The quest became a grim road trip across America. The encounter with Medusa had left a fissure in the group, a crack which made their trip an uncomfortable experience. They were hunted, tired, and constantly on edge.
Nicholas, in his Nick persona, played the role of the pragmatic, slightly jaded support. He used minor charms to help them find their way through the mortal world framed as mist manipulations. He watched Percy's idealism harden into a protective shell, saw Annabeth's brilliant mind wrestling with cognitive dissonance, and observed Grover's fear slowly being tempered by loyalty.
It's like watching a pressure cooker, he mused as they rattled along on another Greyhound. The heat of their experiences, the lies they've been fed, the injustice they've witnessed. They just need the right valve to release all that steam in the correct direction.
They followed the trail of the bolt, which Nicholas, through his far-reaching awareness, knew was with Ares. The plan required a direct confrontation. It required a catalyst.
They found the God of War in a dusty roadside diner outside St. Louis. He looked like the archetypal biker: leather jacket, mirrored sunglasses, a cruel smirk permanently etched on his face. He radiated an aura of violence so palpable it made the air taste like copper and ash. He was flanked by two thuggish mortals whose minds he had undoubtedly broken and reshaped for fun.
"Took you long enough," Ares drawled, not looking up from a plate of greasy eggs. "The little fish and his friends. And the party crasher." His sunglasses tilted toward Nicholas. "Dionysus's brat. Shouldn't you be turning water into boxed wine somewhere?"
The conversation unfolded as Nicholas knew it would. The teasing, the threats, the revelation that Ares had the bolt and the helm, that he was playing his own game to stir chaos among the gods. Ares spoke of mortals and demigods as pieces on a board, his tone dripping with contempt. He described wars not as tragedies, but as entertainment, as a source of power.
Nicholas felt the anger in Percy, a hot, righteous fury. He felt Annabeth's analytical mind trying to find a weakness, Grover's terror. And he felt his own moment arrive.
As Ares mocked them, belittling their quest, their lives, their very existence as pawns, Nicholas stepped forward. Not aggressively, but with a calm, deliberate respect that was itself a provocation to the god of strife.
"Lord Ares," Nicholas began, his voice clear and steady, cutting through the god's bluster. "We understand your power. We respect the domain you hold." He chose his words carefully, the model of a demigod trying to reason with a deity. "But this… stirring conflict for its own sake, using the theft to pit your family against each other… it will cause suffering on a scale even you might find… wasteful. Mortals will die by the thousands, millions, for a game. Don't their lives, their belief, grant you that power? Shouldn't there be some… responsibility that comes with it?"
Ares slowly put his fork down. He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were the colour of dried blood, pits of endless, mindless carnage. A slow, terrifying smile spread across his face.
"Responsibility?" he echoed, the word sounding foreign and ridiculous in his mouth. He chuckled, a sound like grinding bones. "You sound like my sister, Athena. All rules and plans. You mortals and your half-breeds, you're like ants. You build your little hills, you fight your little wars, you believe your little stories. And sometimes, when I'm bored, I put my boot down. Just to see what the crunch sounds like. To feel the vibration."
As Ares spoke, Nicholas, hidden deep within his avatar, sent a silent command. In the Luminous Court of the Atrium, he connected to Marcus, the Cupbearer.
Now, he instructed. Channel it. Not at me. Through me. Amplify the core emotion of this place. Amplify the rage.
Across the cosmic divide, Marcus raised his Chalice. He focused not on the pure Life-Flame, but on a specific, turbulent tributary: the essence of Righteous Indignation, of Fury at Injustice. He sent a concentrated stream of it, not to empower Nicholas, but to saturate the space around his avatar, to make the air itself combustible with the very emotion Ares was so casually dismissing.
The effect was immediate and invisible to all but the most sensitive. Percy's grip on Riptide turned his knuckles white. Annabeth's fear sharpened into a cold, cutting anger. And Nicholas, at the centre of it, felt the Cupbearer's amplified emotion swirl around him. He didn't absorb it; he let it resonate with his own carefully constructed argument.
"You call it a game," Nicholas continued, his voice rising slightly, infused with the amplified, righteous anger saturating the diner. "But those 'ants' have thoughts, families, hopes. They worship you. They give you their fear, their adrenaline, their lives. And you see it all as… as sport? Is that all the gods are? Eternal children with weapons, smashing toys and laughing at the pieces?"
Ares's smile vanished. The air in the diner froze. The grease on the plates stopped bubbling. The two thugs flinched as if struck.
"You dare," Ares whispered, and the whisper was louder than a shout. It was the quiet before an artillery barrage. "You dare stand in my presence, you puling, diluted stain of a mediocre god, and lecture me on morality?"
He stood up. He didn't grow to his divine size, but he seemed to fill the entire world. The diner's windows cracked with a symphony of tiny fractures.
"You think you understand power? You think your words have weight?" Ares took a step forward. "Let me show you what real power does to irrelevance."
He pointed a finger at Nicholas.
It wasn't a blast of fire or a shockwave. It was a redefinition. Ares, in his casual, absolute cruelty, didn't aim to kill. He aimed to humiliate, to utterly obliterate any notion of significance.
Nicholas felt a terrifying, alien will slam into his avatar's form. It wasn't an attack he could block with a shield or deflect with fate. It was a divine decree, a rewriting of local reality.
His body convulsed. He felt himself compressing, his perspective shrinking horrifically. The world exploded in size around him. The cracked linoleum floor became a vast, dusty plain. A discarded sugar packet loomed like a glacier. He saw Percy's enormous sneaker, the detail in the stitching like canyon ridges.
He had been transformed. Not into an animal, but into something even more insignificant. A common housefly.
He buzzed, a tiny, furious speck of life, his divine consciousness trapped in a pathetic, six-legged form. He could see the colossal, jeering face of Ares leaning down, feel the heat of his breath like a desert wind.
"See?" Ares's voice boomed, shaking the fly-sized Nicholas's entire world. "This is your weight. This is your consequence. An insect. A nuisance. Something to be swatted."
And then, with a slow, deliberate, utterly contemptuous motion, Ares raised his massive boot.
Perfect, Nicholas thought, from within the prison of the fly's simple nervous system.
The boot came down.
There was a sickening, microscopic crunch, felt through a thousand primitive nerve endings. Then darkness.
In the diner, from the perspective of Percy, Annabeth, and Grover, it happened in a second. Nick had spoken back to the god. Ares had pointed. Nick had… vanished with a faint pop. And there, on the floor where he'd stood, was a single, crushed fly, smeared on the heel of Ares's boot.
Ares scraped his boot on the floor, wiping off the remains. "Annoying buzz," he said, as if commenting on the weather.
Time seemed to stop for Percy. He saw the smug, brutal face of the god. He saw the spot where his friend, the one who had questioned, who had seen the injustice, who had understood, had just been. Not gloriously slain in battle. Not turned to stone. Erased. Reduced to a bug and stepped on, for the crime of asking why.
The Cupbearer's amplified rage, now with no other target, fused with Percy's own grief, betrayal, and horror. It didn't feel like an external influence; it felt like his own heart exploding.
The battle that followed was a blur of fury. Percy fought with a reckless, desperate rage that shocked even Ares. He didn't just want to win; he wanted to destroy the smugness on the god's face. He called upon the sea, not as a tool, but as an extension of his wrath.
But it was after. After Ares, his pride wounded and snarling, vanished. After the adrenaline faded, leaving them alone in the wrecked diner.
Percy stood, trembling, Riptide dripping with what passed for godly blood. He looked at the smear on the floor. His best friend. Gone. Not by a monster's claw, but by a god's whim. For words.
Annabeth tried to speak, to strategize, to push forward. But Percy wasn't listening.
He saw it all now, with crystalline, horrible clarity. Medusa, victim of the gods' pride. His mother, held by Hades over a family squabble. The Minotaur, a curse on an innocent. The prophecy, a chain forcing him to clean up their mess. And Nick… Nick, who had seen it too, who had dared to voice it, turned into an insect and was crushed underfoot.
It wasn't just Ares. It was the system. A system where such pointless, cruel power was not just allowed, but embodied. A system that demanded worship and offered only exploitation and annihilation in return.
As they stumbled out of the diner, the weight of the bolt in Percy's bag felt like the weight of the world. But heavier still was the new conviction settling in his heart, cold and hard as celestial bronze.
On the edge of his perception, a thread of Fate, one Nicholas had been gently tensioning since Percy's birth, finally snapped into its final, irrevocable alignment. The thread of Percy's loyalty to Olympus, already frayed by neglect and injustice, didn't just break. It was severed, cleanly, by the boot of a war god.
The hero was no longer just trying to clear his name or save his mother. He was now, fundamentally, at war with the regime that had created him.
In the Atrium, Nicholas reformed his consciousness, leaving the destroyed, insectile avatar behind. He watched through the threads of fate as Percy's destiny solidified into a new, rebellious path.
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