Vol.5 Ch.15.2 – The Heroes Of Elysium II

I swung my blade through a wide arc to get the last of the blackish goblin blood off of it. One of the little shits had thrown itself flat to avoid Helios Edge's flames and so he had gotten his very own stab as a reward for his efforts. With my blade once again pristine I looked around and sought out Yume, only to find her standing at the center of a pile of goblin parts, both her swords held at her sides.

Good gods, if this was what she could do without training herself to dual-wield I shuddered to think how powerful she would be once she mastered the use of both blades. Ever since we'd gotten her a sword she had been a force of nature but now, reunited with her old sword, she was positively terrifying. Given that that sword had apparently been forged by a divine blacksmith I wondered if it was actually a Mythic piece of gear. It certainly seemed to be no weaker than Athena's Mythic spear.

But right now that didn't matter. What mattered was that those trolls were clearly regenerating too fast for anyone to deal with. But Yume and I would be able to help with that. Hopefully.

I slid Helios Edge back into its sheath, pulled out the enchanted sword that stopped the Black Goat's regeneration and gave Yume a nod before rushing at the nearest goat troll, the one Albrecht was fighting.

The beast was horrid to look at, a mass of cankerous pink flesh pouring out of an almost normal-looking beast, its skull cleaved in two and balanced on two pink tendrils like the eyestalks of a snail. And since the last time I'd looked at it the beast had clearly grown a couple more grasping pink appendages.

“As much as I like fighting big things,” Albrecht rumbled as I dashed past him, “I think I like it better when the big things actually die!”

“Don't worry,” I called out, “I think I know how to deal with them!” I reached the beast and sank my blade into the bubbling pink flesh, almost too easily. The creature stiffened up immediately, letting me know that the sword's effect had at least done something. And sure enough, as I pulled out the blade the creature's flesh began to bubble and fill in the hole but much more slowly than it had before.

“Well that did sweet fuck-all!” Albrecht yelled as I dodged out of the way of the goat troll's massive arm.

“Hit it again!” I called back. “It should stick now!” I hope.

Albrecht didn't waste time on witty remarks, he just stormed in and swung at the creature. And it was that swing that made me truly appreciate just how strong he was.

Albrecht had not gone easy on me. He had not held back. But the issue with a ludicrously big weapon like his was that against a nimble opponent there was basically no opportunity to swing the weapon through a wide, devastating arc. The only time he's gone for a proper two-handed swing against me had been when he'd tried to blow me away with the blast of air that swing had caused. But against a troll he did have all the time in the world to line up a proper blow.

His left foot came to a halt about three feet in front of the creature and his sword was dragging behind him, held in both hands. With his foot firmly planted he pivoted, twisting through an arc, the motion for his sword swing beginning in his feet. The momentum traveled further up his body, twisting his hips and then his shoulders, and with the momentum of his whole body behind him he swung the sword through a devastating arc. And the world took notice.

A blast of air took the nearest goat-orcs left standing off their feet as the massive sword carved through the troll's body, encountering no resistance as it went. The sword wasn't just enormously long, the blade was also incredibly thick. It had to be, otherwise it would break under the stress his swings put it through, enchantment or not. But this thickness also meant that the wounds it carved were just as enormous as the sword carving it. Never mind the sheer weight such a weapon had to have, the ludicrous force that sheer weight gave to each and every swing.

As a result, the troll's remaining arm went flying, as did the tangle of limbs it had where the other arm had once been. The grotesque eyestalks that had once been the troll's head spun through the air before splattering onto the ground. The pink flesh split open, exposing an open ribcage full of more bubbling pink flesh.

Albrecht stood his ground despite the horrifying sight, staring at the creature. At first I thought he was annoyed that the creature had gone down so quickly but then I noticed that he paid close attention to the bubbling flesh. It was regenerating far slower than before but it was still regenerating. I had no idea if the beast could come back from having its head cut off despite losing access to the Black Goat's regeneration but I wasn't going to chance it.

“Yume!” I called. “Now!”

Immediately my little fox appeared in front of Albrecht and me, a fire snake infused with her Qi curled around her arm. She thrust her arm forward and the fire snake surged into the troll's wound, the flesh popping and sizzling. If the troll had still had a head with which to scream, it would have, but as it was the entire beast stiffened up, its arm stumps reaching up as if trying to claw the fire out of its flesh, and finally the creature fell over with a noise like a falling tree.

“Why did you even drag us here if you just end up killing the monsters yourself?” Albrecht asked, slightly annoyed.

I shook my head. “You killed it. We made the death stick. These fuckers were the reason I wanted you guys with us.”

That seemed to mollify him.

“Shall we take down the rest?” he asked.

“Start hacking at one,” I said. “We'll deal with the ones Athena and Poseidon are fighting, then we'll get back to you.”

“Understood,” he said and charged at a troll that was being kept busy by half a dozen Heroes.

“Poseidon or Athena first?” Yume asked.

“Poseidon,” I said. “Let's get it over with.”

And so we made our way across the battlefield to where Poseidon was failing to kill a troll. My issue with helping Poseidon wasn't just that the guy was an ungrateful bastard who would probably berate us for butting in. The issue was the troll itself. Poseidon's water jets were powerful enough to scour flesh from bone but in the case of these trolls that was less effective than it otherwise would have been. The troll he was fighting looked horrid even compared to the one Albrecht had been fighting.

This troll no longer had a head at all. Neither did it have a neck. There was merely a smooth line of pink flesh from one shoulder to the other. The troll's chest was just a gaping chasm. Poseidon had clearly started off with blasting the beast's head off its shoulders and when that had failed to kill it he'd clearly used his water jets to erase the creature's heart. But now it simply resulted in the beast's upper body being a single gaping maw, rows and rows of teeth undulating around where a ribcage should have been. The beast's arms were still mostly intact, though the fingers had been ground down to nubs. Pink flesh had filled in the gaps, causing wet slapping sounds whenever the creature galloped at Poseidon on all fours, which was these trolls' preferred mode of locomotion.

“You look like you could use a hand,” I called out as we approached the god of the sea.

“I'm too busy to entertain your impertinence right now, Tailor,” Poseidon ground out as we reached him.

“Trust me buddy,” I told him, “I'm just as thrilled to fight with you as you are, but the two of us have a way to stop this thing from regenerating so just shut up and let us work for a moment.”

He grumbled for several moments but eventually he did step back. As he did I noticed him breathing what he certainly wouldn't appreciate me calling a sigh of relief. Apparently tossing his powers around left and right was taxing even for a god like him.

I wondered about that. Having had sex with Athena I of course knew that gods could indeed get tired from strenuous activities but he seemed unduly tired for how little fighting he'd done so far. He was one of the three strongest Olympians, right next to Hades and Zeus and from what he'd shown so far he was clearly on another level than the other Olympians. But then why did fighting tire him out so much?

Was he simply too used to people just obeying him? Was he out of shape? His rippling muscle sure didn't seem like it. Did it have something to do with him having been chained up for months on end and then immediately deciding to fight at full power? Or had the months of inactivity caused enough people to lose faith in him that it was harder to draw on people's belief? Between what Athena had said about Demeter weakening herself by insisting on her little vegetable patch on the clouds and what Wilhelm had said about how gods would turn mortal if they ran out of worshipers I had to assume, then, that gods were parasitic lifeforms that subsisted on people's belief and drew power from their worshipers.

Hold on. Did that mean the life force gods used to power their miracles came directly from their worshipers? It would explain a lot. I vividly remembered Athena's comment when she'd first learned to control her Qi: “It feels weird, like I'm a puppet tugging its own strings.”

But if that truly was why Poseidon seemed so out of breath now then that meant that what the cultists had tried here would have worked if we hadn't stopped it. I truly did believe that the Olympians, horrible as some of them were, were still the lesser evil when compared to a bunch of Outsider cultists but a small part of me was a little peeved that this had been a prime opportunity to knock the Olympians down a couple of pegs and not only did it fail but it failed in large parts because of the actions of me and mine. If this had been allowed to continue for just a few months longer Poseidon might have ended up inside that creature's gaping chest-maw but instead he'd been able to hold his own. Then again, it would probably have taken considerably longer for one of the most powerful Olympians to lose enough worshipers to actually die after being eaten alive so it was a moot point altogether.

Right now we needed every Olympian we could get to save Olympus and oust these fucking cultists but I still seared all of this into my mind for the future. I would not be cowed by the Olympians ever again. I now knew how to kill them.

I looked over at Yume and allowed myself a smirk. Oh yes. There was one Olympian in particular that all this information would be very useful against. The one who had hurt my little fox. Ares was our ally right now but that would change in time.

But right now I needed to focus on helping Poseidon. I rushed forward and right on my heels I heard the clacking sound of Yume's wooden sandals on the marble floor as she came after me. As I reached the goat troll it reached for me with one of its massive paws, the squirming pink flesh it now had in place of fingers looking beyond disgusting.

I idly wondered how the creature could even sense me without a head but just as I began to wonder I saw two tiny orange goat eyes glowing from within the beast's empty chest cavity. Either way I dodged its swing with a sliding tackle.

I wasn't stupid enough to try and kick its legs out from under it, however. Not only was the creature way too heavy and solid for a simple kick to move it but even if I had managed it all it would have accomplished would have been to bury me under a ton of cankerous flesh and rancid fur. No, I slid in between its massive leg, holding my breath and pointedly not looking up as I slid past the beast's junk and ass, and then rammed the sword into its side as I came back up behind it. The maw on its back opened and closed as if the creature was breathing with its back but I didn't really care so long as it didn't snap at me. I did do my best to not look at it, however. It freaked me out. The maw on its chest was full of sharp teeth but I had seen something similar back in the Crystal Crown's dungeon. It was horrifying but it was something I had seen before, something I could handle. However, the mouth on its back was different. It wasn't a chasm of teeth. Instead it looked like an oversized human mouth, the teeth perfectly ordinary if far too big, and seeing something so distinctly human in this context was worse than fangs and claws.

In the wake of me deactivating the beast's unnatural regeneration Yume threw a ball of fire into its chest cavity and then yelled:

“You can take it out now!”

It took Poseidon a moment to realize she'd been speaking to him but when he did he jumped back into action and only someone who was looking for weakness would have been able to tell that he was moving more than a breath slower than at the start of this engagement.

But even a breath slower than before Poseidon was a force of nature. He swung his trident like a halberd once, twice, and suddenly the troll's arms were no longer attached to its shoulders. Pink flesh still bubbled where the beast had been cut but it was so much slower than before that it might as well not have had regenerative capabilities at all. Technically a single fireball from Yume shouldn't have been able to stop a troll's regeneration cold but unlike the unnatural regeneration of the Black Goat a troll's regeneration still required actual energy to work and without a head or a heart the creature's system was clearly overtaxed with just keeping it alive.

Poseidon lined up a third strike, making sure it was perfect, and then sliced the creature in two from neck stump to tailbone.

“Good job,” he told us.

This was no longer the arrogant bastard I'd delighted in pissing off so many times before. I was sure I could have really, truly hurt him right then by pointing out just how weak months of imprisonment had made him but instead I decided to hold my tongue. I simply nodded and rushed to go help Athena.