THEOS

Unease built up inside him, as the hot, glassy sand crunched under his feet with every step he took. Once again reminding him how ridiculous the world of gods was. To think someone he had been traveling with for the better part of three days was carrying around enough explosives to level a town, and the means to survive such an event from within. It was sobering.

It was one thing to know that gods and other more powerful people could erase his existence, whenever they desired it, and that he was largely helpless to the whims of the more powerful. It was another, to know that their descendants, or anyone with a certain connection, could take his life by simply tearing a perforated tab off of a paper.

He sighed deeply. Shaking the thoughts from his head. Lukeus, Nel, Cyzicus, Rex, they were all good people, despite the power they possessed.

An image of Jax, impaled clean through by a spear covered in lightning, flashed in his mind.

But that didn’t mean they wouldn't kill him. He sighed again.

Don’t go down that rabbit hole Luke. He told himself. That way is a life lived alone with no friends. What happened to Jax sucked. Actually, that’s an understatement. But it was also a result of an alarming number of things going wrong. How was Jax supposed to know his clan had betrayed Cyzicus? Or that they would be monitoring his movements as he approached his own home with alarming speed.

Focus on the now.

“You alright?” Luke asked Lukeus. Idly inspecting him for wounds, he nodded approvingly, when he found none. As violent as the explosion was, he wasn’t sure if the other cultivator had been far enough for the talisman to protect him completely.

“Not a scratch.” He dusted off his robes, and turned to the charred remains of his chariot with a frown on his face. The protective talisman he had activated had not covered all of it, and all that remained of it was stray bits of wood, along with a small number of their provisions that had fallen out. A few jugs of water, and some jerky. “The defenses built into it broke most of my fall, and the talisman worked fine.” He frowned as he knelt beside Nutbutter.

The chestnut pegasus neighed pathetically on the ground. Its wings were mangled, its hind covered in scratches, and its legs contorted in awkward, unnatural, angles.

The chariot probably crashed into him when it went down. Luke winced in sympathy.

“Do you have any potions with you Rex, or were they all in the chariot?” Lukeus asked, combing his hands through its fur.

“Chariot.”

“Shit.” He muttered under his breath.

“Here. I have some of my own” Luke pretended to reach into his robes, and retrieved a Warrior-tier potion from his inventory. He had nicked a bunch of them from Sophia’s lair. She had left them, presumably so they had something to heal injuries with. Not that any of them had suffered any.

“Thanks.” He said. “Open up Nutbutter, this will make you all better okay?” He cooed, lightly scratching her chin. The pegasus did as he instructed, and he poured the liquid down its throat.

They watched intently, as its wounds slowly sealed over, and its wings partially mended themselves.

“Do you have more?”

“Yeah.” Luke once again pretended to reach into his robes, and produced another potion. Carefully ignoring the odd look Rex gave him, and pretending that nothing was out of the ordinary.

The robes were baggy enough, and their material thick enough that they could reasonably hold a couple of the tiny glass vials without it being obvious, and Luke would hold to that story.

And knowing Rex, he’s more inclined to think that that I’m hiding being a Warrior than I am secretly having a Primordial-tier artifact implanted in my soul that comes in with a built in storage spac.

If I can actually go ahead and break through in the next few weeks or days, then that would be even better. I really don’t care if he thinks I broke through a week or two earlier than I actually did. Unlike Yjarn, Cyzicus and the people here seem to know enough about how people usually cultivate faster, and they aren’t tempted by it.

Hell, they’re probably looking down on me, thinking that I cultivated manually with all the mana that was in the sheep milk, and didn’t let my body deal with the mana naturally. Which, honestly, I’m okay with. Being seen as less of a prodigy, isn’t terrible.

“He won’t be able to fly anymore.” Lukeus announced, climbing back onto his feet.

“Like ever?” Luke frowned.

“What? No! He’ll be fine eventually. He just needs time to recover. A few weeks at minimum”

“What now then?” Rex asked.

Luke looked to the sky, and used the suns to reorient himself. Pulling the map he had drawn, out of his pocket, he unfurled it between them.

“We’re a day’s walk away from him, and we still have a few days left until the deadline I got runs out. Why don’t we get out of this charred area, and set up camp. Take some time to catch our breath, and we’ll leave tomorrow morning.”

Rex shrugged.

“A little rest will be good for Nutbutter. We’ll have to carry him though. I don’t want him putting weight on his legs yet.”

Luke furrowed his eyebrows as he looked between the brothers and the giant pegasus. Lifting it wasn’t going to be difficult considering their strength, but it was a horse the size of an elephant. There wasn’t exactly a good or comfortable way to carry it.

Rex started to strip out of his clothes.

Wha— Why am I even surprised. Luke pinched his eyebrows, and mentally prepared himself for another round of insanity and wondering what exactly had driven Rex to do what he was doing.

“What are you taking off your clothes?” Lukeus asked before Luke could.

“We have to lift him somehow. We can use our hands, or we can make a… satchel,” he shrugged at his uncertain word choice. “Yeah, a satchel to carry him in. If we tie all three of our robes together, we should have enough material. It should be easier that way.”

“You're right.” Lukeus nodded, and began stripping out of his own clothes.

“You know what. I wasn’t really thinking when I suggested we move out of the charred area. It’ll be a lot easier if we just made camp here. This bit of desert is just as good as that bit of desert.”

“No you had it right the first time. Let’s not get lazy now.” They both laid their robes on the ground, and began tying them together. Emptying their pockets, and storing their belongings into their pants.

“I really don’t think this is necessary.”

“Take off your robe.” Lukeus insisted.

This can’t be for real. Luke thought to himself. Seeing the look in his eyes though, he decided it wasn’t worth the energy arguing against them.

Shrugging out of his robe, he tossed it to them. “Happy.”

“Yes.” Rex said.

“Was there anything else in the cave, besides the ring and the egg?” Luke asked, later that evening. They sat huddled together around a fire, built from the remains of Lukeus’s chariot.

“No.” Rex shook his head. Inspecting the egg in the orange light of the flame, wondering how he was going to hatch it. “There was this sitting on a pile of raised sand, and the ring was next to it.”

“Speaking of that.” Lukeus frowned as he looked at the egg. “Don’t hatch it without talking to Gramps first. There’s a reason he killed all of them. We needed a Hero-tier talisman to get rid of one of its kind at the Mortal-tier. The damage one of those could do at the Warrior-tier or the gods forbid Hero-tier is devastating. Demons aren’t like normal animals, and our bloodline isn’t infalible. We don’t enslave animals, if it's not happy being bonded to you, it will break free.” He warned.

“I won’t.” He nodded, and placed it into the sand beside him.

“Good.”

“Can I see the ring?” Luke asked, extending his hand out. Doing his best to suppress the urge to throw the egg straight into the fire. If he never saw such a horrifying creature again in his life, he would die a happy man. As it stood though, now wasn’t the time to try and convince him.

“Sure.” Rex handed it over. “You won’t be able to get into it though. I’ve tried already. My mana can’t touch it.”

Lukeus palmed his forehead. “You idiot. That ring belongs to the child of a god, Why were you trying to get into it? Do you have any idea of the types of protections it could have? Even Nel’s ring shocks you when you mess around with it, why did you think his ring would be any less dangerous?.”

Rex blushed scarlet, but didn’t say anything.

“I thought mortals couldn’t use storage rings, can we?” Luke asked, as he turned it over in his hand. For something belonging to a god’s child, it looked rather simple. All it appeared to be was band made of a dull gray metal. It didn’t even have any runes etched onto it, and if it weren't for the letters floating above it in his vision, Luke wouldn't even know there was anything special about it.

Lukeus shrugged. “You can look inside them normally, but every ring is a Hero-tier item. At minimum. We don’t have mana dense enough to use most items crafted at that tier properly. Even ones that are specifically designed to be used by mortals aren’t that great at it.”

Luke listened to his explanation with half an ear, not really paying attention. He had a better way of learning about objects.

What if–

He closed his hands around it and reached out to the Seed, and tried to move it to his inventory. Curious to see what the Seed had to say about it.

It didn’t go in.

That’s new. Luke scratched his chin thoughtfully. Glancing at Lukeus, he ignored his warning, and tried to touch it with his mana. Nothing.

Huh.

“Alright. Let me see it too.” Lukeus held his hands out.

Luke flicked it to him.

They woke early the next morning, before the suns had even risen. None of them had slept well in the arid cold of the desert.

Being at the peak of the mortal tier, it seemed, didn’t mean that the sand suddenly felt good against your skin, or that it was any easier falling asleep in a foreign environment.

I’m better off than those two at least. Luke grinned internally. His eyes lingering on their feet, they sank into the sand with every step they took, while he walked comfortably and smugly in the air. All the while, summoning small morsels of food and cold water into his mouth, as he lugged Nutbutter from behind the other two in a triangular formation.

Sweat glistened off their bare backs, as they carried the creature through the desert in a hammock fashioned from their robes. The pegasus could walk now, but not without a limp. Which to Lukeus was enough of a reason to not make it walk at all and its wings were still too weak to support them in flight.

With four days still on the counter, and Heracles only hours away, Luke found that he didn’t mind the extra night they had to camp out in the desert. Especially not when it meant that they would get to him in the early hours of the morning the next day, and not in the dead of night.

Like with Sophia, they heard him before they saw him. Grunts of exertion, the whooshing of a weapon displacing the air, and the wet noise the weapon made when it struck flesh.

“Stay here.” Lukeus said to Rex, as he and Luke gently lowered Nutbetter down into the sand, before taking off in a dead sprint towards the noise. They came to a quick stop, as the desert suddenly gave way to a cliff, at the bottom of which, a war played out between one man with a club and an army of giants.