Allen1996
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Rage against the heavens: chapter 11: The god Equation
🕑 Added 2025-01-26 02:28:46 +0000 UTCOne week had passed, and to say that things had changed would be the understatement of a lifetime. It wasn’t merely a shift in circumstance or status—it was a rupture in the very fabric of what I thought my life would have been, what I had wanted it to be before discovering the truth behind this world.
Hancock Park, a neighborhood that could afford to bathe in luxury, was now powered entirely by my device. Still running flawlessly, might I add, its hum steady and unyielding as it pumped energy into sprawling mansions and manicured lawns. The people here—top one-percenters, every last one of them—could’ve easily afforded to keep the lights on with their bloated bank accounts yet, when faced with the option of something free, they clung to it like it was their god-given right. That’s the thing about the rich: their selfishness is as natural as breathing, not born out of necessity but out of the sheer fact that it costs them nothing to be that way. This was why they were and remained rich.
Among the many, things that had changed, Beryl's career, for one, had roared back to life, not just with a flicker but an inferno that seemed unstoppable. My mailbox was drowning in letters, contracts, and glossy envelopes sealed with the names of production companies that had churned out the greatest cinematic spectacles of the last decade. They wanted her in everything. She wasn’t just back—she was coveted. The very same execs who had laughed in my face, who had sneered when I mentioned my “impossible little device,” were now groveling. Not even an actor myself, I’d somehow received invitations to star in movies. It wasn’t admiration. It was bribery. Bribes wrapped in expensive stationery.
She was actually out, at her apartment picking personal stuff, clothes and the like. I don’t think that any of us had expected when she rang at my door a week ago that she would stay here, that we would begin living together again.
It wasn’t perfect, wasn’t at all like it used to be, there was too much baggage, things between us for that and her staying close, in a place Zeus didn't know about was with my plans only the logical thing. It would probably not be forever but for now, it would have to be such.
They wanted my favor. They wanted a slice of my pie—the pie that could shift the gears of civilization itself. They thought I’d forget the smirks, the derision, the outright dismissal when I told them I’d cracked the secret to limitless energy. Now that I’d proven them wrong, they scrambled like rats on a sinking ship. But let them sink. Let them panic. I didn’t need them.
Oh, they’d be money made. The Huntingtons, my sole allies in the upper echelon, would see to that. I’d already promised that those who believed in me from the beginning would eat well. Even a fractional share in my company—when it launched—would make them wealthier than the fantasies of their wildest accountants. Enough to buy ten homes in Beverly Hills without blinking. That’s what this invention could do. This was the kind of thing that didn't make a billionaire but a trillionaire.
Unlimited energy wasn’t just power; it was empire and empires were not built by indulging every fool with an open hand.
The second change was harder to ignore, as it surrounded me every time I stepped outside: bodyguards. An army of them. Some hired by the Huntingtons—more out of concern for their investment than for me personally—but others sent by the government. Yes, Uncle Sam had finally caught wind. Funny, isn’t it? The nation of endless bureaucracy suddenly discovered a knack for speed when the potential to control a limitless resource entered the equation.
For better or worse, the Huntingtons were now part of my daily life. If it weren’t for Thalia, I’d have written them off entirely. If it weren’t for Thalia, I would not have done any of this, I would have not cared and endured this much with the last thing I wanted to be interacting with people but they were efficient—terrifyingly so. They’d turned mountains of paperwork, licensing, and patents that would’ve taken me months, maybe years, to wade through into mere days. Connections opened doors that were otherwise impenetrable, and the Huntington's had connections in spades. I hated needing them, but fast progress toward my goal demanded sacrifices, even if those sacrifices included tolerating their constant presence.
It wasn’t lost on me that my invention painted a target on my back. Oil barons, governments, shadowy organizations with initials for names—they’d all want a piece. But so what? You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and I wasn’t here to tiptoe around their fragile egos and then there was the Olympians.
it could be said that making an unlimited energy device was the last thing to do if you wanted to avoid the attention of the Olympians but the thing was that I didn't fear their attention on myself if it was because of what I made or did.
In canon, Leo, a demigod, not even a god but a demigod was able to create Festus, a literal mechanical dragon hundred of meters long in less than a year.
I would be surprised if Hephaestus hadn’t already created since ancient Greece such thing and chose to put in one of his garbage dumps.
Hephaestus, the god of the forge probably had entire scrapyards full of more impressive creations than my unlimited energy device and Zeus?
I hated to admit it buy Zeus had known that I was rich but had done nothing to ruin me even though he could easily have. More than that, didn't Apollo in his books say that sometimes, centuries passed in a blink of an eye for a god, that it could happen that decades pass without them noticing?
No, the gods noticed when their pets—favored humans and demigods—started brushing up with things, people they didn't like.
The real danger would come when I got too close to someone they cared about. That’s when the hammer would fall. You don’t notice an insect until it crawls onto your plate. Until then, I would be nothing more than background noise in their immortal lives.
But there was another reason I pushed forward. It wasn’t just about proving them wrong or building my empire. It was about people. About lifting humanity—not just collectively, but individually. What good was any of this if I didn’t care about the people who’d benefit from it? You couldn’t claim to love the world while scorning its inhabitants. No, the love had to be all-encompassing, even for the flawed, the broken, the selfish. Not doing such, not caring in such a way would make me the same thing as the gods and the last thing I wanted was to be like them.
A shriek snapped me out of my thoughts—a sound like someone had tried to play a violin using a chainsaw. Discordant, jarring, wrong in every sense of the word. I looked down at the workbench in front of me, where the twisted remains of a circuit board sparked weakly. I’d been so lost in my thoughts that I hadn’t noticed the test run failing spectacularly.
This was what I’d been working on: a suit. No, not just any suit—an armor forged from Necrodermis itself. The fight with the Cyclops had been a brutal reminder of how fragile I was. If I hadn’t kept my distance, relying on railguns to pepper it with hypersonic slugs, I’d have been reduced to paste within seconds. That thing had reacted fast enough to slash at hypersonic projectiles.
There was no room for error in battles like that, and I couldn’t rely on luck to save me next time. Murphy—also known as the Fates in this world—would see to it that my luck ran dry.
My philosophy was simple: if something could go wrong, it would. Better to overprepare and laugh at my paranoia later than to be caught off guard and regret it forever. The suit I envisioned was something that would probably be not amiss coming out ofthe mind of the greatest Iron Man fan. A blend of cutting-edge technology and near-divine craftsmanship. Think Iron Man, but with elegance, with purpose. It would have two modes: one a physical, visible suit for battle, and the other a more subtle layer, like Gaara’s sand armor, for constant protection.
At one point, I’d toyed with the idea of embedding the armor beneath my skin, nestled between my epidermis and dermis.
I had of course realized seconds after the many problems with the idea kinda like this was straight up going mad and stupid scientist and that maybe , maybe, having in your flesh what could be seen to be the flesh of some of the most dangerous and darkest gods/beings from the Warhammer universe maybe wasn’t like the wisest thing. I was sure that somewhere, in the evil overlord list not that I was evil but there had to be a part warning against grafting your body with remnants of a godlike entity. Just because I could didn’t mean I should.
I turned back to the suit’s frame, tracing the sharp, angular lines of its design. The Necrodermis gleamed faintly under the overhead lights. Necrodermis was a metal that seemed to drink in all forms of light, brightness rather than reflect it.
It was writhing imperceptibly under containment fields that buzzed faintly with energy. It was the closest thing I had ever seen to a metal, a material truly alive yet it was alie, so much that I knew that without the knowledge I had of it due to the inspired inventor, without the passive benefits that came with the C’tan star in my mind, I may have truly gone mad or worse.
I had tested it just to be sure of the veracity of the knowledge I had, to see if it being in another universe didn't change it too much. My conclusion had been that this material didn’t just follow the rules of physics; it mocked them kinda as if it had given the middle finger to logic and slept with its mother and its father.
To make the armor, I’d had to dismantle its inherent chaos, the way you might cage a storm in a jar without spilling even a whisper of wind. I’d started by bathing the metal in an electromagnetic lattice, tuning the fields to specific frequencies whispered to me by the C’tan’s Star of Knowledge buried somewhere deep within my mind.
“Stabilization achieved,” I spoke thinking aloud more than anything else.
The Necrodermis twisted slightly, responding to my words as though acknowledging its containment. It didn’t have a consciousness, not in the way humans do, but there was an intelligence to it. Like a snake coiled around its prey, waiting, measuring.
The next step had been far more tedious. Understanding its baseline properties meant running tests—X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, particle scattering—each revealing layers upon layers of shifting crystalline lattices that reconfigured themselves under pressure, temperature, or even thought. I’d built a model to simulate its responses, though I suspected the star in my mind had already mapped this out. It let me struggle just enough to feel like I’d earned it.
I glanced down at my notes—pages filled with a chaotic mix of formulas, runic symbols from the C’tan’s knowledge, and hastily drawn sketches of what the armor could become. I was designing not just an exoskeleton but an extension of myself, a skin that could think, respond, adapt. The nanomachines embedded in the Necrodermis would act like microscopic architects, tearing apart and rebuilding the material as needed.
Imagine a swarm of bees, each carrying a single drop of honey, collectively constructing an entire hive in moments. Now, replace the honey with atoms, the bees with molecular assemblers, and the hive with me. That’s what I was building or trying at least.
The programming had been the hardest part—not because the science was beyond me but because the implications weren’t. The Necrodermis was alive in ways that defied categorization. It wanted to grow, to evolve. I had to ensure its growth followed my directives, not some latent instinct buried within its alien structure. The last thing this world needed was for it to go Ultron.
So I built a command matrix.
At its heart, it was an encryption system layered with binding protocols—a governor, a leash. Without it, the Necrodermis might decide it didn’t need me anymore And like said before, no ultron if possible. More than that, everyone knew reboots were always worse than the originals.
I turned back to the containment chamber, where the seed pulsed faintly. “Time to teach you some manners,” I whispered, connecting with it by using adaptive material synthesis kinda like an interface. The Adaptive Material Synthesis was my tool for shaping the impossible Without adaptive material synthesis, my use of the C’tan star would have been way more limited.
With it, I began layering instructions into the Necrodermis: how to harden against impacts, how to absorb energy, how to flow like liquid but strike like steel.
Each line of code felt kinda like a brushstroke on a masterpiece that was at the same time a nuclear bomb that that could explode at any moment and kill me if I got it wrong.
The metal responded slowly at first, reshaping into thin threads that coiled around themselves in spiraling fractals. It was contradictory, beautiful, in a way—organic and mechanical, ancient and futuristic.
Adaptive material synthesis guided its growth in accord with my will building layer upon layer until the first piece of the armor took shape: a gauntlet.
I lifted the gauntlet carefully, slipping it onto my hand. The Necrodermis shifted, adapting to the contours of my skin, its texture cold yet somehow alive. I clenched my fist, and the metal rippled, tightening around my knuckles. A single thought, and the gauntlet transformed—fingers sharpening into claws, then retracting seamlessly.
“Perfect,” I murmured, though I knew I wasn’t done.
The rest of the suit would follow the same process: adaptive lattice growth, energy infusion, nanomachine coordination.
Each piece was a triumph of engineering and madness because of how easily it could go wrong. That made it more exciting.
The chest plate, designed to dissipate heat from energy blasts. The helmet, equipped with sensors that would let me see beyond the visible spectrum. The boots, capable of anchoring me to walls or propelling me forward in a burst of kinetic force.
But the true genius of the armor wasn’t its physical capabilities—it was its adaptability. The Necrodermis would shift on command, forming blades, shields, even wings if needed.
The Cyclops had taught me that one mistake, that hesitating was enough for things to go wrong. One mistake—one moment of hesitation—and I would’ve been flattened like a fly under a hammer. The railguns had saved me that time, but I couldn’t rely on distance alone. The next fight might not give me that luxury.
“Murphy’s Law,” I muttered, watching the Necrodermis weave itself into the beginnings of a chest plate. “If something can go wrong, it will.”
I really hope it would not.
Now that I felt very much less even if still vulnerable, it was time to do the thing I had wanted to do the most after what happened to the demigod child a week ago and the disappearance of Thalia.
Total victory was only possible when you knew your enemy, when you knew about them more than they did know themselves.
It was a good thing that I had created the earrings for Beryl and the chain for me that would allow to hide away from the gaze of the world behind the mist but it still didn't change that I was disadvantaged, by a lot because of ignorance.
I would not be able to know I was in presence of a monster without coming close to said monster and did I really need to tempt the fates?
Additionally, the idea that Thalia was maybe somewhere there still in Los Angeles, in the same city than me, alone, homeless, it was not something I wanted to imagine.
Sure I would not be able to interact directly with Thalia if she was hopefully close, if I found her due to Zeus but it didn’t mean I could not use intermediaries.
This was another proof that the gods weren’t shit. Even if there was a law forbidding them to interact with their children which by the way only existed in the movies and not in the books, that still shouldn’t have stopped the gods to interact indirectly with their children like if I were a god and I could not directly interact with my child, I would still make sure that they would miss nothing materially, that they were safe through the use of servants and my powers.
Also the fact even though I knew that I was repeating myself but it bear repeating, I had seen a child’s corpse literally being devoured.
I would not be able to relax until I found her. I would not be able to rest until she was with me.
Me being able to see, to know where every monster and demigod in my vicinity was, to maybe find her if she was still in the city was primordial.
This is why due to the knowledge given to me by the stars of anti-divine and anti-monster knowledge in his mind I knew I had to do one thing, a thing most people would do anything to avoid, something the modern and reasonable human found almost impossible.
I grabbed my jacket and stepped outside, the afternoon air cool against my skin.
Go outside and touch grass because sometimes, the bullshit about the simplest solutions that are the ones that matter most was actually true.
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Leaving my home—fortified as it was with bodyguards due to the limitless energy device I’d crafted—should’ve been an impossible task. It wasn’t just the walls or the locked gates, or even the armed men patrolling my perimeter with expressions carved from stone. It was the sheer impossibility of them letting me walk out the front door, go outside by myself.
Alone? Unthinkable.
They were there to protect me, or so they claimed. Protection from what? Jealous CEOs? Oil barons? Spies? Governments drooling over the potential to monopolize my invention? Sure. People, they could handle. They probably had protocols, weapons, plans.
But monsters?
The kind that tore through steel and flesh alike, that shrugged off gunfire as though it were nothing more than drizzle on their ancient hides? They wouldn’t stand a chance. The same confidence, expertise, experience that would make them perfect against mortal threats would get them killed if they encountered something truly other.
So I didn’t tell them. They didn’t need to know.
More importantly, no one had to know I was gone. If all went well, this wouldn’t take long. Just a few hours.
With my armor clinging to me like a second skin, I was safer than I’d ever been. Unless someone was prepared to scorch both the North and South American continents into glass to get at me, I was untouchable. And even then, I’d wager I could walk through the ashes untouched.
I activated my adaptive material synthesis, the Necrodermis folding around me like shadow and light colliding in a perfect dance. The surface of my body warped, bending light, refracting it until I disappeared entirely. The air around me seemed to ripple faintly for an instant before smoothing into nothing.
Invisible, I stepped out of my neighborhood. Past the gates. Past the guards who’d been trained to see everything but wouldn’t see me.
In the shadow of an alley, I let the invisibility drop. My form returned, smooth and seamless, the Necrodermis armor retracting just enough to appear like normal clothes—a hoodie and jeans, unremarkable in every way.
The air in Los Angeles hit me like a wall—thick with exhaust and the scent of asphalt baked under a relentless sun. The streets bustled with life, chaotic and sprawling. It was 1993, and the city was a cacophony of sounds and colors. Cars crawled along the roads, their engines growling in protest against the perpetual gridlock. Street vendors called out their wares in a dozen languages, their voices competing with the blare of distant music and the occasional scream of a siren.
Billboards towered above the city, their bright colors promising everything from the latest blockbuster to the best burger in town. Neon signs flickered above bars and diners, casting pools of artificial light onto the cracked pavement below. Children darted through the crowds, their laughter piercing through the din like birdsong in a storm.
This city was alive in a way that felt almost violent, as though its pulse could be heard in the honk of a car horn or the bark of a street vendor.
As I walked, my thoughts churned, circling back to the stars in my mind and the knowledge they poured into me. Something I’d quickly come to understand—and was now trying to exploit—was how those stars could work together. They weren’t isolated fragments of insight but pieces of a larger whole, overlapping and enhancing one another.
Take, for instance, the anti-monster knowledge. It was designed—if you could call it design—to deal with beings that preyed on humanity. That definition was fortunately in my case broad. Monsters, spirits, even gods like the Olympians could technically fall under its umbrella.
That meant anything I did or built to target something that was both divine and monstrous gained an edge, a kind of synergy that transcended individual stars. But it was more than just functionality. The stars gave me perspective.
It wasn’t just a dump of information into my brain. It was as though they connected to what I already knew, weaving their knowledge into the framework of my existing understanding.
That’s why the earrings and chain I’d crafted for Beryl and me had worked so well. They didn’t just draw on the stars’ insight but on my own knowledge of the Mist—the strange, elusive veil, the layer of reality that existed only in this world hid the supernatural from mortal eyes.
The Mist wasn’t something that existed in the universes the stars came from yet, using their knowledge, I’d been able to create tools that both concealed us from the Mist and allowed us to see through it. If I hadn’t already known how the Mist worked, those tools might never have succeeded.
That synergy, that melding of the stars’ knowledge with my own, was what had made the spell I was about to cast possible.
The spell held its basis on one thing and one thing only, the thing that was the reason why I would have opposed the Olympians sooner or later even if it hadn’t been for my niece and this thing , the thing I wanted to take to replace the Olympian order or like it was said in the books, the flame of the west and it was in simple terms humanity.
Yeah, The spell was based on a simple yet profound idea: humanity.
it was both simpler and more complicated than it sounded. To understand , it was first needed to realize, to comprehend how this world worked both metaphorically and physically even if in a sense, it would be accurate to say that in this world, both of those things were the same things or at least so linked, fused together that it would be almost impossible to realize where one began and where another ended.
Living in a modern world with literal gods, supposed masters and movers of the unseen and the seen, it would be logical after a good dose of existential dread of course to truly wonder about the logic of how the world, the Universe around worked. We read things, are told things and nothing else other than the bare minimum of an explanation is given.
One would wonder about how the sun and the moon are the twins Olympian chariots yet according to science, not at all, when in simple terms, according to science the moon is a rock and the sun is a star.
One would wonder how Artemis could literally put a new constellation into the sky when Zoe died in the honour of her dear lieutenant when the universe logically, scientifically wise should not function at all this way.
We are told in canon, we read in the pjo books that the gods or at the least the Greek ones are the Western civilization and how them falling, how them being toppled from their supremacy, their thrones grinded to dust mean it would too with everything it ever brought directly or indirectly to the world but we are not explained in details the how and the why.
I was going against the gods themselves and one logically going against the gods would have to win, to know how to fight them effectively How does faith affect them, if starving of said faith or weaponising it would be all that is needed to deal with the gods, if anything else needed, could be done.
I had read so many comments, so many fanfics, even reread the original myths again and again. I saw so money people in real life and on the internet affirming that faith is what powers Gods, creates them even at least in the cosmology, the metaphysics of this world.
I always saw such arguments as lazy because gods would not be called gods if it was the case. It was also insulting in a way. If gods needed humans in this world to exist, if humans were the ones to make the gods, didn't it mean that in a way, humanity was responsible for all the sins of the divine and more than that, that the humanity of this world was shackled, servant because it is what humanity wanted, that the gods and their atrocities came to be and continued because that's what mankind wanted because otherwise they would have been gone for a long time, because otherwise faith would have turned into hatred and spite, enough that no matter the cost, there would be no drop of divine in this universe.
More than that, it was kinda contrary to canon with so many deities like Kymopoleia or even some of the Titans who weren’t known at all even for Greek mythology aficionado yet those deities that 99% of the human population didn't know have not faded and like Kymopoleia had shown it in canon are notweak at all.
Also, in canon, in the books, we are shown that gods that have faded were able to come back without needing faith like Helios and the Egyptians god did.
Additionally, if it was so easy to deal with a deity especially a Greco-Roman one, I don’t think that the Olympians would have chopped their father in endless pieces before throwing said Father’s body parts in Tartarus.
In the Percy Jackson books, in this reality just like the one in my first life, humans understand the universe through science: the Earth orbits the Sun; the Moon orbits the Earth; weather follows meteorological patterns; technology arises from human ingenuity.
In my first life and in this one too, what people typically do is dismissing mythic occurrences as coincidences or illusions.
Human beings wanted things to make sense. It was literally ingrained in our nature. This is why we had survived for so long. This is how we have raised from animals living in caves to what we were now.
Human beings wanted things to be perfectly rational and that was more than understable like what do you mean you saw a twelve-year-old wrestle with a man bull and kill said man bull with his own horn before said man bull turned into golden dust.
When things were reported, things of incredible, life changing things that made everything that one thought was true challenged, shown as false, you better have iron proof because people liked certainty, liked their comfort zone and inherently would do their utmost, their best or worst depending on how you saw it for it to not change even if you were right.
This was the kind of thing even if you were right that sent you to the mental hospital as if sending you away, labelling you as crazy would erase the truth, would change facts and unlike what movies, TV shows, games and the like may depict in a bad light I personally knew that it could easily be so much worst. Thinking about it, there were probably clear sighted mortals and demigods locked in mental hospitals after sharing what they saw. I would have to try if I can make them go out. Another task for later. That was a problem for future Alex.
Anyways, what I was saying was that everything seemed perfectly rational yet beneath that scientific, rational framework, undertstanding existed a second layer: one of mythic truth, one where gods, Titans, monsters, nymphs, and all manner of supernatural powers weaved the tapestry of the world. In these hidden realities:
Apollo and Artemis each had “chariots” guiding the Sun and Moon across the sky. Storms and earthquakes came from Poseidon’s wrath.
Structures of civilization from forging and architecture to democracy owed intangible debts to Hephaestus, Athena, and other gods.
The Olympians were literally anchor the intangible force known as “Western Civilization,” which has moved from ancient Greece to modern America.
It was kinda the man in a cave framework of Plato. It could be said that mankind was the blind man in the cave, the demigods the one with one eye able to peer at the shadow of and an infinsmental small part of the real world beyond from the cave and clear sighted were the ones for the best and the worst who could see perfectly beyond the cave, who could see the world outside as what it truly was.
In canon, in the books, Percy who was the strongest demigod at that point in the books was unable to truly look at the form of Typhon saying in other words because it had been so long since I read the books that doing such would make him go mad.
The same thing could not be said for clear-sighted mortals like May, Rachel and Sally who saw everything and were the only ones who could navigate just with their sight the labyrinth. If we followed that framework, the gods and being alike to them like the Titans or the Giants or the monsters so powerful that there were no differences even if in a way, the differences already existing were kinda academic when you really thought about it were the ones outside the cave, the ones whose actions created the shadows.
The star of C’tan knowledge, the one coming from an universe where the Immaterium, a psychic dimension reflecting a universe, one that echoed and underlined the familiar four dimensions of the material universe existed, this star was the one to make me understand, see it as if even with the chain I built for myself, the one that was supposed to negate the influence on the mist on me so much more.
it was as if I had been blind without my chain, half blind with my chain and that now with the C’tan star, I wasn’t, that now I could see with my two eyes.
I waited on the sidewalk until the lights turn red before crossing the street. This star allowed me to see the world for what it was even better than before. The reasoning behind how the Olympians, gods and the supernatural, the way it fitted with the natural, the rational was due to the fact that in this universe they were the same thing, that the Materium and Immaterium of this universe were not separated like in the Warhammer universe but fused.
In a sense the Olympians weren’t Greek gods at all, they probably originally were but that’s not the case anymore. I had been on the nose. The Olympians were Gods of the Warp. It could be argued that they were a mix of the Eldar Pantheon before its destruction and the Chaos gods.
They were more akin to gods from the Immaterium because they were gods that incarnated the evolving heart of classical ideals—law, art, reason, ambition, heroism—wherever they flourished instead of simply being Greek gods.
With the materium and the Immaterium being the same in this universe I could see it now, how every was connected, why the gods’ fall would mean humanity’s too because I could see it now, this world as if everything in it, everything around me was the different synapses of a same brain.
I crossed the street and everywhere my gaze fell at the world around me, everything was different. Non living Things and living things, artificial and natural the cars, the sky, the buildings, the Earth, the people, the wind—they weren’t separate. They were synapses in a vast, living mind. Everything was connected, a web of energy and meaning stretching out in all directions.
I had never used psychedelics but being on an acid trip was probably similar to this. It made me wonder. Does it mean that in this Universe, the people using, taking drugs like weed and the likes get high but not in a faded way and more I can see the true shape of the world but lack of context and the complexity, weirdness of everything makes them think that their brain due to the drug they consumed is the reason why they saw what they saw instead of maybe because they used substances originating from the Earth and nature that was in this world alive?
Did it mean I had to involve myself with drugs? I didn't want to think about it any more. Probably would have but that was a problem for future me.
Fortunately, the thought was put in the back of my mind when I finally saw I was at my destination. I stopped, finally having reached it: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, one of the only places in the city, alongside the Getty Villa, where I could launch my spell.
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The museum door swung open with a creak, its sound swallowed by the cavernous hush of the building. I stepped inside, and the air hit me like a wall—dense, heavy with something far older than dust or decay. It wasn’t just the chill of air conditioning or the faint scent of waxed floors. No, this was something deeper. Ancient. Alive.
The entrance hall stretched before me, a strange liminal space where modernity kissed antiquity. Marble floors reflected fluorescent lights, and yet the way those lights played across the surfaces felt… off. They shimmered and danced, creating faint halos that weren’t quite natural. Statues lined the walls, their forms bathed in kaleidoscopic hues that shifted and pulsed with every step I took, as if they were aware of my presence.
In my past life—or even this one, before the stars nested in my mind—I wouldn’t have noticed any of this. I would’ve seen a museum like any other, a collection of dead artifacts preserved behind glass. I would’ve walked through this space blind to its true nature.
But now? Now I could see.
In the ancient world, gods had temples, altars. Their power was tethered to places of worship where offerings were made, prayers whispered, and sacrifices laid bare under the heavens and in this world—a world where gods still walked, their influence still saturating every aspect of life—why would it be any different?
This museum wasn’t just a collection of relics. It was in a way a temple. It was a minor one, perhaps, but a temple nonetheless. Its halls and galleries, adorned with statues of gods and heroes, were altars to the Olympian order, to the flame of the West.
My gaze fell on a statue of Athena, her marble form standing tall and proud, her spear raised as if to pierce the sky itself. Beside her, a bust of Zeus, his beard carved in meticulous detail, loomed with an authority that felt suffocating. I wanted to punch it even though I knew it was not the true him.
Nearby, a mosaic of Heracles depicted the hero mid-battle, his muscles straining, his face locked in a snarl of determination.
This place was an altar. A candle lit by the flame of the West and like all altars, it held power. It held authority and since the dawn of time, authority had always been usurped.
I walked further into the museum, my footsteps muffled by the carpeted sections of the floor. The kaleidoscopic glow of the statues seemed to follow me, their shifting hues casting strange shadows on the walls. I moved with purpose, seeking a space devoid of guards, devoid of prying eyes.
Finally, I found it—a dimly lit corner of the museum, tucked away from the main exhibits. The air here felt thicker, heavier, as if the weight of the history, of the divine itself pressed against my chest.
I let out a slow breath, steadying my thoughts.
The anti-divine and anti-monster stars in my mind thrummed softly. Both of those two stars, the anti divine and the anti monster stars in my mind came from the Fate/Nasuverse Multiverse.
it had been in my opinion only a logical thing to use that multiverse as a reference. In most Fate series, games, visual novels, animes etc, humanity sooner or later succeeded in imposing a human order, replacing mystery with science and human reason, at becoming the apex creature.
From Gilgamesh, Solomon, Merlin and series/Franchises like Kara no Kyoukai and note where humanity literally beef and wins against the worst monsters, against the literal manifestation of the consciousness of planets and win by stabbing and shooting them, how could I not take knowledge from this Multiverse?
But in this world? This second life of mine? It was still the age of the gods. In this world, it had always been the age of the gods.
In this universe, humans were not thriving on the entire planet because of themselves, because of their endeavours, no, it was because the gods saw them as pets, as entertaining critters.
More than that with how run-through and slutty most of the gods were, there was a great chance that a large portion of the humanity of this universe descended from them when you took in the fact that they had been mingling with humans in this universe since the dawn of their existence.
The age of the gods permeated everything, saturating the very fabric of this reality but it was because of that saturation that the spell I was about to cast was possible.
In this world, all great achievements—whether in art, science, or civilization—were directly or indirectly tied to the gods. Humanity’s greatest triumphs bore the fingerprints of the Olympian order. Their influence had tainted the souls of mortals, binding them to the gods’ authority.
But not mine.
The anti-divine star and the C’tan star had made one thing abundantly clear: my soul wasn’t like the souls of this world. The gods didn’t exist in my first life—at least not in the same way they did here. If they had, their power and influence over humanity had been negligible.
Comparing my soul and probably the soul of someone from my first life to the one of someone in this one would be akin to comparing two things that had let’s say the same design but one of the two was made with glasses and another without glasses which in the end gave things that resembled greatly due to the fact that they were originally supposed to be identical but weren’t perfect reflections of each other.
In Nasuverse terms, my soul was foreign to this reality. If servants were summoned by an equivalent of a holy grail in this world and a version of me was chosen to be one of the servant summoned, my servant class would probably be the foreigner class. My very existence here was a contradiction, a fragment of another framework intruding on this one, one coming from a human order which meant that I wasn’t as subject to it as someone whose soul had always been from this world.
And that gave me an edge.
More than that, it was without adding the Inspired Inventor and everything it gave me, everything it gave me the possibility of doing.
Anyone with the inspired inventor could probably count as a foreigner with the fact that pulling on concepts from outside reality.
Where someone in this universe to do, make something great would probably directly or indirectly pull from the intangible frameworks of Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, etc, someone with the inspired inventor didn’t which probably meant that whatever I built if Luke won and Kronos destroyed the Olympians thus the Western civilisation would not affect the things I built, the things I did, I taught, I gave.
I was in sense planting reality seeds just with the things I had already made because they were from outside the PJO universe.
The gods didn’t know it and hopefully they would not for a long time but even if I died, even if I failed in my goal, just doing enough would in the long run do a lot to lead to a stable society that no longer held a chance of crumbling into a Stone Age if the gods vanished.
I was in sense rewriting reality even if it would be more accurate to say that I was infecting this one.
Me not originally being from this world making my soul foreign, the inspired inventor and all the perks it gave me, the fact that I created, brought things in this world that were alien to it meant that the spell I was intending, one that would parasite the temple I was in even though I should have failed due to the fact that even though this temple was metaphysically a candle lit by the flame of the West, a fraction of infinity was still infinity, all those things worked in accord to make my spell work.
The air around me began to change as I focused, the Necrodermis blooming from the unseen like a black tide. It rolled across the floor, a sea of liquid metal that shimmered with faint traces of green and gold. Runes began to take shape within the metal, their forms alien and otherworldly, etched with meanings in languages that were both more and less, that were at the same time human and other.
I was a parasite, an intruder in this world.
The surreal hues of the museum—the kaleidoscopic glow of the statues, the faint hum of divine energy—shifted as the Necrodermis spread. Blackness consumed the light, the green and gold runes twisting through the darkness like veins of fire.
For an instant, it felt as though the entire world had pulsed forward before recoiling, a ripple in reality that sent a chill racing down my spine. My vision blurred, the room around me fading into an abyss of black and gold.
I partially activated my armor, a single gauntlet forming around my hand. The Necrodermis surged upward like a wave of rolling darkness, coalescing into the sleek, alien design of the gauntlet. It felt weightless, almost ethereal, as if it were a part of me rather than something I wore and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the spell completed.
The room snapped back to what it had been, the statues glowing faintly once more, the air still heavy with ancient power. To the Olympians, this place would still feel under their dominion. But the truth was different.
Here, at least, I was the supreme authority. It's as if I had hacked let’s say their online forum and instead of removing the powers of the mods made myself supreme mod without them knowing if that made sense.
A faint hum emanated from the gauntlet, and a hologram flickered to life above it—a map of Los Angeles, projected in brilliant green and gold.
The green dots represented monsters, scattered across the city like droplets of poison. There were thousands of them, far more than I’d expected. It was staggering to think that so many of these creatures lived among humanity, hidden in plain sight.
The golden dots, far fewer in number, represented demigods. There were only seven.
Seven demigods in a city as vast as Los Angeles.
My gaze lingered on the golden dot. I would have prayed if the gods of this world were not assholes so I silently hoped, hoped that one of them was Thalia then my eyes caught movement—four dots, two streets away. Three green ones, too close, chasing a single golden dot.
Realization hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Without hesitation, I bolted from the room.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The moment the realization struck, I didn’t stop to think. Adaptive Material Synthesis flowed over me like a second skin, bending light to render me invisible. My surroundings blurred as the thrusters beneath my feet ignited, a surge of Necrodermis-powered force propelling me forward.
Buildings streaked past me in flashes of gray and brown. The faint hum of the thrusters was muffled by the rush of air, each movement a precise calculation of speed and trajectory. I soared above the rooftops, the city a blur below me, every step closing the distance between me and the dots on the holographic map projected on my gauntlet.
The dots flickered and shifted as I neared. The golden one was moving erratically, darting through streets and alleys. The green ones followed in relentless pursuit, their movements swift and calculated. Whoever the demigod was, they didn’t have much time.
The map in my gauntlet adjusted as I approached the alley two streets away. With a final burst from the thrusters, I launched myself above the buildings, twisting mid-air before the Necrodermis thrusters beneath my feet dissipated, their energy redirected into slowing my descent.
I landed in the shadow of a narrow alley, my boots hitting the ground with a soft thud.
There, just a few meters away, I saw them.
The golden dot—now flesh and blood—was a boy no older than five, his brown hair tousled, his face pale and freckled. He wore a private school uniform, his green eyes wide with terror as he stumbled backward.
Behind him, the shadows came alive.
Three figures emerged, their forms a twisted mockery of canine grace. They were probably hellhounds, their black fur shimmering like oil under moonlight, their glowing red eyes fixed on the boy with predatory intent. Their teeth gleamed, each one a shard of ivory death, their growls rumbling low and hungry in the narrow alley.
They were too close. Too fast.
My body moved before my thoughts could catch up.
The thrusters roared to life beneath me, the Necrodermis weaving into a wave of kinetic energy that propelled me forward. I bent the light around me to vanish into invisibility, crossing the distance between myself and the boy in a heartbeat.
The hellhounds lunged, their jaws snapping mere inches from the boy’s face but they never reached him.
My arms wrapped around the boy, pulling him into my chest as I twisted to the side. The Necrodermis flowed over my skin, shielding us both as I slid beneath the snapping jaws of the monsters. Their claws scraped against the pavement with a sound like nails on glass, the momentum of their leap carrying them over us.
We hit the ground on the other side of the alley, the boy tucked safely in my arms. The air felt electric, every nerve in my body on high alert as I carefully set the boy down.
I exhaled slowly, my breath escaping in a sharp, controlled sigh.
The boy stared up at me, his green eyes wide and unblinking. His face was frozen in shock, his lips trembling as he tried—and failed—to form words.
I knelt beside him, placing a hand gently on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
The boy nodded stiffly, his movements mechanical, as if his body hadn’t quite caught up with what had just happened.
“That’s good,” I said softly, rising to my feet. My gaze swept over him, taking in the scuffed knees of his uniform, the way his small hands clutched the fabric of his shirt. He couldn’t have been older than five.
“Probably not how you saw your day going, huh, kid?” I said with a faint smile, trying to ease the tension in the air.
The boy didn’t answer, but the low, guttural growl behind me shattered whatever calm I’d managed to create.
The boy whimpered, darting behind me as the hellhounds regrouped, their eyes burning brighter, their growls vibrating through the narrow alley like a death knell.
I turned to face them.
“Let me guess,” I said, more to myself than to the monsters. “Asking you to turn into adorable, fluffy little dogs like Miss O’Leary is off the table, right?”
The hellhounds snarled, their bodies tensing as they prepared to attack.
“Go figure.” I sighed, rolling my shoulders as Necrodermis flowed over my arms, forming sleek, black gauntlets etched with golden runes. The armor felt weightless, as if it were part of me.
“I guess that’s why I’ve always been more of a cat person.”
Comments
Cesar gonzalez
Nice update Wondering if he’ll make a device that would seal both Olympus and the underworld in there own pocket dimension so they can’t interfere with the mortal world or would that be too much? Like the stuff the old ones used to make the webway. Or even a tesseract labyrinth that trayzn has
