Hecate moved as I stepped outside the dilapidated building Thalia had chosen like shelter. She moved with No rustle. No whisper. Just intent, folded neatly into every twitch of her fingers. Green mist followed her like a toxic fog. The mist had no source. It wasn't born from her mouth, her hands, nor the ground.
It slithered through the cracked floor like it had been buried there all along, waiting for its maestro.
I tightened my hold on Thalia so that if for any reason at all, Hecate attacked, I would be ready to move without making her fall. Speaking of her, she seemed to have falllen asleep in my arms. Just enough to remind myself she was here. Still warm. Still breathing. Still mine. She didn't stir. Only nestled deeper into me, as if even in sleep, she knew what the world outside my arms meant.
And the truth was… I didn't like it.
Her weight in my arms should've comforted me. But instead, it whispered wrongness. She was light, too light. As if her bones had eaten her from the inside. Like she had bartered away pieces of herself to survive, feeding muscle to hunger, hope to fatigue, flesh to fear.
That wasn't how a child was meant to feel. A child should be filled with life and laughter, not feel like emptiness, starvation and ash.
She had been starving. My daughter had starved on the streets like a feral thing, gnawing on shadows. And her so called divine father? Her divine, all-powerful, father, master of the Western world, king of sky and thunder, coward behind clouds had done nothing.
Nothing but spread his loins and then vanish like fog before the sun.
My hatred surged again, impossibly even worse, greater than before. More darker. More in every wrong and right way.
There was a world of difference between absence and abdication. A human father might have no choice but to leave, to not interact with his child depending on circumstances and even that we iffy because a father when he wanted to see would see his child no matter what But Zeus? There was nothing he could not have given her. A warm bed. A bodyguard of storm spirits. Ambrosia when she bled. Nectar when she coughed. He could have bent the world until it smiled at her.
But he let her starve. Let her run barefoot over broken glass and blood. Let her carry fear like a second skin.
If he had at least tried, tried to protect her, I would have hated him still, but I might have respected him. Might have seen something slightly good in him. But this? This was neglect that could not be dressed , rot wrapped in gold.
I kissed the top of Thalia's head. Light. Reverent. The same way you kiss a prayer when the gods are no longer listening.
She's with me now, I thought. Never again.
Never again will she sleep cold. Never again will her belly be empty. Never again will her nightmares be louder than my promises. If I have to bleed the world white, she'll never know this kind of pain again.
"She looks peaceful," Hecate said, her voice curling like smoke in my ear. "It seems things went well."
I didn't look at her. Just stared at the miracle in my arms and whispered, "Yes. Things indeed went well. She's coming back with me and that's all that matters. Everything will be well now."
I paused.
"I suppose the only thing left is building the clone."
"Indeed," Hecate purred.
There was a texture to her tone, something silk-wrapped but barbed. Dangerous. Flirtatious. That ancient play of predator and prey, dipped in seduction like venom on a dagger. The kind of tone that said she knew a thousand ways to ruin you, and had marked you down for one.
"I'll finally get to witness your magic up close," she said. "Intimately."
I didn't rise to the bait.
With a barely a flick of will, a strand of Thalia's hair was cut. I gave it to the goddess.
I had enough on my plate with Charlotte Huntington. I was already dealing with the daughter billionaire trying to chain herself to me like we were tragic lovers in a vampire novel. The last thing I needed was the affections of a goddess, especially this one.
Hecate was the kind of beautiful that sculptors went mad trying to capture, and the kind of broken that poets feared to touch. Even with the cracks crawling over her like veins of shattered porcelain, she was…
…pleasing. That was the word. Not alluring. Not divine. Pleasing. Like an art piece that had been deliberately broken to elicit a gasp.
And maybe that's what bothered me because that was bullshit.
Because she should have died. No matter how divine. No matter her power. My attack, Slash Emperor, even at partial charge should've annihilated her. Not simply wounded. Not simply scarred. But obliterated.
But here she stood. Laughing. Breathing. Moving as though pain was a language she had long since learned to ignore.
That was the problem.
I needed to know.
"How did you survive?" I asked her, voice soft as a blade's edge. "Even if you were at full power, even if you had your strongest wards up, it shouldn't have mattered."
She smiled. Not sweetly. But savagely.
"Yes," she breathed. "I shouldn't have survived."
Her smile stretched. Grew. Curved like a crescent moon sharpened to a knife.
"Unlike the feathered carrion of Egypt or the antlered cretins of the Norse, we Greeks are not immortal in the way that mortals pretend to understand. We do not live longer," she said, spitting the word like it offended her. "We do not simply reincarnate. We are immortal in the purest sense. Not long-lived. Unkillable."
Her eyes flared. "We feel pain, yes. But nothing can kill us."
And as she spoke, the mist doubled, tripled, continued to grow.
Sickly. Vivid. Crawling from nothing and everywhere all at once.
I stiffened. Held Thalia tighter. Every instinct in me coiled. Just in case the mad goddess of crossroads decided this was where our paths ended.
But she didn't strike.
She sculpted.
Her fingers moved like a maestro conducting a silent opera, every twitch bending reality to her rhythm. The mist danced with her. Obeyed her. Worshipped her.
And then it changed.
One bone. A rib. A femur. A skull.
Then sinew. Flesh. Skin.
And in less than thirty seconds, standing there before us was Thalia. Or a creature in her image. The same too thin frame. The same torn clothes. The same smudge of dirt beneath her chin.
Only the eyes were wrong. Vacant. Hollow. Like a doll's waiting for a soul that would never come.
Had I not been holding the original in my arms, I might've been fooled. That's how perfect it was.
The mist vanished as though dismissed.
Hecate turned her head to me, the motion languid. Reptilian.
"So like I was saying," she began, "we can't be killed. Not normally. There are ways, yes. Rare. Feeble. Strip us of our divinity, reduce us to meat and marrow then we might die. Or…"
Her smile fractured again, something inhuman blooming behind her eyes.
"…cast us into the slumbering chaos. Nothing returns from that. No thought. No memory. No echo."
And then, as if the world had been holding its breath
She opened her palm.
Something black emerged.
Not dark.
Black.
The kind of black that devoured light. That bent the soul inward. It screamed without sound, without force, yet every part of me felt it. The hairs on my arms stood like soldiers before a firing squad. My heartbeat tripped.
It reminded me.
Of it.
Of the Slash Emperor.
"This," she said, voice soft as rot, "is more than five orders of magnitude weaker than what you used. I wield enough power in this to split a continent into drifting marrow… and it is still only a fragment. A fraction."
She closed her fist.
The thing shattered into less than dust. Unmade.
"I dissected it, over and over. It can't kill. But it can wound. Truly wound. Wounds that won't close. That heal like rusted gears. Wounds that steal forever. It's a prison of pain."
I saw it then. In my mind.
A god. Golden. Untouchable. Struck by that spell. And all at once, their eternal life became a curse. A rot that never faded. A scream that never dimmed. A prison of agony that time couldn't erase.
And yes, I could see it.
A smile crept across my face.
Because as she conjured, I watched.
And understood.
Her spell was a lesser echo of mine.
So I opened my palm.
And shaped it.
Tennis-ball sized.
More stable. More complete.
Her eyes widened. She leaned in, awed. Not by the spell. But by me.
"Incredible," she whispered. "You reversed it. Refined it. Just by watching."
She gazed at me, something wild and human and wrong in her face. Her words came like honey tainted with arsenic:
"You're like me. It's beautiful. Just that would be enough to follow you down to hell."
And I hated it.
The way she looked at me.
Not like a man. Not like a mage. Like property. Something rare. Something precious. Something hers.
"Your spell should have marked my end. Something tells me that no deity lesser than a primordial would be able to survive it unless they decided to dodge. I hadn't tried to do so until it was too late so what I did was that I put an obstacle on the way. I had extended the size of the Carian's underworld to the same length as the surface of the moon so I teleported the island and us and braced and it still was barely enough. I still almost perished and the beach was the only thing remaining in my realm."
In other words, she had used bullshit to counter my bullshit and it would have not been enough had I used Slash Emperor at full power.
So in conclusion, as long as it is not dodged, it should be a win against anything less than a Primordial except if they were as bullshit as Hecate.
Good to know.
I crushed the spell in my hand.
And walked toward the clone.
"Let's get this over with," I said, not looking back
My fingers splayed like a crown around her head.
And I whispered, not aloud, but within:
"Structural analysis."
The world folded.
Not literally, but within my mind, layers peeled back, one after another. Like pages of an ancient tome that had never been written. Like an autopsy of the soul performed without a scalpel, only with truth.
What I saw could not be described in mere lines of biology. What I felt was not physics. But if a demigod could be understood, if the divine in one could ever be measured, then this was it.
First, the shell: carbon, calcium, iron, water. All in the right ratios, all pretending at humanity. Flesh made to approximate purpose. Underneath, layers of bone framed by deliberate imperfections. Then nerves, sinew, organs. Each pulsing with uncanny precision, as though copied from a page rather than grown.
And then
Deeper. Or rather: truer.
The foundation.
The analysis cut into the architecture beneath biology. Into the secret geometry of what makes a demigod. What makes someone like Thalia Grace a demigoddess, somebody capable of do impossible things for most.
The musculature came first. Hypertrophied, tension-rich fibers, dense and humming with potential kinetic discharge. Not the simple hypertrophy of weightlifters, nor the pathological swelling of muscle disorders. This was purpose bred, the flesh of warriors designed by what seemed to be blueprints. Type IIx fibers, explosive, reactive, ravenous for ATP formed a dense, writhing tapestry beneath her skin. Not just more muscle. Different muscle.
Tendons followed. Thicker, more elastic. Built for strain as if intended so that she would be able to catch herself mid-fall from heights that would liquefy a normal spine, for resisting g-forces that should have shredded her ligaments. Her bones were denser than granite. Not by magic, by accelerated osteoblast activity, mineral layering, and an architectural perfection that no random mutation could yield.
The skeleton, though hidden, was a map of her function. A cathedral of force distribution. No warping, no fractures, not even microfissures. Her being that Bastard's biological daughter hadn't merely given her strength, it'd made sure she wouldn't collapse under it.
Then the hormones. Growth factors spiking well beyond mortal ceilings. IGF-1 levels akin to engineered giants. Testosterone, cortisol, norepinephrine, all running in perfect sync, a hormonal storm that I could say that felt as if balanced on a knife's edge. It was as if her endocrine system was not just made to respond to stress but to anticipate it.
Reflex arcs. My analysis continued toward them and registered conduction speeds that breached theoretical ceilings. Where an Olympic athlete's nerves might fire at 120 m/s, hers danced at double, triple, perhaps more. Neural latency, the milliseconds between perception and reaction compressed until reaction might as well be precognition.
I watched a memory, one she inherited from the true Thalia, encoded in her spinal cord: the first time a blade had been swung at her throat. She moved before her eyes finished recognizing it. Motion before cognition. Survival before thought.
Her senses weren't just sharper. They were prioritized. Proprioception operated like an active radar, scanning her position, pressure, and rotation in real time. Every joint communicated its status at every millisecond. It was like i was seeing the mechanisms of a machine. Fallacy wasn't permitted. Misstep wasn't allowed.
Even her heart seemed to have been built with war in mind. Stroke volumes that would kill normal people by overcirculating their blood. Lungs calibrated for breath-holding for a hundred time longer than the average person. Alveoli optimized for maximal oxygen retention under high-stress combat. Her cells seemed to drink air like it was the last wine of the world.I wondered if that part was because she was a copy of demigoddess or a copy of a demigoddess of Zeus.
Still, it only was beneath it all that there was the true engine. The metaphysical architecture.
Had it not been for the anti divine and C'tan stars in my mind, I probably would have not been able to peer at this level.
I saw something akin to a core, an orb located in the middle of her spine following fern-like patterns paths like that made me think to Lichtenberg scars and that connected to the rest of her body . I saw them now, glowing strands pulsing through her not with blood, but with something akin to energy but not that my anti divine star categorised as some form of divinity.
Already, ideas were blooming in my mind as I analysed it. If this was from what the gods were made, well, let's say that this was not a good thing for them because devices and spells that would have made the torture I inflicted on the Cyclops pale were beginning to tick in my head.
Her body carried over seventy of those Lichtenberg scars like patterns. I could see more of those structures growing. Looking at it, it honestly felt as if they had been cultivated, as if it was on purpose yet something told me that they were inherited, that a god could modify their child in such a way but I didn't think that Zeus had cared enough to do so with my daughter. Still, it felt looking Zeus had written his name into her soul the way humans scrawl their signatures on property deeds.
Disgusting.
Each Lichtenberg scars pattern seemed aligned to something , in this case probably the elemental dominion of sky and lightning. My continue analysis proved me right because some pulsed with static, some with the breathless pull of falling air. It was as if the Lichtenberg scars like pattern didn't channel divinity. They were more bundles of conceptual nerves transmitting meaning into effect.
I could see now that a hen she had called down lightning bolt, when she had sheathed herself in it, with what I saw inside the clone of Thalia, it would not be wrong to say that Thalia hadn't summoned it. In a way, Thalia had been the bolt.
Every concept within her was keyed to a foundational schema, one that I could almost read based on my analysis and theories "Thunder," "Air," "Authority," "Defiance." They weren't metaphors. They were permissions, authorities Hard-coded into her being.
This is how demigods worked.
Their souls had extra components. Organs the eye could not see. Annotations in divine handwriting.
The clone standing before me replicated it with frightening precision. Not perfectly, no, there was noise in the spiritual channels, as if someone had copied an orchestral symphony but forgot to retune the instruments. Yet still… still enough for the analysis to run its course.
I could see this divinity power other things like regeneration. Regeneration followed predictably. Cellular proliferation at rates that mocked cancer's urgency, yet controlled. Stem cell specialization guided by divine infusion. The Lichtenberg scars like patterns rerouted power to damaged tissues automatically, making healing a secondary function rather than a crisis response which meant that even without ambrosia and nectar, what would have taken an normal human with a good constition two months to heal would barely take a week for a demigod with the same level of divinity than this clone. Salamanders would be jealous.
I peered at the edge of the soul. There was something akin to an aura, a fireproofing, something that should make sure that curses would slide off this construct like oil off glass, that soul-borne toxins would wither at the gate. Even conceptual poisons, the shielding. Not because she blocked them. Because they were beneath her.
If I am not wrong, if I remember well, in a crossover written by Rick Riordan, one between the PJO books and the Carter Kane books, it was shown that Percy was resistant, more than he should to spells.
It was as if he divine blood in the clone demanded reverence and that even being fake, being a lesser copy, it still carried echoes of it.
And then came the cognition.
We were shown and told time and time again how every Olympic demigod in the Percy Jackson world Luke, Thalia, Jason, Annabeth and Percy himself, exhibited a different pattern in their brain architecture, one to help them be better heroes, better fighters and this is why most of them were said to have Dyslexia and TDAH. I could see it now with my spell. Dyslexia, yes. But also hyper‑connectivity. Hemispheres talking over each other. Parietal lobe wrapped around linguistic centers like a serpent around its prey. The part of their brains that dealt with language was fascinating. I could see it, how their brains weren't wired for modern languages, how they were tuned to ancient forms, dead dialects, the tongues and variants of ancient Greeks.
I checked the cognition speed. It seemed that It wasn't that demigods thought faster. It would be more accurate to say they thought in sharper shapes or that they were literally super autistic with an inborn hyperfixation in battle.
Battle wasn't calculated. It was sensed. Moves emerged from an instinct as primal as breathing. A Greek demigod would not even need to learn tactics due to this. Learning them if they did would be more akin if they remembering something that they had forgotten.
I could see it through the make up of Thalia's clone A brain optimized for recognition of terrain, vectors of force, trajectories of doom. It was as if a demigod born into danger with their fingers already curled around a blade and with how dangerous the world was for them, I could not even if wanted find a fault to it.
I stepped back, the analysis complete.
Everything within her seemed like big bolded message, You were made for war.
Not love. Not peace. Not life. Just war and this was clone, a pale copy born from a strand. I knew without checking that if I had done this with the true Thalia, I would have found more difference.
At least, I now had a template in my mind to make something alike to a demigod, to see more how they ticked.
Additionally, with the knowledge I had due to the specialisations in my mind, I knew that I could easily make something better and how to do so. I knew that if I wanted I could modify one now that I knew the make up of a demigod, that I could probably turn one into something that would have given Heracles a run for his money while he was still mortal.
Anyway, I had lost enough time here.
I raised my hand.
Simple gesture, simple shape. Five fingers catching the newborn light like a skeleton remembering warmth. But beneath skin and bone, something less benign stirred, my modified magical circuits, the ones I had made with black Necrodermis activated so that I could cast one spell, one called Reinforcement.
It was in a way the hammer of the enforcers from the Nasuverse, what allowed them to keep up and survived against the worst monsters of the moonlight world. It was also ones of Shirou Emiya's signature crutch. A spell that was sharp, more than useful yet unstable, dangerous. It was a spell always on the verge of breaking the wielder before it improved whatever they wanted to improve. Reinforcement was in a way a lie told in action, a wager made by the reckless against the structure of reality.
A wager, a trick that worked.
Not by swelling muscle or sharpening edge in the obvious sense. No, it didn't deal in simple notions like stronger or faster. It whispered instead to the idea of a thing. Whispered softly to the platonic essence and asked "Would you like to be more yourself?"
Say you cast it on a scouter, worn, half-broken, full of old stuff, barely working and rusted electronics. Reinforcement wouldn't just tune its sensors or harden its shell. No. It would touch the scouter's truth, cradle its meaning, and swell it into full bloom. The scouter would become a scouter at the apogee of the concept. Not a better machine, a purer one. Speed, accuracy, efficiency, these would follow. But they were symptoms, not purpose.
It made things more than what they were meant to be.
The girl, no , the thing, standing before me wore Thalia's face. The precise curl of hair, the same glint of defiance in those lightning-blue eyes. But it lacked much. I had seen it in my analysis.
It was a copy. A forgery born of divine magic.
A fake.
But then, what was it Shirou said?
"A fake can still surpass the original."
And I guess that there could be no truth greater than that.
And so I breathed in.
Let in the knowledge of the anti-divine star in my mind come to the forefront . Let in the stars shining in my thoughts like broken stars. The C'tan knowledge followed my will too. It almost seem to claw through my awareness with hands both surgical and cruel with the information I had wanted.
Those two stars came together to add to Alchemical, magus knowledge in my mind.
They offered understanding.
And amplification.
They showed me a way, one to take the Reinforcement spell one step further. To not just reinforce flesh or steel, but that delicate glass sculpture locked inside all living things. The soul. Even a synthetic, false one, what masqueraded as it.
Like the one Thalia's clone had.
That was what I needed. To grab her essence and hold it. To tell the universe: this is the lie you will begin to utter now.
Magic circuits hummed under my skin like a choir choking on its final note. I raised one free hand and snapped.
Lightning never sounded so intimate.
I didn't need to look to know I succeeded. The scent told me everything, ozone and copper surging, overpowering any scent almost like an ancient breath forced through the lungs of a world that resented being touched. It crackled for an instant. Then vanished. Left only the silence behind, like the aftermath of a scream swallowed by the ocean.
Behind me, I heard her voice. Cold, honeyed, and distant as frost blooming on glass.
"Fascinating," Hecate purred. "A spell that reinforces spiritually? No, conceptual? Yes. Conceptual. You're truly… incredible."
I turned.
The clone remained still, inert.
"We're finished now," I told her. "Let's go."
"Alright." Her tone carried no hesitation. She opened a portal, a tear in the fabric of space. Through it, the sight of skyline of Los Angeles welcomed me. Grey towers bathed in firelight. A thousand glass bones catching the sun like the fingers of a god reaching through fog.
The sun was rising.
Dawn.
It felt appropriate in this moment as I held my daughter in my arms.
I stepped toward it, footstepsz
Behind me, hecatems voice shifted almost sounding more human now, more hesitant. Like a shadow in velvet.
"I gave you your daughter back," Hecate said. "I hope that this is enough proof that I'm on your side."
My chest tightened. A thousand answers bloomed. I held back the ugliest one.
"Yes," I grumbled. "This is enough."
I turned my head just enough to let one eye find her.
"But I'm not going to stop here. This is the start, not the conclusion. I won't let it end until they, demigods like my daughter are safe. Are happy. Until they are not hunted, forgotten, or used."
My voice thinned.
"I know you're not doing this for them, you're doing it for me. For my magic. Because you're fascinated. Because you're greedy, in the way only gods can be."
Her lips curled, not in offense, but in amusement. As if she were flattered to be seen.
"But there's a little boy," I continued, "called Alabaster. He loves magic, maybe as much as you. But all he wants is for his mother to be present."
She raised a single, arched brow.
"Are you saying that not interacting with my son would make our future cooperation… more complicated?"
I met her gaze. Pale, impossible eyes.
"You can see it that way if you want. I'm going to keep working with you, more and more, I imagine. So what's one visit each time, to your son?"
The words tasted like rust and old wishes.
"In the end, do whatever you want. Even if you don't, I'll l make him happy. Just like I will for all of them. I just think you being there would make it easier. But what do I know about you gods except that you're all despicable in one way or another."
I stepped fully through the portal.