Fucking Humans Never Change (2)
The festival was revolting.
I'd lost the will to investigate it myself, so I took Minerva and got out of Promethepolis as fast as I could.
Instead, I dispatched subordinates to dig up every filthy detail. Since I couldn't stomach facing it directly, I ended up sending Titan goddesses who'd come from Mount Othrys—they at least had some tolerance built up—to collect the evidence.
I didn't bother convening the full Twelve Olympians for this one.
My wife, my daughters—there was no reason to shove this nauseating garbage in front of their eyes. Letting my own eyes rot and my own stomach turn was more than enough.
For example...
'PrometheusXZeus.'
Humans really do need to be wiped out, every last one. You give them a single flame, and this is the thanks you get.
Only two hundred years had passed, but already they'd cooked up social class, discrimination, slavery—and on top of that, homosexuality.
Seeing all this brought that thought roaring back.
I can't recall which Greek philosopher it was, but plenty of them treated men as creatures of supreme magnificence. I remembered stories about how Greek philosophers kept male lovers and boasted about sharing love with one another.
This was exactly that.
They saw themselves as another Prometheus and me, and they'd spun every kind of lewd, seditious fantasy about our relationship.
'Fuck.'
I'd been trying my best not to swear.
But everything they'd hung up at that festival shoved me straight into a cesspit of disgust.
'Anywhere Zeus...'
Some of it was my own karma.
Whether a Titan goddess leaked the design, or they copied the measurements straight from a statue, or someone stole a model a Titan goddess had used—I had no idea. But my cock had become a celebrated dildo, repurposed for public use.
The Anywhere Zeus I'd handed out so goddesses who grew desperate from missing sex with me could handle themselves—the underwear part had vanished, leaving nothing but the dick-head, which humans were now using.
I didn't even want to specify where they were putting it.
'Shall we track down whose it is?'
'No. We mass-produced so many that trying to assign ownership is nonsense. Athena, what else is there?'
Athena, in her Minerva guise, had toured the human town's festival alongside me. She'd since refined every vile artifact unearthed from that human settlement and brought me a curated selection.
'Athena. Human imagination is truly, bottomlessly revolting.'
'I agree. I never imagined things would turn this horrifying and dreadful in a mere two hundred years.'
Even I, who'd lived in the modern era, recoiled at the sheer number of bizarre objects humans had produced. The prisoner restraints, in particular, were genuinely shocking.
You make them stick their face and wrists through holes in a wooden board and then take them from behind. What an appalling image. Any ordinary person would shriek in disgust the moment they saw it.
And if the person getting railed underneath is a man, that makes it even worse.
'I've been thinking. Wondering whether wiping out every human is truly the answer. Because humans exist, we Titan gods receive their worship. But I don't want praise from creatures like this.'
'Because every one of those bastards is after Zeus's backside.'
Athena hit the nail on the head.
Who in their right mind would stand before Zeus and declare they wanted to tear up Zeus's rear?
They say people will curse the king behind his back, but these bastards had no sense of limits whatsoever.
'The Great Cleansing really is the only answer for humanity. What would be the best way to pull that off?'
'Shall we ask Neptune to cause a Great Flood?'
'Hades would be delighted. More people swelling the Underworld.'
Just sweep them away.
The correct answer.
But simply sweeping them away would drive the species itself to extinction.
'We have to leave the ones with a conscience. Amid the chaos, there are bound to be good people who uphold human decency.'
'An upright married couple would be ideal.'
'Yes. The problem is figuring out a method to test that conscience...'
'How about spreading chaos?'
Athena made a remarkably extreme suggestion.
Yet it was terrifyingly efficient—and at the same time, the greatest calamity you could possibly inflict on humanity.
'Good. Let's make a human who carries Chaos. Then we'll send that human to the surface.'
Until now, I'd used my modern knowledge to overthrow Cronus, to sustain Olympus, and to aid humans.
Now, I was going to use it to kill them.
'We'll leave only those who haven't done it. Some will inevitably get caught in the crossfire. For those people, I'll have Hades gather them separately later and let them be reincarnated as the next iteration of humanity.'
'So you'll kill everyone in the first sweep, but you'll resurrect the victims back onto the surface?'
'That's right. I'm sorry, but we don't have the time to save every individual on the surface one by one. And I have no intention of trying.'
The plan was fully in place.
All that remained was execution.
Project Pandora.
It begins with the Great Cleansing of humanity.
'Summon Apollo.'
* * *
'Alright, sweetheart.'
Homoeros, a guard of Promethepolis, draped a blanket over the unconscious young man, then went to the wall and sat beside the window.
Weeks had passed since the festival ended, yet the people of Promethepolis kept right on celebrating.
They blessed the union of near-perfect man with man, and many shared their love with one another.
'Ahh, great Lord Zeus.'
Homoeros clasped his hands together and prayed toward the heavens. He had never met a Titan god, never set foot on Olympus, but surely Zeus too would one day understand.
The joy of men.
'In your boundless benevolence you embrace women, but true pleasure and true love are found only between man and man...'
Homoeros swallowed the rest of his words.
The gods do not know human pleasure.
The gods do not know human joy.
And so, they must offer prayers to the gods and teach them this joy. The moment a god finally grasped the pleasure of men, the citizens of Promethepolis would go down in history as the first of humanity to repay the grace bestowed by a god.
Yes. True love...!
...Huh?
Homoeros spotted him. Far in the distance, beyond the city's edge, a young man draped in black rags was making his way inside. Catching sight of the man's flowing blonde hair and chapped lips, Homoeros sprang up at once and ran toward him.
'What brings you to Promethepolis?'
'Bread...'
'Ah, oh, oh dear. Here, at least take this.'
Without thinking, Homoeros handed over the cheese and waterskin he'd been carrying. The man devoured the cheese ravenously, like someone who'd been starving for days, and Homoeros licked his lips as he studied the body visible through the gaps in the man's robe.
'Thank, thank you.'
The man wept with joy.
Homoeros slowly knelt before the man and showed his true colors.
'Sweetheart.'
...?!
'What's your name?'
The man trembled, his expression genuinely horrified. But Homoeros pressed down on the man's shoulder with one hand while gripping the wrist that clutched the cheese with the other.
'You look terribly haggard. You'd better rest at my place.'
'Ah, ahh...'
'What's your name?'
'M-my name is...'
The man shut his eyes and quietly spoke his name.
'Aides.'
Creak, creak.
'Huh?'
Something made an odd sound. Homoeros tilted his head.
* * *
Ten years passed.
Olympus flourished by the day, and the remodeling of the mountain had now reached ninety-nine percent completion.
So I was running yet another project in collaboration with Hephaestus. Parts of it felt so absurd that even a Titan god might question whether they were physically possible—but once we tried, we found they actually were, which genuinely surprised me.
Above Olympus sprawls a vast curtain wall.
To ensure nothing from the surface could dare approach, Olympus had erected a towering barrier behind its moat.
The Titan gods grumbled that the wall stretched across Olympus was an eyesore. They complained that Olympus, once brimming with pristine nature, now had white chalk ramparts that ruined the landscape—and they voiced discontent, asking what Olympus could possibly fear to need walls in the first place.
But all of that stayed strictly behind my back.
The moment anyone actually laid eyes on the "thing" Hephaestus and I were building together, no one dared voice such complaints lightly. Quite the opposite—those who saw it suggested maybe the embankments ought to be built even higher.
And that was how I spent my time.
I listened to the reports sent by nymphs scattered across the world, and every single day, without fail, I spent one hour observing a city.
ANG!
It was torture.
If I'd had a cigarette, I'd have wanted a long, deep drag—that's how torturous it was.
There were moments when I wanted to forget the plan, forget everything, and just hurl a lightning bolt straight down.
But I had to endure.
They say a gentleman's revenge can wait ten years, and if I wanted these human wretches reborn into proper humanity, I had to grit my teeth and bear it.
Right.
If I exterminated every human right now, then far in the future, my own family—who would be born in the distant East—would also die.
'I'm holding back for the sake of the real future.'
I'll find the good humans, and I'll keep finding them until they become the ancestors of my mother and father.
But tracking down people like that was far from easy.
'...Hah.'
Humans were dying day by day.
Promethepolis, once the most prosperous nation in human history, was declining in real time, and its inhabitants were perishing without ever grasping why they were falling.
I'd spread a pathogen among the humans.
I summoned Apollo and had her create a disease that would only affect humans.
I'd worried about mutations arising, but because the pathogen was crafted personally by Apollo—the Goddess of Medicine—no mutation occurred.
From the very start, I'd designed it so the illness would manifest only if you did "that deed."
But the humans still don't know what causes it.
They don't know why the disease keeps spreading among men.
'Don't know? Then die.'
The disease I unleashed upon humanity was delivered into Promethepolis via an artificial human Hephaestus had built. This automaton, crafted to perfectly mimic a human, successfully infiltrated human society and fulfilled its original purpose.
Aides.
It looks like a common Greek name at a glance, but its true meaning is something else entirely.
A, I, D, E, S.
A, I, D, S.
'AIDS.'
It isn't identical to the original.
I only borrowed the name. In truth, there's just one trigger.
'An utterly horrifying disease that only afflicts bastards who want to screw Zeus.'
There's only one way to avoid it.
'Don't shove your dick in an asshole, and you've got nothing to worry about.'
One single transmission route.
And yet, despite that, if the infection rate among humans still surpasses ninety percent...
'Ex, tinction.'
Deploy 'Pandora.'
Current AIDS incidence rate: 30%.
Thanks to my overwhelming charm, humanity is diligently marching down the road to annihilation.