Chapter 9: The Clash Begins: Part Two
Kali stalked down one of the dark alleyways of the docks as she closed in on the location of her charge. She wasn’t in too much of a hurry, as she didn’t sense any great danger.
Sensing such danger was an inexact art, but she was a goddess with a portion of her divinity built around the concept of violence. To her, it was as much a part of the world as the colour blue was to a mortal. She could feel it, weigh it, get a sense of where there was or would be concentrations of it. She could feel that Adam would soon face violence and danger, but she was aware of his power and strength, and she was confident that he could endure it.
Kali smiled to herself as she continued to draw closer. Yes, it wouldn’t do to arrive too early. The winged demigod needed to be more blooded, more familiar with fighting for real, rather than in training. This might be a good chance for him to pick up some more experience.
In the distance, she could see the flare of fire light up the nearby skyline once more. Powerful, she decided, but maybe not the result of her charge’s efforts. During their spar, she’d gained something of a taste of the demigod’s power and she could feel those flames weren’t his. The elements he wielded were surprisingly pure, unalloyed with other forces, while these flames were an odd combination of forces. There was the fire of the forge there, the heat that bent metal to the will of mortals, but there was also the fires of the sun, celestial flames not native to Earth.
Was there another force to deal with?
Good, her smile widened at the thought. Her charge could use a bit more of a challenge to sharpen himself upon. Perhaps an encounter with whomever was producing these flames would inspire him to combine his elements, or at least introduce new qualities to them. There might be power in purity when it came to magic, but there was also strength to be found in alloying powers.
Another surge of power came from that area, this time feeling both hot and cold at the same time. There was the burning heat of rushing blood, pounding hearts, muscles pushed to the brink beneath hair and fur. There was also the chill of the grave, the cold of the mausoleum, and the pallid touch of a cooled corpse. Life and death together, and not in a way she’d encountered before.
Kali was no longer smiling, and her pace began to accelerate. Her senses might still feel no great increase in danger, but that didn’t mean Adam was entirely safe. Violence . . . she’d been counting on violence too much! There were other ways to kill someone, ways that could be almost gentle, at least from one point of view. If her charge encountered something powerful enough to annihilate him with a wave of their hand . . . well, there wouldn’t be any violence, now would there?
Had she been overconfident? The Hindu goddess narrowed her eyes as she turned a corner and prepared to break out into a sprint. Maybe she was just jumping at shadows. Aside from Athena, she hadn’t sensed any other gods in the area, nor any other greater powers. Still, that wave of conflicting energies that seemed to be perfectly joined set her on edge. There was something more here. Something she wasn’t seeing-
A spear drove into the pavement before her, splitting it off in all directions! The cracks shining with internal greenish-yellow light that seemed to scream of life and death. Kali came to a dead halt, her hands rising up to grasp at empty air as her eyes locked upon the spear, then darted around to find its wielder.
“You shall not pass.”
The voice that spoke was almost wispy sounding, yet it carried to her ears as easily as though someone was shouting into them from only inches away. For a moment Kali’s head whipped about, trying to spot their origin, and then she paused as a figure took form beside the spear.
The figure was that of a man, tall, broad-shouldered and well-muscled. Wrinkles on the face and a long white beard that fell almost to his waist showed that the man was past his prime, though he still stood tall and proud. He was dressed in leathers and furs, a long cloak hanging from his shoulders, a sword at his hip and metal bracers upon his wrists. One eye was covered by an eyepatch, but the other glittered with will and intelligence. Most strange was that the figure seemed to be made up entirely of the same sulphuric green light that emanated from the spear's impact point. In fact, the apparition was slightly see-through, seeming to be more of a ghost than a solid being. Still, there was no denying the power emanating from the imposing figure.
And it was a figure that the goddess of destruction immediately recognised.
“Odin?”
Kali asked in confusion, unsure of just what she was seeing. The figure before her, the power she could sense from it, both of them unquestionably felt like the head of the Norse Pantheon, but that form . . .
“You shall not pass.”
The words were repeated as the seemingly insubstantial figure stepped forward and grasped his spear. The sound of concrete and cement cracking and tearing as the weapon came free showed that no matter how ghostly the figure might appear it was all too corporeal when it came to exerting its strength. The spear was levelled at her, the tip hanging rock-solid in the air only two feet from the goddess’s eyes.
Those eyes narrowed as she took in the details before her. Kali was a violent warrior, but she was also no fool. She knew this was no true god before her, but there was the power of the Aesir all-father there, and that was enough to stop her rushing in there recklessly. Her eyes flicked to the spear and noted that while it was darker and more solid than the figure it was still composed of the same energies that made up his form. Good, that meant that she wasn’t facing Grungnir at least. Other details clicked into place, the cut of the leathers and furs that he wore, they weren’t Norse, but came from other, more southern, countries. The hilt of his sword was also different. Narrowed eyes opened in realization.
“You’re not Odin!”
“You shall not pass.”
“Yeah, you do know that Hollywood’s had a chokehold on that phase for years now, right? If you don’t want to sound like a desperate cosplayer trying to sound cool, then I’d try for some fresher material.”
The figure didn’t actually recoil from her words, but Kali was sure that she saw a tiny flicker in its one good eye. She wasn’t sure what she was facing, but it wasn’t some emotionless illusion, that was something she was sure of now.
“Okay, so you’re not Odin. Y’know he’s not gonna be too happy when he hears about someone stealing his look. Guess you like living dangerously, huh?”
Kali didn’t wait for an answer or a reaction. Instead, she surged forward, trying to catch the ghostly figure unawares. One hand came up, curled into a fist and aiming to hit the body right into the centre mass. Were a mortal trying this in a fight it would have been a foolish move, trying to hit one of the most naturally armoured points of the human body. When you brought superhuman strength and resistance into the equation it changed things though. She was aiming to send him flying, to get him out of the way. Worrying about his nature and identity could wait until after Adam was safe.
The problem was that the blow never landed. Just before her knuckles would have impacted, the false Odin before her dissolved into . . . she wasn’t sure what to call it. It was too thick to be called mist, yet too ethereal to be called a liquid. It was like a muted glow of yellow and green imitating liquid as it flowed through the air at absurd speed, evading her fist and then reconstituting into its previous form once more just out of reach. It all took place in the blink of an eye, so fast that even the goddess of destruction was caught by surprise.
The figure’s retaliation was instant and potent. The spear slashed through the air, failing to touch Kali but leaving a trail of glowing symbols hovering in the air in the wake of its tip. The Hindu goddess had barely enough time to widen her eyes in recognition before the symbols flared into brightness, then erupted into a blast of pure force that hit as though a bullet train had slammed into her at top speed.
Kali hadn’t been able to brace herself in time, and the blast threw her off her feet and sent her flying down the alley as though she’d been launched from a catapult. Her flight came to a crashing end as she slammed into the brick wall of a warehouse with enough force to crater the brickwork. If she hadn’t let her body go limp to disperse the force of the impact then she might have been driven all the way through.
Waving the dust thrown up by the collision out of her face Shiva’s consort pulled herself out of the impact crater and dropped down to the pavement below her. Massive as the impact had been it hadn’t really hurt her, only surprised her. She was one of the terrors of the Hindu pantheon, a goddess that had faced demons the sizes of mountains in the past, if that was all it took to put her down then she’d never have survived to this point. The thing that had surprised her had been the symbols the fake Norse god had used, symbols that she recognised.
“Runes?”
Runes were a part of Germanic and Norse mythology, the written version of their language of magic. A degraded and powerless version of it had been adopted by the mortals after the gods began to leave, but the original version had been a potent method of harnessing and enacting magic.
It had also been one of the domains of Odin, an area in which he held near supremacy.
Kali had felt the power in the runes that had been used against her, and she was sure that she’d been able to feel a spark of divinity empower them. What had hit her hadn’t been just normal magic wielded by a mortal, it had been the real deal, divine magic.
“Odin?”
Had she been wrong? If it was the head of the Norse pantheon barring her way, then things had just gotten way too complicated very fast. Kali wasn’t going to let it stop her, she had made her oath after all, but beating one of the divine kings to a bloody pulp was going to have serious fallout down the road.
“Not Odin, Wotan.”
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The Hindu goddess was no scholar, but even she knew something of Odin’s renown. Among his notable aspects was that had had many, many names. Wotan was a name derived from his old English name of Wodan, the newer name featuring in some of their more modern plays and stories. It wasn’t a name she thought Odin himself would use though, it was too . . . shallow, too lacking in history.
So, what was she facing? An aspect of the god, rather than the real thing? The nature of the Greek and Roman pantheons had proven that with enough power and faith deities could be spawned off from other gods. The masks that the divine wore could take on lives of their own. Was that what she was looking at here?
Her thoughts were cut off as another blast of fire ripped into the sky, this time rising and falling like a wave, crashing down several streets over with enough force to send a tremor through the ground. The distant feelings of life and death energies intensified, growing sharper, and deadlier.
She didn’t have time for this! Her muscles tensed as she prepared to charge forward, but as though sensing her intentions the semi-transparent figure was suddenly right there before her. This time his spearhead drew a huge circle of runes in the air, the symbols lighting up as the ends connected to form a ring. Even without any real knowledge of what they meant Kali had no trouble guessing their purpose. Suddenly she felt as though she were standing in the shadow of a fortress, one made of more than mere metal and stone. This was a fortification that could stand even against her, at least for a time.
“You shall not pass.”
Kali grimaced as she knew that time wasn’t something she had in abundance.
“I told you, you need something original!”
Without further words, she drew back her fist and began to hammer upon the barrier before her. Going around wasn’t an option, negotiation wasn’t really open to her either. That left her with the simple choice, the one she excelled at.
Kali just hoped she’d be quick enough.
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Athena calmly lifted her aegis and once more blocked an arrow that would have otherwise skewered her through her left eyeball. A distant giggle echoed through the night, and a slight frown touched the Greek goddess’s face.
The situation was an irritating one, though not beyond her ability to deal with. Her foe was keeping their distance, never showing themselves, only attacking when an opening presented itself, then fading away into the darkness. The Greek goddess of wisdom was more than able to defend herself as needed, but the attacks were unquestionably slowing her down to a crawl.
In the distance, she could feel the battle Adam had involved himself in starting to intensify. Magic may not have been her domain, but her nature over wisdom granted her some measure of expertise over it. Such aptitude was enough to let her sense the flows of power and more and more forces began to move towards the site where her appointed student was fighting.
Another arrow came at her, composed of the same condensed yellow-green energies as the others. This one was aimed to pierce her liver, just below the armour she’d manifested when the battle began. Ordinarily, she would have been unconcerned with such attacks, but divine energy was present within the shaft, enough so that the arrow could not simply be dismissed. A single swipe of the spear in her right hand cut the arrow from the air, shattering it into shards of power that quickly dissolved into nothing. Again, there was that distant giggle, then silence.
It was obvious to Athena that this was simply a delaying action, a tactic to keep her from interfering with whatever battle her student had managed to involve himself with. If she was willing to unleash her full power, then she could have ended this farce. Of course, doing so would not only have devastated the general area but also have announced her location and identity to every other deity and powerful spirit on the continent. That was something she wanted to avoid at almost any cost. Her student . . .
Another arrow came at her and was once more blocked by her shield. This time Athena didn’t hesitate though, both her spear and shield disappeared, replaced by a bow and arrow. In the blink of an eye, the shaft had been notched, drawn and released, the arrow aimed right at where the attack had come from. The giggle came once more, only to be cut off by a sharp and undignified squawk as her enemy barely managed to avoid her retaliation. As she heard the tumble of a body the Greek goddess’ eyes narrowed in satifaction. Though she was no goddess of archery Athena was still a goddess of warcraft, excellence in arms was part of her divine rights. Making such a shot was well within her ability.
Swift steps carried her down another alleyway, towards the spot where she’d heard the impact of a falling body. Once her attacker was dealt with, she’d move on to see how her student was doing, and then assess how best to proceed.
She reached the spot, a small opening behind a warehouse that had served as a dumping ground in the past. Dozens of wooden palette bases were piled up on each other, along with the remnants of opened crates and metal barrels. Everywhere there was some sort of industrial detritus left behind, but there was no sign of her attacker.
A trap!
Athena’s mind instantly connected the clues as her aegis once more materialised and rose to block the trio of arrows that came at her faster than the deadliest mortal bullet. One was aimed at her forehead, another at her throat, and the last at her inner thigh. All unarmoured spots, all debilitating targets, even if her immortality would allow her to survive them, all of them coming from an oblique angle that was difficult to block. The enemy had falsified weakness, drew her into an unfavourable terrain, and then struck for maximum effectiveness from a near-ideal vantage spot. Relatively simple, but unquestionably effective.
All three arrows shattered as they struck the aegis, the golden surface of the shield easily withstanding the assault. In the next instant, Athena’s spear whipped about her, pure force being released in a wave that shattered the nearby piles of abandoned cargo materials into near dust, then swept it away, clearing the area.
Yes, it had been a good ambush, but ultimately such tactics were pointless in the face of skill combined with power. The goddess of wisdom was a consummate warrior, and her power was befitting of her station, this was far from enough to bring her down.
But not insufficient to delay her. Once more Athena was aware of the growing concentration of power at Adam’s location. She could feel the power of the demigod rising as well, growing to meet the challenge. As always, his power was frustratingly complex, an alloy of many different elements and attributes combined to make an almost opaque aura that gave little away. He could be fighting for his life or helping a pear tree to grow for all she could tell, all she knew was that he was drawing deeply upon his reserves.
Well, he would have to handle this matter on his own. Athena was unwilling to leave with an enemy at her back, especially one with some measure of divinity to them. Adam had power, perhaps this would serve to force him to either draw more out or use what he already had with more skill. And should he fail . . .
Well, the goddess was sworn to be his teacher, not his bodyguard. Whomever her current foe was they were most likely potent enough that they could kill him if given the chance. Holding them from interfering served to protect him from one threat, therefore she was justified in the continuation of this battle.
With that thought in mind, Athena maintained a watch for further arrows but turned the majority of her focus inwards.
She was the goddess of many things. Wisdom, warfare, crafts, cities, heroism, all of them fell under her purview by right of her inheritance or her achievements. However, wisdom was always the first and foremost of her aspects. She had been born from the brow of her father fully formed, an idea given flesh, the ideal daughter of Metis, thought and reason were the cornerstones of her being. Thought begot wisdom, but thought needed fuel, thousands of tiny tiles from which to form a completed mosaic of detail. Information was the soil from which wisdom was grown, and information could only be obtained through the use of the senses.
It was a lesser aspect of her godly nature, but one that often was of use due to its subtle nature. Reaching into herself the Greek goddess tapped into the golden well of power that was her divinity, and let it rush through her body, enhancing her eyes, her skin, her ears, her nose, even her tongue. All about her the world seemed to come alive, the previous picture offered by her senses a mere washed-out parody of what she now had access to. Everything was so much more! More vibrant, more animated, brighter, sharper, clearer!
Athena knew that even for a god it was perilous to overindulge upon such enhanced senses, the risk of them growing to be like a drug all too great. Ironically it was only the likes of Dionysus who could endure such enhancements permanently, his own nature as a god of madness and revelry allowing his reason to endure where it should have been swamped. The goddess of knowledge might not be empowered, but she could withstand it better than her uncles or aunts might have. It was her nature to observe, to learn, to study, and this subtle enhancement could serve her well.
She heard the creak of the bowstring. She heard the hiss as the shaft was released. She felt the wind of its passage as she turned. She felt more air rush past her as she hurtled towards her attacker. Her eyes pierced the darkness as she finally spied her enemy!
The figure was slight, feminine, and composed of the same yellow-green energies that the arrows dissipated into when broken. She was crouched on the edge of a rooftop, using a large ventilation intake as cover. The instant Athena started to close the distance between them the figure was moving, but the Greek goddess had managed to catch her flatfooted for just an instant.
It was just enough! Just as the figure leapt away the warrior goddess barrelled into her. Athena’s shield and spear were held perfectly, the shield protecting her while her spear tip aimed to stab the etheric figure just below the heart. Her form would have made the finest spartan warrior gape with wonder, yet the figure was able to react in time. Despite having only one foot under her and being caught midleap she was still able to bring her bow up like a quarterstaff and knock the spear up and away from her. It was an impressive feat of skill and agility, but it wasn’t enough. Even if the spear didn’t impale her enemy, the shield slammed into her with all the force of the Greek goddess’s divine muscles behind it. The impact took both of them across the roof and ended with the figure's back being slammed into the brick wall of the larger warehouse adjoining the one on which they fought.
Had it been any normal foe the impact would have driven the wind from their lungs and the fight from their belly, but Athena’s attacker proved more resilient. Seemingly uncaring of the impact that had cracked masonry and mortar the figure drew a short, curved knife and slashed at the grey eyes of the Greek goddess. In instant response Athena tilted her face, letting the blade screech across the metal of her hoplite helmet rather than her divine flesh. The attack proved to be a distraction though, because, nimble as a mink, the figure of yellowish-green energies ducked under her spear and darted to the side.
Athena darted to the side, cutting off her escape, and for the first time since the battle began was able to take a good look at her foe.
It took a lot to catch the goddess of wisdom by surprise, but the sight before her managed to make her eyes widen in shock. The figure before her was small and slight, lithely muscled and clad only in a simple tunic dress and sandals. She had a young agelessness to her, such that her age could have been anything from a mature twelve-year-old to a youthful-looking young woman of twenty. She was beautiful, but in the way a wild fawn or a proud wolf was beautiful. The only jewellery she wore was a thin headband with a crescent moon fitted over her brow. There was no way to tell her details, such as her hair or eye colour, or even the colour of the tunic she wore, all of it was composed of the same green and yellow energy.
“Artemis?”
The name slipped out as Athena readied her spear once more, uncertainty warring with growing anger as she stared at her attacker. Was this her half-sister? This figure was not flesh and blood, but there was divinity there. The archery excellence was certainly that of her fellow Olympian, but . . .
That giggle that was now familiar, so much like the tinkling of exquisitely crafted silver bells, yet with a tone she did not recognise. That smile, so familiar, yet so different. There were other small things, the curve of their bow, the cut of her tunic, the crescent upon her brow . . .
“No, not Artemis. Diana!”
It clicked into place, this was not her half-sister, the Greek goddess of the wild. This was her Roman counterpart or at least some sort of effigy of her. No, a fake would lack the distinct divine spark that she was sensing from this being. Whatever it was, it was alive enough to maintain a divine power of its own, but at the same time . . .
Ah! Suddenly the goddess understood. She knew what she faced, knew what Adam faced, what all of their small party faced.
There was another giggle, and the figure was gone, darting away faster than the swiftest deer could have managed. An instant later another arrow was flying at Athena, letting her know that even if she had deduced her enemy’s nature the fight was still far from over.