Chapter 45: Siren
The valley floor smelled of dry blood and wedged stones.
Cheering kept his pace with the demigods as the key pressed against his ribs as they moved.
Tanya stayed half a step ahead, spear low, while the two demigods scanned the broken temples on either side. Statues of Zeus, Athena, and Poseidon lay toppled, their faces cracked open like eggs. The red-black sky pressed down like a lid.
The lookout demigod stopped first.
"The beasts we spoke of, they’re not distant anymore..."
Figures rose from the ruins ahead—tall, thin, wrapped in the same pale cloth as the masked one.
Their masks were blank, but each carried a different weapon: a rusted sickle, a broken lightning bolt, a spear made of fused bone.
They did not run. They simply walked into the open as if the land itself belonged to them, and Cheering and the others were merely trespassers on their own lands.
Tanya’s knuckles whitened on her spear.
"The Debt Collectors. They were the ones the Olympians sealed away when the First World was still young. They only appear when a covenant is about to be broken...or finished."
One of them, the same smooth white mask from earlier, raised a hand. The others halted.
"Golden...blood," it said in that many-throated voice. "You opened the closed gate...the authority inside your pocket...Hand them over and the Second World will let you leave with your lives. Refuse, and we collect what the lesser gods still owe."
"Lesser gods? Who the fuck did you call the lesser gods?" Tanya muttered. "You maggots, you lot were nothing but insects—"
Cheering stepped forward before Tanya could dive into her rage.
"Nobody owes you shit here, Dipshit. Now move away."
The mask tilted. "You too...golden blood. He freed us...but as He wrote the law that kept this world closed, he locked us here. All of us here.
Now the law is cracking because he is no longer free to hold it. The debt is yours to pay as well. Now give us the KEY!"
The key flared so hot Cheering almost dropped it as gold light spilled between his fingers and painted the cracked ground.
"AUUUUUUUURRRR...."
Something answered from deeper in the valley.
A low, wet sound, like stone grinding against meat, rolled out of the largest ruined temple. The Debt Collectors turned as one toward the valley. Even the masked one took a single step back.
From the temple’s collapsed doorway crawled a shape that should not have existed.
It was roughly human in outline, but the proportions were wrong. Too long in the limbs. Skin the color of old parchment stretched over a frame that kept shifting, as if bones were rearranging themselves under the surface.
Around its neck hung a cracked golden chain. On the chain was a small, dull crystal—the exact same shape as the key in Cheering’s hand, only blackened and cracked.
The creature lifted its head.
Its face was half-gone, but the remaining eye was gold.
Cheering’s stomach dropped.
Tanya whispered, "Th...that’s impossible..."
The creature’s mouth opened. The voice that came out was broken, layered, and somehow familiar.
"Cheering...?"
The name scraped across the valley like a blade on stone.
Cheering’s knees almost buckled upon seeing the abomination before him. He knew that voice. He had heard it every night around the fire for years. He had heard it the day Nyima died. He had heard it the last time Amon smiled at him and said everything would be fine.
The golden eye locked on him.
"I wai...ted," the thing that wore pieces of Amon said. "I waited so long for the gat...e to open again."
The Debt Collectors dropped, wanting to flee away. But they couldn’t. Their feet giving way from the sheer aura the beast released.
Tanya raised her spear, voice shaking for the first time.
"That is not him....that is a mutated siren. If we stay here, then we are literally fucked."
The beast figure took one step forward. The ground cracked under its weight.
"I am what remained," it said. "And I am still hungry."
***
The Oracle stopped walking. The two keys in Claude’s coat suddenly burned cold, then hot, then cold again, as if arguing with each other.
"She is already here," the Oracle said quietly. "And she has the first key with her...?"
Claude turned. The bruise-colored sky above the low hills had developed a single, perfect tear.
Through it poured a column of pure black shot through with gold veins. When the light faded, Liliana stood on the ridge twenty meters away.
In one hand she held a small, dark sphere the size of a clenched fist. Inside the sphere, something golden slept.
Amon. Claude could feel it. Feel him.
"No, she doesn’t have the key. That’s just an illusion." Claude’s breath left him in a single sharp sound.
Liliana’s eyes found him immediately. She looked younger than the last time he had seen her, the years stripped away by borrowed divinity, but the rage in her face was older than both of them combined.
"Oh, I was searching for you, brother," she whispered as she turned to him and then to the Oracle. "I didn’t know this was going to be a family reunion," she said. Her voice carried easily across the distance.
"Why wasn’t I invited...?" She asked. In a blink she was near them.
"You already know why," Claude replied. His hand going to the keys.
"What did you do to him? Release him!"
"Simple...what he taught me to do." She lifted the sphere slightly. "I locked the part of him that kept choosing other people over me. Over all of us. Now the Second World will finish what he started...or what he failed to finish. Either way, I will get those keys of his..."
The Oracle stepped half a pace in front of Claude.
"Liliana. Why do you always interfere? The grand design was never about you."
She laughed once, short and ugly. "The quiet one speaks...oh brother, everything was about him. Every war. Every seal. Every disciple he left behind like discarded tools.
Even the child he never knew he made. Hell already has the boy. Did you know that, Claude? Amon’s bloodline continues..."
Claude’s fingers closed so hard around the keys that the metal edges cut him. Blood ran down his knuckles.
"You’re lying. He is an immortal. Immortals are cursed to bear no heirs..."
"I wish I was." Liliana’s smile was thin. "Michael and Lucifer made a deal over the child the same day they made a deal over the father.
From my perspective, the child is the real key. And I intend to take him."
The Oracle saw it, her intentions in the end.
"You will fail..."
"I have proved you wrong before, Oracle. I guess you haven’t learned much, studying nothing but fate."
She raised the dark sphere higher.
"I have this, the rule breaker, the one who bends fate itself. Using his power, I can do...anything."
The ground between them split in a clean, silent line. From the crack rose the same pale-masked figures that had appeared to Cheering. Dozens of them. Their blank faces turned toward the sphere in Liliana’s hand as if it were the only light left in existence.
The Oracle’s voice was almost gentle.
"You cannot hold him forever, Liliana. Because he is what you say he is...someone who defies even fate."
Liliana’s expression flickered, just for a second—something like fear under the rage.
"My darkness is absolute. You shall see it." She said, as dark purple gas started to emerge below her cape, spreading everywhere.
The Debt Collectors, which rose, were devoured by it.
"What is she doing?" Claude asked.
"Creating herself," Oracle replied. As the collectors encased by the dark purple smoke morphed, with crackling bones, becoming a witch itself.
"My children..." Liliana muttered. "Bring me those keys."
Then the sphere in her hand pulsed once, hard. The witches suddenly encased with rich divinity, sending long dark vines at both of them.
Oracle moved, like he knew what would happen, pushing off Claude just a second before the vine hit him.
"Stay safe," Oracle muttered. "I don’t want to start again."
Claude, who was on the floor utterly surprised, looked back at him. "...how?"
"Because Amon taught me one thing: the ones whose fate I can’t see...death is not for them."
Liliana didn’t hear what the Oracle said for some reason. The words numbed out.
"Stop whispering, lads. Come on, we still have our reunion." she said, her hand casting a small magic circle, a purple fire flaring with high temperature.
[Inferno casted: A-class skill]
With a single wave of her hand, the fire blasted from her hand and landed before him. The Oracle pulled one of the Debt Collectors, letting them take the fire and fall down the hill.
"When I say, run. We run like hell." He muttered towards Claude.
"Ho—?"
"AUUUUUUUREEEE"
A loud scream came from the bottom of the mighty valley.
"Just run."