Godslayer's Legend

When Persephone spoke of the consequences of eating the pomegranate Hades had offered her, Arthur remembered how Hades sometimes said he couldn’t stay away from the Underworld for too long, and he figured Persephone was likely in the same boat.

"The Underworld binding?" he asked, earning a nod from her.

"It doesn’t work on outsiders, but Olympians born outside the Underworld are raised knowing never to eat food from it if they ever find themselves dining there. My mother never taught me that because she never intended for me to go anywhere near the Underworld in the first place."

Persephone’s fingers slowly loosened around the stem of the flower in her hand.

"But while Zeus distracted Mother, Hades brought me there, and I ate the fruit."

A faint smile appeared on her face, though it carried more exhaustion than amusement.

"And now, for at least one quarter of every 366 days, I must remain in the Underworld."

Arthur exhaled softly before speaking.

"You must’ve been furious when you found out."

"I was."

"Completely understandable," Arthur replied. "I’d be furious for you, too."

Persephone laughed quietly at his response.

"I couldn’t remain angry forever."

She leaned back slightly, her back resting against his as she continued, "It took years after that before I formally became Queen of the Underworld, and over those years, after I forgave Hades for deceiving me, our relationship became... amiable."

Her voice softened slightly afterwards.

"I did fall for him once, after all."

"Once?" Arthur repeated.

"Even the hottest love cools over time. It’s been over a hundred thousand years since then."

Persephone looked down at the flower in her hand, a faint smile forming on her lips.

"I still respect him, though, and I do care for him very much. He’s a diligent fool who still tries to properly handle the duty that was forced onto him."

Among the three brothers who ruled Olympus, Hades truly did carry the heaviest workload.

"And there you have it," Persephone concluded. "The story of how I was abducted by my uncle through the schemes of my father."

Arthur’s expression contorted the moment he heard that, and he replied, "That description makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is. Also, doesn’t the story you just told me mean all those tales about you being abducted into the Underworld and forcibly made Queen were a lie?"

Persephone shrugged and said, "True, I wasn’t abducted. I walked in there on my own two feet, but that doesn’t change the fact that my father plotted to match me with his brother."

Arthur simply had no words in response to that. Persephone bent down and picked another flower from the field around them, continuing her explanation.

"I came here because I wanted to see what kind of person you were. I wanted to understand why Hades kept spending so much time, effort, and energy going to Hell to visit you so often."

She tossed the flower into the air, watching it spin before it fell back into the field and re-joined its stem. Then she added, "He also told me you’d be arriving with your mother, though she seems to have gone somewhere else. She even warned me before she left. What an impertinent brat."

Arthur chuckled softly at her words and shook his head lightly. Even though Cattleya might be the stronger combatant and possess a higher Existence Realm, it didn’t change the fact that Persephone was still more than ten times her age.

From Persephone’s perspective, Cattleya really just was a brat.

"She should know better than to leave you alone while you’re here, so the fact that she still left means you were the one who wanted to be alone. Am I right?"

Arthur clapped once and replied, "Correct on all counts, Lady of Spring."

He leaned forward slightly and plucked a petal from a flower in front of him, continuing, "I asked to be left alone because I wanted to meet you."

He flicked the petal into the air and plucked out another one as he continued, "For two reasons."

"And what are those reasons?" Persephone asked, spinning her finger in the air and making the petal that Arthur had just flicked fly back towards its source flower and reattach itself.

Arthur flicked the other petal he was holding and then said.

"I need you to arrange a meeting for me with Athena sometime in the future. I hear you’re quite close with her."

The request wasn’t what she expected, and it piqued Persephone’s curiosity.

"You do realise Athena is one of the last people you should be asking to meet, right?" she said.

"Don’t worry," Arthur replied. "She won’t know it’s me meeting her. I just need you to have her go to a certain location so I can speak with her."

Persephone simply shrugged, unbothered. "Oh well, I wasn’t worried anyway. I don’t care enough about you to worry about you."

Arthur smiled at her honesty and plucked another petal from a different flower in front of him.

"The second thing I need your help with is passing a message to my father."

Persephone blinked in confusion at this request.

"A message? Aren’t you coming to the Underworld?"

"Oh, I’m definitely coming to the Underworld," Arthur replied instantly. "Nothing’s going to stop that. I just want a message delivered to my father before I arrive, at a very specific time."

"And what timing is that?" Persephone asked.

Faced with that question, Arthur turned around, placed both hands on Persephone’s shoulders, and leaned in close, whispering into her ear.

When she heard what he said, her eyes widened in genuine shock, and she immediately reached out and grabbed his shirt, pulling him in front of her.

"How can you be so sure of this?!"

Arthur calmly removed her hand from his shirt and replied, "I’d normally say it’s my Authority over time, but..."

He poured cosmic energy into his origin core, attempting to activate his Temporal Authority. His irises lit up with a blue glow, but the glow flickered a second later, and his irises returned to black.

Shrugging his shoulders like the failure to activate his Authority wasn’t something to be worried about, Arthur continued speaking,

"Unfortunately, there’s a veil over this galaxy specifically blocking my Temporal Authority from viewing the future."

Lostvayne and Celestia reacted with alarm at his words, but Arthur, unconcerned, rose to his feet and brushed off the flower petals clinging to his trousers.

"Please, help deliver the message to Hades," he said, extending a hand toward Persephone.

She took his hand, and he pulled her up before adding,

"I’ll see you in the Underworld later. I’ll stay here and wait for my mother. The reason she left doesn’t exist anymore, after all."

Persephone stared at Arthur in silence for a few seconds before exhaling softly. "Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It would be troublesome if anything happened to you."

Her words made Arthur turn toward her with faint surprise on his face.

"I thought you didn’t care enough about me to worry about me?"

Persephone walked past him, ignoring his surprise as she replied, "I don’t care enough about you to worry about you, but I do care enough about Hades to do so. And he cares about you."

With those words, a gust of wind rose, flower petals swirling around her body, and when the wind faded a few seconds later and the petals scattered across the field, Persephone was gone.

The woman travelled through space at a speed even greater than Arthur’s when he used his Spatial Authority, the ambient cosmic energy of the universe mixing into the spatial channel transporting her as she exercised her authority as Queen of the Underworld to return to her home.

It didn’t take long for her to reappear right outside the Underworld’s dimensional barrier, and she reached toward it, her hand passing through the barrier that would normally reject Olympians, with an even greater repulsion force against members of the Twelve Olympians like herself.

But the instant her hand touched the barrier, her eyes widened as she sensed something that made her snap her attention toward the galaxy she had just left Arthur in.

At the same time, Cattleya, already heading back toward Arthur after questioning the Arbiters battling the Soul Devil and confirming that none of them truly knew where Pheldir had suddenly vanished to, sensed the same thing Persephone did.

She immediately roused all her power, breaking through space and shooting toward the desert planet Arthur was on at top speed.

Meanwhile, on the surface of that planet, Arthur, who was being bombarded with questions from Lostvayne and Celestia regarding the issue of his Temporal Authority, suddenly blinked and looked up at the sky.

A flock of birds flew through the clouds in formation, and one of those birds, separating from the flock, opened its beak...and spoke.

|Sky god’s Trickery.|

What had been a bird instantly became a man wreathed in powerful azure lightning, his hand raised upward while holding a gigantic bolt of lightning as violent arcs of law energy crackled from both ends of the bolt, the upper half stretching far beyond the planet’s atmosphere and deep into space while the lower half extended downward toward the desert world below, the surrounding sky fracturing beneath the overwhelming pressure radiating from it.

The reflection of the lightning flashed across Arthur’s widening eyes, and in that same instant, the divine bolt’s sharp tip had already descended upon him.

"—huh?"

BOOOOMMM!!!!

A deafening explosion swallowed the entire desert planet as endless azure lightning erupted across its surface, consuming the world whole before violently bursting outward into space, the planet itself disintegrating beneath the impact while the expanding storm of power tore through the surrounding star system, engulfing planets, moons, asteroids, and stars alike within a catastrophic explosion of light visible from every corner of the galaxy.

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