1 Month.
That's how long it took for my vocabulary to permanently infect the most powerful beings in the universe. I didn't just train my siblings; I accidentally initiated a massive cultural contamination. When you spend a month spamming gamer terminology and modern internet slang at ancient, newly awakened deities, they don't just learn it. They weaponize it.
We were gathered around a massive, polished ironwood table Demeter had grown for us near the cliff edge. The campfire was burning bright blue thanks to Hestia. We were officially having our first War Council to plan the assault on the Titan stronghold of Mount Othrys.
I stood at the head of the table, tapping a charred stick against a piece of slate.
"Alright, squad," I said, looking at my siblings. "Dad's base has a million armored giants, highly toxic divine moats, and a literal dragon guarding the loot room. We are currently under-leveled and under-geared. I am opening the floor to strategies. Hit me."
Poseidon swayed on his feet, holding a massive, cartoonishly large bone-in chunk of roasted boar in one hand and a half-empty waterskin of nectar in the other. He took a massive bite, chewing loudly with a wide, goofy grin, completely unbothered by the gravity of a cosmic war.
"Right, so, hear me out, mates," Poseidon slurred slightly, gesturing vaguely with the meat bone like a compass. "Why complicate it? We just stroll up to the front gates, declare ourselves the captains of the mountain, eat all their meat, and liberate the banquet hall. Shishishi! Savvy?"
Hera stared at him, her eye physically twitching. "Did... did you just laugh like 'shishishi'? You are literally brain-dead. Did you not hear the part about the million armored giants? If we just 'stroll up,' we get instantly ratio'd! It's a massive L!"'This Idiot is now roleplaying the story characters zeus spouted'
"Ah, but you have heard of me," Poseidon grinned, taking another chaotic bite of meat and nearly tripping over his own feet before catching his balance with a graceful, impossible fluidity. "I'm gonna be King of the Pirates. Or whatever."
"Nobody is rushing the gates," I interrupted, slamming my hand on the table. "They have the numbers. But we have something they don't. We have modern societal tactics. We don't fight them physically... we hit them where it hurts. Their PR. We hold a peaceful protest outside their property line."
"A non-violent psychological siege," Hades spoke up from the darkest corner of the table. He leaned forward, his pitch-black eyes glowing with intense, terrifying seriousness. "To break their minds without drawing a blade. Commander, this strategy is ruthless."
"Right?" I smiled. "Thank you, Hades."
"However, if we sharpen the wooden stakes of the protest signs, they can double as spears," Hades continued, entirely deadpan, already drawing tactical diagrams in the frost with a shadow-blade. "We chant the slogans to lull them into a false sense of security, and when their PR department approaches for negotiations, we impale them."
"Hades, no!" I groaned. "The whole point of a peaceful protest is that it's peaceful! We can't impale the PR reps!"
"Then how do we harvest their souls for the boycott?" Hades asked, genuinely confused.
"Okay, scratch the protest," I pivoted quickly, wiping the slate board. "Plan O: We call OSHA. We become Health and Safety Inspectors."
Demeter, who was nervously chewing on a glowing, highly venomous leaf to soothe her anxiety, blinked her emerald eyes. "O-shah?"
"Workplace safety," I explained, tapping the board. "Mount Othrys is a logistical nightmare. They have open pits of boiling acid. Zero guardrails on the Titan staircases. Terrible ventilation in the lava forges. We walk right through the front door wearing high-vis vests and carrying clipboards. We write them so many citations and fine them so heavily that we bankrupt their entire military budget. We literally shut down their war effort with red tape."
Hades' eyes widened in profound realization. He slowly set down his cup. "A ledger of their sins... We weaponize the bureaucracy. If they fail to provide proper ventilation for the lava pits within thirty business days... we execute them."
"Well, we shut the mountain down, but sure, execution works," I nodded.
"I shall craft the clipboards of doom immediately," Hades whispered reverently, his shadow already forming a perfect, pitch-black clipboard and an impossibly sharp quill. "What is our uniform?"
"I ain't wearing a high-vis vest, mate," Poseidon burped, adjusting his straw hat. "Cramps my style. A pirate of the seas doesn't do safety inspections."
Hera slammed her head onto the table. "I am surrounded by actual toddlers."
"Fine, if you don't like OSHA, we go to Plan C!" I yelled, getting fired up. "We rug-pull them! We invent a fake decentralized currency—TitanCoin. We use Demeter's plants to mint physical tokens, we hype it up on the mortal plane, and get Kronos to invest the entire Mount Othrys treasury. Then, right when it peaks, we crash the market! We leave the Titans holding the bag! Generational wealth deleted overnight!"
Hera slowly lifted her head from the table. Her golden eyes were glowing with such intense, unadulterated murderous intent that the atmospheric pressure dropped fast enough to pop my ears.
"What in the name of Chaos... is a crypto?" Hera asked, her voice vibrating with enough gravity to crush a diamond. "You are speaking in tongues! We are Gods! We are meant to hurl mountains and command the heavens, and you want to defeat the Devourer of Worlds with an imaginary coin and a clipboard?!"
"My aesthetic is cottagecore, not corporate fraud!" Demeter wailed, bursting into tears. "I am not clear-cutting a forest just to make fake money! Do you know how bad that is for the carbon footprint of Olympus?!"
"There's no carbon footprint yet, we haven't invented cars!" I yelled over the chaos.
"Why is the nectar always gone?" Poseidon complained loudly, shaking his empty waterskin upside down over his mouth. He looked at Hera, completely ignoring her terrifying aura. "You look tense, sister. Have some meat. It's an S-tier drop. Shishishi!"
"Can we just, like, vibe?" Hestia chimed in softly from the campfire, roasting a marshmallow over a blinding, blue-hot ember of compressed solar energy. "Like, what if we just cancel Dad on the timeline? Just post that his vibes are rancid?"
"I SWEAR TO THE FATES, I WILL CRUSH YOU ALL INTO A SINGULARITY!" Hera screamed.
A dome of terrifying, absolute gravity slammed down onto the table, cracking the polished ironwood in half. Demeter shrieked and threw her hands up, instinctively summoning a massive, thorny barricade between herself and the fighting. Hades calmly stepped into the shadow of his own clipboard, vanishing from the blast radius, while Poseidon just kept chewing his meat, letting his body turn to water so the gravity just harmlessly rippled through him.
"Okay, stop! Pause the game! Time out!" I yelled, firing a warning shot of blue lightning straight up into the sky. CRACK. The thunder echoed over the peak. They all froze. Hera was panting, glaring daggers at everyone. Poseidon was picking his teeth with a fishbone. Demeter was crying over the broken table, and Hades rematerialized, still holding his pitch-black clipboard, looking incredibly disappointed that we weren't doing the OSHA inspection.
"Okay, reality check," I sighed, dropping the piece of slate. "Kronos doesn't have a stock market, they don't care about OSHA, and Hera is about five seconds away from team-killing us."
Hera crossed her arms, her chin held high. "At least the idiot has some situational awareness."
"Look at us," I continued, gesturing to the ruined camp. "We have insane stats, but our gear is trash. You're all fighting in acid-burned rags. Poseidon is trying to fight with a pork bone. Hades is using arts and crafts logic to murder people. If we go down there now, we get wiped."
Poseidon tilted his head, adjusting his straw hat. "So what is the play, Captain?"
"We need a raid-tier armory," I said, slamming my fist into my palm. "We need divine conduits to channel our mana output so we don't blow ourselves up. The only people who can forge weapons that strong are locked in the deepest, most heavily guarded maximum-security prison in the universe."
Hades' eyes lit up again, tossing the shadow-clipboard away. "A stealth mission into a dark prison?"
"Yes," I grinned. "We're going to Tartarus. We're breaking out the Elder Cyclopes. Let's go get some legendary loot."
"Alright, gather around the map," I said, using my charred stick to draw a crude, multi-layered pit in the frost covering the plateau. "Welcome to Tartarus. The ultimate maximum-security black site. It's located in the deepest, most un-renderable sub-basement of the universe. The lighting is terrible, the toxic debuffs are constant, and there is no fast-travel point."
Poseidon squatted next to the drawing, chewing on the last remnants of his boar bone. "Sounds like a dreary port of call, mate. Who's the harbormaster?"
"The warden," I explained, tapping the center of the pit. "Her name is Kampe. She is a massive, draconic centipede-woman with fifty venomous scorpion tails and a waist made of screaming, mutating beast heads. She is a max-level raid boss with a 360-degree field of vision and a lethal AoE poison attack."
Demeter immediately whimpered, pulling her leafy shawl tighter around her shoulders. "I don't like bugs. Especially not bugs with fifty tails."
"Nobody likes bugs, Demeter, that's why we need a flawless infiltration strategy," I said, wiping my hands. "We cannot fight her head-on. She has too much HP. We need stealth. Pure, unadulterated espionage."
I turned to Demeter. "I need you to grow a hollow, wooden cube. About five feet tall. Light enough to carry."
Demeter blinked, but dutifully placed her hands on the ground. A smooth, perfectly square box of thin ironwood sprouted from the bedrock.
"Behold," I declared, slapping the top of the box. "The ultimate stealth tech. The Solid Snake Maneuver."
Hera stared at the box. She stared at me. She rubbed her temples as if trying to massage a tumor out of her brain. "It is a wooden crate."
"It is an invisibility cloak made of psychology," I corrected her. "Kampe is looking for glowing, majestic gods. She isn't looking for a box. Hades and I will crouch under this box. We will slowly, imperceptibly crawl across the floor of Tartarus. If she looks our way, we stop moving. To her, we are just a misplaced piece of Amazon delivery cargo."
Hades stood up from the shadows, approaching the wooden crate with profound, hushed reverence. He ran a pale hand over the smooth wood.
"A mobile domain of absolute darkness..." Hades whispered, his black eyes widening in realization. "A portable abyss. Ingenious. When the beast looks upon it, she perceives only a mundane shape, entirely unaware of the doom lurking within. I shall carve eye-holes of malice into the front, so that the void may gaze back at her."
"Exactly, bro! You get it!" I high-fived him. Hades didn't know what a high-five was, so he just let me slap his freezing, pale hand while maintaining intense eye contact with the box.
"I am going to throw myself off this mountain," Hera announced, her voice completely dead. "You are the God of the Sky. You literally emit sparks of lightning when you sneeze. They will not see a 'portable abyss.' They will see a glowing, sparking, buzzing wooden box slowly creeping across a flat floor!"
Poseidon stood up, tossing his bone over the cliff. "The Queen makes a fair point, Captain. A box is coward's work. A true pirate walks through the front door. We use the Trojan Pizza strategy!"
"The what?" I asked.
"We walk right up to this bug-lady," Poseidon said, adjusting his woven straw hat with a swaggering grin. "We say, 'Parley!' We tell her we are the local Uber Eats delivery merchants, bringing a massive feast of roasted meat to apologize for the inconvenience of our existence. She drops the gates to take the meat, and boom! We liberate the prisoners. Shishishi! Savvy?"
"She is a primordial horror that guards the deepest pit in hell!" Hera screamed, her composure finally shattering. "She does not want a pizza! She does not know what an Uber Eat is!"
"We could wear the skin of the guards," Hades suggested completely casually, still inspecting his beloved box. "We assassinate the perimeter patrols, hollow out their flesh, and wear them like suits to bypass the biometric scanners."
"Whoa, okay, dial it back, Edgelord," I said, putting my hands up. "There are no guards. It's just Kampe. And we are not wearing anyone's skin, that violates the game's Terms of Service."
"Like, what if we just ask her nicely?" Hestia offered, stirring her campfire. "Maybe she hates her job. Being a warden is probably super toxic for her mental health. We could offer her a severance package."
"Okay, look, as much as I love the idea of unionizing the monsters of Tartarus, we are overthinking this," I said, kicking the box aside. Hades let out a soft noise of disappointment as his box tumbled away.
"If we can't sneak past her, we have to manipulate the aggro," I explained, drawing two circles on the slate. "In every MMO raid, you need a Tank. Someone whose entire job is to be incredibly loud, obnoxious, and impossible to kill, drawing the boss's attention away from the DPS and the objective."
I slowly turned to look at Poseidon.
Poseidon blinked. He pointed a thumb at his own chest. "Ah. You want me to be the bait."
"Not bait, brother," I said, walking over and putting a hand on his shoulder. "The Main Character. Kampe is going to see you, and she is going to throw everything she has at you. You don't fight her. You just kite her. You run in circles, you yell insults, you use your water-armor auto-parry, and you stay alive. You make a grand, nautical distraction."
A massive, terrifying grin slowly spread across Poseidon's face. The idea of being the center of attention while causing absolute, unmitigated chaos appealed to his very soul.
"A grand distraction," Poseidon chuckled, cracking his knuckles, the sound echoing like shifting tectonic plates. "I shall mock her very existence. I will be the most annoying force in the cosmos."
"That shouldn't require much acting," Hera muttered.
"While she is chasing Poseidon around the arena," I continued, ignoring Hera, "Hades and I will shadow-step into the cell block. Hades picks the locks, I break the chains. We grab the Cyclopes, and we exfil immediately."
"And what of me?" Hera demanded, crossing her arms. "Do I just sit here and wait for you boys to inevitably botch the operation?"
"You are our aerial overwatch and crowd-control," I told her. "If Poseidon gets pinned, or Kampe tries to block the exit, you drop the atmospheric pressure. You hit her with a localized gravity dome and pin her to the floor long enough for us to sprint out."
Hera raised an eyebrow, a slight, wicked smirk finally breaking through her exhausted annoyance. "So... I get to crush the oversized bug with the sheer weight of my superiority?"
"Exactly," I grinned.
"Acceptable," she nodded, her golden eyes flashing.
"What about us?" Demeter asked, hugging Hestia tightly.
"You two are the base camp," I said. "Demeter, grow the thickest, most heavily fortified bramble fortress you can right here on the peak. Hestia, keep the fire burning so we have a beacon to return to. When we come back, we are going to have giant blacksmiths with us, and we are going to need a safe zone to forge the weapons."
I looked around the circle. Poseidon was practically vibrating with excitement, ready to throw hands with a giant bug. Hades was polishing his shadow-dagger, looking like a professional hitman. Hera was exuding an aura of absolute, crushing readiness.
For a bunch of traumatized kids who were stuck in a stomach, they looked terrifying.
"Alright, squad," I said, the blue lightning flaring to life across my skin, my eyes glowing like twin supernovas in the evening light. "Check your gear. Buff up. It's time to dive the dungeon."
Poseidon tipped his straw hat down, a massive, unhinged smile on his face.
"Sixxxxx..." Poseidon whispered, testing out the battle cry I had taught him yesterday.
"Don't you dare," Hera warned him.
"Seeeveeennnnn!" Poseidon roared, leaping off the edge of the mountain and plummeting straight down into the abyssal darkness of the underworld.
"He forgot to equip a parachute," Hades noted drily, watching him fall.
"He's a water god, he'll just turn into a puddle," I sighed, walking to the edge. "Come on. Let's go get our loot."