The walls of Athens rose from the plain like a wounded beast massive, ancient, but bleeding from a thousand cuts. Adrestus had imagined the city a hundred times, drawing from memories of another life, from the stories of merchants and travelers. But nothing had prepared him for the reality. The outer gates had been breached in three places, the stonework shattered by cyclopes or siege magic. Makeshift barricades of overturned carts and broken pillars choked the streets. And everywhere, everywhere, there was the smell.
Not smoke. Not blood. Something worse. A sweet, cloying stench that clung to the back of the throat and made the eyes water. The smell of a plague.
Skotadi landed on a rooftop near the western gate. Adrestus slid from her back and looked out over the city. What he saw turned his stomach.
The dead lay in the streets. Not the clean dead of battle—warriors with swords in their chests—but the ugly, swollen dead of disease. Their skin was blotched with black and purple. Their fingers were curled into claws. Flies crawled over their open eyes. And the living moved among them like ghosts, their faces pale, their eyes hollow, dragging the bodies to pyres that burned day and night.
Ares's plague. The god of war did not only send armies. He sent pestilence, fear, despair. He broke cities from within so that his monsters could feast on the remnants.
Adrestus activated his aura sight. The world shifted—colors bled into new hues. The living glowed with faint silver light, their life force flickering like candles in a storm. The dead were dark, empty, cold. And weaving through everything, like black veins in marble, was the plague.
He saw it clearly now: a miasma, a corruption, seeping up from somewhere beneath the city. It pooled in the low places, the courtyards, the cellars. It clung to the living, dimming their silver light, turning it gray. And at the heart of it, somewhere deep in the city's core, was a source—a wound in the earth where the corruption poured out like blood from a cut.
I need to find it, he thought. Cut it off at the source.
He left Skotadi on the rooftop—she would be safe; nothing short of a god would challenge her—and descended into the streets.
---
The city was a labyrinth of suffering. Every alley held a body. Every doorway held a family huddled together, waiting to die. A woman knelt beside her dead husband, her hand on his chest, her lips moving in a prayer that no god answered. A child sat in a puddle of filth, staring at nothing. A priest of Apollo waved a smoking censer, chanting words that had lost their meaning.
Adrestus walked among them, his silver‑blue cloak pulled tight, his helmet tucked under his arm. He wanted to help. He wanted to stop and lift the child, to comfort the woman, to do something. But he knew that saving one would not save the city. He had to find the source.
The aura sight guided him. The black veins thickened as he moved east, toward the Acropolis, toward the Temple of Athena. The silver lights of the living grew dimmer, more scattered. Fewer people moved here. The plague was worse.
And then he saw him.
Kratos stood at the base of the Acropolis steps, his back to Adrestus, his massive frame silhouetted against the smoke. The Blades of Chaos hung at his sides, the chains coiled around his forearms, the blades dripping with something dark—not blood, but the black ichor of the undead. He had been fighting. He was always fighting.
He turned.
Their eyes met. Kratos's face was hard, unreadable, but there was something new in his expression. Not recognition—he had never forgotten Adrestus. Not hatred—that had been burned out by their last encounter. Something closer to acceptance. They were not enemies in this moment. They were two predators moving through the same territory, each with his own prey.
"The Spartan‑Breaker," Kratos said. His voice was flat, devoid of the rage that had fueled their previous battles. "I thought you would come."
"The city is dying," Adrestus replied. "I came to stop it."
Kratos gestured at the Acropolis. "Athena sent me to find the source of the plague. It's somewhere beneath the temple. But Ares's forces guard every entrance. I have been... clearing a path."
Adrestus studied him. The Spartan was different from the man he had fought at Thornwood. The wild fury was still there, buried beneath layers of control, but something else had emerged—a purpose, however hollow. He was serving the gods now, trying to earn forgiveness for the murder of his family. It was a fool's errand, but it gave him direction.
"I'm not here to fight you," Adrestus said.
"Good." Kratos turned and began climbing the steps. "Then follow me, or stay out of my way. I do not care which."
Adrestus followed.
---
The Temple of Athena was not a single building but a complex of shrines, altars, and courtyards spread across the Acropolis. Most of it had been defiled by Ares's forces—statues toppled, sacred fires extinguished, priests and priestesses slaughtered. But the heart of the temple, the inner sanctum where Athena's statue stood, remained intact. A golden glow pulsed from within, faint but steady.
The source of the plague was not there. It was below.
Kratos led him to a collapsed stairwell behind the main altar. The stone steps descended into darkness, and the black veins of the miasma thickened with every step. Adrestus's aura sight showed him the corruption coiling like serpents around the walls, the ceiling, the floor. It was alive, hungry.
"Here," Kratos said. "The entrance to the catacombs. Ares's creatures have nested inside. I will kill them. You find the source and destroy it."
"You're giving me orders?"
Kratos looked at him. The firelight from the altar above cast half his face in shadow. "I am telling you what I will do. What you do is your own affair."
He descended into the darkness, the Blades scraping against the stone. Adrestus followed, his hand on Aetos Pheme, the red lightning flickering along the blade.
The catacombs were a maze of tunnels and chambers, some natural, some carved by human hands centuries ago. The miasma was thickest here, so dense that Adrestus could taste it on his tongue—copper and rot and something sweet, like overripe fruit. The silver lights of the living were absent. Only the black remained.
They found the first nest in a chamber that had once been an ossuary, its walls lined with skulls and bones. A group of undead—not the dry skeletons of the surface, but bloated, rotting corpses animated by the plague—turned toward them with jerky, unnatural movements. Their eyes were black, their mouths open in silent screams.
Kratos attacked without a word. The Blades whipped through the air, severing heads, cleaving torsos, scattering limbs. Adrestus moved to his left, covering his flank, his spear thrusting into the chest of a corpse that had gotten too close. The red lightning burned through the rot, and the creature crumbled to ash.
They fought side by side. Not trusting each other, not speaking, but fighting. The rhythm was strange—Kratos's brutal power, Adrestus's precise speed—but it worked. The undead fell before them.
Deeper. The miasma grew thicker, darker. The walls pulsed with black veins, and the air was so heavy that Adrestus felt it pressing against his lungs.
And then they found it.
A well. Ancient, circular, lined with stones that had been carved with symbols of binding and warding. The symbols had been cracked, broken, defaced by Ares's hand. And from the well, the plague poured—a black mist that rose like steam, curling into the air, seeping through the cracks in the stone.
"The source," Adrestus said.
Kratos looked at the well. His face was unreadable. "Then destroy it."
Adrestus stepped forward. The red lightning gathered in his palm, crackling, hungry. He reached into the well and touched the black mist.
The pain was immediate. The plague tried to infect him, to crawl up his arm, to burrow into his blood. But the red lightning burned it. His aura—his life force—rejected the corruption. He pushed deeper, his hand closing around something solid at the bottom of the well. A shard of black metal, jagged, pulsing with the same dark energy as the mist.
Ares's weapon. A fragment of his power, planted here to poison the city.
Adrestus pulled it out.
The black shard screamed—a sound that was not a sound, a vibration that shook the walls, that cracked the stones, that sent the undead in the catacombs into a frenzy. Kratos cut down three that tried to reach them.
"Destroy it now!" the Spartan roared.
Adrestus did not hesitate. He crushed the shard in his fist, pouring every ounce of red lightning into it. The black metal cracked, shattered, turned to dust. The plague mist recoiled, writhed, and began to dissipate.
The walls stopped pulsing. The air grew lighter. The weight on his lungs lifted.
It was done.
Adrestus opened his hand. The dust of the shard fell to the floor, harmless now. His palm was burned, blackened, but the red lightning was already healing it.
Kratos stared at him. "You took the plague into your hand."
"I burned it out."
"You could have died."
Adrestus looked at the Spartan. "So could everyone in this city. It was worth the risk."
For a long moment, Kratos said nothing. Then he turned and walked back toward the surface, the Blades scraping against the stone.
Adrestus followed. When they emerged into the temple, the golden glow of Athena's statue seemed brighter. The plague was receding. The people of Athens would live.
Kratos did not look back. He had his mission—to find Pandora's Temple, to kill Ares. He did not care about the city he had saved.
Adrestus watched him go, then turned toward the streets, toward the survivors, toward the long work of rebuilding.
The plague was gone. But the war was far from over.
---
End of Chapter 28