"…The sun isn't a god."
The room went silent.
Young Anaxagoras stood in the center of the marble hall, scrolls trembling in his hands. Around him, elders in white robes stared as if he had just spat on Olympus itself.
"It is a star," he continued, voice shaking but eyes steady. "A burning mass, like the lights we see scattered across the night sky. The heavens are not divine decorations. They are matter. Real. Knowable."
A murmur rippled through the chamber.
"Blasphemy," one archon hissed.
"Dangerous thinking," said another.
"You reduce the gods to… objects?"
Anaxagoras swallowed.
"I elevate humanity," he said quietly.
That night, his name was scratched from public records.
"Hide them."
Anaxagoras whispered as he shoved parchment into clay jars, hands stained with ink and ash. His small home flickered with candlelight, shadows dancing like witnesses.
"If they find this…" his student muttered.
"They will," Anaxagoras replied calmly.
"Eventually."
"You're not afraid?"
He paused, then smiled faintly.
"I am," he said. "But fear has never disproven truth."
He buried his writings beneath loose stone, beneath floorboards, beneath silence. By day, he spoke carefully, philosophy diluted, ideas masked as hypotheticals. By night, he calculated the size of the sun, the distance of stars, the mechanics of eclipses.
"Let them pray," he murmured to himself once, scratching diagrams into wax. "I will understand."
Years later.
Chains clinked softly as guards escorted him through a corridor of stone.
"You could have recanted," one said. "All you had to do was say the sun was a god."
Anaxagoras looked up, eyes tired but unbroken.
"And lie?" he replied. "To comfort ignorance?"
The guard scoffed. "You philosophers are all the same."
"No," Anaxagoras said gently. "I'm different."
"How so?"
"I don't need the universe to love me," he answered. "I only need it to be true."
At his feet lay what remained of Anaxagoras.
From the waist down, his body was intact, legs slack, one foot twisted slightly inward, sandals half-burned. The bronze cane lay nearby, snapped cleanly in two, its pointed tip resting uselessly against the arena floor.
Above the waist. Nothing.
No illusion covered it. No comedy softened it. The top half of his body was simply… gone, erased by concentrated solar force, as if reality itself had been cauterized.
Ra looked down at the remains, expression unreadable.
"So," he said quietly, almost to himself, "this is the man who laughed at the sun."
Ra turned away from the body at last, his cloak of light trailing behind him.
"Remember this, humans," he said, voice carrying across the coliseum like dawn over a battlefield. "Laughter bends gods. Illusions confuse us."
He glanced once more over his shoulder at Anaxagoras' remains.
"But disbelief," Ra finished, "does not save you from the sun."
Ra took one step forward.
Then.
Impact.
A fist slammed into the side of his jaw with a crack like colliding stone. The sound rang through the arena, sharp and wrong, and for the first time since the match began, Ra staggered.
Gasps erupted from every tier.
"What?!" Zeus lurched forward.
Ra skidded half a step, sand grinding beneath his heel. He turned slowly, disbelief flashing across his face and saw him.
Anaxagoras stood behind him.
Or rather… part of him shouldn't have been there.
Where his upper body had been annihilated moments ago, light now bled and stitched itself together, not divine gold, but something stranger, an outline of heat shimmer and fractured reality, like a man rebuilt from concepts rather than flesh. His chest was translucent in places, stars faintly visible beneath skin as if the night sky itself had been pressed into human form.
His eyes burned with clarity, not rage.
"I never…" Anaxagoras said calmly, rolling his shoulder, "…truly die."
Ra's eyes widened.
"That's impossible," he growled. "Your body was erased."
Anaxagoras smiled, crooked, tired.
"My body?" He tapped his own temple with two fingers. "Sure. You killed that."
He took a step forward. The arena floor rippled, not into comedy this time, but into something vast. An abstract expanse of rotating lights, orbiting sparks, invisible paths crossing endlessly.
"But I was never fighting you with my body."
The gods felt it then.
Not illusion.
Principle.
Anaxagoras spread his hands slightly, the remnants of solar scorch still crawling across his reforming torso.
"I told them the sun wasn't a god," he continued, voice steady. "They tried to silence me. I hid my work. I ran. I survived."
He looked Ra dead in the eyes.
"You're not death," he said. "You're a phenomenon."
Ra snarled and lunged but Anaxagoras vanished, reappearing beside him in a flash of warped space, driving another punch into Ra's ribs. This time, Ra felt it. His body buckled, heat flaring uncontrollably as he was forced back.
"How?!" Ra spat.
"Thought," Anaxagoras answered simply. "Observation. Understanding."
He raised what remained of his cane now glowing faintly, etched with orbiting symbols.
"You can burn flesh," he said. "But ideas don't stay dead."
"I am… immortal…"
Anaxagoras adjusted his stance, half-smiling despite the scorched remnants of his form.
"Round two of the joke," he said softly.
"This time, you're the punchline."
His body blurred, not from speed alone but from overlap, as if multiple positions were being considered at once and reality simply chose the worst one for Ra. The first punch landed square in Ra's sternum.
BOOM.
The sound wasn't flesh on flesh it was like a collapsing orbit. Ra's body bent inward, light exploding out of his back as he was hurled across the arena, skidding, tearing trenches through divine stone.
Before he could rise.
Another fist.
Anaxagoras appeared above him, driving a hammering blow straight down into Ra's face. The impact cratered the floor, shockwaves ripping outward, cracking the stands. Gods shielded their eyes as solar fire and abstract light clashed violently.
"What is this?!" Ra roared, swinging wildly.
Anaxagoras stepped through the attack.
His form was no longer fully human now.
His skin shimmered like heat over sand. Veins glowed faintly, tracing constellations instead of arteries. Where his eyes should have been were rotating points of light, distant and calm, like stars observing from far away.
This was no illusion.
This was Anaxagoras' true form.
A man no longer bound to flesh, but to understanding.
He drove his fist into Ra's jaw, once, twice, three times. Each blow snapping Ra's head sideways, tearing solar plasma from his mouth. Ra tried to counter, a knee, an elbow, a blast of heat but every strike passed just beside Anaxagoras, missing by fractions of an inch, as if Ra's attacks were always calculated one step too late.
"You rely on force," Anaxagoras said between strikes, his voice echoing strangely, layered.
"I rely on truth."
He unleashed a flurry.
Punch after punch after punch.
Each one landed.
Ra's body cracked, fissures of blinding light tearing across his chest and arms. His aura flared wildly, the sun itself destabilizing as his form was driven backward, overpowered by a human who refused to stay dead.
Up in the stands.
"He's overwhelming Ra…" Perun whispered.
"That's no mortal," a new god muttered, fear creeping in. "That's a concept wearing skin."
Anaxagoras finished the barrage by grabbing Ra by the face and slamming him into the arena floor.
The ground shattered.
Ra lay there for a heartbeat, stunned, light flickering erratically.
Anaxagoras stood over him, fists still raised, breathing steady despite the ruin of his body.
His feet slid across the fractured stone as he straightened, rolling his shoulders once, calmly, like a man stretching between thoughts. The glow along his veins dimmed slightly, constellations settling into slower rotations beneath his skin.
Then he smirked.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't manic.
It was knowing.
He looked down at Ra.
the sun god sprawled across the shattered arena floor, light flickering weakly from the cracks in his divine body, chest heaving as if he'd forgotten how to breathe without being worshipped.
"Well," Anaxagoras said lightly, tilting his head, cane resting against his shoulder like a prop returned to relevance,
"this is awkward."
Ra tried to push himself up.
His arm trembled. The light sputtered.
He failed.
The stands were silent now. No laughter. No commentary. Even Mercury's horn hung frozen at his lips.
Anaxagoras' eyes. Those distant, star-like points, never left Ra.
"You know what the funniest part is?" he continued, voice calm, conversational, as if they were still inside one of his skits.
"You finally stopped laughing."
He crouched slightly, meeting Ra's gaze.
"And the moment you did… you lost."
Ra growled, solar fire flaring weakly around his clenched fist.
"You… tricked me… humiliated me…"
"Observed you," Anaxagoras corrected gently. "Tested variables. Measured reactions."
He gestured vaguely to the ruined arena.
"You're not a god because you're the sun."
Ra's eyes narrowed.
"You're a god because people believed the sun needed one."
The words landed harder than any punch.
Anaxagoras straightened again, stepping back just enough to give Ra space, space that felt like mockery.
"But stars don't care about belief," he said softly.
"They burn whether they're prayed to… or understood."
Ra lay there, staring up at him.
For the first time since the match began, The sun god looked small.
Anaxagoras' smirk widened, just a fraction.
"Now," he said, raising his fists once more, stance settling, "let's see if the sun can rise… from the ground."