Mount Othrys groaned. Not metaphorically: reality itself strained under the pressure of what was happening around it. The sky fractured into overlapping periods: dawn layered over dusk, stars bled through daylight, moments stuttering as time tried and failed to correct itself. The divinity of time was in disarray, and Kronos felt it the most. He saw the reason for this.
The 7th son. The one without a name.
At the summit of the mountain, the King of the Titans rose from his obsidian throne. The Titan of time could no longer afford to sit high above everything; the time had come to fight. He was aware of it the moment the bright light reached the summit of Mount Othrys. His vast frame rose to great height, every step thundered across the vast distance with the promise of timely death. In his grasp rested the Scythe of Severance, the blade that had once unmanned Uranus and rewritten the cosmos with his mighty swings.
Around Kronos, temporal pocket rings rotated, the past, present, and future cycling endlessly, feeding him an infinite number of possibilities. The path to victory, as he called it, would be revealed to him.
And before him, standing alone upon shattered marble and wealth of Kronos' temple, was Neoth.
The God Emperor did not wear a crown. He did not need one. Golden armour radiated around him, inscribed with runes the Titan didn't recognise and which seemed to manifest themselves into existence and change constantly. Monstrous psychic and divine power burned behind his eyes, wild, furious, seemingly boundless, but perfectly controlled.
Around him and through him, manifested as the glorious armour, the Sage Force could be felt. If one had to describe it, it was luminous wisdom and science combined with psychic might. Neoth had turned one of the fundamental forces of the Multiverse and centred it around himself, becoming its corona and the channel for it.
Kronos snarled, pulling himself out of the illusion that he saw before him. It wasn't that Neoth did anything actively. His mere presence manifested differently in everyone's mind. He appeared as the perfect specimen, bigger than a mountain and more powerful than the world itself.
"You should not exist," Kronos thundered, his voice overlapping itself in different timelines. "I devoured you to prevent this moment. I erased you from time!"
Neoth met his father's gaze, unblinking and unafraid. He had a very calm, smooth voice. However, his lips don't move, as he was speaking with his mind.
"You brought about the inevitable. You feared prophecy so much that you made it absolute. I broke out of your prison with my own power. If I turned you katatonic when I was an infant, what do you think I will do to you now that I have grown far more powerful?"
"You will die here today," Kronos growled. "I have seen it."
"No. You have not. No such moment exists in the future."
...
The mountain vanished as Kronos struck first. The Scythe in his hands fell.
Not downward, not sideways, but backwards in time. The blade carved through causality itself, aiming not for Neoth's physical body but for the moment of his birth, the moment he broke out of his stomach. Time collapsed inward, bending to Kronos' will, as the Titan sought to unmake Neoth at his weakest.
Any other being would have ceased. But Neoth did not.
Neoth's boundless psychic power was unleashed. Infinite strands of probability rewove themselves as Neoth's mind expanded beyond linear thought. Limitless strands of thought existed simultaneously as they met with Kronos's attack.
The Scythe passed through Neoth's bdy... and split nothing. Neoth stepped forward, unharmed. His armour shone brighter than it did initially, fuelled by his usage of psychic energy. The Sage Force fuelled his inherent power further, making him more than powerful enough to contend with the Titan of Time.
"You rule time," he said, raising his hand lightly.
He closed his hand for a moment, his psychic power compressing matter and energy on galactic scales. When he opened his palm less than a millisecond later, a new galaxy hovered there. The miniature galaxy expanded and then compressed again, forming a new 'big' bang and creating new galaxies. The three-dimensional creation, suddenly twisted and morphed into something that didn't fit the third dimension, jumped into the fourth dimension and fizzled out of the present.
A certain 4th Dimensional imp was startled as a growing and expanding set of galaxies appeared... who knew where those came from?
"My rule stretches beyond time."
The air shrieked, roared and cried as Neoth's will became the law, the rule, and an order. Kronos felt it right away, Neoth's will imposed upon reality, stretching further than he could see. For the first time since the dawn of creation, the King of Titans, ruler of time, felt unsure and out of his depth.
Kronos roared and retaliated, unwilling to be outdone this way. Time reversed. Neoth's wounds, wounds that had not yet happened, opened across his armour. Futures in which he failed were pulled back to the past as Kronos attempted to overwrite the present. Entire timelines collapsed onto him, each carrying the limitless weight of death, defeat, and the end.
Neoth staggered momentarily; the power of Kronos had surged momentarily. Someone was weaving with fate, and it seemed that Kronos was starting to affect fate directly as well. This happened through the free manipulation of time. Someone was sending aid from the future, allowing Kronos to affect time. If this went on, the King of Titans would gain a divinity of fate as well, making the fight harder.
Faced with this problem, Neoth smiled. He closed his eyes, and a moment later, the battlefield froze. Not slowed down, but halted in its entirety.
Kronos strained, pouring all his divine energy into his dominion of time to reverse the process, but time refused to answer. The Sage Force, which was constantly feeding into Neoth's power, had done something impossible: it had outpaced chronology. Neoth's mind expanded beyond the frame Kronos ruled, stepping into a higher axis of perception where time and fate were merely variables.
"You lost," Neoth said softly. His eyes burned as they reopened.
He raised his sword. The Emperor's Blade ignited. It was a channel for his power. Every swing carried his psychic authority and divine order, his will. Neoth slashed his sword through the air once, and billions of conceptual blows landed simultaneously.
Kronos reeled as layers of his existence were peeled away, his past weakened, his future destabilised, and his present was suddenly cut apart. He looked down and saw a clean slash, having cut through him, splitting him in two. There was no blood, no hindrance to the sword. His defences were bypassed and reduced to nothingness.
"I AM TIME!" Kronos roared, summoning every remaining ounce of his power. "I made you!! YOU CAME FROM MY LOINS!! I CAN TAKE THIS POWER THAT YOU STOLE FROM MEEE!!"
The Scythe sang as he fuelled it with his divinity and swung again, this time aimed at Neoth's destiny itself. But destiny no longer anchored Neoth. The god born without a name, who had given himself one, had removed himself from the book of destiny itself, choosing how his story would go.
Neoth answered this surge of power with his own.
"TIME IS NOT POWER OF YOUR CREATION."
With a thought, Neoth created a new decree. He imposed a new axiom upon existence: Time would flow forward as it was initially. Every action taken today would be rendered null, and Kronos' authority would be mute.
Kronos froze. For the first time since his creation, the Titan King could not see the future or the past. And for someone like him, he was essentially blind. Fear flashed across his ancient face. Fear and understanding that he never saw his own victory. He had seen a loop of endless suffering and death... at his own hands.
Neoth advanced, each step resuming order in the world around them. The skies stabilised, the mountains reformed beneath their feet, as the fighting stopped outside and Neoth's forces came out on top. Kronos struggled, his Scythe trembling as its dominion had been stripped from him.
"You could have ruled beside me," Kronos rasped. "You could have inherited eternity."
Neoth stopped before him. Kronos saw his son tower above him, looking down on him like the god he was, looking at an ant.
"I already did. But you were never needed for that. I will take all of it on my own."
Neoth stabbed The Emperor's Blade through Kronos' stomach. A clean execution of the old order.
"AAAHHHHHhhhh..."
Kronos screamed as his power drained, his body withered, and his essence shattered, absorbed into Neoth and truly dead. This power was siphoned, stabilised, and absorbed into Neoth's divine power, further empowering him and pushing him further up the ladder of powerful beings.
The Titan King's particles, reduced and broken, dissipated in the wind and died out with a small whisper. The Titanomachy had ended.
.
Demeter & Custodes Primarch Antonius, together with the IVth Custodes Legion, had defeated Iapetus. Demeter had absorbed the Titan of light's ichor and parts of his power.
Hades & Custodes Primarch Hasturias of the IXth Custodes Legion had fought and defeated Atlas, the Titan of strength and endurance. Hades had done the same to Demeter and absorbed parts of Atlas' power, using this strength to rule the Underworld later on.
The Xth C-Legion had fought alongside the silver-armoured, newly established Grey Knights. Custodes Primarch Tybalus had led the charge against the Titan Oceanus and his many children. The Paladins had proved their worth and eradicated those who stood in their way, while shattering Oceanus' mind and turning him into a useless vegetable. Their order had been to strip the Titan of his divinity and then capture him, but not kill him, as the Emperor still had uses for him. Grandmaster Ignatius of the Ist Brotherhood carried the sphere containing Oceanus' divinity and power to the Emperor.
In the south, where the sea had once boiled as the enraged Helios fought with all his rage and power, melting the attacking frigates with beams of divine solar power, silence had returned. Aboard the Aquila Invictus, the Captain General Constantin Valdor stood beside Custodes Primarch Desh. They had killed Helios and then supported the other fronts, picking off the Imperium's enemies by the thousands.
The Captain General marched at the front, making his way up Mount Othrys, to stand at the Emperor's side.
The forces of the Imperium, the Custodes Primarchas and the Emperor's guard, as well as Neoth's siblings, Hestia, Hades and Demeter, arrived at the summit of Mount Othrys and looked at the splendour that was Neoth. He had done it, had done alone what would have taken Zeus and his siblings the support from fate itself.
Neoth turned his gaze toward the horizon, where the future Empire waited to be forged. He looked at his siblings and his soldiers.
"Let history remember this moment," he said, his voice carrying across space, reaching everyone's mind.
"The Titanomachy has concluded, and we have emerged victorious. The old order has ended, and with it a new age has begun. We will rearrange our Pantheon and establish a new order."
"What will you do, brother? What about Zeus, Poseidon and Hera?" Hestia asked.
Neoth's eyes found his sisters. His gaze felt like the weight of a mountain on her shoulders, and she shuddered lightly. But Neoth wasn't angry with her; he respected her love for her siblings, and as goddess of the hearth, this was to be expected.
"Your concern for our siblings' wellbeing honours you, Hestia. They will return in due time to fill the roles they were meant to hold. Our Pantheon has work to do, and you all will be responsible for this."
"What about you?" Hades asked.
"Will you leave again? Can I come with you?" Demeter asked hopefully.
She wanted to step forward, but Constantin Valdor intercepted her, stepping in between.
"My ways are my own, but as ruler of our Pantheon, I naturally will be around when it matters. Although not always."
Neoth had plans that surpassed the scope of Earth. He could feel that Earth held tremendous secrets and value, and was a place of great importance, judging from how fate and destiny interacted with it. But he dreamed bigger and understood that they needed to be ready for whatever the future held.