The eastern pillar of Mount Orthys rests in the hush of a false dawn, the sky a deep, untrustworthy blue. Below, the ocean is a sheet of polished obsidian, silent and unnaturally still. Upon a flat stone at the cliff's edge, Koios sits cross-legged. The ring on his finger glows with a soft, indigo light. His eyes are closed, his breath steady, the very fabric of the world bending gently around his form.
Then, the sea betrays the calm.
A tremor ripples through the water's surface. The deep ocean darkens, the weight of something ancient gathering in the abyss. The horizon begins to boil.
In the next heartbeat, the calm shatters.
Waves roar upward, crashing against the cliff face with the force of a dying star. A violent surge of power tears the clouds asunder. From the heart of the sea, Poseidon bursts forth, trident in hand, water spiraling around him like serpents of living storm. His eyes are chips of sea-ice, his jaw a locked vise of fury.
Koios opens his eyes. The ring on his finger flares once. He rises, not with muscle, but with intent, as if gravity itself is a servant he dismisses.
"Still bound to your temper, I see," he says, his voice quiet yet cutting through the roar.
Poseidon doesn't answer. He twists his wrist, and the sea behind him obeys, rising into a vast, sky-swallowing column. He thrusts the trident forward. The column explodes into a barrage of compressed torrents, each capable of pulverizing a mountain.
Koios raises his hand, his ring flaring a soft indigo. 'Axis change — reverse.'
The sound of the roaring waves vanishes. The torrents freeze mid-air, hanging like crystalline sculptures for a single, impossible moment. Then, with a violent spin, they reverse course, hurtling back toward their creator.
Poseidon's eyes narrow. He crosses his trident before him, and the redirected waves part around a shield of divine will, the water vapor hissing against his aura.
The cliff trembles under the force.
Poseidon lunges forward, the ground cratering beneath his feet. His trident cuts the air, slicing arcs of compressed pressure. Koios slides aside effortlessly—every movement is smooth, pre-ordained.
'Axis change — updraft.'
Poseidon's body jerks upward as the gravity beneath him inverts. He slams into an invisible stone ceiling in the sky. Before he can regain control, Koios rotates his hand. 'Axis change — compressed.'
The pressure multiplies. Air itself condenses around Poseidon like a divine vice. His bones creak, his muscles scream in protest but instead of breaking, he roars. The ocean answers.
A tidal wave erupts from below, colliding into the cliff with enough force to splinter continents. The impact breaks Koios's focus for half a breath, enough for Poseidon to fall, spinning downward. He twists midair, landing on a rolling surge of water, riding it back toward the Titan.
Their weapons meet.
A flash of light tears the sky in two. Metal screams against metal, divine power against cosmic law. The trident's tips scrape across a shield of warped space, throwing sparks that burn the air. The backlash splits the sea apart, revealing the glowing magma of the seabed ten miles below.
Koios slides back, his feet carving deep grooves into the stone. Poseidon follows, relentless. Every strike is heavier, faster. Water coils around the trident's shaft, forming serpents and dragons that lunge and bite with lethal intent.
Koios extends two fingers. 'Axis change — distortion.'
The space before him warps, bending Poseidon's trajectory. The god of the sea twists through the distorted reality, skidding sideways along the warped air and landing hard. Rocks shatter under his boots.
He spits a glob of blood and seawater, a fierce grin touching his lips. "You're not what you used to be."
Koios's eyes narrow. His voice remains a calm, chilling contrast to the chaos. "Nor are you."
The ring on his finger flares brighter. The wind freezes in place. 'Axis change — division.'
A shockwave of pure conceptual power erupts. The battlefield splits along invisible lines. Every drop of water, every grain of sand separates, suspended in a state of waiting. Poseidon feels the air peel away from his skin, the very molecular cohesion of the world snapping apart.
He answers by slamming his trident into the ground. The sea below responds. From the lightless depths, hundreds of spectral shapes rise translucent forms of ancient sea beasts, leviathans, and dragons, each wreathed in haunting waterlight. They swim through the air, their silent roars merging with the thunder.
"Rise," Poseidon commands, his voice a low rumble. "My friends!"
The Leviathans surged forward, a tidal wave of myth given form. A colossal sea serpent, its body a range of moving mountains, dove for Koios, maw wide enough to swallow the pillar whole. Koios didn't flinch. 'Axis change — repel.'
The serpent's head met an invisible wall, its own momentum shattering its spectral skull into a downpour of harmless spray.
Before the spray could fall, a kraken, its tentacles thick as ancient oaks, whipped from the flanks. Each sucker-lined arm carried the crushing pressure of the deepest trench. Koios rotated his wrist. 'Axis change — rotation.'
The tentacles suddenly knotted around themselves, the kraken roaring in spectral confusion as it strangled its own limbs.
Then came the dragons, sleek and serpentine, breathing not fire but jets of hyper-pressured water that could slice through celestial steel. Koios raised his palm. 'Axis change — density shift.'
The air before him thickened into a diamond-like barrier. The water jets shattered against it, exploding into mere mist.
The Leviathans lunge as one. Koios moves his hand in a slow, deliberate circle. 'Axis change — spiral.'
Gravity twists into a vortex. The Leviathans' bodies contort, pulled apart into shimmering ribbons of water. The ocean itself twists upward in a colossal pillar, threatening to swallow the sky.
Poseidon clenches his fist. The ribbons of water resist, coiling around the vortex, fighting his control. The spiral shudders, then reverses direction, collapsing back in on itself toward Koios.
The Titan's expression flickers. For the first time, there is strain.
He clenches his ring-hand. 'Axis break — reflect.'
The collapsing spiral detonates. The shockwave rips the sea open down to the seabed, exposing glowing fissures of magma that paint the scene in hellish light.
Poseidon lands on his feet, chest heaving, water dripping from his brow like tears of the ocean. He stares through the heat shimmer, his eyes burning with a blue, unyielding fire.
Koios's robe is torn, but his composure is only lightly cracked. "Still relying on fury to power your logic," he observes.
Poseidon doesn't bother with a reply. He simply charges.
They collide again, faster and harder than before. Each clash shatters the air; each parry bends space. The ring pulses with rhythm 'Axis shift — reverse… rotation… expand…'—the commands come like gunfire, each altering a fundamental law of reality.
Poseidon forces his way through, even as gravity turns sideways and air turns solid. His instincts scream at him to adapt. Every blow of his trident carves deep, angry furrows into stone and sky.
Koios ducks a wild swing, his palm snapping forward. An invisible, crushing wave of condensed gravity hits Poseidon in the gut, sending him skidding backward across the ocean's surface, carving a trench of white foam in his wake.
Poseidon steadies himself, spits a stream of saltwater, and laughs, a low, dangerous sound. He predicts everything. Calculates every move. The thought was a poison. He was a storm being dissected by a god of cold, hard logic.
'You think you can bury me in my own sea?' he thinks, the fury cooling into something far more deadly.
He raises the trident high. The sea behind him turns the black of the abyss. Storm clouds roll down from the heavens, lightning arcing between them like divine nerves.
"Come, stormbreaker," he growls.
Thunder is his answer. The sky falls.
Bolts of lightning rain down as pillars of white fire. Each strike illuminates Koios's silhouette still standing, unmoved, the ring glowing like a captured star.
'Axis change — null vector.'
The lightning vanishes inches from his body, diverted into nothingness.
Poseidon dashes through the fading arcs and thrusts. The trident meets Koios's open palm. The Titan doesn't block, he redirects. The blow veers off, tearing a colossal chunk out of the mountainside behind him.
Koios counters with a short, sharp pulse from his ring, gravity compressed into a needle. It pierces Poseidon's shoulder, and golden ichor splatters into the air.
Poseidon's teeth clench against the pain, but he doesn't step back. Enough.
He slams his foot down—not just into the water, but into the very crust of the earth beneath it. 'Earthshaker'
The entire ocean convulses. The cliff face shatters. A thousand-meter wave, born from the union of sea and quake, rises from the depths and engulfs them both.
Underwater, the world turns silent, a muffled cathedral of blue. Only the vibration of raw power remains. Poseidon's wounds seal as the divine pressure of his domain wraps around him. Koios floats opposite, his aura bending the sea into a perfect, motionless sphere around him.
Their eyes meet through the dark, swirling water.
Koios extends his hand. The ring burns with a cold, white light. 'Axis release — absolute zero.'
Instantly, everything stops.
The water freezes solid—not into ice, but into pure, absolute stillness. Every molecule locks in place. Like time itself halts. Poseidon's body seizes; his trident is caught mid-motion. The cold isn't a temperature; it is the death of motion, the end of energy.
Koios's voice echoes through the conceptual void. "All movement ends at zero."
Divine frost, cold as the void between stars, crawls up Poseidon's skin, locking his muscles, stilling the very blood in his veins. His thoughts slow, growing heavy and distant. 'So this is how it ends? Not in fire, but in silence?... No.'
A memory flashes not a thought, but a feeling. The rumble of the abyssal plain, the shudder of continents adrift on his mantle, the raw, untamable pulse of the world itself. The sea was his, but the earth was his foundation.
A crack appears in the perfect, motionless prison. Then another. Poseidon's hand twitches, not from conscious will, but from a primal, instinctual command that bypassed his frozen mind.
'QUAKE.'
A pulse of pure seismic terror tears through the ocean, ripping the absolute zero field apart. The frozen molecules explode outward in a shockwave of steam and force. The temperature shatters.
Poseidon steps free, steam rising from his skin, his eyes blazing with a new, feral light. He grips his trident, his knuckles white. "Earthquake."
The tectonic plates below convulse in earnest. Magma blasts from the ocean floor, painting the world in strokes of red and black. The world, once stilled, regains its flow with violent intent.
Koios raises his arm, forming another gravitational field, but the command is a stammer in his mind. 'The calculations are unstable. The variables are—'
Poseidon vanishes from his perception.
The Titan's eyes widen. 'Why can't I sense him? His trajectory, his intent…it's gone!'
The trident grazes his ribs, leaving a searing line of divine ichor. Koios spins, mind racing, calculating a thousand possible angles for the next strike. 'He will come from the left, with an 87% probability'
A blow to his jaw shattered his calculations into blinding pain. He stumbled, his focus broken. The Titan tried again, 'Axis change—' but the command was cut short by a crushing impact to his side. For the first time in eons, Koios felt a tremor that had nothing to do with the earth: panic.
Poseidon moved like a force of nature, his blows a storm of pure instinct. Each movement was precise yet animalistic, unpredictable because it was not thought, but felt. The trident became an extension of his will, water coiling and exploding with every swing.
"Instinct divinity…" the God of the Seas growled, his voice raw and guttural. "You can't read what doesn't think."
He spun the trident once, driving it into the sea below them. The resulting wave rose like a waking mountain, swallowing Koios whole.
The Titan burst free moments later, soaked, bloodied, and disoriented, still trying to reassert control over a reality that had become chaotic. "Axis reversal—"
But Poseidon was already there.
He slammed his palm into the ground. 'Quake.'
The world convulsed. A shockwave of pure vibrational energy radiated outward. It tore through reality, shaking the divine essence inside everything it touched.
Koios froze mid-command. His ring flickered, dimmed, and died. His knees buckled as invisible, destructive vibrations crawled up his spine and through his veins. His gravity field collapsed into nothing.
Poseidon advanced, calm now, deadly calm. He lifted his trident, its points reflecting the molten glow from the fractured earth.
Koios looked up, sweat and golden ichor mingling on his face. For a fleeting moment, defiance burned in his eyes—the last spark of a dying star. Then Poseidon's trident descended.
The impact shattered the ocean floor. The entire eastern pillar cracked with a sound like the world breaking. Columns of water and superheated steam shot skyward, piercing the clouds.
When the dust and foam settled, Koios's broken body lay half-submerged in the churning water, his ring dark and inert beside him.
Poseidon stood over him, trident lowered, his chest heaving. The sea around him was silent, as if in respect for the fallen.
He didn't gloat. He simply looked down, his eyes as cold as the deep abyss, his voice rough with exhaustion and finality.
"Stay buried, old Titan. The sea has no mercy left to give."
He turned and walked away, and the tide, obedient to its master, rose to reclaim the battlefield.
The waves swelled, swallowed the shattered cliff, and the eastern pillar of Mount Orthys disappeared beneath the furious, churning storm.
Suddenly, a cold uneasiness grips his heart. Poseidon touches his chest, feeling his heartbeat racing rapidly against his ribs. "What is this feeling?"
"Kwaaaa!!!"
A loud, piercing cry, resonant with death and rebirth, echoes across the ravaged landscape. Poseidon looks up toward the peak of Mount Orthys. There, casting a vast and ominous shadow over the entire mountain, is the form of a colossal black phoenix.
Poseidon's eyes harden. "Hades…"