How was anyone supposed to process this?
But even the freeting thought of her—Persephone, in all her naked, divine, world-shaking glory—made something stir in the wreckage of his chest. Fear, yes. A terror so profound it was its own language.
But also... wonder. Awe. A secret, terrible pride in the memory of something so perfect, so forbidden, so divine that it was, unequivocally, worth dying for. Not just once, but twice.
He had committed the ultimate sin and borne witness to the ultimate prize.
He had seen what mortal men were never, ever meant to see. And now two gods had sworn to hunt him across the bones of reality itself to un-see it.
Well. If he even survived the next thirty seconds.
The giantess's earth-shaking roar snapped him back from the precipice of memory. It was a physical assault that tore through his internal monologue, an raw, gravelly promise of violence that vibrated in his teeth.
She chalged art him.
The ground shook with each thunderous step, a rhythmic, percussive drumbeat counting down to his doom. The meteor hammer spun faster, a deafening whistle of impending impact, a projectile screaming for his head.
Her face was a mask of pure, unadulterated battle-fury, her eyes locked onto his with the gleeful promise of a slow, messy, and very public end.
The crowd went absolutely, riotously insane.
Pete tried to stand. His legs were broken noodles, his body a sack ofHave pain and fractured ribs that flatly refused to obey commands. He was a puppet with all its strings cut.
The giantess was thirty feet away.
A world away.
Twenty. Close enough to see the crazed light in her eyes, the individual cords of muscle standing out on her neck like thick ropes.
Ten. Close enough to smell the metallic tang of her sweat and the stale leather of her sandals.
An intimate, terrifying smell.
She raised the meteor hammer high, the iron balls gleaming in the bright, unforgiving sunlight, ready to cave in his skull and paint the sand a lovely new shade of arterial red.
Pete closed his eyes. "Well," he whispered to the darkness behind his own eyelids, a final, private joke. "At least I saw a goddess naked first."
The hammer came down, its falling shadow swallowing him whole.
And then—
Time seemed to have slowed down.
A voice. Not a voice. A presence. Something that bypassed his ears entirely and was injected directly into the wetware of his consciousness.
An interface.
Golden letters bloomed in his vision, stark, absolute, and blazing like the holy script that had appeared on the book.
[First Power Granted: BLINK!]
Pete's eyes shot open.
"What—"
Time resumed!
The hammer was a hair's breadth from his face. He could see the intricate scratches, the deep dents, the dark flecks of ancient, dried blood caked on its surface.
Pete didn't think. Didn't plan. He didn't have the brainpower or the time to understand.
He just moved.
No—
He blinked.
Reality didn't just warp; it folded like origami, creased, and spat him out elsewhere like a bad taste.
And Pete disappeared from the path of the hammer.
The meteor hammer hit the ground where he'd been a split-second before, the impact cracking the packed earth and sending up a geyser of sand and rock.
The giantess stared, her muscular body frozen mid-swing, at the empty, smoking crater.
The crowd went silent. The sound of a hundred thousand throats closing at once. A hundred thousand gasps, stolen in a single, collective breath.
And somewhere in the arena, in a spot thirty feet away, Pete reappeared, tumbling to the ground in a heap of fresh, blinding agony.
Still broken. Still exhausted. Still, in every conceivable way, completely and utterly screwed.
But alive.
Pete was, stumbling, nearly falling.
His knees buckled. His stomach lurched violently, threatening to empty itself onto the sand. The world tilted sickeningly—colors too bright, sounds too loud, his sense of balance completely shot to hell.
"What the fuck was that?!"
Oh, he knew what it was!
His body felt wrong. Like he'd been disassembled at the molecular level and reassembled by someone who'd only sort of remembered what a human body was supposed to look like. His skin tingled. His bones ached.
There was a taste in his mouth like copper and ozone.
But he was alive.
The silence didn't just break; it detonated.
A roar erupted from the hundred thousand giants, a physical wave of sound that hit Pete like a fist. It wasn't anger or confusion. It was pure, unadulterated joy.
"THE BOY FROM BEYOND!"
"MAGIC! HE WIELDS THE STRANGE MAGICS!"
"DID YOU SEE IT?! HE PASSED THROUGH THE VEIL!"
Their voices crashed over the arena, a tidal wave of ecstatic bloodlust. Tens of thousands of giants were on their feet, stomping hard enough to make the very stone foundations of the colosseum tremble. They weren't horrified; they were electrified. This was the show they had been waiting for. Not a simple slaughter, but a true spectacle. The impossible, made flesh and blood in their arena.
"You goddamn motherfuckers," Pete wheezed, a mix of terror and bewildered awe.
This was entertainment worth a king's ransom: a mortal with a trick.
The giantess spun toward him, her quicksilver shifting from triumphant rage to something far more dangerous. Veins, thick as ropes, bulged in her neck and across her forehead. Her eyes were wild, bloodshot, and utterly humiliated.
"COWARD!" she bellowed, her voice cleaving through the din of the crowd. "STAND AND FIGHT! FACE ME WITH HONOR, YOU LITTLE GHOST!"
"Like the hell I will!" Pete screamed back, his voice a pathetic squeak.
The meteor hammer began its deadly spin again, but this time it was different. Faster. The chain sang a higher, more urgent whistle that made the fillings in Pete's teeth ache. The iron balls blurs of malevolent intent, carving invisible paths through the air.
She charged.
Each footstep was a localized earthquake. The sand exploded upward with every impact. The air itself seemed to thicken, to resist her passage.
Pete's hindbrain, that primitive lizard part of him that had kept his ancestors alive long enough to procreate, went into overdrive. It didn't think. It didn't reason. It just screamed one single, frantic command.
MOVE. DODGE. SURVIVE.
BLINK.
His conscious mind was a passenger. His body simply... acted. It wasn't a choice. It was a seizure.
Reality didn't just warp; it folded in on itself, a crease in the fabric of existence that Pete was violently pulled through. The world dissolved into a blinding white static. His ears popped with a sickening pressure change. Every cell in his body vibrated at a frequency that felt like it was tearing him apart from the inside out.
And then—
Snap.
He was fifteen feet to the left.
The meteor hammer hit the space where he'd been a heartbeat before, and the impact was biblical. The twin iron balls struck the ground with combined force that cratered the sand and cracked the stone beneath. A geyser of dirt and blood-stained earth rained down like wicked hail.
The shockwave alone was enough to throw him off his broken feet. The direct hit would have liquified him. It would have turned his bones to dust and his organs to a fine red mist.
"STOP FLITTING!" the giantess roared, wrenching the hammer from its crater with terrifying ease. Her whole body flexed with the effort, the chain snapping taut. "FACE ME! DIE LIKE A WARRIOR, NOT A MAYFLY!"
"I'M NOT DOING IT!" Pete shrieked, his voice cracking with desperation. "I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW!"
It was true
Oh, gods, it was the god's honest truth.
The blinking wasn't him. It wasn't a choice. It was his instincts—some primal survival mechanism buried deep in his hindbrain that had suddenly awakened when those golden letters appeared.
His body moved on its own, teleporting him away from death by fractions of a second, leaving his conscious mind to catch up and scream in horror.
Thank fuck his instincts were sharp.
Because Pete had absolutely, positively, no fucking clue what he was doing. He had powers—apparently. Powers granted by that god-cursed, blank-paged book that cost him a fortune. But he had never used them.
Never trained.
Never even thought about it.
And he was in the middle of a life-or-death performance, and if he dared to stop for a single second to figure out the mechanics, the only thing awaiting him was oblivion.
He could only thank his instincts.
The giantess came at him again.
Faster this time. Angrier. Thinking.
She swung the meteor hammer in a wide, sweeping horizontal arc, both balls spinning at chest-height, a wall of whistling death. The air screamed in their wake, the displacement creating a visible shockwave that distorted the very light around it.
Pete's instincts fired—
BLINK.
The sickening, inside-out sensation wracked his body again. His vision went white. Every atom felt like it was being pulled in a different direction.
He reappeared ten feet back, gasping for air that wouldn't come—
And his eyes locked onto the second iron ball, already arcing toward him from the other side of her body.
She'd anticipated him. She hadn't aimed at where he was. She'd aimed at where he was going to be.
"SHIT!"