The guards resumed their onslaught, but I'll be quite clear. I don't even remember much of my fight with them.
These feelings in my body…they'd never been there before. I'd never been so purely angry to the point where I lost all sense of myself, but that's what happened when I faced down Carcinus. What I do remember, was that the rest of his guards were easy work—like I said, I wasn't even thinking straight at this point. All of the finesse and training I'd spent the last few weeks learning went flying out of the window. That cool and collected logic I'd tempered my blade of fighting in was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, I felt something primal in my body roar. It really did feel like something snapped.
I leaped forward on the closest guard, pure animalistic rage taking over my body. I ripped into his body with my flame-encased hands, blasting through his armor and chest with two jets of fire. I screamed again in a blind rage, tearing his body in two.
I was a monster.
[Hermes' Shadow] kept ticking in my top right, and I barely even noticed the damage numbers as I moved through the guards as if they weren't even there. For the first time, it actually ticked all the way up to 100%, and every attack I made was carried out with deadly force. Every punch blurred through the men as if they were made of paper mâché. Every slash swam through their bodies like a hot knife through butter. Every jab shot through them like a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun. The ones that tried to run became immortalized in stone, Medusa's eye taking their lives in mere moments.
Blood and guts spilled everywhere and I ravaged the group, literally ripping them apart like a cyclone of pure destruction. The blood on my hands and body steamed and evaporated through the aura of fire that was steadily building on my body. This type of fire…the green kind, was insane. I could smell the chemicals inside of it burning, and it was actually setting the air around me ablaze, as well.
"Face me yourself!" I yelled at Carcinus, blasting forward at him. "Your men won't be able to protect you from me!"
"You're beginning to annoy me!" Carcinus hollered, his suit buttons flying open. The skin began to dissolve and roll backward, revealing a metal, hull-like body. He seemed to get bigger as well, the suit completely shredding as he got larger and more hunched over.
What do you think this is, an anime? I'm not letting the fucker transform without a fight.
I interrupted his weird transformation, shoving a fire-encased fist into his hull, denting it heavily, and following up with an ax kick to the face. His fully formed claw came shooting forward at me, snipping the air where my head had been a moment ago. I skidded backward a moment later as I tanked his other arm's full-powered robotic punch with my spear.
Twin streams of green fire shot out of my hands, cascading over his body. The constant tick of [5000][HP] was interrupted around thirty seconds in, as he screeched loudly. I can't make this shit up—his head exploded. I went flying into a wall as the explosion shattered the floor and ceiling, and rings of wind slammed into my body. The support beams holding up the once ornate ceiling of the palace had begun to creak and wear from the battle, crashing one of the chandeliers against the wall. A shower of broken glass fell from the ceiling.
"Carcinus, you bastard!" I roared, propelling through the water at breakneck speeds. The weird green fire dripped from my body, sizzling against the ruined palace floor as the water shot me toward my foe.
"You insignificant pest!" I heard Carcinus yell, but his voice had dropped a few octaves. I watched, through my haze of anger, as a fully metallic claw came firing out of the smoke. I dodged it with ease but was caught off guard by the pattering noise of little metallic impacts on the ground.
"No way," I said, disbelief coloring my voice. I…I just couldn't believe it. "What are you?"
Carcinus had disappeared. The portly man I had seen before was nowhere to be found—although I did notice a weird skin-suit-like thing floating away in the water, completely torn apart.
"This is what you made me do!" The robotic drawl of Carcinus rumbled. "Now you will perish!"
The smoke had finally cleared. Sitting in the impact crater of my previous attacks was no longer a man, but a gigantic metallic crab. The body of Carcinus stretched long and wide, easily encompassing the entirety of the dance floor in a monumental shadow. His hind legs were small by the standards of the rest of his body but were still terrifying. They were curved rods of metal, sickeningly sharp and deadly, the length of your average baseball bat but the thickness of a car door. The half-developed claws I'd seen before were now fully grown, easily the size of flagpoles. They were as wide as school buses, behemoths of glinting metal. His bright red eyes stared at me balefully.
"Behold, Perseus Jackson! The true anchor of the sea!"
I felt a little bit more in control of my emotions at this point. This form, whatever it was called, was horribly draining. The sea negated the brunt of its steep cost, but I was still losing around [500] [MP] every minute, and my stamina was taking some hits, as well. I took a few more calming breaths—the rage was fading a bit, allowing me to rein in the power and regain my battle sense.
Carcinus was still around [750,000/1,000,000][HP] which meant that I had to play this smart. I had power, yeah, but I couldn't just blast through Carcinus as I'd done with his guards. He'd be a little trickier than that. Whatever he was, he wasn't human, or organic in nature at all. Medusa's eye was useless against him. I was fighting a fucking robot.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Rings of energy exploded out of my hands as I countered each of Carcinus' strikes with my own punches. I was losing [200][HP] with each parry, but I noted that the fire covering my body was draining his [HP] at a much steeper rate, [2000][HP] for each punch.
Man, this dude really was weak to fire.
"You entertain me, Jackson," Carcinus praised, his robotic drawl sending shivers down my spine. "It's been a while since I've been able to let loose."
"Oh, it'll be the last time," I replied, still matching his punches. I grunted, and some mana drained out of my body as I fortified my body to be able to hang with this level of power. "Tell me…how did you manage to do this for so long?"
"Why, I had help, of course," Carcinus bragged, smashing his claw down on where I'd been a moment ago. "From your very own government."
I thought as much.
"Who helped you?" I demanded, my anger coming back. [Hermes' Shadow] had ticked back up and my punches had started to dent the metal lining Carcinus' body. The metal claws were starting to feel less like metal and more like wood, or even clay. "Tell me!"
"Someone very intimate with our Lord," Carcinus laughed. "You won't be getting much else out of me, boy. Come, now. Let's end this folly…it's almost feeding time."
Feeding time?
Yeah, fat fucking chance.
I swerved backward, the combat instincts taking over my body, letting the fight continue on autopilot as I began to devise a plan to put the murderous crab in the ground for good. There were no more guards left.
Good. I could focus my full attention on Carcinus. He had around three-fourths of his full [HP] left, which still wasn't too stressful. I'd been training for weeks now, devising ways I could deal crazy numbers of damage in a short period of time. I had a couple more…explosive ways to do that.
I glanced around between blows, noticing the ruined state of the palace. How did he die in the myths again? Hercules crushed him under his foot, right?
Now, I'll be the first to tell you that I just don't have enough power in my body for that. Still, though, if I played my cards right, I could give him a round two by collapsing the palace on him—and I had the perfect move in mind for some damage like that.
I felt the tug of power in my gut. The perk from earlier increased my powers from Hestia exponentially, which meant that this move I'd been working on would be all the more effective. Carcinus was weak to fire, after all.
You see, after my initiation fight to join Delta's quadrant, I'd taken some inspiration from the moves the figure had used. Specifically speaking, the crystal-mirror attack. It was a pretty sick move. Not too complicated to understand, either. The whole basis had been the creation of a mirror that their mana, combined with mine had gone through, to boost their elemental attack.
Pretty simple. Their mana + my mana + mirror = annoying crystal attack.
Of course, after seeing it in action, I had to have it for myself. I knew that with my fire and water powers, that sort of thing could go crazy. As I'd come to learn from Delta, himself, the mirror wasn't just there for show. It was a way to compensate for a lack of mana by combining two sources and sending it through a creation known as Mirror of Venus.
CRASH!
I dodged as some projectiles came flying towards me from Carcinus—can the man let me have my fucking monologue in peace? I growled, slipping under another block of metal and throwing some of the rubble back at his little feet with a twirl of my spear and a burst of water.
Where was I?
Right. The Mirror of Venus. You guys might need some background for this one.
As you may or may not know, the mirror is one of Aphrodite's greatest symbols, right up there with love itself and doves. I know, I know. You can laugh—I'm not going to lie, I thought it was pretty lame at first, too. What, my dad got a trident, all of the seas, a horse? Zeus had the skies, his bolt, hell, even badass eagles. Hades has a whole world to himself, not to mention a killer staff and helm. Comparing that to a mirror and some birds, it definitely started off looking like she got the completely short end of the stick.
Well, not really, though. Over the years, people have come to think that the connection between Aphrodite and mirrors was there because of pride, and vanity. I'm guilty of this myself—I always thought that the mirror defined by the myths was like a make-up mirror or a vanity mirror and that the goddess' symbols reflected her: a weak, fragile deity who had no desire that wasn't sexual in nature.
The mirror, obviously, seems kind of lame like that—like it's some sort of thing she just uses to her need to witness her own otherworldly beauty. That sort of idea was just exacerbated by that fucking stunt Ares pulled.
The problem with this, of course, is that the mirror that represents Aphrodite isn't anything like that. It isn't as shallow as people make it out to be.