arrows mid-fight, allowing her to fire one arrow only for six to actually strike her foes.

  Odysseus' style of fighting was entirely different from all of them, however, and it was easy to see that he came from a different era. His fighting style eschewed most of the fir of what I saw from the other Heroes and simply focused on being extremely efficient. His bow was rger and longer than Atanta's and Anna's, reminding me more of the greatbows that the Atanta cult used than anything else, except those dies usually operated far away from the battlefield rather than directly on it. Odysseus never lined up a shot unless he could kill at least two foes with it, his arrows rge and heavy enough to spear one goat-orc through the heart and then come out the other side and embed themselves into the skull of the one behind it. Whenever enemies approached him he dropped the bow and let them sm into his aspis, a great round shield like the one Athena used. Once the foes bounced off his shield he simply stabbed them through the heart with his spear. There was something workmanlike about his style of fighting and it was quite terrifying to behold. He didn't concern himself with looking impressive, he simply dealt death with every move.

  Comparing him directly with Poseidon I wondered if this was part of why Poseidon hated him so much. Poseidon was by far the fshiest fighter here and Odysseus was almost his total opposite. Or was it the other way around and Odysseus fought this way precisely to spite Poseidon? The legendary items the Olympians gave their Chose Ones did always tend toward the fshier side, case in point Helios Edge's fire enchantment.

  I shook it off and fsh stepped into the next goblin fortification just as Albrecht finally reached one of the goat trolls. Again I sliced and burned, killing the little shits as quickly as I could. With six gods and dozens of Heroes around I was certain that even hails of excrement-covered goblin arrows wouldn't be too big of an issue but being shot at by arrows was always dangerous in the heat of battle. When a momentary pse of concentration could be fatal a goblin arrow was an unacceptable risk. If you dodged backward to avoid an arrow taking out your eye that might give another opponent exactly the opening they needed to kill you. And so I kept on decimating the goblins rather than joining in the fray.

  In just a few short sshes this fortification was filled with nothing but corpses as well and I turned around to see how Albrecht was doing. And immediately wished I hadn't.

  Albrecht's sword had no trouble cleaving through the goat troll. In fact, the field around the two of them was positively littered with discarded limbs. But that didn't matter. The moment he scored a wound pink flesh exploded outward and filled out the missing space. It didn't grow back neatly, either. Instead of the hairy limbs the troll had once had it was now covered in lumpy, pink flesh, dozens of grotesque, misshapen limbs growing out of the wounds Albrecht had managed to score.

  Where the creature's right arm had once been a tangle of dozens of differently sized pink limbs now grew, unduting and swaying in the breeze conjured up by the wind sshes Atanta's swords produced around the tholos. At some point Albrecht must have tried lobbing the troll's head clean off. He'd even managed to bisect the head from top to bottom. But all that had done was that now the two halves were connected to the body by tangles of pink flesh, the whole thing looking like the eye-stalks of a snail coming out of a troll's body.

  “Gods above...” I breathed, unable to help myself. I had known fighting these things would be bad but this was a cut above anything I could have anticipated.

  But I shook it off. I still had goblin nests to exterminate. While the trolls were clearly higher priority targets, I had decided to cull the goblin archers and everyone present – except maybe for a few of the Olympians – was a good enough tactician not to butt in on decisions like that. In short, by attacking one goblin fortification and destroying it in a couple of swings I had designated myself as the one who took care of the goblins and that meant I had to see it through to the end because people now relied on me to do so.

  Unfortunately despite all the mystic fruits I'd eaten and all the training I'd had fsh stepping still took a lot out of me and that meant I had to take short breaks between jumping into these goblin hordes. And while watching Albrecht fighting something that grew more horrific the more he decimated it was harrowing, it had also been just what I'd needed to catch my breath. I jumped into the next horde.

  This one fell even faster than the previous one. Goblins were malicious creatures but they were also stupid. And so they reacted the exact same way as the st two hordes. They jumped in surprise, then started chattering in a panic and only then did they drop their bows and grab for short spears to skewer me with. And by the time they'd managed to raise their weapons most of them were already dead.

  Once again I used the opportunity to take a deep breath and survey the battlefield. A good half of the goat-orcs was already dead and while the rest of the beasts kept our side busy there were few enough of them that besides Albrecht Athena and Poseidon had managed to break through their lines and engage the trolls. For an instant I had hoped that the gods would have more success breaking through the trolls' regeneration but no such luck. Athena had clearly tried to use her Paldion miracle on the one she was engaging and it had merely resulted in the troll now having a stake of knotted pink flesh coming out of both sides of its ribcage and all Poseidon's flesh-scouring water jets had accomplished had been to repce more of the troll's furry flesh with twisted growths. The one he was fighting barely even looked like one of the goat trolls anymore. It was simply a mound of pink flesh with indistinct limbs and teeth. Lots and lots of teeth.

  I shook it off and fsh stepped to the next goblin nest but before I could so much as raise my sword Yume appeared next to me, now wielding a katana in each hand and slicing the goblins apart with ease.

  “This feels awkward,” she said. “I will need to train this.”

  “It looked pretty impressive,” I said and she gave me a quick smile. “I take it Wilhelm got away?”

  “I could have caught up with him but he fsh stepped into this rge temple structure surrounded by enormous bck tentacles. I figured this is where the Holy Maiden is and decided not to engage her on my own.”

  “Good girl,” I said. In response Yume gave me an eye roll. She was much older than me after all. Except despite the eye roll her tails were wagging at the compliment. “But that means she now knows we're here.”

  “She does,” Yume said. “A moment after he appeared in the temple the tentacles became agitated. They don't seem safe to pass through.”

  “We'll figure something out,” I said. “Even if we have to waste one of Alisha's miracles on a Cleanse. Now, let's take those st few goblins out so we can help with the trolls.”

  “You with the enchanted sword and me with fire?” she asked.

  “You got it.”

  And so we each fsh stepped into one of the two remaining goblin nests.