Several days later.
Nightfall
Sensing the familiar resonance from the emblem on her chest, Medusa quietly rode the winged horse out of the city and landed in the dense forest outside the city walls that she frequently visited.
"You're here?"
Lorne's figure stepped out from the darkness, smiling as he opened his arms and pulled the girl into a big, warm embrace.
Reunited after a long separation, Medusa wanted to savor this rare moment of warmth between the two of them.
However, several monsters with no sense of occasion came bounding over excitedly, chattering and making noise from the side.
"A Gorgon! It's a Gorgon!"
"The smallest one from before!"
"She's grown so tall now, and she has Mother's scent on her!"
Seeing a crowd of Typhon's descendants with all manner of monster heads appear before her, Medusa couldn't help looking at Lorne in surprise.
"You brought all of them?"
"Not all. Just these eight."
Lorne counted them, then pointed toward the dense forest behind him and added with resignation.
"Oh, right. There's one more in the back."
Medusa looked ahead, and immediately spotted a terrifying divine monster of mountainous stature covered in pitch-black scales, with nine enormous serpent heads at its front end, drooping listlessly as it lay coiled on the ground without moving.
"Little Nine? What happened to her?"
"This girl insisted on fighting to the death with those Harpies.
No amount of persuasion would stop her. So to avoid any accidents,
I knocked her out."
"What did the Harpies do?"
"Nothing much. They only threw some animal dung into the Lernaean Lake to draw the Hydra out."
"..."
After a brief silence, Medusa spoke quietly. "She holds grudges..."
"Mm. And her temper is particularly fierce." Lorne casually agreed while making the follow-up arrangements. "Once we're up the mountain, have Mother of Monsters come wake her up herself."
As for why he wouldn't do it himself, it was because the underhanded business of throwing the dung had been his idea.
At this moment, Medusa caught the implication beneath those words.
"You're not coming back with us?"
"I need to make a trip to the Far West to meet your eldest sister Ladon."
"You're going to the Garden of the Golden Apples?"
"Mm. The road is long and the journey difficult. Bringing them along would be inconvenient. So these problem children, I'll leave in your care to bring up the mountain."
As he spoke, Lorne turned and beckoned to the back with his hand.
"And you too, Melinoe. Go up the mountain with Medusa. She'll arrange lodging for you. If you need anything while I'm away, you can ask her."
The Underworld princess, who had been causing trouble all along the way, reluctantly came out from the shadows.
Under a certain guardian's threatening gaze, she could only pinch her voice and put on a well-behaved act, proactively introducing herself.
"I'm Lorne's little sister. I look forward to your care from now on."
Little sister?
Hearing this, Medusa's previously warm and friendly gaze instantly went on guard, her heart feeling somewhat unsettled.
Lorne noticed the change in her mood, and immediately corrected this with righteous clarity.
"Adopted!"
"That's true. But we have a very close bond."
At this moment, Melinoe proactively walked up and hooked her arm through Lorne's, displaying their intimate relationship.
Those pitch-black eyes of hers lit up with a trace of gleeful malice.
Lorne smiled, extracted his right arm from between those meager ribs, and then lightly patted this problem child on the back.
In an instant, Melinoe felt the divine power within her drain away completely.
The malicious grin on her face immediately froze as she looked at the mark of the dead that had lit up on the back of Lorne's hand in bewilderment.
'Not only had that woman Persephone been fooled, but even the old man had fallen for his tricks, and even bestowed his divine seal on this fellow?'
"Right then. Her divine power has been sealed by me. If she doesn't behave, feel free to beat her senseless."
Lorne told Medusa with a cheerful smile, then offered an even more reassuring addition.
"If you can't bring yourself to do it, you can let Stheno and Euryale handle it. Those two have probably been going stir-crazy lately."
"Mm!"
Medusa gave a sweet, obedient nod, a flower-like smile blooming on her face, then without the slightest ceremony yanked the trouble-seeking Melinoe behind her.
'After spending so much time alongside the Goddess of Wisdom Athena, even a stone should have wised up by now.'
'Melinoe's little trick of stirring up discord to damage her relationship with Lorne was far from sufficient.'
'And for a troublesome thorn with ill intentions, her two elder sisters would definitely be delighted to take the girl under their wing.'
'After all, since the two of them had been dealt with several times in succession, they had not had the opportunity to lovingly "dote on" a little sister for quite a long time.'
Sensing the wave after wave of chills suddenly multiplying on her body, Melinoe gave an inexplicable shudder, and a sense of foreboding immediately rose in her heart.
'Things are about to go very badly...'
After completing the simple handover, Lorne embraced Medusa again, pressed a light kiss to her smooth forehead, and said his farewell in a warm voice.
"Then I'll leave them to you.
For how to settle them in, just follow the arrangements of Mother of Monsters and Athena. I should be on my way."
Medusa touched the moist spot on her forehead, gave a gentle nod, and watched Lorne's figure gradually recede and disappear into the night.
---
....
Seven days later. The Far West.
Traveling day and night, Lorne arrived at the foot of a mountain range.
Looking into the distance, the mountain range stretched out in an unbroken succession of peaks.
The most towering and majestic main summit stood at the junction where heaven and chaotic earth met, shaped like a giant holding up the sky.
The broad, dense forest was his hair and beard. The ridges supporting the mountain body were his shoulders, arms and bones. The peak rising into the clouds was his head.
The Atlas Mountains...
'By the looks of it, that sky-bearing Titan assigned here was probably nearly done for as well.'
Lorne murmured to himself, then turned his gaze toward the churning sea.
According to legend, the Garden of the Golden Apples was located near the Atlas mountain range, on a solitary island in the Western Ocean.
When the Olympians had won victory in the Titanomachy long ago, the Earth Mother Gaia, as an expression of support, had brought a great tree with lush foliage back from the western coast as a wedding gift for the new divine king Zeus and divine queen Hera.
The tree bore golden apples filled with immortal divinity.
Hera was overjoyed, planting the precious golden apple tree in her own sacred garden, and dispatching the three Hesperides nymphs, along with the hundred-headed dragon Ladon, to jointly guard it.
Carefully searching along the waters near the Atlas mountain range, after half a day Lorne at last discovered an unnamed solitary island concealed by several magical formations.
Looking at the brilliant, multicolored play of sunset hues above the island, he nodded inwardly.
'This must be it.'
According to legend, the three Hesperides sisters who guarded the sacred garden were named for radiance, crimson glow, and twilight respectively, representing the changing colors of the sky at sunset.
The unique divine manifestation above the island had already confirmed the location of the Garden of the Golden Apples.
However, finding the right place was only the first step.
How to get the golden apples into his hands next, without arousing anyone else's suspicion, was the real question.
Just as Lorne was finding this a difficult problem to work through, he found out that without realizing it, he had past the boundary of the normal ocean, and arrived in the primordial, chaotic sea beyond.
The moment he entered this wild expanse, a heavy stench of blood hit him square in the face.
Beneath a shroud of red-black blood mist, densely packed primordial sea beasts surged up to the surface, their eyes crimson, their expressions frenzied, launching into a bloody melee and slaughter with one another.
Watching those divine monsters charge forward without fear of death even with their limbs torn apart and their organs ripped out, still savagely biting at their opponents,
Lorne furrowed his brow slightly.
'Their condition was somewhat strange. As though they had been struck by some kind of curse...'
As his gaze caught the red-black blood mist over the sea showing signs of expanding, a flash of insight struck Lorne, and he grasped the true answer in an instant.
'War divinity!'
Quietly concealing his presence and observing from the periphery in secret, Lorne quickly located the source triggering this chaos.
A goddess with long red hair and black wings on her back was standing on the clouds, watching the chaotic battlefield of slaughter with an excited face, clapping her hands in delight.
"Fight, fight! I want to see rivers of blood!"
Seeing that distinctive red hair and black wings, and that expression of loving nothing more than to see the world in chaos, Lorne couldn't help blinking.
'Eris? What is she doing here?'
Very quickly, as surges of blood energy almost tangible in their density flowed from the sea surface into Eris's body, subtly elevating her divinity by several degrees, he suddenly understood.
As the goddess presiding over discord and strife, her divinity was naturally connected to chaos and slaughter.
In the last chase, she had partnered with the three Furies and nearly turned half the Oceanus sea upside down.
Who knew how many sea beasts and divine blood kin had died directly or indirectly at their hands.
Although in the end Hecate stepped in to intervene, not only throwing the three Furies into the Underworld to work as laborers but nearly plucking Eris completely bald of her feathers, the chaos they had caused, obviously let this Goddess of Discord develop a taste for it.
So she had quietly slipped to this primordial ocean, stirring up and manufacturing chaos among the sea beasts, enticing them to slaughter and sacrifice each other, using this to grow her own divinity.
'In the past she had been running roughshod over gods and mortals alike without the slightest restraint.
And now she had fallen to picking fights with sea beasts and even having to do it on the sly.'
'Fallen on hard times, family...'
Lorne looked at the Goddess of Discord shouting and hollering up in the clouds, shaking his head with sympathy, while his eyes flickered quietly.
The question of who would settle the account for the golden apples.
He seemed to have an idea now.
(End of Chapter)