Commission:Ganymede and the triple H alliance: Chapter 2.3: The Conversation that is War

Ares fell.

Not descended. Not dropped. Fell akin to icarus.

The air around him screamed. It burned, ignited by the speed of his passage, his armor glowing white-hot as something invisible compressed and caught fire, trailing behind him like a comet's tail. The sound came after, a thunderclap so massive it was less noise than pressure, a force that flattened everything below in an expanding cone. Corpses simply ceased to exist in his path, not scattered but erased, turned to red mist and fragments too small to name. The rivers of blood below boiled before he even reached them, steam erupting upward in columns that met his descent and were instantly cooked into vapor that glowed with heat.

His spear led the way, bronze point gleaming, angled perfectly for his mother's heart.

The distance between them collapsed in less than a heartbeat. Ground and air and space itself seemed to compress, reality straining, buckling, threatening to tear under the velocity, under the divine will channeled into a single strike that carried the weight of every battle ever fought, every warrior's desperate killing blow, every last stand where men threw everything into one final, perfect thrust.

The tip of his spear met the flat of his mother's sheathed blade.

The point of contact became briefly the center of everything. Light bent wrong around it, drawn inward like water circling a drain. Then the force had to go somewhere, had nowhere else to go, and reality stopped trying to contain it.

The blast erupted outward in a perfect sphere. It hit the piled corpses and they exploded into pieces, bone shards and armor fragments and meat reduced to pulp, all launched outward in a circle that carved flat everything for distances that stretched beyond sight. The blood-rivers didn't splash or spray. They detonated, became fine mist that hung in the air as red fog, every droplet suspended for one frozen moment before being blasted away by the second wave of pressure. The ground itself rippled like water, circles of force moving outward, each one lifting entire mountains of the dead and smashing them flat again, grinding them finer with each pass.

The red sky flickered and dimmed, its eternal crimson pulse stuttering like a heart in shock. The blood moon overhead actually moved, nudged fractionally by the sheer force transmitted through whatever passed for air in this realm, its swollen face developing cracks, fissures of brighter red light showing through like wounds in its surface.

When the world stopped trying to shake itself apart, when the sound finally faded from overwhelming roar to merely deafening rumble to aching silence, Ares hung suspended there, spear locked against his mother's blade, every muscle in his divine body straining, armor joints creaking, groaning under the pressure, feet dangling above a crater that had been ground zero for their meeting.

Hera was smiling.

Not a polite smile, not a cruel smile, not even the cold, empty expression she'd been wearing. This was something else entirely. Lips pulled back too far, teeth showing, white and perfect and wrong. Eyes too bright, too wide, the expression cycling through all three faces in perfect time so that child and maiden and crone all wore identical grins of pure, manic delight. Her whole body practically vibrated with barely contained energy, with joy, with something that looked disturbingly like the happiness of a child receiving exactly the gift they'd wanted.

"Finally!" she said, and all three voices harmonized perfectly into genuine, giddy excitement.

"You've gone mad!" Ares screamed, still locked against her blade, still pouring every ounce of divine strength into pushing forward, into driving his spear through that insufferable smile. "MAD!"

"I have gone right!" she screamed back, the smile never wavering, never diminishing, only growing wider, wilder, more terrible in its genuine pleasure.

Then her leg came up.

Ares saw it coming, barely, she was so fast, but couldn't disengage, couldn't pull back, was committed to the spear thrust, had nowhere to go. Her bare foot, somehow pristine despite the gore coating everything else, planted against the center of his breastplate with perfect precision.

She kicked.

His armor didn't just dent. The bronze folded, creased inward around the point of impact like cloth, divine metalwork that could withstand giants and titans just giving up, unable to maintain its shape. His ribs beneath, divine ribs that were as much concept as bone, snapped. He felt them break, felt the wrongness propagate through his essence, and then he was moving.

The world became a blur of red and black. His arms flung outward from the force, spear torn from his grip, shield ripped away by resistance that felt like hitting stone walls in rapid succession. Corpse-mountains that had stood dozens of body-lengths tall simply exploded as he passed through them, his passage creating a tunnel that filled with atomized flesh and bone dust and blood spray in his wake. The ones he only clipped, struck glancingly with his tumbling body, launched sideways, arcing through the air like siege projectiles, trailing bits of themselves, before crashing down far beyond sight.

His feet, when they finally caught ground, dug trenches. Deep trenches. Furrows that could have held rivers, channels carved through the blood-soaked earth, through compressed layers of bodies laid down like sediment, and his armored boots just tore through it all, mulching everything, leaving behind gouges that immediately flooded with blood, becoming instant rivers that fed back into the greater circulation of gore.

He managed to slow himself, to dig in harder, to arrest his momentum.

Hera was already there.

Not running. Not flying. Skating. Her bare feet, child feet, maiden feet, crone feet, impossible to track which, glided across the blood's surface like ice, leaving not even ripples, the liquid supporting her weight without question, without resistance, simply accepting that she wished to move this way and accommodating. She closed the distance faster than he could process, faster than he could raise his guard, and then her scabbarded blade was already swinging for his head.

He summoned back his weapons and got his spear up. Barely. The impact sent vibrations down the shaft hard enough that the bronze sang, a perfect note that cut through the air like an a wailing sound of agony. He pivoted on his heel, reversing his grip, spinning the spear in a tight arc aimed for her midsection, a disemboweling strike.

She wasn't there.

Hera had twisted, body moving in ways that seemed to dislocate every joint at once, flowing around the strike rather than away from it, and her hand shot out, fingers closing around the spear's shaft just behind the head. She pulled. Not gently. The angle said he should have been able to resist, should have been able to plant his feet and counter, use his greater mass.

Instead, Ares lurched forward, yanked off balance, armor suddenly feeling like a liability as its weight worked against him. His face passed within striking range and Hera's free hand came around in a blur, palm open, the slap connecting with his cheek with a sound like wood splitting.

His head snapped sideways. Stars burst across his vision. The taste of ichor filled his mouth, golden and bitter and wrong. He'd bitten through his own cheek.

Rage surged through the pain. He swung his shield around in a wide arc, all technique abandoned, just wanting to smash that smiling face, to wipe that expression away with bronze and force and the satisfaction of impact.

The shield hit something hard.

Hera's forehead.

She'd headbutted his shield. Not blocked it, not deflected it, not even really braced against it. Just slammed her head forward into the oncoming bronze like it was the most natural thing in the world, and now she was the one pushing, her skull against his shield, and he was going backward, feet sliding through the muck, losing ground.

That smile never left her face. If anything, it grew wider.

Ares roared and exploded into motion properly, muscle memory and divine training taking over from shock and fear. The spear became a blur in his hands, spinning and striking and thrusting in combinations that had no names because they moved too fast for naming, each strike carrying enough force that the pressure alone pulverized whatever corpses still remained nearby. 

Thrust, withdraw, spin, slash, reverse, thrust, overhead, sweep. 

The patterns flowed like water, etched into his essence across ages of warfare, each movement faster than thought, each one capable of punching through fortress walls, of turning stone to gravel, of reducing armies to paste.

Hera dodged.

Simply dodged. Didn't block, didn't parry, didn't meet force with force. Just moved, body flowing between his strikes like smoke, like shadow, sometimes by margins so thin he felt the air from his spear's passage brush her skin, sometimes by wider distances that somehow felt more insulting, like she was giving him space out of boredom rather than necessity.

His spear thrust for her heart. She leaned back, spine bending in a curve that should have toppled her, and the point passed a hair's breadth from her chest. Before he could recover, before he could even register the miss, her fist crashed into his face.

His head rocked back. Blood, ichor, golden and divine and wrong because it shouldn't be outside his body, sprayed from his nose, droplets catching the red moonlight, hanging in the air like suspended gems before splashing down into the greater ocean of blood below.

He swung low, spear aimed for her ankles, a sweeping cut meant to take her legs. Hera didn't jump. She stepped, one foot planting on the spear's shaft mid-swing, using it like a stepping stone, and her body flipped forward, a rotation so perfect it seemed planned, rehearsed, and her heel came down on his helm as she passed over him.

The bronze crumpled. Partially. Enough that his ears rang and his vision went gray at the edges and he tasted ich.

 She'd landed behind him, touched down light as a dancer, and by the time he spun to face her she was already moving again, already inside his guard, scabbarded blade striking his solar plexus with pinpoint accuracy.

The air left his lungs. He swung wild, desperate, shield coming around. She ducked under it, hand shooting up to grab its rim, and then she was pivoting, using his own shield as leverage to swing herself around, legs whipping through the air, one foot catching him in the temple.

Everything spun.

When his vision cleared, how much time had passed?, she was standing on his spear. Not near it. On it. One bare foot planted on the shaft where it lay on the ground, her weight pinning it, the whole posture radiating such casual disrespect that it hurt worse than the blows.

She was laughing. All three voices, pealing and bright and utterly delighted, the sound of someone having the time of their life.

"Enough!" Ares screamed, and something deep inside him, some core of divine power he'd been holding in reserve, cut loose. "Enough is enough!"

He swung his shield. Not at her, not with any technique, just a wild, desperate, furious swing with every piece of strength he possessed, with power he'd never fully unleashed before because there'd never been need, because most opponents shattered under a fraction of this force.

The shield's edge caught empty air where she'd been standing a moment before and the force had to go somewhere. It moved outward in a visible wave, a ripple in reality itself, and when it hit the ground the realm screamed.

Fissures opened. Not small cracks but genuine chasms, wide enough to swallow temples, deep enough that no bottom was visible even with divine sight, spreading outward in patterns like a spider's web that covered the horizon. Corpse-mountains collapsed into these new rifts, entire ranges of the dead simply disappearing into the hungry dark. The blood-rivers changed course, cascading into the chasms in waterfalls that dwarfed anything in the mortal world, the roar of their falling audible even over the continued rumbling of the disintegrating ground.

The red sky actually tore, rents appearing in it like fabric under stress, showing something beyond, not darkness, not void, but something else, something that hurt to perceive, colors that weren't colors, shapes that wouldn't resolve properly.

When the devastation finally settled, when the realm stopped collapsing, Hera stood perhaps thirty body-lengths away. Not far. Not nearly far enough. She'd been pushed back, had yielded ground for the first time in this entire exchange.

She looked down at her feet, at the small distance she'd been forced to retreat, at the trenches his strike had carved between them.

Then she looked up at him, smile never wavering.

"What's the problem?" she asked, tilting her head in a gesture that would have been cute on the child-face, coquettish on the maiden-face, and deeply unsettling on the crone-face. All three expressions cycled through the motion at once. "You said you wanted to have a conversation, and what other kind of conversation can War have other than one with weapons and blood?"

"You call this a conversation?!" Ares spat the words, ichor dripping from his lips, one hand clutching his ribs where they'd been caved in, still not healing.

"I am barely using my physical strength," Hera said, conversational, pleasant, like they were discussing weather over wine. "I am not using any of my domains against you. Had I done so, there would be nothing left of you. So yes, this is conversation, Ares."

She took a step forward. Just one. But something about it carried weight, finality, promise.

"And if you want this conversation to continue, you should really show me a better showing before I become bored."

The words hit like physical blows.

Barely using her strength. Not using her domains. Not even trying.

And she could end him. Really end him, true death, mortality forced upon immortality, the impossible made inevitable. He'd seen Hermes' scar. He felt his own wounds refusing to close. She could do it. She would do it, if he didn't give her reason to keep playing with him.

Terror crystallized into something sharp and cold in Ares' chest. Terror mixed with rage, with humiliation, with desperate animal survival instinct. He'd come here to talk. To understand. To solve a problem for his father, for Olympus.

Instead he was going to die unless he showed the Queen of Heaven that her son was worth keeping alive for entertainment value.

The realization was acid in his throat, bile and ichor and shame all mixed together.

His only option forward was to reveal everything. Hold nothing back. Show her what the God of War truly was when he stopped pretending to be civilized, stopped playing by rules, stopped being anything other than the living concept of slaughter.

Every deity had domains. This was fundamental, the thing that made gods gods rather than just powerful beings. The naiads, those water spirits, could breathe beneath the waves, move through currents like they were moving through air. Minor sea deities, little more than divine fish, had the same, could command small tides, direct schools, survive the crushing depths. Oceanus, Titan of the World-Ocean, had that and more, could raise storms that drowned islands, could speak to every drop of salt water in creation simultaneously. Poseidon commanded it all, from the water in a cup to the greatest ocean, could reshape coastlines with a thought, could drown the world if the mood struck him. They all shared the domain of water, could breathe it, move through it, control it.

But domains were roots. Deep, fundamental, shared.

Names were branches. Unique, specific, individual.

Names, or authorities, titles, epithets, the words varied but the concept remained, were how gods expressed their domains in ways that were uniquely theirs. A name about beauty could make everything less beautiful bow, could be used to deflect attacks by making them too ugly to touch beauty's bearer. An archer's name granted perfect accuracy across impossible distances, the arrow finding its mark before the bow was even drawn. A name meaning swift-footed let its bearer run on nothing, on air itself, on water that should have given way, on concepts rather than solid ground.

Names were power made specific. Names were domain made personal.

And Ares had many names. Too many to count, accumulated over ages of warfare, given by mortals and gods alike, each one a facet of what War meant, what War was, carved into his divine essence until they were his essence.

He called them forth.

"Miaephonus!" The name burst from his lips like a war cry. Blood-Stained. Bloody. Every surface of his armor darkened, covered in layers of gore that weren't metaphorical, that represented every drop spilled in his name, from the first man who'd brained his brother with a rock to the latest soldier bleeding out in some forgotten field. The blood moved, flowed, lived, coating him in a second skin that made him slippery, untouchable, unable to be grasped or held. Any weapon striking him would slide, would fail to find purchase. Any grip would slip. He became the gore, became the aftermath.

"Chalceus! Chalcocorustes!" Brazen. Of the Bronze. Armed with Bronze. His armor transformed, no longer merely divine metalwork but Bronze itself elevated beyond material. Not metal that could dent or break, but the idea of bronze, the perfect form that all bronze weapons and armor aspired to but never achieved. It sealed over the damage Hera had inflicted, reinforced itself endlessly, drew strength from every bronze implement ever forged for war. His weapons gained the same quality, became Bronze not in substance but in essence, able to cut anything because Bronze meant war, meant killing, and reality accepted this.

"Aatus Polemoio!" Insatiate of Fighting. Insatiate of War. The exhaustion weighing down his limbs vanished. Not healed, not rested, but irrelevant. He could fight forever now, would never tire, never slow, never lose even a fraction of speed or strength to weariness because he was War and War never stopped, never rested, continued until one side or the other ceased to exist.

"Enchespalus!" Spear-Brandishing. His spear, which had been merely an exceptional divine weapon, became The Spear. Not a spear, not his spear, but Spear as concept, as ideal form. Every thrust would be perfect. Every angle would be optimal. Techniques from battles he'd never personally fought downloaded into his muscle memory because they were spear-techniques and therefore were his techniques, belonged to him by right of this name.

"Rhinotorus!" Shield-Piercing. Flesh-Piercing. His weapons gained the property to ignore armor, to treat shields and breastplates and helms as though they weren't there, striking the vulnerable flesh beneath regardless of protection. And his own defenses hardened further, because if he was the piercer then he understood piercing, could feel the angles and force required, could shift just so to turn lethal strikes into glancing blows.

"Oxys!" Sharp. Piercing. Every edge on his body became impossibly sharp, sharp beyond material limits, beyond physical possibility, able to cut anything.

"Polemistes Talaurinus!" He Who Fights Under the Shield's Guard. His shield expanded, not physically but in meaning, creating a zone of protection that extended beyond its physical rim, an area of safety that moved with him, that should  turn aside strikes without him consciously blocking, that should the shield less an object and more a territory he controlled.

"Thoös!" Swift. Fleet. Speed increased beyond his current one, not merely fast but Fast, moving at speeds where each step could cover vast distances.

"Thurus!" Violent. Furious. His strikes would carry more than physical force now. They would carry violence itself.

"Obrimus!" Strong. Mighty. Strength multiplied beyond measure, not merely capable of lifting mountains but of asserting his will against physical law itself, where if he said something would move then it moved, if he said something would break then it broke, strength as authority rather than merely capability.

"Dinus!" Terrible. Fearsome. His presence became weaponized, a pressure that pressed outward, that would make  even some gods hesitate, that would make warriors' hands tremble and plans crumble before implementation.

"Enyalius!" Warlike. The capstone, the synthesis, the name that encompassed all others. He was War. Not a war god, not merely associated with war, but War itself given form and will and purpose.

The names activated in cascade, each one building on the last, and when a deity activated enough of their names simultaneously, when they stopped holding back, stopped pretending to be something manageable and safe, they took on their true form.

Ares' body began to change.

Not growing, not shrinking, but intensifying. His armor fused with his flesh, became indistinguishable from skin, bronze and meat and concept all merged into a single substance that was all three and none of them. His limbs elongated slightly, proportions shifting to be just wrong enough to trigger unease in anything observing, beauty twisted into something that resembled but wasn't. Extra eyes opened across his body, not functional eyes, not seeing, but watching eyes, witnesses to atrocity, the eyes of soldiers staring at horrors they couldn't process, glazed and empty and haunted, dozens of them, hundreds, covering his arms and chest and legs like decorations.

His face split, divided in meaning into aspects. The face warriors showed their enemies, snarling, savage, full of killing intent. The face soldiers wore during the march, tired and resigned and already half-dead. The face of the veteran, scarred and empty and unable to return to peace. The face of the berserker, inhuman and ecstatic in violence. All of them existed at once, flickering, cycling, each one a different version of what War looked like when it had a face.

The blood coating him from Miaephonus began to steam, to burn, the heat of funeral pyres and the stench of rot rising from him in waves. Weapons emerged from his body, not held, not wielded, but growing from him like growths, swords and spears and axes and maces, all the implements of death humanity had invented sprouting from his divine flesh because he was their purpose, their reason for existence, and they belonged to him, with him, as him.

His shadow spread wrong, too large, too dark, and in it played scenes of every battle, every war, every skirmish, tiny figures butchering each other in endless loops, the shadow itself a window into War's true face, into the accumulated horror of ages of conflict.

This was Ares' true form. Not terrible because it was monstrous. Terrible because it was real. Because every ugly piece of it corresponded to something true about war, about violence, about what he represented when the poetry and glory were stripped away and only the screaming and dying remained.

He looked at his mother, this thing that was War wearing approximately a god-shape, and waited for fear, for hesitation, for some acknowledgment that he'd forced her to take him seriously.

Hera looked back. Considered him. Tilted her head thoughtfully.

Then, with deliberate slowness, with ceremony that somehow made the gesture worse, she reached for her sword.

Her fingers wrapped around the hilt. She drew.

What emerged from the scabbard wasn't a blade. Wasn't metal. It was blood. Golden blood. Ichor, divine and luminous and wrong, pouring from the scabbard's mouth like a wound in reality, like the sheath had been holding back an injury rather than containing a weapon. The blood poured out, more than should have fit in the scabbard, more than should have been able to exist in a single space, thick and bright and moving with terrible purpose.

It formed into a blade shape, roughly, approximately, the blood holding together through something beyond surface tension, beyond divine will, but the edges weren't clean, weren't solid, were constantly dripping, constantly replenishing themselves, the weapon both liquid and solid and neither.

Where the blood-blade passed, the air itself died. Not exploded, not burned, just died, went stale and gray and empty, as though the weapon was bleeding reality itself, draining vitality from everything nearby. The red sky overhead dimmed further, drained of color, of vibrancy. The blood-rivers on the ground began to flow toward her, drawn by connection, like calling to like, all blood in the realm responding to the presence of this blood made weapon, this weapon made blood.

Hera held it loosely, one hand, the weapon dripping golden ichor that splashed onto the ground and didn't just pool but spread, crawling outward like something alive, like something seeking.

Her smile had never left. If anything, it widened further.

"Finally," she said, the same word as before, but with different weight now, different meaning. Not 'finally you're taking this seriously.' Instead: 'finally I can stop holding back even this much.'

Ares moved first because hesitating  meant acknowledging fear, meant surrender.

He crossed the distance in a fraction of instant, speed from Thoös making the ground blur beneath his feet, strength from Obrimus channeled into a spear-thrust that carried force enough to crack mountains, delivered with perfect precision from Enchespalus, aimed for her heart.

The spear met the blood-blade with a sound like breaking worlds.

Force rippled outward, visible bending in space itself, tearing through the corpse-piles, through the ground, through the realm itself. New chasms opened. Old ones widened. The sky's tears spread further, showing more of that impossible nothing beyond.

They broke apart and came together again, again, again, each clash another devastation, another wound carved into the realm's fabric. Ares struck high, blocked. Low, parried. Feinted left and struck right, she was already there, blade moving to intercept before he'd committed to the real strike, like she could read his intentions before he fully formed them.

His shield came up to block a counter-strike and the blood-blade hit it, not with clean impact but with a splash, with spray, and wherever the golden ichor touched his blessed bronze it hissed, ate through the metal like acid, left smoking holes that widened even after the blade had withdrawn.

He pivoted, spear spinning in complex patterns from Enchespalus, twelve strikes in the space of one breath, each one from a different angle, each one fatal, each one perfect.

She weaved through them all. Didn't block, didn't parry, just moved, body flowing like water, like smoke, like she was made of the blood that covered everything and could reform anywhere it touched. His spear passed through where her throat had been, she'd bent backward, spine curving impossibly. Through where her heart was, she'd twisted sideways, let it pass between ribs that apparently weren't solid enough to impede it. Through her head, and he'd felt the impact, felt the spear pass through skull, but she was smiling, undamaged, golden ichor leaking from the wound for a moment before it sealed, before the blood-blade in her hand drew the leaked ichor back into her body, recycling it, wasting nothing.

She grabbed his spear mid-thrust. Just reached out and caught it, hand closing around the shaft, ignoring Oxys, ignoring the impossible sharpness that should have severed her fingers. They bled, yes, ichor welling around her grip, but she didn't let go, didn't flinch, just pulled.

Ares came forward, yanked by his own weapon, and her forehead met his broken nose.

Lights exploded across his vision. She was already moving, already spinning, her blade coming around in a flat slash that he barely ducked, felt the air move, felt droplets of her weapon splash onto his back and begin eating through the armor.

He drove forward into a tackle, abandoning weapons, using his body itself as the weapon, Obrimus and Thurus combining to make him a projectile of divine violence. They crashed through the landscape, through corpse-mountains that exploded into pieces, through blood-rivers that geysered at their passage, rolling and striking and bleeding in equal measure.

Hera's fist caught his jaw. His knee drove into her ribs, he felt them crack, felt the satisfaction of damage inflicted, and then watched as the blood-blade touched the injury and the ribs re-formed, golden ichor flowing into the cracks and hardening back into divine bone, the weapon itself healing her, or maybe she was healing herself using the weapon's blood, it was hard to tell at the moment where she ended and the blade began.

He managed to get his spear between them, leveraged her away, drove the butt-spike into her sternum with force that should have shattered it. Did shatter it. The breastbone collapsed, caved inward

She laughed. 

All three voices, bright and manic and utterly delighted, laughing through the injury. 

The blood-blade touched her chest and the bone re-formed, pushed back out, sealed perfectly, the injury erased in the span of a heartbeat.

Then she cut him. Flat slash across his abdomen, the blood-blade slicing through Chalceus and Chalcocorustes and his divine flesh beneath like they were paper. His intestines tried to spill out, he felt them shifting, felt the wrongness of internal parts becoming external, but she struck again before they could fully emerge, blade dragging up his chest, opening him from groin to sternum, splitting him like fish for cleaning.

The pain was unimaginable. Would have been unimaginable if he could still imagine anything other than the pain. He tried to scream and golden ichor poured from his mouth instead of sound.

The blood-blade touched him again. Not striking, not cutting, but touching, and its golden ichor flowed into his wounds, mixed with his own divine blood, and began pulling things back together. Intestines retreated into his body. Skin crawled over exposed organs. Muscles knit back together fiber by fiber. The pain of healing somehow worse than the pain of injury, every nerve shrieking as it reconnected, as it re-formed, as it remembered what it was like to be whole.

Within moments he was healed. Perfect. Unmarked, except for his ruined armor.

She'd cut him down and healed him with the same weapon, with the same blood, doing both without apparent effort, without even slowing, and through it all she was laughing, sounds of pure joy bubbling from her throat like she'd never had so much fun in her existence.

"Again!" she said, delighted, and cut him again, different angle this time, spilling different organs, and again healed him, again made him whole, again laughed through the entire process.

They crashed into motion once more, Ares driven by desperation now, by the screaming animal certainty that stopping meant the end but continuing might mean something worse, something prolonged, an eternity of being cut down and healed and cut down again for her amusement.

His spear found her throat, drove through it, emerged from the back of her neck. She grabbed the shaft with both hands, the blood-blade disappearing. She hauled herself forward along the spear, impaling herself further, dragging her body toward him, getting closer, close enough that he could see the individual teeth in that too-wide smile, could see all three faces cycling in perfect detail.

She headbutted him. Again. His helm crumpled further, nose breaking for the third time, maybe fourth, he'd lost count, and he threw her away with Obrimus-strength, put everything into it, launched her like a stone from a sling.

She flew. Punched through a corpse-mountain, through the one behind it, through dozens more, blazing a trail of destruction that carved a canyon through the landscape.

Ares pursued, Thoös lending him speed, closing the distance, not giving her time to recover, to reset, to prepare. His spear led the way, Enchespalus ensuring perfect form, Rhinotorus ensuring it would pierce whatever defense she tried to mount.

Hera caught herself mid-flight, feet touching blood, carving trenches as they slid, and she turned, pivoted, that blood-blade swinging to meet his charge.

They collided at speeds that made everything except the immediate moment of impact irrelevant.

Spear and blood-blade locked, slid apart, locked again. He struck at her legs, she jumped, both feet planting on his shoulders, using him as a platform to flip backward, and as she passed over his head the blood-blade carved a line across his scalp, peeling it back, exposing skull-bone that promptly also split. She landed, turned, slashed, and the blade opened his back from shoulder to hip, cut deep enough to see spine.

Before he could fall she was there, blade touching him, not cutting this time but healing, closing the wounds with golden ichor that burned like fire and ice at once, forcing his body back into working order regardless of his will, regardless of the damage, regardless of anything except her apparent desire to keep fighting.

"This is," he tried to speak, couldn't, mouth full of his own blood, spat it out, tried again, "This is endless! This is pointless!"

“This is war!” she screamed back.

She drove her fist into his sternum, shattering the breastbone, following up with a knee to his face that sent teeth flying, divine teeth, clattering across the ground like mortal ivory. 

The blood-blade slashed across his eyes, blinding him, then touched them again and vision returned, returned with the memory of pain, returned with the knowledge that it could be taken again at her whim.

This was just suffering, just pain for pain's sake, violence without purpose or end or even the dignity of death at the conclusion of it.

She grabbed his helm and pulled, ripped it off his head, and smashed it into his face, using his own armor as a weapon, and laughed through the whole process, that manic, joyous laughter that suggested she'd never been happier, that this was the best moment of her eternal existence.

They tore into each other, through each other, savage and primal and divine all at once. His spear pierced her heart, she healed. Her blade opened his throat, he was healed. They crashed through mountains of corpses, reducing them to paste, to powder, to nothing. They struck each other hard enough to create waves of pressure, sent each other flying across the realm in heartbeats, the world around becoming a blur of red and black and golden ichor.

Every exchange left craters. Every strike could have leveled cities, could have carved new coastlines, could have reshaped the mortal world. They fought with strength to make mountains crumble, with technique polished across ages meeting against something else, something that fought like it had been holding back for an eternity and finally, finally been given permission to cut loose.

Ares employed everything he knew. Every stance, every strike, every counter developed across centuries of mortal warfare and perfected in divine hands. Holds flowing into spear work, grapples breaking into sword techniques, everything blending together in a continuous flow of violence that should have been overwhelming, should have been unstoppable.

Hera simply moved.  She fought like water, like shadow, always exactly where she needed to be and never where his weapons were, and when she struck back it was with casual, terrible precision, finding weaknesses he didn't know existed, exploiting them, then healing the damage and attacking the same weak points again just to prove she could, just to show him that the first time hadn't been luck.

His spear carved her arm off at the elbow, she caught the severed limb with her other hand, held it back in place, and the blood-blade touched it and it reattached, flesh seeking flesh, bone finding bone, skin flowing together like it had never been parted.

Her blade opened his abdomen again, spilling intestines again, and she laughed again, that same bright, manic laugh, and healed him again, and he was so tired, gods he was so tired, but Aatus Polemoio wouldn't let him stop, wouldn't let him rest, kept his body moving even when his mind wanted to shut down, wanted to flee into unconsciousness where the pain couldn't reach.

"Why?!" he screamed during a brief separation, one of the rare moments when they weren't actively tearing each other apart, standing perhaps a hundred paces apart across a crater they'd just created through mutual destruction. "Why are you doing this?!"

His voice broke on the words, godhood insufficient to keep the desperation from showing through.

"This is not you!" He gestured at her, at the blood-blade, at the realm, at everything. "This is madness!"

Hera came at him again, not running, not flying, something in between, and her blade found his shoulder, his hip, his ribs, opening him up in three places at once, or maybe in sequence but too fast to distinguish. The golden ichor of her weapon flowed into his wounds and began closing them, and she was still smiling, still laughing, beautiful and terrible and utterly removed from anything he recognized as his mother.

"This is me, Ares!" she screamed back, and there was genuine feeling in her voice now, not just amusement but conviction, certainty, truth. "I am acting the way I should have been acting since the beginning!"

Her blade swept through his defenses and took his left arm, severed it cleanly at the shoulder. Before it could hit the ground she'd grabbed it, shoved it back against the stump, touched it with the blood-blade and reattached it, the healing and the mutilation both expressions of the same terrible attention.

"I am the Goddess of Women!" she screamed, her voice rising to something that could have been heard across the mortal realm if this place had any connection to it, "and right now, I am exacting that fact because there is nothing more womanly than being covered in blood and beating the shit out of a bitch!"

She drove her knee into his face with force that sent him flying, followed him up, caught him mid-flight, dragged him back down, and smashed him into the ground hard enough that the impact crater spread for distances immeasurable.

They fought through it. Over it. Above it. They struck each other with enough force to create smaller impacts, their bodies becoming weapons when their actual weapons were momentarily unavailable, headbutts and elbow-strikes and knee-drops and holds that would have torn mortal bodies apart but only damaged divine ones, only created openings for more cutting, more healing, more laughter.

Ares tried. By his father, he tried. Employed every technique, every name, every particle of skill accumulated across ages. Fought like War itself should fight, perfect and terrible and unstoppable.

But she was better.

Stronger.

 faster.

Just better.

His spear pierced her lung, she healed and laughed and cut his throat.

Her blade opened his thigh, she healed him and he smashed her face with his shield, felt her nose break, felt satisfaction that lasted until she healed it and broke his nose again in return, exchanging injuries like gifts.

It was endless.

Every time Ares thought he couldn't continue, thought the next exchange would be the one where he finally failed to defend, failed to counter, failed to survive, the golden ichor would flow into him, would heal him, would force him back to fighting condition, and the battle would continue, and she would laugh, and he would suffer, and nothing changed except the landscape growing more devastated, more scarred, more thoroughly destroyed by their passage.

She wasn't serious. The realization hit him worse than any physical blow. She wasn't using her true form. Could end this any time she wanted. Could disregard his immortality, make him mortal, kill the unkillable, kill a god, kill her son.

But she hadn't.

Wasn't.

Was keeping him alive, keeping him healed, keeping him fighting because she was happy.

She was happy beating him to death and bringing him back and beating him to death again, was enjoying herself, was having fun, and this was what broke something inside Ares that all the physical damage hadn't touched, this understanding that his suffering was her entertainment, that she could stop at any moment but wouldn't because this was the best time she'd had in recent memory, possibly ever.

Her fist caught his temple and he was flying, not paces or even distances with names but vast stretches, crossing the realm, punching through every obstacle.

He flew for what felt like forever, might have been forever for all he could tell, time becoming meaningless under the red sky, and then he was stopping, was being stopped, his body carving a trench through packed corpses and blood-mud and the substance of the realm itself, friction and weight finally winning their war against his momentum.

When he finally stopped moving, when the world stopped spinning, he realized his spear was gone. His shield was gone. Torn away in flight, lost somewhere in the vast stretches between where he'd been struck and where he'd landed, buried under corpses or sunk into blood-rivers or simply destroyed by the forces involved.

He tried to stand. Managed to get to his knees. One leg wouldn't support his weight, broken, shattered, the names unable to override basic mechanical failure. His armor was more gap than metal now, whole sections simply gone, other parts hanging by threads, barely covering anything.

His second attempt to rise got him almost upright before his leg gave out completely and he collapsed back onto the blood-soaked ground, face-down in the muck, breathing ichor and gore and the matter that had once been corpses.

He heard footsteps.

Slow. Measured. Unhurried. The splash of feet on blood, coming closer. Not running. Not flying. Just walking, taking her time, savoring the approach.

They stopped at his side.

"Already had enough?" Hera's voice drifted down from above, all three aspects speaking together, and there was something in the tone that hurt worse than any blade, worse than any blow. Disappointment. Like the fun had ended too soon. Like he'd failed to entertain adequately and now the consequences of that failure were coming due.

Ares managed to turn his head, barely, neck muscles screaming at the movement. Managed to look up at her through the blood and ichor coating his face, through eyes that were swelling shut, through divine vision that was failing under the accumulated trauma.

"Why?" he whispered. All he could manage. All that remained of the conversation he'd come here to have. "Why?"

Hera repeated the word out loud, tasting it, rolling it around in her mouth like wine she was evaluating. "Why, huh?"

She crouched down, bringing herself to his level, that face cycling through its aspects, child, maiden, crone, all three looking at him with the same expression, something that might have been pity, might have been contempt, might have been simple exhaustion with the question.

"I honestly would have liked to continue," she said, conversational, pleasant, like they were discussing ended festivities rather than divine combat, "but hey, there is no more fun in you."

She settled fully into a sitting position beside him, legs folding beneath her, posture relaxed, at ease, while he lay broken at her feet. Her gaze locked on his, forced him to maintain eye contact, wouldn't let him look away even if he'd had the strength.

"I had a realization weeks ago," Hera said, her triple voice quiet now, almost contemplative. "A simple one."

She paused, and the pause stretched, and Ares waited for the conclusion, for the point, for the answer to why.

"Everything's shit," she said finally, matter-of-fact, like she was observing weather patterns rather than delivering what apparently passed for philosophical insight. "Even my life was nothing but shit and it was time for me to change that if I wanted to be happy."