Chapter 324: The Gods’ Last Push
Poseidon’s voice rolled out, not spoken but carried on the water itself, making even the battlefield quake.
"You thought to chain the sea forever. You thought me buried. Yet here you kneel, not before Thalorin, not before Dominic... but before the tide itself."
He raised his trident. The ocean followed.
From the abyss below, pillars of water surged upward, solid as marble, cutting through divine defenses with crushing weight. Aegirion staggered, one arm crushed by the strike. Seraphin screamed as steam exploded around her, her flames smothered by torrents.
Zephyros alone met the attack, his lightning colliding with the flood. For a moment, the sky and sea split, two forces clawing at supremacy. The clash turned the world white-blue, blinding mortals who watched from far shores.
But even Zephyros faltered. Poseidon did not.
The flood swallowed sky-fire. The sea bent lightning into its current, devouring it. When the light cleared, Zephyros knelt, his feathers torn, his divine ichor staining the waves.
Poseidon lowered his weapon slightly. "Do you see? Even judgment drowns."
Far away, on the cliffs above the half-drowned city of Thalos, mortals watched. Sailors, priests, refugees—eyes wide, throats dry. They had prayed for salvation from the gods. They had begged the heavens to intervene.
And the heavens had come.
But what they saw was no salvation.
It was their old prayers colliding. Their protectors breaking.
A fisherman whispered, "That... that is our god now."
A priest of the Seven Currents fell to his knees, weeping. "The council cannot stop him. The seas belong to him alone."
The people did not know whether to cheer or to fear. For the line between god and monster had never been thinner.
Broken but not defeated, the three gods rallied.
Zephyros lifted his spear once more, voice hoarse but thunderous. "I will not allow creation itself to bow to you!"
Seraphin ignited again, her entire body burning like a star. "If I must burn away every drop of water, then I will!"
Aegirion, battered and bleeding, pressed his trident to the sea. "Forgive me, brother... but I will not kneel."
Together, their powers surged. Sky split open, fire rained down, and tides turned against their master.
The sea howled as forces clashed—Poseidon’s command against their rebellion. Waves rose high enough to scrape the stars, while fire turned steam into blinding walls. Lightning shattered the heavens into fragments of light.
The world itself groaned.
Poseidon’s lips curved, not in cruelty, but in inevitability.
"You fight not against a god, but against inevitability. The sea does not ask permission to rise."
His eyes flared abyssal blue.
The waters bent.
Not just the sea, but all water. Blood in veins. Rain in clouds. Dew on grass. Even the ichor that bled from the gods themselves.
They froze.
Aegirion gasped as his own lifeblood betrayed him, rushing toward Poseidon’s call. Seraphin’s fire sputtered as the moisture within her flames was ripped away. Zephyros’s lungs tightened, his breath itself bending toward the tide.
Poseidon lifted his trident.
"Drown."
The command rippled, not just heard, but felt in marrow.
The ocean obeyed.
A single, colossal wave rose—taller than mountains, broader than continents. It hung suspended for a heartbeat, casting its shadow across both sea and sky.
Mortals screamed. Priests prayed. Even gods trembled.
Then it fell.
The wave swallowed the battlefield, crushing all sound, all fire, all light. For a moment, the world was only water.
When the waters receded, the battlefield was unrecognizable.
Islands had vanished. Skies had stilled. Silence reigned.
Aegirion floated broken, his body dimmed of light. Seraphin’s flames were no more, only embers clinging desperately. Zephyros crawled onto a shard of cloud, his wings tattered, his spear cracked.
And Poseidon stood above them, untouched. His trident gleamed, his form towering, his aura no longer that of a reborn god... but of the sea itself made flesh.
He looked down at them, his voice calm, inevitable.
"You are not defeated by power. You are defeated by truth. The sea cannot be chained. Not by mortals. Not by gods. Not even by fate."
The gods shuddered under his gaze.
Poseidon turned away, the ocean parting before his steps. His final words rolled like thunder across both realms:
"Tell Olympus—the tide does not bow."
And with that, he vanished into the abyss, leaving only silence, wreckage... and the terrifying knowledge that the sea itself had declared war.
The ocean had gone silent.
Not quiet, but silent—the kind of silence that pressed against the eardrums until even the beating of one’s own heart seemed foreign.
Above the shattered cliffs of Olytherion, three gods stood bloodied but unbroken, their divine forms flickering from the weight of battle. They had thrown everything—storms, lightning, sacred flame—yet still the sea stood tall, and at its center loomed Poseidon.
His trident was buried in the stone, yet the ground cracked outward like veins of lightning across the earth. Seawater seeped into the fissures, turning solid land into a sinking mire. Behind him, an entire wall of ocean remained suspended in the air, frozen only because he willed it.
He wasn’t even breathing heavily.
"You’re trembling," Poseidon said at last, his voice as deep as the trenches. His eyes swept across his opponents—Nymera, the shadow-weaver; Zephyros, lord of sky and judgment; and Aegirion, the newest god of tides, his once-proud trident now chipped and bent.
"You fought well," Poseidon continued, dragging the trident from the rock with a shriek of breaking earth. "But the tide has no equal. It does not bow to flame, or to shadow, or to wind. It consumes."
Zephyros spat blood, his golden wings hanging heavy. "You think yourself the tide incarnate. But you are still only one god."
Poseidon lifted his weapon, and the suspended ocean behind him moved. Not a wave—the ocean itself. It tilted forward slightly, just enough to make the gods’ footing slip on wet stone.
"One god," Poseidon said softly, "was all it ever took."
Shadows stretched suddenly, clawing at Poseidon’s feet, anchoring him to the stone. Nymera’s voice was sharp, desperate:
"Bind him!"
Her veil of darkness swarmed upward, wrapping around Poseidon’s legs and chest like constricting chains. The other two gods surged forward, attacking as one.