The sheer audacity of the Tsiolkovsky student's demand rippled through the massive dome. The audience let out a synchronized, highly intrigued "Uuuuuww!" The dramatic tension of a duel was something every single student in the Luprime system lived for.
All eyes fell heavily upon the stage.
Percival stood perfectly still for a second before letting out a surprised chuckle. "Oh wow. Okay, this is entirely new. Hit me, Ivan. What is the challenge?"
Ivan adjusted his glasses, his expression remaining deadly serious. "First things first, Composer. I need to establish some ground clearance for our variables. Do you currently work for, or consult with, Round Table Studio?"
The question hit Percival completely off guard. He physically paused, his hand hovering over the neck of his electric guitar. The crowd gasped at the bold inquiry. It was the absolute biggest rumor currently circulating the galactic net.
"Oh..." Percival tilted his masked head, smoothly recovering his stage persona. "Well, I won't deny nor confirm that."
"A standard non-answer," Ivan noted dryly, unbothered. "Let me change the basis of the inquiry, then. Do you play, or are you at least deeply familiar with, RTS intellectual properties?"
Percival had to bite the inside of his cheek to suppress a very genuine laugh. 'I literally programmed them,' he thought.
"Yeah..." Percival replied, his voice laced with heavy amusement. "Well, I know a thing or two about them."
"Great," Ivan said, tapping his datapad. "Then do you know the Legend of Achilles?"
Percival's posture shifted. The playful energy vanished, replaced by a sharp, focused curiosity. "Where exactly is this going, Ivan?"
"This will be our final project for one of our class," Ivan explained clinically. "The study of the implementation of mythological legends in social psychologies. We want to know how an artist operating in a completely different medium views these legends, and how they would translate its core psychological themes into their respective art form."
Percival rested his hands on his hips. "Oooh... so you literally just want to use me as a test subject for your final exam."
Ivan didn't even blink. He gave a single, firm nod. "Yes."
A wave of laughter echoed from the Astra Nova side of the dome at the sheer, shameless pragmatism of the TSI students.
"Alright, I'll play along," Percival smiled beneath his mask. "But do you mind telling me what your personal opinion on the legend is first? What did you draw from the lore?"
"Well," Ivan began, his voice projecting clearly across the silent dome. "I am deeply interested in the moment when Achilles actively decides not to go to war. Historically, within the framework of the Stellar Accord, refusing a draft or standing down from a military conflict has always been seen as cowardly, unjust, and a blatant sign of treasonous rebellion."
The dome remained deathly quiet. Ivan was treading on highly dangerous, heavily monitored political ice, but his academic delivery kept him safe.
"Yet," Ivan continued, "from the fragmented lore we have gathered from the Hades databanks, it seems like Achilles is viewed as brave for standing his ground. He refused to fight because his honor was slighted by a king. He stood for what he believed was right, demanding accountability from his superiors. And despite his rebellion, he is still revered as fiercely loyal, because when his closest companion finally fell, he answered the call when he was needed most."
Percival smiled warmly. Hearing a student perfectly dissect the exact thematic nuance he had woven into the Hades lore filled him with immense, secret pride.
"So," Percival summarized, "the moment when Achilles refuses to fight, the quiet stalemate of his anger and his honor is the most interesting part in your eyes."
"Yes," Ivan confirmed. He then narrowed his eyes, glancing at the electric Fender in Percival's hands. "And please, Composer. Don't use those electrical instruments for this. We would like to see this as a further, more complex variable to your challenge."
A collective 'Ooooh' erupted from the music majors scattered throughout the crowd.
Percival looked down at his electric guitar, then back up to the TSI platform. "Fine."
With a smooth, practiced motion, he unhooked his guitar strap and placed the heavy instrument back onto its stand. He turned his back to the audience and walked directly toward the string section of the Proximata Orchestra.
He approached the first-chair violinist, exchanging a few quiet, urgent words. He then turned to the gray-haired conductor, gesturing with his hands as he rapidly explained the time signature and the emotional scale he needed them to hit.
The conductor's eyes widened slightly before he offered a sharp, deeply respectful nod. He silently signaling the entire orchestra.
A faint, haunting sound of instruments gently tuning and shifting into position began to echo all around the massive dome.
After a minute of precise adjustments and whispered pointers to the string section, Percival walked back to the center of the stage. He brought a violin to his collarbone, settling into a flawless, classical stance.
The gray-haired conductor kept his eyes locked entirely on the masked youth. In the pit, the lead cellist readied his bow, perfectly prepared to fill in Percival's spontaneous string arrangement and hold the musical pocket.
Percival began to play.
[Gang Of Youths - Achilles, Come Down]
A breathtaking, baroque, chamber-pop elegance immediately washed over the Grand Hall. It sounded like the haunting echoes of ancient Greece, a specific tonal scale the modern Accord audience had never heard before. It invoked a deep, crushing sense of tragedy, a sorrow that felt as if it had been relentlessly repeating itself for thousands of years.
Ever so slowly, the lead cellist began to play arco, drawing long, mournful notes with his bow. Percival accompanied him by playing a sharp, rhythmic pizzicato, plucking the violin strings with his bare fingers.
Then, Percival stepped up to the microphone. He opened his mouth, and a deep, trembling, incredibly rich baritone voice filled the dome.
"Achilles, Achilles, Achilles, come down...Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?"
Up on the VIP platform, Ivan's eyes went wide behind his glasses.
Percival had completely flipped the narrative structure. He had put himself entirely in the shoes of the person desperately trying to save him. It sounded exactly like Patroclus, pleading from beyond the veil to pull Achilles back from the edge of his own despair. It was absolutely nothing like what he had expected.
"You're scaring us and all of us, some of us love you...Achilles, it's not much but there's proof."
The mythological theme of the song was still flying completely over the heads of the casual audience members. For those who actually knows the Hades databanks, a profound realization set in. This was the exact, devastating moment Achilles refused to go to war, paralyzed by his own grief and stubborn honor in the face of absolute destruction.
Down in the pit, the grand piano entered the mix. The pianist played simple, heavily rhythmic block chords squarely on the downbeats, grounding the floating strings.
"You crazy-ass cosmonaut, remember your virtue...Redemption lies plainly in truth."
Beside Ivan, another TSI student sharply inhaled, frantically typing on his datapad. "Cosmonaut," the student whispered in awe. "That is a brilliant modern wordplay on 'Argonaut'. The legendary band of ancient heroes mentioned in the deep lore of the game. I think Composer Percival knows significantly more about this universe than we originally calculated."
"Just humour us, Achilles, Achilles, come down...Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?"
Hearing the final, desperate plea of the chorus, the rest of the students who didn't know the lore finally began to understand the raw emotion of the track. It ceased to be a simple historical lecture.
It sounded exactly like someone desperately trying to talk a deeply depressed, suicidal friend off a literal ledge. The sheer, overwhelming humanity of the lyrics gripped the entire dome.
Percival stepped back from the microphone, letting the lead cello take a powerful, sweeping solo.
The musical arrangement was an absolute masterclass in live mixing. Percival's continuous pizzicato acted as a flawless metronome. It provided a sharp, percussive "tick-tack" that established the entire rhythmic grid.
Over that strict grid, the arco cello played a gorgeous, legato minor-key melody, smooth and deeply connected.
The piano sat squarely in the mid-range frequencies, perfectly filling the EQ gap between the high, plucking violins and the low, weeping cello. It acted as the ultimate harmonic glue, flawlessly preparing the acoustic track for the inevitable entrance of the heavier rhythm section.
As the string arrangement swelled, Percival leaned back into the microphone. His voice lost its perfect, polished control. It intentionally cracked, wavering heavily with a raw, agonizing emotion.
"Achilles, Achilles, Achilles, come down...Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?"
He plucked the violin strings harder, the sharp pizzicato driving the tempo forward.
"The self is not so weightless, nor whole and unbroken..."
It was a brilliant, terrifyingly accurate portrayal of the human psyche. The lyrics played a dangerous trick, mimicking the suffocating voice of depression that actively weaponized a hero's own relationships against him, trying to pull him over the edge.
But then, the perspective definitively shifted.
"Remember the pact of our youth...Where you go, I'm going, so jump and I'm jumping...Since there is no me without you."
A collective gasp echoed from the Tsiolkovsky platform. Percival had finally, explicitly revealed exactly who was pleading in the second verse. It was Patroclus. The beloved companion whose brutal death would ultimately destroy Achilles' spirit. He was using their unbreakable bond to force Achilles to step back from the ledge. If you jump, I jump. So don't jump.
"Soldier on, Achilles, Achilles, come down...Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?"
This time, Patroclus added a heavy command. Soldier on. Live.
"Loathe the way they light candles in Rome...But love the sweet air of the votives."
Percival's baritone voice cascaded over the orchestral backing, highlighting the agonizing duality of grief, the painful reality that a person can fiercely loathe and deeply love the exact same thing at the exact same time.
"Hurt and grieve but don't suffer alone...Engage with the pain as a motive."
Across the sprawling geodesic dome, the regular audience members who knew absolutely nothing about ancient mythology finally, completely understood. The overarching theme of the song became crystal clear.
Somehow, in the middle of an academic challenge about a mythical Greek warrior, Composer Percival had managed to deliver a deeply real, profoundly modern message about battling depression and surviving suicidal thoughts.
"Today, of all days, see...How the most dangerous thing is to love."
Ivan's analytical brain immediately went into absolute overdrive. He stared at the masked Composer, rapidly calculating the mythological implications.
'The prophecy!' Ivan realized, his eyes darting back and forth. 'In the epics, there was a strict prophecy stating Achilles would only die after he killed the Trojan prince, Hector. As long as Hector lived, Achilles was safe. But in the chaos of battle, Hector killed Patroclus. That singular act of loss sent Achilles into absolute, reckless despair. He killed Hector in a blind rage of revenge, thus sealing his own fate and fulfilling the prophecy. Achilles' love for Patroclus directly caused his own downfall! The "most dangerous thing" for the invincible hero was, undeniably, to love.' As Ivan sat there, utterly blown away by the multi-layered lyrical genius, Percival closed his eyes beneath his silver mask.
"How you will heal and you'll rise above..."
The delivery of that specific line felt so impossibly genuine, so breathtakingly raw, that it sent shivers down the spines of everyone in the Grand Hall.
It was genuine because Dorian was singing about himself. When he was just a child, his mother had simply packed her bags, walked out the front door of the Kepler house, and abandoned her family without ever looking back. It was a completely different, colder kind of grief.
But standing there, bathed in the golden stage lights with his guitar and his music, Dorian knew the truth of his own lyrics. He had learned to endure the storm. He had engaged with the pain, he had healed, and he had risen far, far above it.
The tempo suddenly shifted. The heavy piano chords backed away, making room for the lead violinist to take center stage. She raised her bow, launching into a breathtaking, frantic, and wildly complex solo that spiraled through the Grand Hall.
But as she played, Percival did the unthinkable. He didn't step back to let her have the silence. He deliberately cut right over her solo.
His voice was no longer the warm, trembling plea of a desperate friend. It became sharply articulate, persuasive, and dripping with lethal cynicism. He spoke the lyrics rather than singing them, projecting a cold, venomous authority over the sweeping strings.
"Achilles, Achilles, Achilles, jump now...You are absent of cause or excuse."
A violent shiver ran through the crowd. The sudden, jarring change of message was terrifying. The voice was literally telling the hero that his life had absolutely no meaning.
"So self-indulgent and self-referential...No audience could ever want you."
Ripples of profound realization swept through the regular students in the dome. The cold, articulate venom was the exact, suffocating way anyone battling deep depression spoke to themselves in the mirror. It was the voice of self-loathing.
But for the lore-obsessed who knew the Hades databanks, the lyrics took on a brilliant, secondary dimension. They recognized this cruel, belittling tone perfectly. It was the voice of King Agamemnon, the arrogant ruler who bitterly rivaled and insulted Achilles during the Trojan War, driving the hero into his isolation in the first place.
"You crave the applause yet hate the attention...Then miss it, your act is a ruse."
Up on the floating platform, Ivan slowly lowered his datapad. He stared down at the stage, a breathless, utterly defeated smile creeping across his normally stoic face.
"This is... it's too much," Ivan whispered under his breath, completely overwhelmed by the sheer, multi-layered brilliance of it. "Is this how genius composers do their work?"
"It is empty, Achilles, so end it all now...It's a pointless resistance for you."
There it was. The darkest, most dangerous corner of a deeply depressed mind, laid completely bare for people to hear.
Percival paused. The violinist was only three-quarters of the way through her frantic solo. Percival looked over at her. Instead of being annoyed that the Composer had spoken over her spotlight, the elite musician just offered him a wide, brilliant smile as she played, completely entranced by the theatrical majesty of the duet.
As the final note of the violin solo soared into the rafters, Percival grabbed the microphone. The cold, cynical voice of Agamemnon vanished.
The desperate, protective voice of Patroclus returned, soaring with an incredibly powerful, emotional melody.
"Achilles, Achilles, just put down the bottle...Don't listen to what you've consumed!"
It was the ultimate voice of a friend desperately trying to help.
"It's chaos, confusion and wholly unworthy...Of feeding and it's wholly untrue!"
Percival laid the message out with absolute, undeniable clarity.
"You may feel no purpose nor a point for existing...It's all just conjecture and gloom!"
He pointed out exactly what Achilles were currently feeling. He acknowledged the terrifying void of their anxiety. And then, he offered the ultimate, realistic build-up. A simple, profound reach of a hand.
"And there may not be meaning, so find one and seize it...Do not waste yourself on this roof!"
It was a voice of absolute reason. If there is no meaning, you make one. You survive. The orchestra swelled to a magnificent, breathtaking crescendo. Percival poured every ounce of his soul into the final verse, telling Achilles, telling the world to take a single moment and make peace with their mortality so they could carry on living.
"Hear those bells ring deep in the soul...Chiming away for a moment!Feel your breath course frankly below...And see life as a worthy opponent!"
See life as a worthy opponent. The phrasing was so incredibly powerful, it made the act of simply waking up and living a regular life sound like the most heroic, epic battle in the universe.
For the general audience, that one moment, stepping back, taking a deep breath, and choosing to engage with life was everything they needed to hear.
But for Ivan and the lore enthusiast, the lyric was a masterpiece of storytelling. Achilles was a demigod. He was dipped in the River Styx. He was virtually impenetrable and completely invulnerable to physical blades. Across the entire world, there was not a single soldier or monster worthy of being his opponent.
Except for Life.
Life inflicts no physical wounds. It inflicts grief, heartbreak, and despair. That was the one battlefield Achilles was never prepared for. Life was the only opponent capable of bleeding the golden hero dry.
And Composer Percival was telling him to finally stand up and fight it. He stepped back from the microphone, taking a deep, shuddering breath as the heavy piano chords faded away.
He pointed the neck of his violin toward the lead cellist and the first-chair violinist. Taking the cue, the gray-haired conductor slowly lowered his baton, gracefully signaling the rest of the massive orchestra to pull back and fall silent.
Only the two stringed instruments remained. They played a slow, delicate, intertwined melody that felt like a beautiful, tragic sigh of relief.
Percival leaned back into the microphone for the final lines.
"Today, of all days, see...How the most dangerous thing is to love...How you will heal and you'll rise above..."
He closed his eyes beneath the mask.
"Crowned by an overture bold and beyond..."
Percival let out a long, melodic exhale, an exhausted release of all the built-up tension in the song.
"Ahhh... it's more courageous to overcome."
The way he sang that single line was completely transformative. It sounded like Achilles himself. It felt as if the golden hero had finally stopped looking down into the void and had finally lifted his head to see the sun rising from his high vantage point on the roof.
The desperate plea had worked. Achilles was finally coming down.
The final, gentle note of the cello hung in the air of the Grand Hall before smoothly fading into absolute silence.
The Proximata Orchestra sat quietly in the pit, looking up at the masked young man on the stage. This was the second time they had engaged in a spontaneous "jam session" with the Composer, and it felt as if they were sharing a single, unified consciousness.
They could communicate complex emotional shifts with just a glance and a gesture. It was musical telepathy, and this latest performance was the ultimate proof of it.
The deafening silence lasted for exactly two seconds.
Then, the roaring scream of students shook the very foundations of the Astra Nova dome.
It was a roar of genuine, absolute awe. The highly critical, heavily elitist students of the Luprime Academia System were collectively realizing that the person standing in front of them was an undeniable, generational genius.
Floating invisibly directly beside Percival, the shimmering projection of Aphrodite wiped a single, glowing tear from her cheek.
"I truly think Achilles would have loved to hear those beautiful words, Creator," the Goddess of Beauty whispered softly. "Alas... his sweet Patroclus died long before he could ever say them."
Percival simply smiled beneath his silver mask. He stepped forward and offered a deep, sweeping bow to the roaring fans.
Up on the floating platform, Hana Vhan was openly crying, wiping tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her Percival merchandise jacket.
"Oh my stars..." Hana sniffled, her voice trembling with emotion. "What kind of profound heartbreak has the Composer gone through to be able to make songs like that?"
Lyra, standing beside her, didn't say anything. She just looked down at her older brother, a fierce, protective pride swelling in her chest.
The fourth concert ended spectacularly. And in the immediate aftermath, millions of students across the galactic network who had previously known absolutely nothing about Round Table Studio's newest title immediately began frantically researching.
They desperately wanted to know what Hades was about, and they needed to know exactly what had happened to the golden hero, Achilles.
⋘ 𝒍𝒐𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒅𝒂𝒕𝒂.. .⋙
🎮:
- Stardwey Valley: Completed.
- Hades: Completed.
- Pokémon: Completed.
- Sky: Children of the Light: ◌ Loading…
🎬:
-
♬:
- Your Song – Elton John (ch.9)
- A Lovely Night – La La Land (ch.20)
- Merry Go Round of Life – Howl's Moving Castle (ch.25)
- Small Fragile Hearts – Victor Lundberg (ch. 27)
- Skyfall – Adele (ch. 29)
- No Time To Die – Billie Eilish (ch. 30)
- Yesterday – The Beatles (ch. 32)
- Lovely – Billie Eilish, Khalid (ch. 47)
- Best Part – H.E.R. feat. Daniel Caesar (ch. 67)
- Lovely Day – Bill Withers (ch. 68)
- My Song – Labi Siffre (ch. 75)
- Isn't She Lovely – Stevie Wonder (ch. 89)
- Gotta Catch 'Em All – Pokémon OST (ch. 90)
- Don't Stop Me Now – Queens (ch. 102)
- Grow As We Go – Ben Platt (ch. 102)
- Feeling Good – Michael Bublé (ch. 104)
- You'll Be In My Heart – Phil Collins (ch. 105)
- We Will Rock You – Queen (ch. 108)
- The Bones – Maren Morris feat. Hozier (ch. 110)
- Achilles, Come Down – Gang Of Youths (ch. 111)