Vol.5 Ch.13.2 – An Overdue Conversation II

Hopping across the clouds had become so routine to us that I barely even registered Poseidon's bemused look as we started our journey to Hades' tholos.

According to Athena the next tholos on our way, the most important leg of the journey, in a lot of ways, was going to be guarded by a group of trolls corrupted by the Black Goat, among other things. But even just those trolls would be troublesome.

Trolls were known for their incredible regenerative capabilities, able to grow back entire limbs within minutes. Their regeneration was easy enough to counteract by cauterizing the wounds but that only held true for proper trolls.

Creatures of the Black Goat had frightening regeneration as well, able to knit wounds back together even faster than trolls. I had a sword that could shut off their regeneration but we only had the one weapon capable of it. I'd had it enchanted for durability after it had saved our lives thrice over in the Crystal Crown's dungeon but that didn't change the fact that we only had the one sword and we wouldn't be getting any more.

The sword had been part of the treasure hoard of the Dark Lord of Shub-Niggurath Alisha, Selene, Yume and I had beaten and it had been one of a set of five enchanted items. They didn't feel malignant but the very fact that they could directly affect Outsider powers like the Black Goat's regeneration or the Yellow King's necromancy meant that they were at least touched by the Outside.

No, these tools weren't dangerous, that wasn't the issue. The issue was that they were unique enough that no enchanter I had showed them to could even fathom how to replicate their enchantments. As such, unless we somehow found another treasure hoard touched by the Outside we would likely never be getting a second sword like this.

And with these corrupted trolls the issue went even further. Cauterizing their wounds would shut off their innate trollish regeneration but it would still leave them with the regeneration of the Black Goat. Slicing them with the enchanted sword would turn off that regeneration but it would leave them with the innate regeneration of a troll. That meant we either had to laboriously shut off both types of regeneration for each troll or hit them with something so devastating that there wouldn't be enough left of the troll to regenerate.

Of course, that also left the question of what else we would find within that tholos. Even with the way we'd struggled against the possibly-Fomorians I thought this was going a little too smoothly. We were attacking a realm that had been overrun by the Holy Maiden's personal army, an army that had managed to overwhelm an entire pantheon.

We were strong but it still struck me as more than a little odd, the skeleton guard we'd found all over the realm only just barely enough to keep the Olympians contained. Was this just because we'd attacked at night, while most of the force was asleep?

Or maybe... I suddenly had a horrible suspicion. What if the Holy Maiden truly did have enough forces to overwhelm the Olympians left but it was all consolidated inside Zeus' tholos? We still didn't know what the Holy Maiden herself was capable of in direct combat, nor how strong her congregation was.

I hoped everything would go swimmingly once we had the Heroes here with us, that they would help us overcome anything we wouldn't be able to handle on our own...

Hold on. Why not work smarter than harder?

As we hopped I moved closer to Melinoe, swallowing down my desire to get to the bottom of what was going on between her and my girls, and asked: “So, how does that portal work?”

She startled momentarily but then began to consider. “How do you mean? You've used one of these portals recently.”

“Right,” I said, “should have clarified. Your father said only those with permission to pass can go through it. But wouldn't that mean the Heroes could just charge through it?”

“I thought you and the Heroes agreed that charging through it would be insane,” she said, her tone not condescending but baffled.

“Right,” I said. “I'm really not explaining things very well. You're right, just charging through the portal would have alerted our enemies and, depending on what's stationed there, would have been like running into a deathtrap. What I'm asking is, once we reach the tholos and engage whatever's waiting for us, is there anything stopping us from just calling in the Heroes?”

Her eyes widened in understanding. “Ah, now I understand. Well, the portal seemed inactive last I checked it. Mom and dad could open it from their side at any time but they don't know when exactly they should open it so we need to turn it on from our side.”

“And when you say 'we',” I began, “you really mean yourself, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Auntie Tina knows how to do it and I'm sure Uncle Hermes does as well but neither of them have as much practice with it as I do. It's not as simple as poking it and saying 'Activate'.”

I turned away from her so she couldn't see me press my lips together. What she was saying was that, essentially, we needed to rely on her to open the portal. If Athena knew how to do it that didn't mean we had nobody else who could do it but only with Melinoe's help would we be able to open the portal fast enough for the Heroes to help us in the coming fight. And it brought me to a horrifying realization.

We had considered whether there was only one traitor god and we had considered whether it might be some forgotten minor deity. What if the one who had snuck the army into Olympus hadn't been a god at all but a demigod? Melinoe had told me that she didn't resent the Olympians for their divine status but there was nothing stopping her from lying.

And right now our entire plan hinged on her pulling her weight. If she was the traitor then screwing us over would be as simple as breaking the portal rather than activating it. And if there was a way to break these portals then as the daughter of the two gods who had created them she would know best how to do it.

Alisha had reassured me that Melinoe could be trusted. And while I wasn't thrilled that I'd found Melinoe in bed with my girls didn't thrill me, the fact that none of them had had their throats cut in their sleep implied that Melinoe could be trusted but maybe she had just been biding her time, waiting for a much more dramatic way to betray us.

At the same time, I didn't want to suspect her. I liked her. As aggravating as she was sometimes and as much as her presence around my girls bothered me, I enjoyed her company. My mind was screaming at me that she was deeply suspicious but my heart trusted her. More importantly, my heart trusted Alisha and Alisha had told me that Melinoe wasn't dangerous.

“Hey Melinoe?” I asked quietly.

“What is it?”

“When this is over, we need to have a conversation.”

“Yes,” she said, quietly but with gentle conviction behind it. “Yes, we do.”

**

Finally, we reached Hades' tholos. It was as big as Poseidon's though I was sure I would find the décor much more spartan. Unlike basically all the other Olympians Hades and Persephone did not live on Mount Olympus, after all, and so it only stood to reason that the place would not be decorated like a living-space. I assumed I would find the same dark marble as Hades' palace in the Underworld and an essentially empty tholos safe for a portal at the center.

As we slowly crept up the stairs I reminded myself of the plan we had hashed out. If everything went swimmingly we would be keeping whatever foes we found busy until Melinoe, under an invisibility spell from Yume, would activate the portal. Our job would be to keep the enemy forces occupied so that they wouldn't notice the portal starting to activate. Of course, if Melinoe did end up being a traitor then we would be unfathomably screwed as we would continue waiting for reinforcements to arrive that never would.

I tried to push the thought out of my mind, tried to reassure myself that Alisha was the best judge of character I'd ever met. Of course there was a nagging thought in the back of my head reminding myself that if Alisha really was that good a judge of character she would never have decided to stick around me for so long but I pushed that thought out of my head as well. I needed to get my head into the fight.

Once we reached the rock plateau I saw that what I had assumed Hades' tholos to look like had been true. Or at least it had been true once upon a time.

The tholos truly was built out of the same dark marble as his palace in the Underworld, noticeably darker than every other tholos we had seen, and it truly did hold the empty stone ring of a deactivated portal and little else in the way of permanent structures. But that empty space was instead filled out with foes. Dozens of those goat-orcs were sitting around chatting with their weapons in easy reach and dozens of goat-eyed goblins were cowering behind barricades, gnawing on dismembered limbs of their victims like rabid beasts. On top of that there were six of the trolls we had been warned of. And while those trolls were certainly horrifying they weren't what was holding my attention.

In the center of the tholos, near the portal, sat a young man in a brown cloak. Given that according to Athena the cloaked figure with the stringy blond hair was currently busy tormenting Artemis it was already pretty clear who this young man had to be. It was made even clearer by the fact that he was sitting on a chair made of red crystal.

Prince Wilhelm, the youngest of Anna's brothers. I had known that we would be running into him sooner rather than later, had known it since long before Ares had revealed to us that he was here. I had simply hoped to run into him much later than this.

He was slouched in a pose of extreme boredom and I briefly wondered what he had done to be forced into guard duty but that wasn't nearly as relevant as the fact that they had clearly anticipated someone trying to open this portal. If Wilhelm's presence hadn't been proof enough then the entire army being ready for an assault was. I mean, the goblins had spiked barricades and were armed with bows, for the gods' sake. The real question was: Were they anticipating an assault from the portal or towards the portal?

It didn't much matter. The goblins were set up in circular nests, nearly impossible to attack without either skewering yourself on their barricades or being turned into a porcupine by their arrows. And I knew how nasty goblin arrows were. The little shits didn't smear them in poisons, no, nothing so sophisticated. Instead they dipped their arrows in their own feces, to contaminate any wound they caused with them.

The goat-orcs, meanwhile, were just as big and burly as the ones we'd seen in Poseidon's tholos but, mercifully, I couldn't spy any of those blasted standards. I wondered idly why that was the case. Did they think this army was strong enough on its own or was it because these standards were too indiscriminate? Would they slow down Wilhelm or those trolls? Would they slow down anything but the goat-orcs? It didn't matter much to me, honestly, so long as we didn't have to deal with any of them.

And then there were the trolls. Gods above.

Trolls came in dozens of shapes and sizes, to the point that some monster manuals would snarkily point out that there were as many kinds of trolls as there were trolls but they could generally be classified based on the environments they called home. Some of the most common ones were rock trolls, ice trolls and river trolls, and each had adapted to their environments in some way. River trolls, for example, had webbed hands and feet, gills and scales. And that adaptability went even further. Take a troll out of its normal habitat and before long it would begin to adapt to its new habitat. And the things we were facing here weren't simply trolls corrupted by the Black Goat, they were trolls that had adapted to the Black Goat.

There weren't any obviously grafted-on cankers on these beasts and neither did they have any red bubbling flesh that seemed wholly out of place. No, these creatures were covered with dark gray fur, only their bellies bare and the skin on those was a reddish brown color. Their heads were grotesque, a combination of the features of a troll with those of a goat. They had elongated skulls and horns but they still had a bad underbite and noses that jutted out a bit further than they should, their ears the big bat ears of trolls but drooping like a goat's. Their eyes were too big for proper goats and set too close together for a herbivore. The trolls' legs didn't end in hooves but they were backwards bent, the creatures practically forced to move around on all fours if they wanted to keep their balance. Their arms ended in enormous claws, not the spindly talons of a wendigo but instead the huge paws of a troll but with far sharper claws.

So far they looked relatively normal. Maybe not like normal trolls but not too terribly grotesque either. Even the fact that each of the trolls had a dozen nipples on their bare bellies didn't faze me too much. No, the true horror only became apparent once you looked at their backs.

Rock trolls had backs covered in raw gemstones. Ice trolls had backs covered in chunks of ice that smelled like troll sweat. River trolls had fins on their backs that let them pretend to be huge fish while in water. But these goat trolls had a mess of goat eyes and tentacles on their backs. The eyes weren't decorative, either. Each of them moved, staring out at the world and collecting visual information, giving the troll an almost perfect cone of vision. The tentacles, meanwhile, were by far the grossest I had ever seen on any creature of the Black Goat. When I said that these trolls were covered with hair I hadn't been kidding. Even their tentacles were covered in thick black clumps of hair, the hair wet and stringy from the moisture of the eyeballs. The tentacles were constantly questing around and I already knew without having to be told that if those tentacles grabbed hold of someone they would hold them in place on the troll's back, ready for the eyes to do gods knew what to them. With how grotesque these creatures looked I would not be at all surprised to learn that their backs could split open to reveal a giant maw or something equally bad. Either way, I already knew what to avoid.

At the same time, my mind was still at my earlier thought: Work smarter, not harder. If we could stall long enough for Melinoe to open the portal then we would have all the reinforcements we would need to take this army down. And I already knew from our encounter in the bowels of the Crystal Crown's dungeon that Wilhelm loved running his mouth.

If we could keep him talking we could end this fight before it even had a chance to start.

And so I walked out into view of the entire army and called out:

“Hello princey-boy, long time no see!”