Mount Elbrus, Russia. Dawn.
Mount Elbrus was not a place made for heroes, much less for Titans. Europe's highest peak rose like a pair of snow-covered twin horns, stabbed into the glacial sky. Its slopes were treacherous, with sudden blizzards that swallowed climbers and winds that could freeze a satyr mid-scream. The ice cracked underfoot, the air was thin, and the morning light bathed everything in a sharp gray-blue. The only path to the summit was a trail of loose rocks, treacherous ice, and a general disdain for living things.
And there he was: Cronos.
In the body of Luke Castellan. Or rather, what had once been Luke Castellan. Now, it was nothing more than a perfect vessel for the Lord of Time.
He had let Luke live long enough to serve a purpose: to lure Silena Beauregard.
The daughter of Aphrodite was more than just any demigod; she had a strong connection to Ikki Phoenix and hated Luke enough to be easily drawn to him. The plan was simple: capture Silena and, at the same time, reveal to the son of Zeus that he was waiting for him in this sacred, frozen place, meticulously prepared with every trump card he could muster.
But then Percy Jackson showed up.
Ah, Percy…
Cronos frowned.
The son of Poseidon had been a greater nuisance than he had anticipated, his strength exceeding Cronos' predictions. Even so, the message was delivered, though the girl was killed by Luke, ruining his plans for her. But he devised a backup plan during the attack on Camp Half-Blood, and it was one of his current trump cards.
The attack on Camp Half-Blood was orchestrated by his siblings, whom he had gathered over the past months. While they handled the camp, his pawns—the Slavs, easily manipulated with the promise that they could permanently replace the Greeks—attacked Mount Olympus. They hated the Olympians not only due to ancient rivalry but also because of the constant insult from mortals who confused their names with those of Zeus and company. Driven by this hatred, they assaulted Olympus, and though they lost the confrontation, it served its purpose.
Meanwhile, he prepared the body.
Luke Castellan was no longer a demigod; he was a vessel. Over the years that the boy served him, Cronos collected fragments of himself from Tartarus. A tooth beneath the River Lethe. A bone buried under Mount Etna. A strand of beard (yes, beard) frozen in a crystal at the bottom of Lake Stygian—all placed within his original sarcophagus. These were mixed with Luke's body and strengthened through time rituals, fully merging with the boy and restoring Cronos to his prime.
And though it was arrogant to think that was enough, he went further with a clever idea, using his dominion to mimic the gods, elevating his current power to a level he believed sufficient to defeat Ikki Phoenix. He didn't underestimate Ikki in the slightest, which is why he made so many preparations. He had paid the price for underestimating someone once and would not repeat that mistake.
He snapped out of his reverie abruptly. The one he had been waiting for had finally arrived.
At that moment, he felt…
Cronos raised his gaze.
Descending from a sky cloaked in steel clouds, Ikki Phoenix floated downward, as if gravity were in mourning and had given up on pulling him back. It was a sight that even a Titan would think twice before facing. His long, jet-black hair, darker than the deepest night, flowed behind him like a living cape, as if Nyx's own darkness had lent a fragment to adorn him. His skin, white and pure as untouched snow, seemed untouchable, glowing under the faint dawn sun. It wasn't a sickly pallor but a supernatural perfection that made the mountain itself, with all its majesty, seem dull and faded.
And his eyes—gods, his eyes.
Blue as sapphires fused with thunder, they vibrated with raw electricity, so intense they outshone the rising sun. It was like staring directly at the starry sky and seeing the universe blink back.
Ikki landed softly ten meters away. The ice beneath his feet didn't even creak, as if Mount Elbrus, with all its ancestral pride, had decided not to offend this presence.
Cronos frowned.
"You came…" said the Titan, his voice reverberating like muffled thunder.
Ikki remained silent, merely observing him with a gaze as calm and cold as the thin air around them.
The wind howled, making the snow dance like specters. Time seemed distorted, hesitant, as if even natural laws feared interfering with what was about to unfold.
Cronos forced a smile, bitter and hard.
"I knew you wouldn't resist such a personal invitation…" He spread his arms, the gray light of distorted time rippling around his body. "This mountain will be your tomb, Phoenix…"
Ikki tilted his head slightly, like someone listening to a mosquito buzz before swatting it.
His silence wasn't arrogance. It was the kind of silence born of pain, the deep, rooted kind that carves someone from the inside out until only something pure remains, like a blade forged in cold fire. Funny, he always thought that if he met one of those responsible for his mother's death in person, he'd feel more than rage, but all he felt was cold—an inhuman cold within him. Despite that, he was more than ready to crush the Titan before his eyes. He could sense the Titan's power through his [Divine Sense] and judged him to be even stronger than Apophis when he faced her in her natural habitat. But that didn't bother him in the slightest. All he wanted was to humiliate, trample, and crush the Titan with all the pleasure in the world, and this brought an invisible pressure that enveloped the world, more suffocating than the thin air of Elbrus.
And it was all directed at him.
The Titan let out a dry laugh.
"Seems you're more eager than I thought… Did you like my gifts, my dear grandson? I suppose my brothers and sister entertained you after killing many of your friends and campmates. A pity they died without seeing my reign over this world again, since you're here…"
Ikki's only response to the provocation was to slowly clench his hand into a fist.
The air crackled.
The ice around him splintered into a web of fine cracks, as if the entire mountain had held its breath.
And then Ikki spoke.
His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
"You killed my mother…"
Cronos gave a sardonic smile, as if it were an old joke.
"Still on that? I've killed many others. Planning to build a memorial here?" he taunted, casually spinning the Time Scythe that materialized in his hand, a spectral, golden blade.
Ikki didn't move. He just continued.
"You killed my friends. Silena. Grover. The Stoll Brothers. Katie…" Each name rang like a funeral bell.
Cronos raised the scythe into position.
"If it hurts so much, thank them. It was their weakness… your weakness… that killed them."
"…"
"…And I should be furious, but all I feel is that I must kill you. I don't know why, but I've changed to the point I no longer care…"
With that, Ikki moved.
There was no explosion. No flash. Just the sudden sound of an impact that shattered the ground beneath Cronos like glass.
Ikki was in front of him. Without Cronos having seen.
Ikki's fist, wrapped in raw electricity, drove into the Titan's stomach with enough force to bend time itself around them. The released energy was so brutal that snow miles away evaporated, revealing the mountain's bare rock.
Cronos stumbled back, genuinely caught off guard. He was still trying to catch his breath—if Titans even breathed—when Ikki moved again.
Ikki swung his leg.
Or at least, that's what common senses would have sworn.
But what really happened was that the universe bent around a gesture.
The kick wasn't just fast. It violated the speed of light, ignored the laws of physics, and dismissed common sense as if they were schoolyard rumors. When Ikki's foot left the ground, it didn't travel through space—space traveled for it. Entire cities flickered like burnt-out bulbs from the reverberation of the acceleration.
In that single instant, that minuscule fragment of non-time, light tried to keep up.
Tried.
But it was like comparing an asthmatic turtle to an embarrassed lightning bolt.
Photons froze in their paths, as if facing an ancestral predator. Even time hesitated, as if regretting its existence in that moment.
And then, the kick landed.
The contact was absolute, as if the universe had paused to witness the exact moment a Titan was reduced to a problem of geometry: infinite velocity times the mass of an enraged demigod.
Cronos' face exploded backward in a silent symphony of shock and raw power. The impact didn't just break his jaw—it broke logic. He was launched so absurdly fast that the air lagged behind in stunned particles.
He crossed Elbrus' second peak in a fraction so small even Planck couldn't measure it. The mountain disintegrated not with a boom but with a crushing whisper, as if apologizing for existing between the two.
And then came the collapse.
Tectonic. Planetary. Continental.
When Ikki's kick hit Cronos, the first consequence wasn't visual.
It was gravitational.
The Titan's mass, combined with the absurd force applied at that microscopic point, generated a local gravitational spike.
For a trillionth of a second, Earth's gravitational field distorted.
Gravitational force lines twisted like hairs pulled by cosmic tweezers.
The distortion was so intense that gravitational waves—those Einstein predicted and LIGO only detected a century later—swept through the planet, warping space-time in their path. They were so violent that small objects in quantum physics labs thousands of miles away moved on their own, while measuring instruments went into a frenzy.
The atmosphere, unable to absorb the energy, collapsed. A supersonic shockwave traveled at over 60 times the speed of sound. The air, compressed ahead of the wave, heated instantly to temperatures exceeding the sun's surface, around 6,000 Kelvin, vaporizing oxygen and nitrogen and forming a massive atmospheric plasma bubble.
This bubble expanded in seconds, devastating everything. Air particles were so accelerated that atmospheric pressure locally dropped to zero, creating a temporary vacuum in the Caucasus. Any living being within a 2,000-kilometer radius died before even realizing it. The impact on the Earth's crust was a geophysical calamity. The shock penetrated the lithosphere, piercing the crust and part of the upper mantle. Friction and pressure released energy equivalent to 10³² joules. For comparison, the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device ever detonated, released "only" 2.1 × 10¹⁷ joules. In other words, this was billions of times stronger than any weapon ever created.
The crust was ripped away over an area equivalent to half of Russia. Cities, rivers, mountains, and forests were pulverized, but the real destruction came later. The ejection of mass and molten rock into the atmosphere was so colossal that it breached the exosphere, Earth's uppermost layer, and small pieces of still-incandescent rock escaped Earth's orbit, traveling through space as cursed relics of a divine war.
Earth's rotational axis tilted two degrees, enough to, if sustained, cause mass extinctions and a new ice age within weeks. The released energy was felt on the Moon, where lunar seismometers left by Apollo missions vibrated before being vaporized by secondary radiation.
Earth's magnetic field briefly collapsed. Auroras appeared simultaneously over the South Pole, Japan, and the Sahara before vanishing as the magnetism stabilized into a new, more chaotic pattern.
Satellites were fried by the electromagnetic radiation from the impact. High-energy particles hit low orbits, turning low Earth orbit into a graveyard of melted technology.
Alpha, beta, and gamma particles ionized atmospheric gases, creating a diffuse radioactive rain that would fall slowly over the planet for days. Technically, half the northern hemisphere would be uninhabitable for human life for the next millennium.
And at the epicenter? There, the laws of physics took a vacation.
The heat exceeded 100,000 Kelvin, enough to break nuclear bonds and turn ordinary matter into quark-gluon plasma, a state that only existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. For three seconds, that patch of Earth ceased to be a planet and became, literally, the start of a new miniature universe before collapsing into a crater 500 kilometers deep and 1,000 wide.
On the surface? All that remained was molten glass, liquid metals, and absolute silence.
The collision's reverberation affected local gravity, creating gravitational anomalies. Objects began to float, clocks went haywire, and compasses pointed to nonexistent directions. Even time suffered minor distortions; for minutes, clocks worldwide showed different times.
And Ikki? He simply lowered his foot back to the ground, took a deep breath, and looked toward the apocalyptic crater.
Normally, he would have held back. He always had that nagging sense of responsibility, the weight of knowing each of his movements could cause earthquakes or open dimensional rifts.
But now?
Now he didn't care.
The innocents? The cities? The consequences?
To hell with them.
Ikki had come to settle scores with a Titan.
The world could wait.
The absolute silence that followed was a sound no living creature should experience.
A silence so dense and absolute that photons seemed to hesitate to cross it, as if light needed permission to exist there.
Ikki stood still, his foot half-sunk in the molten crust, now solidified into a layer of black glass reflecting a sky where blue had turned greenish-gray. Small pieces of satellites burned on reentry, streaking fire across the heavens.
And then, the impossible—or, to be fair, utterly predictable when dealing with gods and Titans—happened.
The air in front of Ikki flickered.
Not a common distortion, but a literal break in the fabric of space-time. Reality's lines folded in on themselves, like a sheet twisted until it tore. And from that rift, something fell.
A figure.
Cronos.
Or, more precisely, the body of Luke Castellan, occupied by an entity that once ruled the Golden Age. His skin hung in charred strips, his right eye a cavity where temporal orbits still burned in golden hues, and his left jaw pulverized, leaving his tongue and part of his teeth exposed in a smile that wasn't human.
And yet… he began to rebuild.
Slowly.
Time around Cronos seemed to hesitate, and particles of matter reversed in time. Bones snapped back into place, muscles reformed in spasms of living flesh, and skin reassembled, not without first revealing tendons vibrating like harp strings.
When he finally raised his face, half of it was still charred. And that's how he spoke.
His voice was deep, slurred, with an echo of multiple temporal versions of himself speaking in unison.
"The speed… boy… that was unfair."
He spat black blood, which evaporated before touching the ground.
A beam of light split the distant sky.
Cronos laughed.
Or tried.
It was more the sound of living flesh tearing in an attempt at humor.
"Not even the gods… not even I…" He tilted his head, his single golden eye sparking with a glow that wasn't anger but a skewed respect and pure fear. "…the primordials, nor the time I command, could keep up…"
With that, Cronos advanced.
This time, there was no warning.
The air between them imploded, not from speed, but because time in that space decided to exit stage left. A temporal rift opened instantly beneath the Titan's feet, and he vanished, only to reappear behind Ikki with the Time Scythe raised like the second hand of a homicidal clock.
The blow descended.
Ikki moved.
Not to the side, not backward.
He simply stepped out of time using his authority over it.
Cronos sliced through empty space, the air screeching like cracked glass. His attack would have split the Earth in half if the spot where Ikki stood hadn't been reinforced by Ikki himself to withstand it.
Ikki appeared behind him before the blow even began, his elbow coming like an arrow charged with pure authority. The impact shattered the rest of the Titan's face, sending him flying.
Cronos barely had time to turn his head.
Ikki's elbow sank straight into the Titan's throat.
The impact made no sound. It couldn't anymore. The air had given up on conducting sound there. But if anyone, anywhere on the planet, had a seismograph, they'd see the needle pierce the paper and melt the device. Because in that instant, Russia—or what was left of it—ceased to exist as a geographical concept.
The impact reverberated like a choked thunder, the Earth's crust cracked like old porcelain, and the aurora borealis became a smeared blur of blue plasma.
The Time Scythe fell to the ground, creating a fissure in space-time. Small fragments of reality melted like glass under intense heat.
Cronos stumbled back, golden blood spraying in droplets that turned into tiny stars upon touching the thin air.
Ikki flexed his fist, temporal sparks snaking across his skin.
"If I stay here," he thought, his gaze fixed on the burning wreckage of his enemy, "the Pantheons will stick their noses in this. And the world… well, it's already had a rough year."
So he did the unthinkable.
He raised his right hand.
Dimensional lines folded, forming a mirror of everything that existed. A vacuum of reality opened behind Cronos, a portal to a new, infinite, wild universe shaped by Ikki's Authority over Space.
A "plane" where time, limits, natural laws, gods, or mortals didn't exist.
A universe just for them.
"This world's gotten too small for us, Cronos."
Cronos widened his remaining eye. He tried to retreat. Too late.
Ikki advanced, his right fist vibrating with cosmic energy. It was more than strength. It was the pure negation of reality. A punch that shouldn't exist, in a direction that shouldn't be possible.
The impact was so violent it didn't just send Cronos backward—it made him dive.
As if the space behind him were an ocean of liquid glass, the Titan sank, swallowed by the invisible waters of that twin universe, a perfect reflection of reality stretching forever in all directions.
Ikki took a step.
The portal behind him absorbed the last fragment of the devastated Earth.
And then, nothing.
An infinite plane.
Two figures floating over a void of infinite galaxies. Newly born stars blinked like curious eyes, observing their new gods.
Ikki stared at Cronos.
The Titan's skin still tried to rebuild, but here, without time to obey his commands, matter writhed in despair, like flesh trying to remember how to be solid.
"Welcome to my domain," Ikki said, his voice reverberating in all directions, as if space itself were learning the sound of that name.
Cronos gnashed his remaining teeth.
"You created… an entire universe…"
"An infinity," Ikki corrected, his eyes shining like collapsing stars. "And here, Cronos, I am the beginning, the middle, and the end. Here, there's no past. No future. Only me."
Constellations danced behind Ikki. Realities folded into kaleidoscopic patterns. The very concept of 'distance' ceased to make sense.
He had pushed his authority to the limits of the possible, creating a four-dimensional space.
If you're not a theoretical physicist or a very curious demigod, here's the explanation: we mere mortals exist in three spatial dimensions (height, width, depth) and one of time. That's it. You move forward, backward, up, down, side to side. But only one way in time: forward.
Ikki ignored that rule. The universe he created was a hyperspace, where the fourth spatial dimension acted as a new physical direction, invisible and incomprehensible to any ordinary being. In this space, moving "sideways" could mean crossing a hundred million light-years without leaving the spot or vanishing forever into a fold of reality. Past, present, and future were figurative, useless human concepts. Here, time and space weren't separate lines but a single malleable fabric that could be folded, twisted, torn, or sewn as Ikki pleased. Not that he couldn't do the same in the normal world; here, he didn't need to hold back because no living beings existed.
The infinite wasn't a metaphor.
Mathematically, this plane had zero curvature and non-compact topology, meaning it had no edges, no limits, no center. It was a space that stretched forever in all directions… including those you can't imagine.
The stars blinking there weren't celestial bodies like in our universe. They were smaller singularities, points where energy density was so absurd that the concept of mass collapsed, giving way to structures of pure space.
At the words of the son of Zeus,
Cronos roared.
"Damn son of Zeus!"
Or rather, what came out was a sound impossible to classify. If a microphone sensitive enough existed, it would capture the noise of all the stars in that plane dying for a microsecond and reigniting. That was it. A scream that deformed reality.
The Titan moved.
Not like someone running. Not like someone flying. He simply ceased to occupy one point in space and appeared in another, the concept of distance shattering between a blink—if blinking still made sense there.
The Time Scythe reappeared in Cronos' hand, not because he carried it, but because in that lawless plane, it was part of him. An extension of his essence.
He struck.
Faster than time. Faster than light. Faster than the very notion of "before" and "after." If this happened in our universe, the particles of matter and antimatter in the surrounding space would collapse instantly, exploding with enough energy to evaporate entire galaxies before their inhabitants even realized what hit them.
That was the power of the primordials. The truth was, in their earlier exchange, if Ikki hadn't absorbed Cronos' attacks with one of his authorities or countered with his own, the destruction would have ended the mortal world in the first blows, even affecting the spheres of influence of other gods living in their own dimensions.
Ikki realized he had underestimated the Titan of Time's power level. Not only had Cronos returned to his prime, but he had gone beyond somehow. Through his [Right Eye], Ikki understood that Cronos had used his dominion to condense human faith in himself, mimicking the gods' method, elevating his existence to the level of an older primordial, becoming so strong he could dominate the world, subjugating all Pantheons.
Gods had an unknown power level; some relied heavily on human faith, others on their own methods, but in their "true form," all had the power to destroy the world. Those more significant in their mythologies had even greater power. And the Primordials? Like Apophis, who devoured Ra and could destroy the infinite Chaos Sea of the Duat, their power was on a universal scale. No demigod could face a Primordial at full power—unless they were limited in some way, making it possible.
Like a demigod defeating a god, which was a mere fraction. It could only be called a defeat if the demigod truly beat the god in its [Divine Form], which would have vaporized them before they even had a chance to try.
But despite Cronos' current power being the toughest adversary Ikki had faced, he didn't even flinch. After becoming a Pseudo-God with an almost complete [Divinity], his power had long surpassed his former self. If it were the old him, he might have struggled against the Titan but would have won regardless.
The strike didn't just cross space—it pierced the dimensional fabric, creating a visible scar, as if the cosmos were black silk sliced by a sharp scalpel.
And then, Ikki raised his hand.
Just one.
No rush.
As if stopping a soccer ball kicked by a five-year-old.
The ancestral blade of the Time Scythe met Ikki's open palm and… stopped.
Just like that.
No explosions. No clash of blinding lights. Because in that instant, the entire infinite held its breath. The space around them imploded, creating a gravitational well so absurd that, in the real world, the entire Solar System would have been sucked into a single space-time point and turned into a black hole of incalculable mass. The Milky Way's central axis would have shifted. The gravity of every star in the galaxy would have realigned around that new epicenter.
But here… just the sound of broken air snapping.
Ikki kept his hand closed over the blade.
"Is that all?" he asked.
The words didn't travel as sound. They manifested in all directions, making the small suns and singularities of that space tremble like dissonant harp notes.
Cronos growled, pushing the scythe downward, trying to break through the demigod's hand with all his strength.
But Ikki's hand didn't even tremble. He smiled.
And with a slight wrist twist, which in the physical world would have caused gravitational waves capable of distorting time's passage for years across a thousand light-years, he snapped the scythe in half.
The sound of the metal breaking was like hearing time itself have a heart attack.
The weapon's halves fell into the void, creating new reality lines that dissolved moments later.
Cronos retreated a microsecond before advancing again—or rather, the concept of "before" and "after" became irrelevant there. He was in two places at once, then nowhere, then everywhere, delivering blows that should have crossed all possible timelines and crushed Ikki's existence in past, present, and future. He used his dominion to its fullest.
Cronos threw a punch, and where his fists passed, the very concept of duration shattered. In the real world, seconds would have refused to exist for years across an area equivalent to a third of the observable universe. Planets would freeze in time. Entire civilizations would be swallowed by eras of oblivion in an instant.
But Ikki blocked the blow with his forearm.
The impact sounded like the Big Bang in reverse. A thunder born before the first atom, a shockwave that should have rewritten the equation defining gravity. But here… it was just another muffled boom in the lawless void.
And then, Ikki counterattacked.
His fist tore through layers of reality, space folding like a ripped sheet. The punch hit Cronos in the stomach, and the force was so immense it misaligned the dimensional axes of that space. In the mortal plane, the gravitational shock would have dismantled the Solar System like a house of cards, planets hurled like projectiles at light speed.
Cronos was spat backward, but Ikki appeared behind him before the Titan even moved.
Another punch.
Another impact.
Another tear in the dimensional fabric.
Ikki spun, dodging and parrying blows like he was dancing to a song only he could hear.
And each time Cronos tried to retaliate, the [Authority of Pain] did its work. Ikki activated it to ensure the Titan felt the worst pain possible. What would have been a normal hit for an entity of his scale multiplied into torment. Pain that couldn't be measured. Pain so pure it became matter. A cluster of suffering that gained color and form in the distorted space.
With a kick, he launched the Titan into a floating structure resembling a spiral of black holes. The impact was so intense that the fabric of reality there tore like paper, releasing an unnatural glow that was the sound of physical laws screaming.
Cronos tried to summon the scythe again, reforming it through his authority.
But Ikki snapped his fingers.
And in that plane where will shaped reality, snapping his fingers was like deciding to erase a concept. The weapon reappeared in the Titan's hand, but it was no longer a scythe. It was a serpent of black light that devoured its own tail before exploding in a silent flash.
"You'll need more than that, grandpa," Ikki said, rolling his shoulders as if preparing for another round.
Cronos attacked again. Arms, legs, tentacles of pure temporal energy. Chains that condensed Ikki's past, trying to force him to relive every pain, every fall, every failure.
But Ikki… grabbed one of those chains in midair. And smiled wider.
The chain vibrated like a clock's pendulum. Ikki yanked it hard.
Cronos came with it.
The demigod spun on his axis, the motion shifting the gravitational vectors of three nearby quasars. Black holes began to merge. In the real world, it would have been enough to distort the space-time continuum and create a new cosmological constant.
And then… CRACK.
Ikki hit Cronos in the jaw.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Each blow sank into Cronos' consciousness. The [Authority of Pain] overflowed, every spark of energy Cronos released turning into amplified agony.
Ikki deliberately held back his strikes, pacing them, stretching the Titan's pain.
Because he was enjoying it.
Because after everything, it felt good to make his mother's killer suffer so much.
Cronos staggered in the distorted air, his form flickering with the devastated body of Luke Castellan—his young face, crazed eyes, mouth spitting blood that evaporated before touching anything. Wounds regenerated in the blink of eons, time running backward around the lacerations until the flesh closed, only to be torn again the next second.
But amidst that insane scene… Cronos smiled.
Not just any smile. The kind that would make Hades change his tunic and Apollo stop composing music. A sly, corner-of-the-mouth smirk that said, "Oh… so I'll have to use *that*."
And before uttering any command, the extra-real plane vibrated. A fissure opened behind Cronos, and from it, as if space-time itself had panicked and stepped aside, emerged the silhouette of something… impossible.
The air filled with the smell of sulfur and boiling magma. A silent thunder rippled through the fabric of nothingness.
Then it came.
Typhon.
In mythology, it was said even the gods fled at the sight of him, and here, even in this battlefield where concepts like "before" and "after" were useless, the primordial instinct of all things screamed to run.
Roughly humanoid, if you considered a being the size of a dwarf planet, its lower half a pulsing nest of titanic boas, each with eyes like red supernovas. From its hands, a hundred fingers ended in serpent heads, hissing in unison with voices that vibrated the tenth dimension. Its wings unfurled, and their mere flapping shifted nebulas to other points in space.
And the smell… like a volcano had caught fire. And was made of liquid sulfur.
"Surprise, son of Zeus," Cronos said, his smile now insolent, mocking. While sending his subordinates to attack Camp Half-Blood and the Slavs to assault Olympus, and merging with Luke, he had also awakened Typhon and trapped the King of Monsters in a "space" created by his dominion, suspended in time, to use later—one of his trump cards.
Ikki didn't respond to the Titan. He advanced, fist ready, toward the King of Monsters, his arm surrounded by gravitational sparks. He delivered a punch that should have disintegrated matter at the subatomic level, creating a billion localized supernovas.
But when his fist touched Typhon's skin… nothing.
Nothing.
The creature's skin was like a cosmological absolute. A fixed point where the laws of physics simply weren't authorized to operate.
And in that opportune moment, Typhon attacked. A monstrous arm moved, the pressure shifting quasars billions of light-years away. The blow hit Ikki square, throwing him back with a force that, in the real plane, would have vaporized half the Milky Way and made Andromeda approach Earth thirty times faster.
Ikki crossed light-years and landed floating, spinning in the air. He brushed his clothes, clearing the dust of a newly formed nebula, and returned to Cronos' side with a single step.
Cronos smiled.
"Knew Typhon would come in handy. I kept him in a [Temporal Space] since your friends invaded my forge and got distracted with my minions crafting my scythe. I was waiting for the right moment. And look at that, the son of Zeus forced me to use him…"
Typhon roared.
"But that's not all, boy…" Cronos said. "Typhon… absorbed all his children and Echidna, every monster you can imagine. He incorporated the Cyclopes. The Hecatoncheires. And more… I made him consume every Slavic monster. Koschei the Immortal. Zmey Gorynych. Viy. Baba Yaga…"
Typhon's eyes glowed brighter, and now each serpentine finger spat miniature hydras and elemental dragons.
Meanwhile, Ikki floated, arms relaxed at his sides, as if waiting for the next bus and not facing the absolute incarnation of mythological chaos.
The vastness of the four-dimensional space-time around him twisted, stars forming and dying in microsecond intervals, nebulas collapsing into black holes only to explode as inverted supernovas. It was such absolute chaos that any known physics would throw its notes out the window and scream across the galaxy.
Ikki smiled.
A small, almost bored smile. Like someone watching the weekly villain boast before the final blow in the season finale.
"So… that's it?" he said, his voice echoing through the extra-real plane like the song of a thousand colliding comets.
Cronos, with that air of *finally turned the tables*, raised an eyebrow. Typhon roared again, the sound creating microfissures in the dimensional fabric, shockwaves distorting universal laws like leaves in the wind. The smell of sulfur now had taste. And temperature. And color.
Ikki advanced.
Not with a war cry. Not with some dramatic attack announcement. He just… went.
In a Planck blink, if Planck blinked, he was in front of Typhon.
His fist moved.
The speed? Simple: each movement generated gravitational waves that altered the surrounding time flow. The blows didn't travel through space—they *were* space. They created folds that turned three-dimensional vectors into reversed four-dimensional geometries olemos.
The fist hit Typhon's jaw.
BOOOOOOOOOOM.
The impact created a stable singularity for 0.0000001 nanoseconds before collapsing in on itself. If this were in the real plane, at least five galaxies would have vanished before their inhabitants knew they existed.
The titanic creature stumbled.
Ikki didn't stop.
The next blow came to the abdomen, a spinning kick that ignored the concept of distance and displacement. Ikki's foot appeared in the middle of the monster's torso, displacing cosmic flesh, spewing primordial energy like stellar lava. Typhon's snakes screamed, some exploding into microverses that immediately collapsed into subdimensional particles.
Cronos moved.
He tried to summon a new temporal chain, but Ikki was already there.
A backhand punch to the Titan's jaw.
Another to the stomach.
A knee strike that launched Cronos upward, piercing screaming temporal layers as he passed.
Typhon tried to grab him. Ikki leaned to the side, the blow passing a fraction of *before*. Yes, because here, before and after were interchangeable.
He blocked another of Typhon's attacks with his palm, absorbing energy that should have obliterated multiple planets, and returned it as a sequence of ten simultaneous consecutive strikes.
Cronos reappeared, trying to strike with his scythe.
Ikki grabbed the Titan by the collar.
Lifted him.
"You talk too much, Cronos."
And threw him into Typhon.
The impact was grotesque, in a good way. A Titan colliding with the King of Monsters mid-dimensional fold, creating a gravitational anomaly where concepts like "mass" and "time" melted.
Ikki landed in the air, adjusting his shirt collar like someone returning from a leisurely walk.
The smile was still there, serene, but now with a slight curve of anticipation.
"Just need to wipe that smirk off your face, Cronos."
He could have ended it the moment the fight began. But something inside him wanted to see Cronos broken. To see the arrogance melt. To see despair settle in the eyes of the one who killed his mother, though he was strangely calm about it all; it was as if he were a bored god punishing an ant that bit him, growing closer to completing his [Divinity] and losing his humanity, something he was starting to notice more and more. But he didn't care…
He decided to deal with Typhon first.
Typhon charged like a blur of muscle and serpents, cavernous roars echoing through the ethereal plane. The snakes on his face hissed hysterically as the monster's skin shimmered gold. The Nemean Lion's invulnerability covered his body.
Ikki's fist cut through space.
The impact shook the world.
The golden skin resisted… for half a second. Typhon was launched like a shooting star, tearing the ground until he stopped with a dull thud, sunk in a crater.
Before the rocks settled, his wounds began to close, flesh sprouting in a grotesque spectacle. The Hydra's regeneration.
Ikki appeared beside him in a blink and crushed his leg.
It reformed.
He broke both arms.
They returned.
He drove an arm into Typhon's forehead, cracking the skull.
It reformed.
Another punch to the stomach. Ribs burst. Regenerated.
A kick snapped the spine. It returned.
Each blow only reset the massacre.
Typhon stumbled back, eyes burning with silent fury. The snakes opened their mouths, spewing black flames, the Chimera's fire.
Ikki snapped his fingers. The flames vanished.
Stymphalian wings sprouted from his back, firing volleys of cutting feathers.
Ikki walked through them. None pierced his skin.
Shadow tendrils rose from the ground, Chernobog's miasma forming claws.
Ikki passed through them like mist.
Golden lightning tore the skies—Perun's bolts.
Ikki dodged them all with lazy steps.
Typhon grunted, roared, hissed. Every monster he had absorbed lent a new trick: Ladon's acidic venom, Koschei's curses, Antaeus' strength. Each ability appeared, activated… and failed.
Ikki simply nullified, broke, ignored.
At the peak of desperation, Typhon activated every possible regeneration. Hydra. Zmey Gorynych. Drekavac. Flesh stitched so fast the sound was a grotesque symphony.
But it didn't matter. Ikki crushed again.
Broke a leg. It returned.
Tore off a wing. It returned.
Snapped the neck. It returned.
Ripped off half the head. It returned.
Speechless, only animalistic roars and groans, Typhon writhed, stumbled, drooled, trying to attack with more legendary powers that once struck terror in ancient eras.
Nothing.
Finally, he fell to his knees.
The snakes stopped moving.
Ikki walked to him, plucked a rock from the ground, and casually hurled it at the beast's chest.
Crack.
The bones shattered.
Typhon collapsed.
"Weak…" Ikki said, emotionless.
The most feared monster in mythology, reduced to a pile of flesh and despair.
Typhon, mutilated, regenerating incessantly, became a grotesque blur of flesh, bones, tentacles, and black flames. Each cell pulsed with power stolen from hundreds of mythical creatures—Nemean Lion, Hydra, Ladon, Chimera, Stymphalian Birds, Zmey Gorynych, Drekavac, and dozens of other Greek and Slavic entities.
But here, before Ikki, it was just a standing corpse.
Ikki raised his fist.
"Sky-Shattering Fist…" he murmured softly, converting his maximized authorities to amplify the effect.
No more words. Just an absolute verdict.
The blow struck.
The air—or rather, the concept of space filled with particles—ceased to exist where the fist moved. The trajectory tore the dimensional fabric at a four-dimensional level, creating waves of destruction that collapsed the fundamental structure of the Infinite Universe.
In a single impact, Ikki's fist touched Typhon, and the entire universe was destroyed.
The blow released pressure surpassing the energy needed to undo the cosmological constant. The potential energy in space-time reversed, the infinite's expansion halted, then collapsed, compressing all layers of existence into a single point.
The sound of the blow didn't exist, for sound requires a medium.
The glow? It fled beyond light itself, becoming pure, undetectable information.
The blow didn't just kill Typhon.
It erased Typhon.
No record of his existence remained in any timeline, dimension, or abstract concept.
In the next microinstant, before total destruction, Ikki recreated everything.
Meanwhile, Cronos… the Lord of Time, the Primordial Titan who ruled the Ages, whose scythe had cleaved skies and gods, whose control over the temporal structure transcended eras and mythologies.
In that instant… he was frozen.
Not by magic or some spatial control trick from Ikki. But by pure, brutal, absolute existential terror.
Cronos had witnessed the blow.
He couldn't look away when Ikki's fist touched Typhon and, in the span of an infinitesimal Planck time, the universe was erased.
Cronos didn't see Typhon die.
He saw concepts die.
He saw Riemann's geometry collapse, Planck's constant become an erratic variable, the Higgs field dissipate, and space-time's expansion invert into an absolute implosion.
And then, something even more impossible: he saw Ikki remake everything.
But he had no time to contemplate the absurdity.
Ikki instantly appeared before him. No sound. Just the moment his hand clenched into a fist, and the Titan's body shuddered before the impact. A dry, brutal blow that shattered Cronos' face and hurled him to the ground like he was made of clay.
Ikki grabbed him by his bloodied divine hair and struck again. And again. Each impact sank the ground, the sky, the nothingness, and everything around.
When Cronos tried to regenerate, Ikki crushed his chest with a knee, held the body, and, with an almost lazy gesture, ripped Luke's soul from its host. A pale orb, trembling in fear, whimpering in the eternal silence.
Above his palm, an ethereal cage formed, built not of matter or magic but of absolute laws.
Its bars were made of metaphysical clauses, impossible paradoxes, and self-executing cosmic orders. No living or dead, divine or profane being could conceive of touching it without suffering irreversible ontological damage.
Ikki cast Luke's soul inside.
The prison sealed. Within, horrors conceived beyond causality began their work. Eternal punishments, so unimaginably grotesque they'd make Nyx or Erebus flinch. Personal realities where Luke would be destroyed, rebuilt, and obliterated, each second redefining the concept of suffering on infinite scales.
Cronos, weakened, tried to move.
Ikki walked to him unhurriedly. Each step seemed to weigh more on Cronos' essence than millennia of battles.
The demigod grabbed the Titan by the hair, lifting his deformed face.
Cronos tried to articulate something—perhaps a plea, perhaps an insult—but Ikki only gave a faint smile. He raised his left hand and created a chain, not of iron but conceptually forged from his [Authority of Destruction].
Ikki whipped him with that chain. Each strike didn't wound the body—it destroyed memories, moments, prides. It erased, piece by piece, every victory Cronos had ever had. Every conquest. Every humiliation he'd inflicted on others.
Until only the old man remained, weeping, alone.
Ikki then created, floating above his palm, a small translucent box where he literally gathered "all the world's humiliation" conceptually to trap Cronos inside. For someone as proud as him, it was a well-deserved end.
Cronos would see it all, again, forever.
Then, Ikki approached, grabbed the Titan's head with one hand, and crushed his skull like it was clay.
Cronos was literally erased from the world as his "immortal essence" was sucked into the translucent box. Ikki snapped his fingers, and the entire [Infinite Universe] he had created turned to clouds in the wind as he appeared in what was once Russia.
At that moment, he looked toward a specific point in the sky.
During his fight, he felt the subtle influence of [Fate]. The Fates had truly tried to kill him this time. That's why all of Cronos' plans had gone so perfectly, and they spared no effort to eliminate him. Ironic that they wanted to use him, but when he woke up and stopped being manipulated, they went on the offensive.
But that ended today too.
His eyes glowed as he vanished from where he stood in a crack that opened and closed.