Sorry... There's Nothing Like That Here
“No way... what is this...?”
A woman was pressed flat against the wall beside the window, hiding herself from view.
A Titan with moonlike silver hair and sun-bright golden eyes.
Leto.
As befit the mother of the future goddess of the hunt, she had concealed herself with perfect discipline, but the moment she heard the conversation taking place inside, her face had frozen solid.
The Titan faction was currently at war with Olympus.
For now it was only a series of minor skirmishes, but with a full-scale offensive looming, Leto had been given orders by her father, Coeus.
She was to keep an eye on Oceanus in case anything unexpected happened.
At a time like this, whether the neutral Oceanus chose to turn his spear toward one side or the other could decide the whole shape of the war, so Coeus’s order was more than reasonable...
And yet the Leto who received it interpreted it in a completely different way.
Watching Oceanus means watching the god Hephaestus too, since he belongs to Oceanus’s side. Therefore, watching Hephaestus means watching Oceanus.
With that miracle of logic, she had not infiltrated the great ocean where Oceanus resided, but instead slipped into Lemnos Island in the Aegean Sea and was now observing Hephaestus’s movements.
Of course, if anyone found out, her father would undoubtedly tear into her or at least give her an earful, but Leto didn’t particularly care.
After betraying them over a seed already, this much is nothing...
What mattered to her now was the so-called “candidate” of prophecy standing over there.
The man who had sent Cronus flying with a single punch.
Some people had looked at his face and called him ugly, but to Leto, who didn’t care much about appearances, that wasn’t important in the slightest.
What mattered most to a man was strength.
Especially since the prophecy laid upon her had only strengthened Leto’s own belief in that principle... or perhaps her preference would be a more fitting word.
But setting her private tastes aside, the path that man had just heard them discuss had made the spy in her break out in a cold sweat.
Tartarus...
As a Titan—indeed, as the eldest daughter of Coeus, the Titan of wisdom—she knew better than anyone what Tartarus was.
The abyss of the underworld that even the gods feared.
The instant she heard they were preparing to enter it, Leto could not help wondering if they had all gone mad.
And yet...
Even as her cool mind told her that, deep in her chest a fierce curiosity began to stir, along with a strange sense of anticipation.
Hephaestus, who had gone so far as to hurl a punch at Cronus just days earlier—an act that defied all reason.
If a man like that went to Tartarus... then surely there was a very good chance he would do something once again beyond her imagination.
Maybe this will shake the entire balance of the world again, even more than punching Cronus...
She could not be certain of anything yet.
But that was what her instincts, which had proven remarkably accurate, were telling her.
This would not end as some meaningless act of youthful recklessness by a young male god.
With intense interest in that unforeseen turn of events, Leto stayed hidden and continued watching everything that happened here on Lemnos Island.
*
“I-is this really for me?”
“Yes, Aunt Styx.”
“Oh my goodness... how can something like this even exist...”
A luxurious necklace crafted from black crystal lay before her.
A treasure shaped, with my mother’s help, exactly to match her tastes.
The daughter of Oceanus and my mother’s elder sister, Aunt Styx, stared at it with sparkling eyes—far less composed than usual.
“It’s so beautiful... honestly... I was just thinking of asking you for something like this. My nephew really is the best, you know. Thank you, truly.”
Styx smiled brightly, genuinely delighted.
Watching her like that, I—the very nephew in question, the best one and all—spoke to her in a low voice.
“Aunt, may I ask you for something personally?”
“A favor? Of course. You made me this necklace, so what favor could I possibly refuse? I’ll swear on the name of Styx itself, so tell me what you want.”
“...”
It was the kind of line that reeked of a Greek myth death flag, but since this was still the early part of the Titanomachy, that oath had not yet gained official force.
Anyway, seeing Styx speak so casually, I answered in a solemn voice.
“Please open the road to Tartarus.”
“...What?”
The moment she heard that, Styx’s face hardened.
After a long and weighty silence, she finally spoke, worry thick in her voice.
“...Do you really think that makes any sense?”
Styx was the one who controlled the passage from the underworld to Tartarus.
There was a route on the surface that had been used when Kedalion was driven out, but that way was sealed tightly most of the time, and hidden behind divine power, making it nearly impossible to find.
In the end, the only path left was to ask this aunt for help... but...
“You want me to send my nephew into Tartarus? No, I can’t. Absolutely not. How am I supposed to face Eurynome if I did something like that?”
Her reaction was the kind that practically screamed, Has this kid lost his mind? But I only continued in earnest.
“I already got permission from Mother.”
“...What? No, wait—Eurynome let you do this? How could that woman let her own son...”
Styx reacted just as strongly as Mother had.
It was a little tedious to explain the situation to her again, but at the same time, I couldn’t help feeling grateful for it.
The fact that Styx was trying so hard to stop me meant that she truly did worry about me as her nephew.
This family wasn’t bound to me by blood... or rather, only faintly so, and yet they cared for me this much.
That was why, even if it meant taking risks, I was willing to protect them.
“...Haah... fine. I’ll open it. The road to Tartarus.”
“Thank you.”
After a rather long round of persuasion, I finally won her permission.
I bowed my head deeply to her in gratitude.
“And... could I ask for one more thing while I’m here?”
“Haah... go on. Since you’re going into Tartarus anyway, I might as well hear whatever else you have in mind.”
Styx spoke with a slightly resigned voice.
Carefully, I took a single letter from inside my robes and held it out to her.
“I’d like you to deliver this.”
*
The Street of the Abyss.
The place where the abyssal palace, home of the Protogenoi Tartarus, stood, and where the Jailers of the Abyss and their slaves lived.
One of the few places within Tartarus that could actually be called a city.
But no matter how many beings lived here, it was still unmistakably part of Tartarus.
All across the streets, the screams of souls turned into the Jailers’ playthings echoed endlessly, and the road was littered with fragments of spirits torn apart after torture.
What was even more horrifying was that these broken souls would, with time, return to their original form only to be dragged back into endless suffering as the Jailers’ toys once again.
That was the most miserable fate awaiting those who had fallen to the very bottom even here in Tartarus.
“Kraaaaghhh!!!”
A soul thrown to the roadside again today, shrieking as its limbs were ripped away by a Jailer’s hand.
Watching it, the man in black clothes who had just entered the street spoke in a dry voice.
“I feel this every time I come here, but it really is a disgusting place. The dead ought to be given proper rest, and yet they play with souls like this.”
The man idly touched the sword in his hand as he spoke.
Then—
“Don’t do anything reckless.”
Another man in black robes restrained him in a calm voice.
“Unfortunately, this too is their fate. More importantly, this is their domain. It is not our place to interfere, coming from the Dwelling of Night as we do.”
“...I know, big brother.”
The man called “big brother,” who had a broad, hulking frame and stood a head taller than the other, had a scroll nearly as large as a person strapped to his back.
He began walking slowly down the road together with his younger brother.
“So, what did your investigation turn up?”
“Nothing decisive yet. Only that, over the past few years, that Tartarus fellow has been behaving a little strangely.”
“Strangely? Don’t tell me he’s really—”
“A woman, sir.”
“...What?”
The hulking man frowned at the unexpected answer.
No matter that Tartarus was male; frankly, he seemed like the sort of being who would keep a very wide and very deliberate distance from that sort of thing.
Most gods fathered children freely, but in Tartarus’s case, he currently had only one child.
And even that child had not been born in any ordinary way.
So the idea that Tartarus had taken an interest in female flesh could only sound like a rotten joke.
Then—
The younger brother casually pointed somewhere with the scabbard in his hand.
“She’s there now. That woman right there.”
“? ...A carriage?”
A glamorous carriage drawn by black horses sat in a street utterly unsuited to it.
Inside sat a woman with black hair, black eyes, and pale skin that called to mind a corpse.
Watching the woman known as Nyx, the hulking man stroked his chin and voiced his confusion again.
“...She’s certainly quite pretty, but that much?”
She was undeniably beautiful.
But to say she had captured the heart of Tartarus himself still seemed questionable.
From the vitality she gave off, she seemed to be a living being rather than a soul like them—probably a god—but the power she radiated was nothing extraordinary.
At best, she was only a little above a lesser god.
In every respect, she didn’t seem like someone worthy of the most notorious Protogenoi in existence fussing over her.
“Even to me, she doesn’t look all that impressive. And according to rumors, that woman was actually married and had a child.”
“...I’m starting to have a hard time believing this. Has Tartarus been locked away in the abyss for so long that he’s gone mad?”
“But it’s true. As you can see, every day he summons her from the outskirts of the Street of the Abyss to his own dwelling. They say he hasn’t missed a single day in years.”
As if to make it visible to everyone, the procession had continued day after day for years on end.
Whether Tartarus was simply showing off his woman or there was some other reason, they couldn’t tell.
But whatever Tartarus thought of it, from the perspective of the underworld’s residents, the way they looked at that woman was anything but kind.
And that was true for the two men, who had been born in the underworld, as well.
“Hmm... unbelievable. If it were me, I wouldn’t even be able to look at her without feeling filthy...”
“Taste is one thing, but... I still can’t understand that woman. She abandoned her family and clung to another man. She really has no shame, just like those surface women.”
Among the gods and fairies of the surface, it was said to be common enough for married men to take other women at will, or for married women to run off with different men.
But in Tartarus and the underworld beyond it, there was a far stronger social expectation that married couples should remain faithful to their homes.
In a world of the dead, when all was said and done, the last thing you could trust was your spouse—that was, in a way, a somewhat progressive notion for the times.
As an aside, Hades—who was still unmarried, though currently a god of the underworld—would later become a devoted husband, which could also be seen as a result of that cultural atmosphere.
Tartarus, who had taken another man’s woman, was baffling enough on its own.
But even more than that, the filthy tale of Nyx, who had torn apart her own family and was now swaying her waist atop another man like one of those loose surface goddesses, was deeply unpleasant to the two outsiders as well.
“Well, setting the disgusting whore aside...”
The issue was not the loathsome woman herself, but whether there was anything useful they could make of this.
As the two men stood there thinking that over and watching the carriage pass before them, with that bitch sitting inside, one of them suddenly paused.
“...This is... rather interesting.”
“!”
“Sister...?”
Between the two of them, a woman slowly stepped forward.
She had purple hair and was shorter than the men.
Like them, she wore a black robe, and a massive scythe was strapped across her back.
Her black eyes glinted as she spoke in a quiet voice.
“Investigate her. That woman. In more detail.”
“Why, what is it?”
“Do you see some kind of good way to use this?”
The two men asked in evident confusion.
To that, she added only a single short reply.
“Investigate.”
“...Yes, ma’am.”
“Mm... right.”
Their questions shoved aside, the two men vanished in an instant, almost like they were fleeing.
Left alone, her gaze fixed on the woman in question.
Within those abyss-deep black eyes, she let a sticky, unsettling emotion slowly surface.
-PS
---
REMINDER: All system notifications, comments, letters, status windows, and special in-universe content MUST use styled
blocks with inline CSS from the templates. Never output these as plain
text.