Vathys was a city that forgot what it was built on — and bled for it daily.
Neon signs buzzed over alleyways paved with fossilized prayers. Subway tunnels hissed above buried sanctuaries. No one talked about the gods anymore unless it made them money, and yet their shadows stretched long across the skyline, carved into the bones of the city.
Alexis Drakon knew those bones by name.
He stood knee-deep in the ruins below Block-17, once the foundation of a temple long sealed and long forgotten. His boots crushed centuries-old mosaics — depictions of battles not taught in schools, faces not found in scripture. A worn flashlight hung from his belt. Its beam flickered across a half-buried altar.
The smell down here was old stone, rust, and something… older.
"Three serpent heads. Three sacrifices. One oath."
The voice wasn't his.
It pulsed from his spine, threaded through his heartbeat. It lived in the Aegis Shard — the sliver of divine wrath fused into his body like a second soul. It whispered in a tongue that smelled like lightning and sounded like memory.
Alexis clenched his jaw. He didn't answer the voice.
Instead, he knelt.
The altar before him wasn't in any record. He only found it because the relic sensor on his gauntlet overloaded the moment he stepped into this sector. It wasn't calibrated for divine interference. Nothing was.
He brushed off the dust.
Beneath the grime, the altar's surface gleamed faintly — gilded bronze, worked into a writhing sigil. An eye surrounded by a serpent, surrounded by flames.
He knew it. He'd dreamed it.
And now it was real.
"You shouldn't have come here alone."
The voice again — sharper now, closer to his thoughts than his ears. It was always with him. Guiding. Judging.
Protecting.
He stood slowly, letting the moment hang like a blade in the dark. He scanned the chamber — not with his eyes, but with his Mythic Awareness.
The air rippled. Something else was breathing down here.
Something not human.
Suddenly, the wall to his left shifted, stone unspooling like muscle. A figure peeled out from the darkness, its flesh silvered and half-seen, as if it belonged to a dream.
Not a god.
A Watcher — ancient guardians left behind by whatever pantheon built this place.
Alexis didn't hesitate.
His back arched as the Aegis Shard flared to life, etching molten veins up his spine and across his chest. Divine sigils erupted along his arms as golden armor unfolded from within his body — not summoned, but awakened.
He became Aegion.
"You are not welcome in the holy places."
The Watcher's voice came from no mouth. Its eyes, dozens of them, all stared into him.
"You bear the shield. But not the permission."
Alexis raised his hand. Light rippled outward, and from the space between his fingers, the Shield of Echoes bloomed — a spectral barrier shaped like a serpent-eagle, forged from divine memory and unyielding will.
"I'm not here for permission," he said. "I'm here for truth."
The Watcher lunged.
And Mycaelia's forgotten war began again.
The Watcher struck first.
It moved like mist, limbs elongating with sickening grace. A barbed arm carved a glowing arc through the air, aimed at Aegion's throat.
CLANG.
The Shield of Echoes caught the blow with a sound like a cathedral bell snapping in half. Sparks and divine residue rained across the chamber. The force of impact pushed Alexis back two steps — but only two.
He gritted his teeth, eyes burning gold. His armor hissed, divine runes crawling like fire across his gauntlets.
"Analyze. Adjust. Destroy."
The Aegis Voice fed him data with each heartbeat: speed, angle, power. The Watcher's body flickered between realms, unstable. Magic-based construct. Half-bound. Vulnerable between shifts.
Perfect.
Aegion lunged, faster than human reflex. His knee slammed into the creature's midsection with enough force to rupture stone. The Watcher bent, screeched, and tried to vanish again.
Too slow.
He rotated mid-strike and smashed the shield into its face — not defensively, but as a weapon. The impact cratered the wall behind them, cracking ancient glyphs like eggshells.
Stone fell like rain.
The Watcher screamed.
Its many eyes shimmered, flickering from gold to red to pitch black — each one showing a face of judgment, each one begging for reprieve.
But Aegion had none to give.
"You are a gatekeeper of forgotten gods," he said coldly. "And you just tried to kill me for entering a grave no one remembers."
The Watcher raised its head, broken and trembling.
"It was not meant for your kind. You carry the wrath of gods. You are a walking violation."
Aegion stepped forward, light seething from every seam in his armor.
"Then let the gods file a complaint."
His hand snapped open, and the Wrath Pulse fired.
The air detonated — a white-hot concussive burst radiating from his chest like a divine shockwave. The Watcher shattered mid-scream, its body reduced to fragments of starlight and ash. A final echo rang off the chamber walls — a whisper in a language older than death.
Silence followed.
Alexis exhaled slowly, armor retracting in layers like molten petals folding inward. The divine glow faded from his veins, but not entirely. The Aegis Shard never truly slept. It only pretended.
He looked down at the remains — nothing left but an impression in the dust and a thin trail of flickering symbols crawling back into the altar.
Something deeper had awakened.
"This wasn't random."
The voice in his head was softer now. Almost reverent. Almost… afraid.
"You weren't meant to find this place yet."
Alexis narrowed his eyes, gaze settling on a mural behind the altar — one that hadn't been there moments ago. Freshly uncovered. Somehow older than time itself.
It showed a shield split in three, each piece buried in a different city.
Below it: a figure with no face, wearing a crown of serpents.
And beneath that, scrawled in divine script that burned to look at:
WHEN THE AEGIS IS MADE WHOLE, OLYMPUS RETURNS.
Alexis stared for a long moment.
Then, quietly, he spoke.
"Not on my watch."
The ruins didn't like being disturbed.
As Alexis climbed the stairwell out of the temple — half stone, half rebar scaffolding — the walls pulsed faintly behind him, as if the chamber were watching, or remembering.
The glyphs on the altar still whispered.
But he left them.
He always did.
Back above ground, the smell changed from dust and secrets to smoke, oil, and street incense. The alley behind the excavation was narrow, squeezed between two corporate towers like a secret the city didn't want to keep but couldn't quite forget.
His boots scraped the asphalt as he stepped out into the Vathys under-market: Lowlight Row.
A cacophony of life surged around him.
Neon glowed in rusted signs overhead, written in hybrid tongues: Old Hellenic spliced with trade glyphs, divine calligraphy next to barcodes. Vendors shouted over each other in half-magic voices, hawking relic-shards, fake blessings, exorcism charms, and genetically imprinted familiars in jars.
"Two-for-one soul tattoos! Guaranteed to keep minor spirits out — or let the fun ones in!"
"Fresh Titanbone! Straight from the Steppe, don't ask how I got it!"
"Need a curse lifted or laid? Talk to Grana. She don't ask questions."
Alexis moved through the crowd like a shadow wrapped in silence. People gave him space without realizing why. Even cloaked, even with the Aegis asleep under his skin, they could feel something about him — like standing next to a thunderstorm before it broke.
He passed a stand selling blessed circuitry — microchips etched with runes that hummed when touched.
"Shield-bearer," came a voice behind him.
He paused.
An old woman sat beside a mound of prayer cloths dyed with relic dust, eyes clouded white. A beggar. Or an oracle. Or both.
"You're leaking," she whispered. "Your soul is cracking around the edges. You've been somewhere the city doesn't want to remember."
Alexis didn't answer.
She chuckled to herself, then spat into a jar and corked it.
"Here. For the next time something tries to wear your skin."
He didn't want to take it. He did anyway.
Never disrespect the old blood.
He tucked the jar into his coat and kept walking.
The market wound inward, deeper — toward the Reliquary Core, a central plaza where information flowed as freely as contraband relics. That's where he was headed. He needed to speak to someone who could tell him what the mural meant. And that meant finding Ione Vale — if she hadn't gotten herself arrested or disappeared into some god-haunted manuscript again.
But before he got two steps further, something pulled at him.
A chill. A ripple through his myth-sense.
Someone nearby was carrying a relic.
And it was singing.
Softly, under the noise. Just enough for him to hear. Just enough to mean trouble.
He turned slowly, eyes narrowing.
"...Don't do this," he muttered under his breath. "Not today."
But the market was already shifting. Shadows flickering wrong. People moving slower. A scream building in the bones of the ground.
Something had followed him out of the ruins.
And it wasn't done yet.
That's when it hit him.
A green energy blast — raw, spiraling divine force — slammed into his chest like a god's hammer.
The concussive wave lifted Alexis off his feet, sending him crashing through a vendor's table and into a rusted support column. Fruit, glass, and hex-inked scrolls rained around him. Smoke hissed from his jacket where the blast hit.
The market exploded into chaos.
Screaming. Running. Some people dropped to their knees — not in fear, but in worship. Because they'd seen what he'd seen:
Anubis's staff.
The Was Scepter — blackened, barbed, and crackling with emerald flame — hovered in midair, held by no one, but guided by something ancient.
A shape stepped from the shadows behind it. Robed, masked, and wrong.
Its body was a man's, but its face was the jackal — eyes glowing gold, lips unmoving, and around its neck hung a collar of glyphs written in Old Kemetic divine:
JUDGE. DEVOUR. RETURN.
Alexis coughed, wiped blood from his mouth. His ribs were cracked, maybe worse. The blast hadn't just hit — it had judged him.
The Aegis Shard surged.
"Hostile relic identified. Pantheon: Nile. Fragment carrier. Vessel state: unstable. Permission to kill?"
"Granted," Alexis growled, rising.
The armor came alive.
Light poured from his back and spine, wrapping around his body in a golden tempest. The Divine Aegis Armor slammed into place with a thunderclap. His hand snapped outward, and the Shield of Echoes unfolded in front of him like a gleaming, living crest.
Another blast came. He deflected it — barely.
The staff screamed through the air like a banshee, spiraling back to its wielder. The jackal-man caught it and leveled it again, speaking in a voice like stone on bone:
"You carry a fragment of the False Pantheon. That is a crime."
Alexis stepped forward, the ground cracking beneath each armored footfall.
"And you're carrying a relic from a god who hasn't walked this world in three thousand years."
The jackal-man tilted its head.
"Then let him rise again — over your ashes."
It charged, staff glowing.
Aegion met it halfway.
Their clash lit the market like a second sun. Sparks of godfire and divine force crackled across stalls and walls. The staff was fast, slicing through air and space like it didn't care about physics. Alexis blocked, ducked, countered — each motion perfect, honed by the battle-memories of countless Aegis-bearers.
Then he caught it.
Bare-handed.
The staff shuddered in his grip. The jackal-man hissed.
"How—?"
Alexis twisted, dragging the staff down and driving his knee into the figure's chest with bone-shattering force. He spun the shield and slammed it into the jackal-mask, cracking it down the middle.
"You picked the wrong myth to wake up."
He activated the Wrath Pulse.
The divine blast sent the jackal-man flying, staff and all, straight through a stone pillar and into a statue of Heraklesholding up a neon billboard. The relic-user hit the ground and didn't get up.
Silence fell.
Smoke drifted. The crowd returned slowly, drawn by awe and terror.
Alexis stood alone in the cratered center of the square, his armor steaming, the Aegis humming in his blood like a choir of warning bells.
And then he heard it.
A whisper — not from the shard, but from the relic his attacker dropped.
It was faint, old, and desperate:
"The gods are stirring, shield-bearer. They do not rise alone."
He turned toward the source — but the staff was gone.
So was the jackal-man.
Only scorched stone remained.
And above it, etched by the energy blast, three symbols shimmered in green:
Ω • 🜂 • 🜨
Greek. Alchemy. Earth sigils.
A cipher of resurrection.
A war was coming.
And Alexis Drakon, bearer of the Aegis, had just stepped onto the battlefield.