A while later,
A faint sting at the back of her neck pulled Melinoe's consciousness up from the depths of darkness.
"Where am I?"
She shook her somewhat sore and heavy head and looked up at the stone ceiling above her, which was only vaguely familiar.
"Still in the Arima cavern, but we have come out of the underworld."
The low voice came from Lorne, who sat at the cave mouth eating a wild fruit as he turned to look at the younger sister lying on the grass mat who was just now waking, his expression one of undisguised contempt.
"After I lifted the suppression curse, you still managed to stay unconscious for two hours. How hopelessly weak is that?"
Fragmented memories rose and slowly pieced themselves into a complete picture.
Melinoe turned a furious glare on the shameless creature beside her who was delivering these casual judgments, and ground her teeth with indignation. "You ambushed me! And you can stand there acting so righteous about it? Shameless!"
"Pot and kettle."
Lorne gave Melinoe a flat look and snorted without any particular sympathy. "I simply tried what you had been planning to do to me the night before on you."
Having her behind-the-scenes scheming laid bare in a single sentence, Melinoe found herself with nothing to say.
But after a moment, the underworld princess stiffened her neck and argued back. "I did not actually go through with it, did I?"
"So you only got knocked out and slept for a bit." Lorne tossed the fruit core aside and rose, the contempt in his eyes deepening a shade further. "Otherwise I would have beaten you properly a long time ago."
Realizing she was completely outmatched by this calculating guardian of hers, the girl could only close her mouth in sulky defeat.
Satisfied that he had successfully redirected the subject and given this congenitally restless goddess of schemes a firm reminder of her situation, Lorne then held out a leaf piled with wild fruits and extended it toward her. "Eat something. You have a journey ahead."
Melinoe took the fruit and tried a few pieces without thinking.
The sweet-tart flavor made her eyes brighten, and she picked up her pace considerably.
By the time she had finished every last piece with the enthusiasm of a small storm, her dark expression had improved noticeably, and she asked without much hesitation.
"Where are we going?"
Lorne smiled and did not answer directly. Instead he asked with evident interest. "After getting beaten by me so many times, you must be feeling pretty resentful right now."
"Not at all. It was all for my benefit, was it not?"
Melinoe's face went guarded at once, and she shook her head with a stiff smile, afraid this was another one of the scoundrel's tricks to dig a pit for her to fall into.
Lorne, however, watched her reaction and delivered his mockery with relish. "You cannot even admit when you have been wronged.
What kind of goddess of schemes has absolutely no spine?"
A teenager in the middle of a rebellious phase naturally could not withstand provocation.
Melinoe flushed with defiance and went all in with a reckless shrug.
"Fine. Yes, I am resentful. What of it?"
"Tired of always being held down by me?"
"Yes."
"Want to hit someone?"
"Absolutely. I would love to land two good punches on you right now."
Staring at that grinning face, Melinoe clenched her fists and demanded impatiently. "What are you trying to say? If you want to fight just do it.
Do not think for a second that I am afraid of you."
"How would you like to come with me and hit something?"
Under Melinoe's gaze, half delighted and half suspicious,
Lorne smiled and produced the scale Echidna the serpent mother had given him.
* * *
Several days later, on the eastern face of the Arcadian mountain range.
"ROAAARRR!"
A savage, furious bellow rolled across the flat expanse of the Nemean plain.
A massive male lion with thick tawny fur, its body stretching dozens of meters in length, dragged the suppression curses clinging to it forward and lunged at the shadows shifting in the tall grass.
"Still not cooperating? Hit it!"
At the command, several figures of varying shapes burst from the grass and closed in on the charging lion from all sides.
A fox covered in snow-white fur, half the height of a person, blurring with speed, struck first, sweeping a paw at the lion's face.
The moment of contact produced an ear-splitting metallic clang.
The great white fox clutched its cracked and chipped paw, let out a cry of pain, and went flying backward.
The lion's charge didn't slow in the slightest. Not a single strand of fur was disturbed.
Its coat had clearly hardened to something beyond iron.
Watching the enraged lion veer straight toward the fallen white fox, a strange divine monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a tail made from a living serpent charged from the flank, throwing itself against the lion with everything it had.
Two great forces collided and produced a low, thunderous boom.
The creature with three monster heads was no match for the lion's strength and defense, and was sent tumbling a considerable distance.
"Hiss, this brainless brute is still as hard to damage as ever."
The serpent head at the tail end hissed its complaint.
"Stronger than me too." The lion head at the front grumbled with barely contained annoyance.
"But it moves just as stupidly as always. An absolute blockhead.
I can only assume everything it has eaten over the years went straight to building muscle." The goat head on the back offered this with cheerful malice.
"Obviously." All three heads seemed to reach the same conclusion simultaneously, nodding in unison and turning gleeful eyes toward the tawny lion shaking its head and climbing back to its feet on the plain.
Thud.
At the same time, a divine monster with the head and body of a young woman, long hair flowing, with wings on her back, did not wait for the lion to find its footing before she threw herself back on top of it, pinning it down again, and brought her unsettling face close to the lion's eyes, chanting in a dreamy, meandering way.
"What has feet that no one sees, stands taller than trees, rises straight into the sky yet will never grow?"
"What devours all things, insects, fish, birds, beasts, flowers, and forests? Gnaws through iron, eats through steel? Turns stone to dust, kills kings, destroys cities, turns the sea to land and mountains to plains?"
"The answer. What is the answer?"
The lion, head ringing and dizzy, snarled its response at this peculiar, unhinged creature.
"ROAAARRR!"
"Wrong! Wrong!"
The Sphinx let out a shriek of delighted excitement, then raised her claws and began hammering the lion's head with wild enthusiasm.
"Sphinx has gone off her head again."
"Fight, fight!"
"Yes, yes, just like that, hit it!"
In the tall grass nearby, the goat head licked its lips with a grin, the serpent head wove back and forth flicking its tongue, the lion head let out low, excited rumbles, and the three-headed creature watched the chaos with gleeful interest, calling out encouragement with absolutely no intention of wading in to help.
Before long, the lion came to its senses, and with abnormal brute strength smacked the Sphinx, who had been clawing and scratching all over it, clean off its body, then charged at the silver-haired young man in the grass with furious momentum.
The beast's instincts told it that this one was the real threat.
By the laws of divine monsters, if you brought down the strongest, the rest of the pack would scatter.
"Hehe, the big dumb brute is about to be in trouble."
Four divine monsters circling the battlefield above, each with the head and body of a young woman, long hair loose, with bronze bird claws and bird wings, swept through the air laughing with open schadenfreude.
The Harpiai, also known as the Harpies, were the four daughters of the primordial monster Typhon and Echidna.
Aello, Celaeno, Ocypete, and Podarge. Spirits of the wind, they sometimes acted as messengers of Hades across the sea, carrying the souls of the dead to the underworld.
Their divine monster nature, however, made them rather excessively lively and loud.
At the same moment, Lorne in the grass watched the lion charging straight for him with a mild smile, stood where he was without moving, and slowly raised his right hand.
Then brought it down hard.
Boom.
Accompanied by a low bull's bellow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, the lion took the blow to its head and dropped as though struck by lightning, its skull driving into the earth, all four limbs twitching without direction.
The moment it hit the ground, a small dark-haired girl wrapped in dense death energy darted out from behind the silver-haired young man, launched herself onto the lion's back with evident excitement, raised both fists encased in gloves, and began hammering its head in rapid succession.
"So you are the Nemean Lion.
What exactly is so impressive about you?"
"ROAAARRR!"
"You dare roar at me? I will beat you until you behave yourself."
Melinoe drove her fists down in a relentless torrent of blows at the tawny lion flat on the ground, the dark mood that had been building up over recent days completely gone from her face, replaced by a charged, uncontainable exhilaration.
This felt incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
Thinking back over these past few days, the underworld princess could not help her eyes curving into crescent shapes.
Coming out of the Arima cavern, she thought she was about to be dragged to some secluded place and forced to spend her days walking on eggshells, with that certain someone using the word protection as an excuse to breathe down her neck and give her orders all day.
She didn't expect that their very first destination would be a fight.
And the targets were a pack of divine monsters who looked like they could hit hard and very much deserved to be hit.
Apparently they were descendants left behind by the great monster ancestor Typhon from ages past, each one dominating their own territory and doing exactly as they pleased.
But their fearsome reputations meant nothing except against ordinary mortals, demigods, and gods.
Up against a combination like her and that certain someone, a dragon had to coil up, a lion had to lie down, and any eagle flying overhead had better leave three feathers behind as a toll.
And so the two of them fought their way through every obstacle, making short work of any of Typhon's children they encountered, leaving each one thoroughly chastened.
The Teumessian fox, Chimera king of the three-headed beasts, the Sphinx, the Harpiai.
These children of Typhon now trailing around them as subordinates were the harvest from their journey so far.
And the one they were currently dealing with was a child of Typhon known as the Nemean Lion.
It had to be said, this thick-skinned, hard-bodied creature was not only remarkably difficult to hurt, it was also a complete brute with an intellect that barely registered.
Even basic communication was nearly impossible.
It had to be beaten flat first before any thought of taming it could be entertained.
Melinoe thought about it and put a little more divine power behind the next punch, intent on claiming this lion's submission for herself.
The Nemean Lion, however, with its extraordinary defensive capability, did not go down.
On the contrary, after being pummeled over and over, it finally tapped into something deeper and its full ferocity erupted.
The Nemean Lion wrenched its head free from the ground, shook its entire body with force, and sent the unprepared Melinoe flying off its back, then rose to its feet and let out a roar of furious warning to all sides.
Seeing the lion's eyes go completely wild, the nearby children of Typhon who possessed intelligence stopped advancing.
Lorne yawned with comfortable indifference and spoke in a calm, unhurried tone.
"All in together. It is getting dark. Finish it up. Anyone who slacks off gets no dinner tonight."
Hearing those words, every nearby child of Typhon felt a jolt of alarm run through them, and then the entire group moved together, descending on the Nemean Lion from every direction.
Chimera spat streams of fire.
The four Harpiai beat their wings together and whipped up a fierce aether storm.
The Sphinx murmured divine words in a low, drowsy chant.
The Teumessian fox widened its flickering, spectral eyes and unleashed mental interference. And the underworld princess Melinoe slipped out a pair of venom-coated short blades and launched a thoroughly shameless ambush from behind.
Before long, the previously imposing Nemean Lion let out a bellow of furious outrage and crashed to the ground beneath this merciless group beating.
Melinoe was on her feet and moving the instant it fell.
She stacked a dozen or more suppression, unconsciousness, and binding spells on the downed lion in rapid succession, then exhaled slowly and produced several ropes woven from wyvern tendons, wrapping the oversized unlucky cat in three layers and then three more until it was completely secure.
Only then did she brush off her hands with the satisfaction of a job well done.
"Done."
Lorne looked at Melinoe's textbook-quality work and felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
She was teachable after all.
He pulled out a sheet of sheepskin parchment, crossed out the name of the Nemean Lion, and then led the children of Typhon alongside him into the depths of the vast Arcadian mountains to make camp for the night.
(End of Chapter)