Chapter 247
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Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 247
Chapter Title: A Sword Held in That Hand
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A sword is held in that hand.
Charybdis.
Poseidon’s most cherished goddess, and a mighty deity who rightfully should have claimed one of the two vacant seats among the constellations.
Yet Zeus feared allowing another powerful god or goddess not of his bloodline to reside in Olympus, where he dwelt.
In the end, Charybdis, who had ascended to Olympus a single step ahead of Antaios, fell victim to Zeus’s scheme. She was struck by his lightning bolt and cast down.
“If... it had merely been that lightning strike, my sister could never have withstood it.”
No matter how overwhelmingly powerful Zeus’s thunderbolt was—stronger than the combined might of the other eleven gods—a goddess of the sea, inheritor of Gaia’s blood, was no fragile being.
“And Zeus, that vile wretch, knew it full well.”
“What exactly happened?”
Blue veins bulged from his clenched fists behind his back, and the low, gravelly voice had now turned into a quiet sob.
“The bastard first approached my sister, whispering vile words of love.”
“Hah...”
However, as the daughter of Gaia, Charybdis had long maintained a close friendship with Hera and had heard more than enough about Zeus’s lecherous escapades. She firmly rejected him.
“My sister is, after all, the daughter of Gaia herself. No matter Zeus’s grandeur, he could not take her by force.”
Yet this only fueled Zeus’s grudge against his sister... and heightened his wariness of the power and authority she wielded.
“And then the incident everyone knows occurred. Zeus claimed she was punished for gluttony—for insulting her master with the sin of devouring. But I saw it. Even now, in that distant sea, the breath of Limos hanging around my suffering sister’s neck!”
“...Limos!?”
Limos, the goddess of hunger.
In the tales Chiron always cited to warn against blasphemy toward the gods—like the story of Erichthonius—it was Limos’s breath that Demeter commanded to instill infinite hunger in Erichthonius at her order.
Her origins were shrouded in myth: some said she was Zeus’s daughter, others that she was born when Demeter wandered.
No one in Greece dared risk inquiring into her true lineage; she was that dangerous.
Judging by her absolute curse and the power of hunger even gods feared, she might even rank among the primordial deities. That was the prevailing thought.
“I don’t know how he persuaded Limos, but my sister, off guard amid the feast prepared in his own honor, couldn’t evade her breath. The rest, you know well enough.”
That was the hidden truth behind Charybdis, unknown to the rest of Greece.
Yet Poseidon, who could not overlook it, confronted Zeus. But his brother, the king of the gods, instead blamed Charybdis’s insolence and threatened him to stay silent.
From then on, a deep rift formed between the heavens and the seas. During Olympus’s grand assemblies, the tension between them was always on the verge of erupting.
“But Zeus’s machinations didn’t end there.”
Serpents rising from the earth would bring war.
To overcome that war, the blood of mortals would be needed.
Zeus, anxious over Gaia’s prophecy, did as all Greece knows: he sired demigod heroes en masse by dallying with countless mortal women.
And beneath the surface, he had been purging divine kin not of Olympus’s blood—especially the descendants of Typhon, who had once driven him to the brink of death, and those mingled with Gaia’s lineage.
“The prime examples are none other than myself and my brothers, the Laestrygonians, descendants of Gaia.”
In the end, they were hounded by the blades of humans and demigods, driven from fertile Greece. Antaios rallied them and conquered the perilous seas.
“Th-then... is there no way to cure the madness inflicted on Charybdis?”
“Hah, do you think that tyrant Zeus would act so carelessly? In toppling the sea’s mightiest goddess, second only to Typhon?”
Antaios, desperate for a solution, had sought Gaia at the world’s edge.
But even Gaia could do nothing about Limos’s hunger.
“A curse wrought by the name of a self-born goddess is no mere malediction—it follows the laws of fate, the absolute oracle.”
Whatever means Zeus used to sway the goddess of hunger, Limos’s divine authority—seated among the primordials—was a force even Poseidon could not defy.
In the end, Poseidon granted her domain in the seas most frequented by Zeus’s progeny, devouring the heavenly offspring in eternal opposition to him.
“Yet Gaia whispered to me quietly. That far in the future, there might come a single chance to save her. And I asked when that time would arrive.”
Gaia answered, he said.
“A sword is held in the hand of one neither fallen from the heavens nor risen from the earth.
They shall make unspillable blood flow and shatter unbreakable chains.”
“...”
Finishing his words in silence, Antaios slowly turned his head to face me.
“By my name, Antaios, I swear it: in your journey, wherever you sail these seas, you shall receive aid and protection in my name.”
“Sounds like more than just a blessing.”
“...Naturally.”
-Bwooo! Bwooo! Bwoooo!
With a peculiar expression, Antaios turned back to me just as another trumpet blast reverberated in my ears.
“We’ve arrived, it seems.”
“...”
A strange atmosphere, and remarks that practically screamed flags.
On top of that, Gaia’s ominous prophecy.
‘I just came to pick up a dog, but things keep escalating...’
Half intrigued, half annoyed, I followed Antaios out onto the deck. Far off on the horizon loomed a vast archipelago of dozens of islands.
“Welcome, traveler. The Erytheia Archipelago welcomes you.”
His earlier somber mood was gone without a trace.
Antaios grinned confidently, offering words of welcome.
In truth, had Antaios wished to settle, no place in Olympus or Greece would have denied him.
Even Zeus, who had toppled his sister Charybdis, feared Poseidon’s blazing wrath and dared not touch him.
Not even Zeus’s vaunted demigod heroes could match him.
Indeed, the regions of Boeotia and Naxos—now ruled by his wastrel half-brother twins—had once been his domain.
Back then, he had been a just king, praised even more lavishly than Olympus’s gods.
Yet the more he shone, the more Olympus’s gods grew wary. They envied and resented him.
Apollo, who coveted his radiant glory and usurped his seat, unleashed savage warhorses and scorching sunlight to lay waste to his kingdom.
The lowly Artemis, who stole the seat meant for his sister, roamed his forests at will, hunting and tormenting his people.
In the end, branded under divine curse, he and his brothers could find no peace even in their own lands. The very subjects who once lauded him began pointing fingers, calling them monsters.
Disillusioned with it all, Antaios led his Laestrygonian brothers under their father’s guidance to these distant seas, arriving where they now stood.
Antaios and his brothers had waited far too long.
Even when countless brothers begged to sate their burning rage with the blood and flesh of those rotten mortals, to grow their strength and strike Olympus, Antaios waited.
Even when Hephaestus—fallen like his sister by a supreme god’s bolt—sought him out and armed his legions in exchange for Geryon’s cattle, Antaios waited.
As his fame swelled day by day and outcast heroes, drawn by his notorious legend, challenged him only to fall and join his ranks—their victories offered as sacrifices to Poseidon and Gaia—he waited still.
And today, the wait ended.
‘This one.’
The colossal darkness that crushed him and felled his brothers.
Yet it had flawlessly protected its beloved. That black demigod’s authority captivated him and his brothers, filling them with conviction.
Only after witnessing him firsthand did Antaios understand whom his mother’s prophecy foretold.
What mortal flesh born of earth could contain the abyss’s profound power?
What lofty celestial bloodline could embrace that brilliant darkness?
If neither fallen from the heavens nor risen from the earth...
What else could serve as its origin?
Truly, none but one forged from darkness, devouring the abyss itself.
Only such a one could save his sister, cursed in the name of the most radiant and cruel light.
“...Brother Antaios.”
“Brother...!”
As he watched the black hero and his beloved disembark first, savoring the city of giants he and his brothers had raised...
Other brothers, sharing his thoughts, called out to him.
They said nothing, terror etched into their bones.
But Antaios knew the words they left unspoken.
“Yes... perhaps, at long last, it’s over.”
The one to spill unspillable blood, to break unbreakable chains.
There was but one way to know.
“Proclaim to all of Erytheia: tonight, the great arena’s braziers will blaze.
A grand festival offered to Gaia and Poseidon.”
The grand festival that set all gods and demigods of the perilous seas ablaze with fervor.
The altar of the great arena, unlit since the last challenger fell to Antaios’s hand, would burn once more.