West Snowfield
Not long earlier.
"
You choose to lament, Bull of Heaven?"
Alcides saw only a mass of tremendous might.
He drew his bow as he stood in a rock platform protruding out of the water in the field flooded by both the deluge that he caused and the destruction that the giant cumulonimbus before him caused.
But the Bull of Heaven—Gugalanna, avatar of torrential rain and thunderstorm—no longer saw Alcides standing on the ground in front of him.
He felt the Divine Core of Goddess Ishtar disappear from the surface, severing the link between himself, the temple, and Huwawa.
The Mistress of Heaven was falling into the bottom of the earth.
The embodiment of storm was Ereshkigal's first spouse in some myths, and for that reason, his Divine Core's proximity to Ishtar is something that brings her closer to the underworld. Losing the goddess who was the basis for his present manifestation, the foundation of his existence was quickly thrown into disarray.
If left to his own devices, he would wreak havoc to avenge the goddess, capable only of flattening Snowfield before it ran out of magecraft and became a regular tropical cyclone formed in the continent.
But one man would not allow it.
Shooting the hundred heads
"Nine Lives"
An arrow meant to pierce through anything through comet-like propulsion, far surpassing the cannon of a tank.
However, its trajectory refused to follow a straight line. The arrow became a serpent trying to coil the world and deviated from the shooting line.
In an overwhelming contradiction, it was both a never-bending spear and a freely flexible whip.
And what enabled that was the fruit of the techniques nurtured by the legendary hero in the sum of his adventures.
Faced with an unbelievable technique right out of the heroic tales where he put down all sorts of mystic beasts, the hurricane suffering with the loss of his divine might was expected to disperse—
But Gugalanna was still a divine beast nonetheless.
It's because Gugalanna connected to the temple through Goddess Ishtar once that the passing of the goddess was no reason for him to drop to his knees.
What reason would he have to get pierced and accept his death from an arrow shot by a man, albeit a hero, who willingly discarded the power of the gods?
That was what finally brought the living hurricane's eyes to the pile of hostility.
Due to being a divine beast, or perhaps due to being lieged to Ishtar, Gugalanna was sure of his presence.
Something humanoid stood in front of him.
He was large for mankind's standards, but still difficult to see from Gugalanna's gigantic eyes.
But Gugalanna sensed the Saint Graph of a legendary hero of old and the reddish-black mud within him.
He knew for a fact it was something that mustn't be let loose.
Its very existence was a tragedy that would sully the world and the humanity that Ishtar loved.
A few moments before, he could have permitted it.
While the air was that of the Age of Gods, that would have been still dangerous but would be only one phenomenon out of many. It could sully the land but wouldn't go as far as harming the folks living in it, per Gugalanna's estimation.
But now that wasn't the case.
Now that Ishtar fell to the underworld, he was a blatant threat to the land she governed.
Therefore, his one role now was to trample the mud, reject it, and return it to the darkness.
That was his entire reason to remain manifest in a world without the goddess.
With that decided, Gugalanna immediately reorganized his priorities.
To vanquish the
enemy of the gods even if it cost the land he was enshrined in.
Gugalanna violently vibrated his body—the cumulonimbus compressed by magical energy—as if to let the whole nation hear him announce the laws of the world.
He quaked the air, either to spike the power left behind by the gods or to make the human before him tremble.
The gales gained direction, putting a stop to all winds assaulting the west side of the United States.
All wind, all hail, all thunder focused on Snowfield as the hurricane with more energy than a giant earthquake poured 80% of its power into
spears of thunder-wind.
With this much natural energy amassed, shattering it would be an act of rebellion not against the gods but against planet Earth.
He launched them against the incoming serpent-clad arrow, expecting it to vaporize Alcides along the way.
── Here you see power: the definition of righteousness.
── Here you see god: the definition of the world.
── Here you see death: the definition of humanity.
── Nothing belongs in the hands of those who forgot the goddess' protection.
Those are the words the divine beast would be screaming if it were capable of speech.
The launched spears of lighting and windstorm shook the earth and the sky like a funeral lament for the goddess.
But the divine beast forgot one thing:
Despite being human, this hero surpassed humanity's limits.
The
other beast in the sky was wholly aware.
To take revenge against all laws created by the gods, the hero abandoned his heroic past.
Looking only at the results without the process, this hero surpassed the frameworks of a hero.
Alcides.
A legendary hero originally summoned as an archer but later converted into an avenger Saint Graph by his Master's Command Spells and "mud" filled with chaos and malice.
Separating from the gods.
Dedicating everything to revenge.
Neither of those things lessens his essence as an unparalleled hero.
A hero capable of changing the lamenting tone of the divine beast's roar into its death throes.
The torrent of energy engulfed the avenger hero.
All the energy of a hundred-meter-long hurricane was compressed into two twisters, charging in the form of Gugalanna's horns, and passing through where Alcides was.
A torrent of power.
It was capable of shaving away the hero's Saint Graph, erasing along the mud and lethal Hydra venom within him.
The Nine Lives he shot was wiped in the crash against the twisters. The platform Alcides stood on became a gallows to be minced along the subject of the execution.
The Heroic Spirit engulfed by the deathwind would be erased in less than three seconds.
When 30% of himself was shaven away, he mockingly laughed.
"You're exposed…"
At that instant—the air enveloping the world changed.
The presence of the goddess Ishtar had already vanished, and the local Texture of Snowfield was returning to the era of men until it began flipping again into another kind of heterogeneous environment.
The pivot of the alteration was Alcides's whittled Saint Graph.
The mud-like magical energy covering his body attempted to fill up the lost parts of his Saint Graph, instead flowing into Gugalanna and beginning to eat away his divine aura.
When Gugalanna noticed the disaster, it was already too late.
The blow that was supposed to completely catch his opponent–the twisters from the Age of Gods charged with his divine aura and the energy of the galestorms–was used by the lone avenger as a trap for Gugalanna.
The magical energy at the tip of the repelled arrow expanded in the form of a serpent.
The arrows shattered into nine pieces ascended to form the Hydra, and this nine-headed venomous dragon tried to strangle the thickest cumulonimbus in the hurricane: Gugalanna's head.
"Bring this to a close, divine beast."
The divine aura devoured by the mud and the serpent mix together to surge into Alcides's body, but he refuses to make it his flesh and blood.
"It's your turn… this time, your kind will be the ones
paying tribute."
The repelled divinity refused to let go.
By driving his magical energy and "mud" into the lightning-colored divine aura, Alcides forcibly twisted it, twisting along the space around it.
"You
govern man no longer."
Gugalanna roared in resistance to his words.
In a hopeless attempt to load his dry well of magical energy, the divine beast followed the thread connecting him to the goddess.
He traced his bond of fate to the goddess, not caring if it would send him to another land, another timeline, another period, or even a place that doesn't lead to any future.
To deny his words, not by saying he was wrong about Gugalanna, but by saying he was wrong about Ishtar.
But he was too late.
No vestige of Goddess Ishtar remained, and no thread was left for Gugalanna to follow. He could feel Huwawa's Saint Graph quickly deflating.
Even then, the divine beast continued his struggle, focusing his wind, rain, and lightning.
Only one thought in his mind: if his Saint Graph were to disappear from past and future, he'd need to at least end the fight in a draw if he wanted to face Ishtar without shame.
One old scene resurfaced in the transforming Alcides's memory as he watched Gugalanna, never giving up to the very end, nonetheless helplessly waiting for his Saint Graph to crumble.
The Argo.
Images from when he was risking his life to defend the famed ship in its hard-fought voyage.
This was not like the twelve trials he faced to atone for himself.
He wielded his power purely for the benefit of others.
His days in that boat, where he could entrust his back and his life to others, is what Alcides considers true glory.
That might have been a hallucination caused by the extreme pain of the lethal toxin consuming his body, but Alcides interpreted it as a stream of emotion transmitted through the opponent's magical energy and whispered:
"...I see that goddess was the keel to your vessel."
Alcides's expression at the time couldn’t be determined with the Nemean Lion's pelt hiding his face.
However, he chose to cast final words at Gugalanna's crumbling Saint Graph.
"My hatred is doomed to rot away when I inevitably do."
He didn't know if his words were understood.
In terms of size, he was like an ant compared to a giant, but now, while he was devouring the essence of the bull's magical energy, was the only moment when his words reached the divine beast’s ears.
"Nothing will be left. Neither this repulsive mud nor the divinity I'm stealing from you."
Alcides knew precisely how much time he had left.
He was greatly affected by having parts of his Saint Graph chipped away just now, and instead of absorbing divinity to replenish those parts, he spent all of it on an exoskeleton.
How much time did he have left?
If the magical energy supply from his contractor Bazdilot were severed, he'd instantly be swallowed by the mud and forsake the Saint Graph and consciousness of a Heroic Spirit.
Because the avenger knew that to be the case, he took his time for his first and last expression of respect to the embodiment of gust and thunderbolt Gugalanna—the beast serving the loathsome god.
"Return to the sky… You have fulfilled your duty."
(Did he get to hear it?)
The divine beast momentarily stopped, but only for a few seconds.
He quickly resumed focusing magical energy, only for Alcides to ultimately plunder all of it.
However, Alcides felt no hatred or sorrow to be found in his final struggle.
Third parties have no way of determining whether that was a delusion he had while showering in the immense torrent of magical energy or if the beast really changed in some way.
Alcides himself was also losing his means to verify it.
His last words to the divine beast, his human memories, and his remaining life were all swept away by Gugalanna's immense torrent of energy and sunk to the bottom of the deep well.
The fact that he managed to preserve his ego while the deluge ground everything into unclear particles is evidence that he was an awe-inspiring hero.
As his last light fades, the world began to slant again toward its ambiguous borders.
He was sure of only one thing: at that moment, goddess Ishtar was replaced by an equal threat in the lands of Snowfield.
Originally Posted by ayukireen
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